Owning a time machine in Toronto would be really neat: we could go back, year by year, and see how the city changed, often dramatically. It’s hard to keep track of what was built, hard to remember what was good or even great amidst the mediocre. There’s been lots of good and great, though.

Imagine zapping back to 1967. The city was largely defined by its Victorian and Edwardian “old Toronto” neighbourhoods and the leafy 1920s streetcar suburbs. Yet the postwar boom was on and subdivisions were steadily creeping out into the farmland that is now Etobicoke, North York and Scarborough. Downtown, the TD Centre’s central black monolithic slab was nearing completion and New City Hall was, well, brand new.

It would be an interesting moment to look at Toronto, a place that would seem somewhat old and lowrise to our eyes today, a city of surface parking lots. Toronto would transform radically over the coming decades, as would the rest of Canada. It’s one reason why a new book, “Canadian Modern Architecture — 1967 to the Present,” is so compelling: it looks at how much remarkable building has taken place since then and tells the story of Canada’s modern, determined invention.

“Architecture-wise, the last 50 years has really seen the growth of Toronto as a modernist city,” says Elsa Lam, co-editor of the book along with University of Calgary architecture professor Graham Livesey. “The New City Hall competition, launched in 1956, was a significant catalyst.”

Lam, who is also the editor of Canadian Architect magazine, says city hall, by Finnish architect Viljo Revell in collaboration with the Toronto firm John B. Parkin Associates, not only brought international attention to Toronto when it opened in 1965, but also attracted talented young architects to move and work here, a somewhat hidden legacy of the building.

“Much of Toronto’s strongest architecture has continued in a modernist vein, taking a problem-solving approach to design that values functionality, efficiency and the expression of structure, but not at the expense of beauty,” Lam says.

The 1967 starting point for this survey is as natural as it was the year of Expo 67 in Montreal. For many Boomers it was one of the most remarkable and memorable summers of their lives, when they came of age and, at 100 years, so did the country. Gen Xers grew up in the shadow of it, hearing all about it, some of us wishing we could have attended.

It likely lives much less in the imagination of younger folks but its influence on all of our lives continues today, from the modern experimentation it made room for and the coinciding 1967 centennial building projects, more than 800 of them across the country, including the Ontario Science Centre.

In the book Lam makes the point that though Toronto was growing rapidly prior to this time, “much of Toronto’s architecture in the 1950s was influenced by the city’s conservative Anglo-Saxon culture,” and dominated by traditionalist firms that produced stripped-down, neo-classical buildings for banks and other institutions. Handsome, perhaps, but not terribly exciting. All that would change.

The book includes essays from a cross section of Canadian architectural thinkers on subjects like public institution and campus architecture, a historic overview of First Nations contemporary architecture, international movements that influenced Canada and our own regional differences. Though a truly Canadian book, there is a lot of Toronto in it and Lam’s own essay, “Toronto Architecture: Form and Reform” digs deeply into the last 50 years of Toronto city building and how it paralleled the political temper of the times.

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The “reform” era council of David Crombie during the 1970s that limited the height of buildings, for instance, encouraged interesting infill projects such as York Square that combined a series of townhomes on Avenue Road and Yorkville Avenue, creating a unique courtyard, though redevelopment threatens it now. In fact, many modern but aging structures are threatened today across Canada, another reason this book is an important reminder of their worth at a time when they might be out of fashion.

Lam’s is a succinct overview of Toronto and includes looks at the 1977 Toronto Reference Library and the 1983 renovation of Queen’s Quay Terminal, an early repurposed residential and commercial loft project. By 2001, lofts were being built new and specifically residential, such as the District Lofts on Richmond Street just east of Spadina Avenue with its distinctive catwalks.

It’s easy, and lazy, to say nothing good has been built here but in paging through this book, rich in colour and vintage black and white photography, the sheer number of exceptional public and private buildings built in the GTA, such as the National Ballet School on Jarvis Street or the Whitby Public Library, both built in 2005, or the Regent Park Aquatic Centre (2012) and the Brampton Soccer Centre (2007), prove otherwise.

It’s a book for anybody that appreciates, or wants to learn how to appreciate, modern architecture in Toronto and Canada.

Shawn Micallef is a Toronto-based writer and a freelance contributing columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @shawnmicallef