TheStar.com – Once Upon A City: Apartments for the space age

Uno Prii changed Toronto's architectural landscape with his futuristic designs

Uno Prii was light years ahead of his time. The Estonian-born architect shot Toronto into the space age, an Orbit City right out of The Jetsons animated TV series, with futuristic apartment buildings sporting curved, looped balconies and white concrete structures pointing skyward like rocket ships. They were so unlike the boxy, no-nonsense Modernist designs of the 1960s.

Some admired his peek into a where-no-one-has-gone-before Star Trek universe, while no-frills advocates dissed his designs, considering them strange, dull and blights on the landscape…