THIS IS A great book for browsing. Sight Lines: Looking at Architecture and Design in Canada is a collection of Adele Freedman`s magazine and newspaper pieces, many from the "By Design" column she has written for the Globe and Mad since 1981. Her writing style is characterized by critical reserve and one might call her essays Miesian (but only if one promises no puns on architectural 11 "columns"); like the modernist master Mies van der Rohe, Freedman allows the material -steel and glass for him, buildings and designers for Freedman - to speak for itself. The essays are grouped in two sections, each with its own chronology: the first looks at "People!` and the second at "Sites and Issues." As Freedman aptly points out in her introduction, design is an international phenomenon, influenced and informed by people and ideas beyond national boundaries. Thus we are treated to essays about Frank Gehry of the United States, Ettore Sottsass of Italy, and Shiro Kuramata of Japan in addition to those about the Canadians Douglas Cardinal, Phyllis Lambert, Ron Thom, and Eric Arthur. Among the other topics Freedman treats are urban planning (her piece on suburban sprawl in Vaughan township Was my favourite), graphic design, landscape, and furniture design. The book`s illustrations, a handful of black-and-white pictures, are understated at best, although given Freedman`s descriptive abilities they aren`t even really necessary; and the index is handy for quickly referencing names and buildings. The essay that opens the collection is a fascinating look at the late and little-known Toronto architect Peter Dickinson. This piece is an expanded version of a 1985 Globe column on the innovative, modernist architect who had a large role in shaping Toronto`s architectural style in the 1950s. Dickinson, a whirlwind character worthy of biography, was also a tireless designer whose architectural credits include Benvenuto Place, Beth Tzedec synagogue, a Regent Park South highrise, and the OKeefe Centre. Architecture is often described as an old man`s art. It combines engineering, design, craft, art, and function. It seems at once both eclectic and exclusive; perhaps because of this it often seems the exclusive domain of the initiated. But, as critic and commentator on design issues and architecture, Freedman allows the uninitiated but intelligent reader to join the club. Indeed, it was the conviction that people are interested in the world around them, "city or chair, teapots as well as towers," that initially fostered her Globe column. Freedman offers a social and artistic context in which to examine our architectural environment. Writing about a single building in Toronto, for instance, she makes us privy to the web of influences that created this building at this time in this place. And she asks the right questions: Is this the architect`s first building? Is it a departure from the architect`s previous work? Who were the architect`s contemporaries? What was the architectural mood of the times? Sight Lines also testifies to Freedman`s exceptional descriptive ability - essential because architecture is, after all, art. She describes design elements, massing, materials, engineering, and construction without letting us lose sight of the artist`s intention. Perhaps one of the best examples of this sense that we are them seeing the budding she describes through informed eyes, is her description of the Canadian Museum of Civilization: To be standing inside the Great Hall of the museum, looking across the Ottawa River, is a magical, liberating experience. The shape of the hall is made by two arcs, suggesting a canoe of magnificent proportions. The wall of window curving out towards the river is marked off by slender stone columns, flaring as they rise: a ripple of oars. Alternating strips of polished and unpolished granite band die floor: shoreline.