Toronto’s Skyline Is Having a Conversation, and We’re All Invited to Listen
Tonight, on a crisp Halloween in Toronto, the air is electric. You can almost feel the city holding its breath. Down by the water, the roar from the Rogers Centre is a living thing, a wave of sound from a city on the brink of a World Series championship. The iconic CN Tower will surely be bathed in blue light, a beacon of hope for the Blue Jays. But if you look closely, you’ll see that for the first time in 50 years, it’s no longer alone. There’s a new giant in the sky, a slender, crystalline spire reaching for the same clouds.
This is the Pinnacle SkyTower, and its arrival isn’t just an architectural event. It’s the start of a conversation.
For half a century, the CN Tower has been the undisputed monarch of the Toronto skyline. A magnificent feat of engineering, yes, but it was fundamentally a monologue. Built as a communications tower, its purpose was to broadcast a signal outwards, a singular voice speaking for the city. It was a symbol of an era when downtown was a place you visited for business and then left. Its observation deck, at 346 meters, was designed for you to look down on the city, a passive observer.
But now, rising just 1,200 meters away, the SkyTower is a direct reply. Topping out at a staggering 350 meters, it will look the CN Tower right in the eye. When I first saw the renderings of the two towers framing the skyline, I honestly just sat back in my chair, speechless. This is the kind of breakthrough that reminds me why I got into this field in the first place. It’s not just architecture; it’s a city writing the next chapter of its story in steel and glass. This new tower isn't for broadcasting; it’s for living. With 800 residential units inside, it represents a profound shift in what a city core is for. It’s a declaration that downtown is no longer just a place of commerce, but a place of community.
From Monolith to Metropolis
What we’re witnessing is the physical manifestation of a city’s soul evolving. Architect David Pontarini calls the SkyTower a “counterpoint” to the CN Tower, symbolizing the transformation of Toronto into a “24/7 fully activated mixed-use, residential, office, commercial, retail city.” This is a central theme in recent coverage, where Pinnacle’s SkyTower highlighted as skyline link to CN Tower. Think about what that really means. The old model was a city that slept. The new model is a city that lives.
This is a paradigm shift in urban design, and it’s as significant as the moment cities first got electricity. First, you had the single, monumental power station—a symbol of progress, much like the CN Tower. But the real revolution came when that power was networked, lighting up thousands of individual homes, each a point of light in a new, interconnected constellation. That’s what the SkyTower and its sibling towers represent. They are a constellation of homes in the sky, a vertical neighborhood where 2,500 families will live, work, and dream.
This isn’t happening by accident. It's the result of years of intentional, forward-thinking policy, like the city’s Lower Yonge Precinct Plan, which encouraged exactly this kind of supertall, dense, and livable development. The team behind it, from Pinnacle’s CEO Michael De Cotiis to the architects at Hariri Pontarini, kept pushing the boundaries, revising the design from 95 stories to 106 even as it was under construction. This is the real engine of progress—the relentless human drive to ask, “What if we could go higher? What if we could build better?”
Could they really execute on this? That was the question they asked themselves. And the answer is rising into the sky right now. It required a leap of faith, a belief that we can build not just taller buildings, but better communities.
The very language we use is changing to keep up. The recent conference where this project was discussed officially changed its name from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat to the Council on Vertical Urbanism. This is a crucial self-correction—in simpler terms, the world’s best minds are no longer just thinking about how to build tall, but how to build entire communities, entire cities, straight up.
This is the kind of future that fills me with incredible optimism. It’s a future where our cities grow smarter, not just bigger. Of course, with this ambition comes immense responsibility. When you build a vertical city, you have to perfect the human-scale experience on the ground—the parks, the public spaces, the feeling of connection. How do we ensure that a city of towers doesn't lose its soul? That’s the next question we have to answer together.
But the impulse for connection is already there. I was scrolling online the other day and saw a small, heartfelt post from someone who travels with a hat that says, “Dear Canada We Hate Him Too.” They talked about the countless times Canadians have stopped them to say thanks, sharing a moment of solidarity. It’s a tiny thing, but it speaks volumes. In a world that often feels fractured, people are desperate for connection, for a sense of shared identity and community. That’s the same energy pulsating through Toronto tonight for the World Series. It’s the same energy that will fill the 2,500 new homes at One Yonge.
That’s the promise of a truly modern, vertical city: not isolation in the clouds, but thousands of points of light, connected and shining together. The speed of this is just staggering—it means the gap between the Toronto of yesterday and the Toronto of tomorrow is closing faster than we can even comprehend, and it’s a beautiful thing to watch.
A Skyline That Breathes
For fifty years, the CN Tower stood as a magnificent, lonely monument. Now, it has a partner. This isn’t a rivalry; it’s a relationship. It’s the beginning of a conversation written across the sky, a dialogue between our past and our future, between broadcasting and belonging, between observing a city and living within it. What we’re seeing is more than just new construction. It’s the birth of a skyline that finally breathes.