Over the next couple of weeks we're going to be looking back at some of the biggest stories in Canadian arts and culture from the year 2000. The first stop is a particular love of mine - architecture.

The Biggest Win: While many Canadian architects made huge gains in winning competitions around the globe (think of Frank Gehry's recent triumph in snagging the gig to design the new Guggenheim on the Lower East Side of Manhattan), the competition win that most interested me was Bruce Mau and Rem Koolhaas's Tree City in Toronto.

Located in the northwestern stretch of Toronto, Parc Downsview Park is a 644 acre property that used to serve as a base for the Canadian military. The base shut down in 1994 and then the federal government announced that the vast tracts of land would be turned into Canada's first National Urban Park.

The land, occupied in part by de Havilland aircraft manufacturer, is populated with factory buildings, airplane hangars, an enormous one million square foot supply depot and a runway. The park and its disparate structures have been used to provide sets for Canada's booming film business and the hangars have been home to indoor soccer leagues.

In July of 1999, Canada Lands Company Ltd started the call for proposals for the Downsview Park International Design Competition. The aim of the design was to create "an urban park that sets the 21st century standard for excellence in landscape architectural design and urban recreational planning." And the proposals flooded in. After the sheep were separated from the men, there were five firms left standing. The short-listed group got $100,000 to prepare second stage submissions. And these were the fiscal rules of the game. You've got $145 million phased over 15 years with a $40 million dollar slush fund to start things off.

Mau and Koolhaas's Tree City won hands down. (Actually the winning design team is comprised by Koolhaas, Mau and Oleson Worland. It's funny how few outside of the biz has heard of Oleson Worland. I guess the cult of celebrity is as alive and well in architecture as any other art form.) The official jury claimed that "there were no other projects of comparable vision and promise." Gerald Scheff went on to remark that the winning team didn't plan a park. Instead they "focussed on laying down the foundation for a park by concentrating on remediating the soil." Clearly Koolhaas and Mau started at the ground up. Mau claims that Tree City is "not a design at all; it's a strategy for a series of operations at a meta-level." Here's Mau's linguistic formula "Grow the park + Manufacture nature + Curate culture + 1000 pathways + Destination and dispersal + Sacrifice and save = low density metropolitan life.

Tree City is a fluid park, designed to evolve over time. The team wanted to allow nature and people to have a say in this vast urban space. It's a free forming landscape architecture, held together by an overarching philosophical principle.

What makes Tree City controversial are these random elements. Many community representatives wanted to see a more concrete proposal, but the jury was adamant, maintaining that "the scheme's high degree of flexibility offered the most promising future for the site."

I can't help but agree. While Tree City is most definitely a product of its time and culture (the open-ended approach and extreme simplicity of design), doesn't it make great sense to allow a natural urban space to evolve as naturally as possible?

Other notable news: The Montreal Expos get a new stadium which will be built in the centre of the city ... Niagara Falls builds a permanent casino. The new development will include a 24 hour casino, retail space, restaurants, a Special Entertainment Attraction area, a Performing Arts Centre, plus a 368-room four-star Hyatt Regency hotel complete with a spa ... Toronto gets $1.5 billion to clean up and build a new waterfront -- let's hope for the best.

Biggest Stink: The battle is continuing to heat up over the nature of architectural competitions and may soon reach critical mass. Here are the stakes. On one side of the fence are the folks who believe that competitions should be open to everyone. They feel that by allowing anyone to throw their creative hat into the ring, that younger architects will have the chance to strut their stuff. Furthermore, this free-wheeling approach keeps architecture from becoming a closed community of haves (who get to do all the significant design) and the have nots, (who can just watch the buildings go up).

On the other side of the fence are the critics of open competitions. They feel the competitions are "exploitative and risky, a way of getting architects to provide a great deal of work for no compensation. Limited competitions avoid wasting the time of hundreds of firms by narrowing the field to serious contenders only.In addition the client is provided with some assurance that the winning team has the experience and expertise to see their design through to completion."

To me this sounds terribly familiar to the quandry of anyone trying to get a job writing for Canadian TV series. If you don't have the credits, you can't break into the old boy's club. And that my dears is why I think a lot of Canadian TV simply tanks. I say let the doors swing open. Thanks to open competition the world's got Toronto City Hall, the Sydney Opera House, the Library of Alexandria and Centre Pompidou.

Sad news: Architect Randale Ireland passed away at age 71. Known as an architect- as-master-builder versus architect-as-artist (think Frank Gehry), Ireland and Rhone were responsible for building Simon Fraser University and the fantastic Modern installations for the Bennett Dam on the Peace River.

Book it: Just in time for Christmas, Oxford University Press has published a "Concise Version" of eminent historian Harold Kalman's two-volume History of Canadian Architecture. On initial publication, Kalman's work won praise for focussing on built structures rather than theory, so you can take the book out on the streets and see what he's talking about. The new volume contains an expanded final chapter on modern architecture. ($65.00, 750 b&w photos, 664 pages) ... a great gift for your designing friends.

Snowbird Sings: Fans of Anne Murray will want to get down to Roy Thomson Hall to hear one of our nation's most beloved songbirds sing a medley of holiday classics, some of her favourite hits plus material from her latest platinum-selling CD What a Wonderful World. Should be a wonderful time.

Fine Tuning: It's a miracle ... that they keep broadcasting the original Miracle On 34th Street at all. We'll keep our eyes peeled to the listings for the real thing in the next few days, meanwhile CBC is offering a 1994 re-make. Not a bad cast: Richard Attenborough, Elizabeth Perkins, Dylan McDermott and Jane Leeves. Tonight at 8 p.m. on CBC TV.