Vancouverites love to slam Toronto, but they’re not the first to treat Canada’s largest city with disdain. More than 50 years ago, British writer Wyndham Lewis condemned the town as a “sanctimonious icebox”, arguing that bland brick buildings and strict liquor laws produced a “hell of dullness”. Even Charles Dickens lambasted Toronto’s political culture as “appalling”. Having grown up in Ontario, I usually defend Toronto’s good name, citing the city’s cultural diversity and its vibrant arts community.

With the recent unveiling of three new buildings in the downtown core, Toronto has become the darling of the international design scene. Created by superstar architects, these buildings are so controversial that my family of art lovers spent an entire evening arguing about them when I visited in December.

“It looks like an airplane crashed into the side of the building,” said one of my brothers over dinner, after we had toured the Royal Ontario Museum’s Michael Lee-Chin Crystal. Designed by Daniel Libeskind, the Crystal does look a bit like a downed jet—it’s an aggressive outcropping of aluminum and steel that towers over the sidewalk at a sharp angle. Consisting of five interlocking structures, the building features diagonal windows cut into the walls and open catwalks joining the galleries inside.

Dogged by controversy since it opened in 2007, the Crystal has been simultaneously dubbed an icon and an eyesore. Local bloggers have been particularly harsh, declaring it a “geometric tumour” and an “atrocity”. Of course, Libeskind is well known for his challenging visions, having designed an extension to the Jewish Museum Berlin and won the competition to rebuild the World Trade Center site in Manhattan.

“It’s the most hated building in Toronto, but I love it,” said my brother-in-law during our family-dinner debate. Well, not hated by everyone: the Crystal has received acclaim from architecture critics, and was named one of the “New Seven Wonders of the World” by Condé Nast Traveler last spring. I couldn’t make up my mind how I felt about it, but it was absolutely worth a visit. Where else could I have seen dinosaur bones and ancient artifacts displayed in rooms resembling a carnival funhouse, with no flat walls or right angles?

Another unforgettable and equally controversial building is located right beside Chinatown, where I grabbed some dim sum in order to keep my energy up. The award-winning Sharp Centre for Design, designed by British architect Will Alsop, is like nothing else I’ve seen before. Opened in 2004 as part of the Ontario College of Art and Design, the building is a two-storey “tabletop” covered with a layer of black and white tiles, suspended 26 metres above the ground on brightly coloured, angled columns.

Labelled “a little insane” by the Royal Institute of British Architects, the building resembles an enormous Rice Krispie square skewered on Day-Glo chopsticks. Although the interior is closed to the general public, I had fun walking around the outside, where I was convinced that the mammoth mothership above me was going to topple over at any moment. Conveniently, the Sharp Centre is located beside Toronto’s latest architectural star, the recently renovated Art Gallery of Ontario.

Like the Royal Ontario Museum, the Art Gallery of Ontario desperately needed to expand its facilities in order to showcase its collections, which are among the best in North America. Frank Gehry—a “star-chitect” known for his knockout design the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao—was born in Toronto, and his involvement in the Art Gallery of Ontario’s $276-million expansion project catapulted it into the international arena.

Attracting 70,000 visitors during opening week last November, Gehry’s redesign of the building features 600 feet of glass rippling down the front like a two-storey ocean wave. On the opposite side, a five-storey blue glass and titanium wall throws light into the galleries and offers stunning views of the CN Tower. Twenty percent larger than the original structure, Gehry’s renovation is both restrained and outrageous, complex and streamlined.

Maybe it was the novelty of touring a new structure, but I was amazed as strangers spontaneously started talking to each other in different corners of the building. In one dramatic room showcasing three Peter Paul Rubens paintings, a woman giggled with me about the “rippling flesh” of the Rubenesque women, which is “just what we don’t want nowadays”. Even a security guard shed his stern demeanour to offer a favourable opinion of Gehry’s renovation.

But my favourite site for random encounters had to be the Gehry-designed Baroque Stair, a mammoth scissor staircase looping wildly up the equivalent of 11 residential floors. Clad in Douglas fir veneer, the staircase narrows and widens unexpectedly, creating an intimate space where Gehry hoped “you might meet your future wife”. I didn’t find romance, but I did laugh at one man who announced loudly that he wanted to “slide down the whole thing”. And a crowd of us who were walking down the 138 steps commiserated with a family who had made the mistake of walking up.

My siblings and I never did come to an agreement about the state of architecture in Toronto, but I developed an affection for the new buildings simply because they inspire such passionate arguments. No longer sanctimonious and certainly not dull, Toronto is now a city that forces visitors to think outside the box—literally. Lewis and Dickens would be impressed, I think.

ACCESS: For more information, see the Web sites of the Royal Ontario Museum , the Ontario College of Art and Design, and the Art Gallery of Ontario.