An exploration of how the bureaucracy of procurement shapes design — and how civic culture shapes bureaucracy.

Why doesn’t Canada have a design culture? Throughout my career as an architectural journalist, the question has carried a sort of gravitational mass. Whether the conversation hinged on Toronto’s dispiritingly generic condos, the lack of opportunities for emerging firms, the middling state of institutional architecture, or the general paucity of public engagement with contemporary buildings, the dialogue circled an invisible drain that eventually arrives at two inevitable words: Design culture.

I never quite grasped what it meant. When I started writing about design a decade ago, I wasn’t used to a milieu whose jargon isn’t intelligible to many members of the profession itself, let alone us dilettantes. I’d sheepishly nod along as architects and academics described the vague contours of a seemingly ineffable problem. Oftentimes, the gist of it was that the public just wasn’t sophisticated enough to “get it.” But whatever design culture was, I was assured that Canada — especially English Canada — doesn’t have it. (Googling the term didn’t help, yielding a Wikipedia entry consisting of management consulting pablum about business structures and customer experience; a cousin of the similarly vacuous notion of “design thinking.”)