Toronto's culture is layered rather than monumental: a Group of Seven collection inside a Frank Gehry rebuild, a Daniel Libeskind crystal bolted onto a 1914 museum, and Kensington Market's murals a streetcar ride away.
Frank Gehry rebuilt his childhood-neighbourhood gallery in 2008, adding the 137-metre Douglas Fir Galleria along Dundas West. Inside: the largest Group of Seven holdings anywhere, plus the Thomson ship-model collection. Open Tue–Sun, late until 21:00 Wednesday.
Will Alsop's black-and-white checkerboard box hovers 26 metres above Grange Park on twelve coloured steel legs, finished 2004. It houses Canada's largest art and design university. The undercroft is public space; the Ada Slaight Gallery at 100 McCaul shows student work.
MOCA occupies five floors of the 1919 Tower Automotive Building in the Lower Junction, an aluminium-foundry shell of exposed concrete columns and steel sash windows. Programming leans to commissioned installations by Canadian and international artists.
A kilometre of laneway running parallel to Queen Street West between Spadina and Portland, sanctioned by the city since 2011 as a legal aerosol corridor. Pieces are painted over every few weeks, so nothing here is permanent — expect fresh work each visit.
Canada's largest museum pairs a 1914 Beaux-Arts wing with Daniel Libeskind's 2007 Michael Lee-Chin Crystal — five interlocking prisms of aluminium and glass. Strengths: Chinese temple art, the Bat Cave, and dinosaur galleries in the Crystal's canted rooms.
A 1,135-seat concert hall completed in 2009 behind the 1881 Victorian Gothic McMaster Hall, with a suspended undulating veil of Douglas fir strips over the audience. Acoustics by Anne Minors and Sound Space Design; free noon-hour student recitals run in Mazzoleni Hall.
Raymond Moriyama designed the 1995 building as an abstracted shoebox with a lifted lid. The collection runs to 15,000 items across 4,500 years — Ancient Egyptian sandals, Chinese bound-foot shoes, Elton John's platform boots and Inuit sealskin kamiks.
Canada's first purpose-built opera house opened 2006, home to the Canadian Opera Company and the National Ballet of Canada. The horseshoe R. Fraser Elliott Hall seats 2,071 and is acoustically isolated from the subway running directly beneath University Avenue.
The Austin family's 1866 estate on the Davenport escarpment, restored to its 1920s condition with original furnishings, wallpapers and a working Victorian kitchen. Six acres of gardens sit next door to Casa Loma but draw a fraction of the crowd.
A National Historic Site of Canada since 2006, layered by Jewish, Portuguese, Caribbean and Latin American waves of settlement. Narrow Victorian houses turned into shopfronts, painted murals on nearly every gable, and Pedestrian Sundays car-free from May to October.
Housed in a 1926 ice house and power station for the Terminal Warehouse, its brick smokestack still standing at Harbourfront Centre. No permanent collection — three exhibition cycles a year of commissioned contemporary work, often by artists showing in Canada for the first time.
The world's last operating stacked double-decker Edwardian theatres, opened 1913 and 1914 as Loew's vaudeville houses. The upper Winter Garden is hung with 5,000 preserved beech branches and lanterns; both were restored in 1989 after decades sealed shut.