It is, as he happily admits, a rough-and-ready sort of place inside. After all, it's an art college. It needs to be able to take a good kicking, and you'd be disappointed if the students didn't rise to the occasion. However, its importance in Toronto is nothing to do with its function. It represents an aesthetic rupture with the tradition of this rational, grid-planned, block-and-tower city where the needle of the CN Tower represents a rare excursion into look-at-me urban histrionics. What Jack Diamond calls "the genius of Toronto" is to do with the civilized whole, not the mostly absent iconographic parts. This is, after all, the adopted city of that champion of true urbanity, Jane Jacobs.

Bruce Kuwabara, a Torontonian to the core, is also evangelistic about the enlightened polycentric nature of his city with its precise hierarchy of streets, and his proposed film centre with its inhabited roofscape is intelligently calculated to fit into that tradition. Kuwabara is too polite and perhaps too young to offer comment on the work of the latest celebrated incomers, but Diamond, as a hardened and highly successful international veteran, has no such scruples. Diamond does not like the signature-buildings approach here, and tells you as much. He has designed his opera house to be an opera house, not to be a giant piece of sculpture. Both Diamond and Kuwabara have therefore designed Torontonian buildings - more transparent, more outward-looking than many of their predecessors, but not the sort of buildings that would automatically be flashed as iconic images around the world. They are more modest than that.