Calming design for a frenetic world

For something so static, architecture can do a lot of things. It can stir the soul (religious buildings), it can excite or inspire playfulness (a world’s fair or midway), or it can soothe and calm the human heart.

For calming architecture, my thoughts turn to Raymond Moriyama’s slow escalator descent into the valley at the Ontario Science Centre, the curving walls of my childhood library, S. Walter Stewart Library in East York (or almost any library for that matter), or the Grand Hall at Union Station.