Everyone called him Jack. Born Abel Joseph Diamond in the South African town of Piet Retief in 1932, the young architect arrived in Toronto in 1964, and quickly became a leading figure in Canadian design — and in the civic culture of a nascent metropolis. As a practitioner, and an early champion of adaptive reuse and contextual sensitivity, he helped define the fabric of Toronto. As a public intellectual, he was instrumental in guiding the city through the tumultuous politics of rapid growth. Jack Diamond passed away on October 30. He was 89.

Diamond grew up in the shadows of World War II. In his recently published memoir, Context and Content, he recounted growing up in a large Jewish family in South Africa and encountering the atrocity of the Holocaust from a distance. “We were aware of the plight of European Jews, but we did not know the extent of their persecution. The horror of the camps had yet to be discovered,” he writes. After the war, they learned that only a handful of his father’s relatives had survived.