It was folly to believe that architecture in the year 2002 would release its ambitions and lie down like a lap dog. That's because architecture taps directly into a society's DNA -- it reminds us every day about who we are and what we think of ourselves.

We might have predicted that a series of skyscrapers proposed for ground zero would soar hundreds of feet above the original World Trade Center towers. Competing architects were asked to define a distinctive new skyline to fill the terrible gap in New York City. The skyscrapers rise from the ashes as technological marvels. But they also mirror the political tick-tock of any nation -- look at a postcard of the Egyptian pyramids or the marble palaces for Saddam Hussein and you get a fairly clear picture of the forces behind civilization.

At its most monumental, architecture slays our inner demons and makes us feel like heroes. And heroism, complete with insane amounts of American flag-waving, would be required from anyone interested in leasing an office on the 130th floor in Manhattan. My feeling is that a penthouse suite should be specially reserved for George W. Bush.

Luckily for Canada, arrogance does not figure as brashly in our architecture. This frees our practitioners to consider the meaning of architecture as it relates to this place, this country. But there is a level of boosterism among condominium developers that would have been difficult to predict following the tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001. Residential towers are not considered a target for terrorists, goes the popular belief in Canada and around the world. It's not unusual to find a condominium such as the Spire, a 40-storey needle tower designed by Architects Alliance, for downtown Toronto.

"We're designing a lot of very tall residential buildings in Canada, Asia and the Middle East," says Andy Bergmann, president of Yolles engineers. "There has been no impact on those from Sept. 11."

Like the world's first and secondary cities competing within a global market, Toronto -- most often cast as a secondary player -- is placing all bets on the power of cultural institutions to reinvent its metropolis. That may be a simplistic way of thinking about the complexity of cities but, with a federal government stuck on a country of lumberjacks and fishermen, it's about all we can manage.

These days in Canada, careers of museum directors and university deans go on the line not so much for the kind of academic discourse they might engage in but for the buildings that they're putting up. Architecture -- great architecture, at least -- can transform a tired institution into a place highly sought after by locals and globe-trotting tourists.

It takes guts to take on the promise of great architecture. William Thorsell, director of the Royal Ontario Museum, pledged to bring a beacon of light to Toronto with a major crystalline addition by the acclaimed American architect Daniel Libeskind. And there was more than a little interest from the public -- and from the museum's potential patrons who will be called upon to fund the $120-million addition -- when it was discovered that the cladding for the building is primarily stainless steel with scratches of light running through it.

As in the Trudeau era, Canadian universities are providing architects with challenging work. In Vancouver, both the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University are spearheading major expansion plans. The University of Toronto is currently building 19 new facilities. Don Schmitt of Diamond and Schmitt Architects Inc. won a limited competition to design the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, the first new university in Ontario since the 1960s.

At last, Toronto has emerged from the urban lassitude of the last 20 years to attract the high rollers of iconic architecture. Norman Foster -- a genius of techne -- has been charged with imagining the new Leslie L. Dan Pharmacy Building for the University of Toronto. Frank Gehry -- the world's master of sculpted undulations in architecture -- was officially signed on to design the major addition to the Art Gallery of Ontario.

And the Ontario College of Art & Design broke ground a few weeks ago to build British architect Will Alsop's design for a flying rectangle raised high into the air on spindly steel columns.

There is something else about architecture in Canada this year, a story that travels outside the slipstream of cultural monument making. This has to do with a movement of new modernism -- an ad hoc school of architecture grown up over the past decade that resonates deeply with who we are as Canadians. The scale is often discreet -- to do with community centres, public libraries, school and private houses -- but there is an intense dedication to crafting buildings with elegant, formal geometries. Materials are locally quarried and often used to evoke the great northern landscape. Americans, for one, are noticing that Canada is home to more than tepees and igloos. They're starting to search out the work, the way they might a novel by Margaret Atwood or Michael Ondaatje.

"There was an editor from Architecture magazine," says Schmitt, whose firm is currently building cultural and academic buildings in the United States. "He was talking about the buzz coming out of Toronto." The buzz spread when Architectural Record magazine, another esteemed American review, featured on its front cover the Point Grey Road house by Vancouver's Patkau Architects. Of the eight awards given to an international array of practitioners in its 2002 Architectural Record Houses issue, three awards were to Canadians; besides the Patkaus, the practice of Shim-Sutcliffe won two awards for their deeply considered residential designs.

The Year 2002 turned out to be a coming of age for Canada as a nation of urbanites. Eighty per cent of Canadians live in cities, with those numbers expected to climb to over 20 million by 2030, according to The Centre for Spatial Economics. In Ottawa, our politicians seem woefully out of touch with the immediate crises faced by major metropolises such as Toronto and Vancouver. Without an adequate federal formula for funding major infrastructure improvements, Canadian cities have been cut adrift to manage overwhelming numbers of homeless people and drug addicts, public transportation systems that are woefully inadequate, and the dilemma of how to house vast numbers of immigrants in safe, livable neighbourhoods.

The anger felt by Toronto's business elite and those working on the front lines of social programs were heard loud and clear at the summer's City Summit.

As more people leave the farms and the fisheries to flood into Canada's cities, the issue of how to create livable cities that might aspire to beauty becomes an urgent one. It's no longer enough to believe that magnificent cultural redevelopments are enough to heal the city, not with the kind of urban wastelands along Winnipeg's Portage Avenue, in Vancouver's drug zones, and in Toronto's northeast district where a rash of murders have recently been committed. Architecture that is great will manage to inspire -- but, in Canada like in any other country, that inspiration depends on what the architecture is asked to confront and required to mirror.