Reasons to Love Toronto 2014: #3. Because the City Puts On A Nightly Light Show

Over the past few years, as a forest of condos and commercial towers grew in the core, the nighttime skyline began to shimmer and twinkle. ­Torontonians are the happy beneficiaries of a kind of artistic one-upmanship among developers, who are commissioning light installations to lend other­wise inter­changeable glass towers some ­personality. The biggest concentration is in the 21 CityPlace condos, between Bathurst and the ­Rogers Centre, where the Ottawa-based artist Adrian Göllner used thousands of multi­coloured LEDs to highlight the nooks, parapets or angles of each building. (He says his project, titled Warm by Night, is a reaction to the cold glare of the financial district.) Another 17,200 lights illuminate the RBC Centre on Wellington in the bank’s signature blue, and 19 strips of LEDs programmed to shift through a range of colours make the Arcade Building, at the foot of Yonge, seem to dance. ­Perhaps the most dramatic is at the Corus Quay complex, right on the lake, where the prestigious British art collective Troika installed a 12-metre-high polycarbonate lightning bolt–like sculpture covered in 35,000 lights. Each addition to the nightly show is another beacon drawing us to a new, vibrant downtown.