The University of Toronto's billion-dollar rollout of new buildings, now in full swing, has been good for students who need reasonably priced places downtown to park their socks.
The new residences popping up on the St. George campus are hardly the quick-built, gloomy cinderblock bunkers I remember from undergraduate days in an American university. Instead of going cheap, the U of T is investing in good architects -- Thom Mayne for Graduate House, for example, and Gilles Saucier for the New College dormitory -- and, not surprisingly, getting good, intelligent and occasionally controversial architecture for the money. (We Torontonians, who shun the grand gesture, will probably never forgive Mr. Mayne for the big steel O punching out from Graduate House over the middle of Harbord Street.)
Soon to join the lineup of the university's notable student digs: the new 385-bed Woodsworth College residence now going up at the intersection of St. George Street and Bloor Street West. Designed by Toronto architects Peter Clewes and Adrian Di Castri, who spend most of their time doing condominium towers in the downtown core, the Woodsworth building will add a dose of neo-Modern strictness to an architecturally entertaining crossroads.
Each of the neighbours that share the corner with the new residence is an item of architecture with attitude. There's the opulently luxurious Gooderham mansion in the Romanesque style, a ladylike Jazz Age skyscraper, and the exploding box of the Bata Shoe Museum.
Compared with these showy fashion statements, Mr. Clewes and Mr. Di Castri's Woodsworth is attractively reserved. The bottom consists of a blocky, squared-off U, its outer sides plunging straight and hard -- too hard for my taste -- to shops and offices at ground level, its inner sides enclosing a courtyard.
This short podium, finished in Toronto's familiar yellow brick, forms a platform for the 17-storey tower, which has been catching my eye ever since its skin started to go on. I can't think of anything in Toronto that's quite like the tower -- anything, that is, built since the 1950s, and maybe not even then.
Not that it's spectacular or breathtaking. It's just very Modern. Using three kinds of glass -- the effects are dark, misty grey and soft white -- the architects have created a patterned curtain wall. The wall is reminiscent of something chic, sleek and pop from North American Modernism's great mid-century moment: Cold War-era drapes or upholstery, a Chevrolet Impala, a Peter Dickinson apartment building.
This surface is decorative, in a Modern way -- abstract, I mean, and visually classy, and democratically elegant. It doesn't shimmer. It's also unlike (and better than) the ho-hum things I'm accustomed to seeing architects do nowadays with glass -- unless, of course, they happen to be Mr. Clewes and Mr. Di Castri, or one of the other young practitioners who've renounced the post-Modern follies of the late 20th century and gone back to the real Modern thing.
The overall design of this residence did not escape unscathed from the city's approvals process. As it's being built, the structure backs away from the corner of St. George and Bloor. If done according to the architects' original proposal -- and according to the wishes of the university -- the building would have pushed out much closer to the sidewalk line. It would have gone nose-to-nose with the Bata museum across the street, and produced a "pinch" -- Mr. Clewes's word -- where St. George crosses Bloor from the north and enters the university campus.
The failure to get the necessary permission, said Mr. Clewes, was "a wound, not a body blow. Good projects should be able to take a few wounds."
Apart from the vanity of the architects, I can't see that anything has been wounded by the city's refusal to allow the residence to billow out to the sidewalk. In fact, the decision has spared Toronto another injury of the kind the university seems determined to inflict on us. I'm talking here about the U of T's continuing program of indicating its edges with so-called "gateways" -- pinches or architectural exclamation points or self-important monuments. (Earlier examples: the steel O at Graduate House, and the galumphing, ugly concrete entrance to King's College Circle off College Street.)
One of the distinctive urban virtues of the university has always been its way of comfortably, casually sprawling throughout its downtown neighbourhood. The U of T has long been part of Toronto, and Toronto part of it. Though the university has small walls and quiet enclosures here and there, there has never been (until now) hard, formal lines between town and gown. There's absolutely no need for them now.