On a sunny day, light streams into the Allen Lambert Galleria at Toronto’s Brookfield Place, drenching the hustle-and-bustle of the financial district below.

Take a moment inside the atrium to glance upward and you’ll see an arched, treelike canopy of criss-crossing steel and glass. Some may know the atrium, one of Toronto’s seminal architectural masterpieces, was designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava.

For everyone else, a pocket-size interactive guide awaits.

The Ryerson Architecture Mobile app, free for most smartphones, was recently released by Ryerson University to help students and the general public better understand and engage with Toronto’s architecture, past and present.

It’s the brainchild of Vincent Hui, a Ryerson architectural science professor who said he was inspired to create the app in late 2010 after he moved to the city from the University of Waterloo. He wanted to find a way to take advantage of Toronto’s architecture to improve his lesson plans, he said.

“We have a lot of world-renowned architects building in Toronto, yet a lot of it goes under the radar on the international scene,” Hui said. “I wanted students to engage with the built environment. Teaching architecture in isolation is the last thing you should be doing.”

In early 2011, Hui and fellow architectural science professors teamed up with Ryerson librarian Graham McCarthy and more than 60 student volunteers to collect data — including information provided by Canadian Architect magazine archives. They then designed the app and released a prototype last summer.

The app uses geolocation data to plot out architectural landmarks in Toronto’s downtown core. It offers detailed information about more than 90 buildings around the city — including information about buildings’ form and function, the architects involved, design sketches and photos from past and present.

It operates on “augmented reality” technology, using the phone’s camera to display the real-world environment as the user walks around the city, but adds detailed information about the scene in view.

Just launch the app, lift your phone in front of you and let it do the work.

When launched, a series of small photos of buildings included in the app float on the screen. Those photos — of St. Michael’s Cathedral or Brookfield Place, for example — can be tapped to retrieve detailed architectural information of the building’s history and significance or directions to the location.

“It allows you to travel through time and space,” said Hui.

Hui added that the app is “in its infancy.” But the team of professors, librarians and students plan to feed the system with more layers of information, including panoramic photos, video and information about buildings’ energy consumption.

Though Hui is working on integrating the app into Ryerson’s curriculum in the coming years, he said he also hopes the general public will take advantage of the technology.

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“We’d like to see it make broader connections,” he said. “I think it will allow people to gain a better appreciation of their environments.”

Currently, the app is only programmed for Toronto. But Hui said colleagues in Seattle and Las Vegas have expressed interest in extending the architecture database to their cities.

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