As more condominiums are being developed in Toronto’s downtown, the city skyline begins to take on a different look.

Many of these buildings are point towers with 40 to 50 storeys or more.

With land becoming scarce, there’s nowhere left to build but up.

Canderel’s Aura condos at College Park currently under construction at Yonge and Gerrard streets, will be the tallest residential tower in Canada with 75 storeys.

An architectural model puts it into perspective; an immense obelisk towering above Yonge Street, disproportionate to any other structures in the area.

All that is about to change, according to a revealing outlook from one of Toronto’s top architects as to the future landscape of the city. 

“When you talk about a very tall building being shown, and it stands out like a sore thumb, it doesn’t surprise me. There’s a number of guidelines released by the City which show how we’re going to densify the city, and in the central core the heights that are being shown are quite tall,” says Richard Wit, director of Toronto’s RAW Design.

 “The bigger cities in the world, Bombay, Shanghai, these cities are the megacities that most people talk about, the same is true in Toronto. There’s an increase in population which is huge and there’s nowhere else for people to go,” explains Wit.

Setting the standard for height are buildings like the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the tallest building in the world with over 160 storeys.

And Toronto is set to follow suit.

“The whole centre of the city is going to change dramatically; it’s going to be very tall. In the very centre of the city, the height limits that are possible are unlimited so we can have a 1,000-storey building in the centre of the city, I mean I doubt that that’s going to happen for a number of reasons, but legally through the planning process, it’s possible,” says Wit.

“Several studies have shown that a dense city is a more sustainable city. It means that we’re less reliant on transportation to do things, we reduce pollution, we reduce consumption.”