Toronto’s University College gets a bold new chapter

The new library at University College.Handout

University College was burning. It was Feb. 14, 1890, and Canada’s first secular university had been preparing for a party. Instead, a spilled lamp set the building ablaze, and it became “a ragged, blackened ruin,” as The Globe reported the next day. Toronto had “suffered the cruellest loss in its history.”

That wasn’t the end of the story, however. Three years later, the college reopened after a major reconstruction. One hundred and thirty years later, it is part of the University of Toronto and recently got another, albeit more subtle, renovation, orchestrated by Kohn Shnier Architects and ERA Architects.

The redesign, completed during the pandemic, takes an exemplary approach to heritage architecture. It builds on the college’s history as a place that borrows freely from the architecture of other times and places, mixing and matching and reinventing itself.

The project altered roughly 25,000 square feet of the designated national historic site, creating fully accessible routes via new ramps and an elevator; restoring one upstairs room to its historic function as a library; and renovating a circular space that was once a chemistry lab, the Croft Chapter House, into a conference room.

“A great deal of the building was just sitting empty,” explained Donald Ainslie, a philosophy professor who began the renovation while serving as the principal of University College. “The goal was to make students feel welcome, to put that space to use and to improve the accessibility, which was woefully substandard.”

This is the kind of repair job that can be, in some hands, nearly invisible. But the design team, led by architect John Shnier and ERA’s Graeme Stewart, were determined to make their work visible. To a point.

“We aimed to do something unexpected and very contemporary,” Mr. Shnier said on a recent tour of the building. “But I wanted to make sure that in 50 years nobody would be able to put a date on it.”

The renovation was done by Kohn Shnier Architects and ERA Architects.Handout

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This attitude toward heritage reflects a norm in European architecture firmly established in the 1960s. In Canada, there is sometimes an expectation that contemporary interventions should try to blend into a historic building – even when that historic building, as in the case of the Château Laurier hotel in Ottawa, is itself a kitschy imitation of a centuries-old castle. Mr. Shnier rejects that idea: “We do not want to disrespect the integrity of the building by simulating a faux heritage language.”

And he points out that Victorian architecture had a magpie approach to historicism. When University College was designed in the 1850s by the architects Cumberland & Storm, it had “an eclectic Gothic style, more like Harry Potter than Cambridge,” Mr. Shnier said. After the fire, the 1890s renovation by David Dick added late-Victorian flourishes such as brightly coloured tile mosaics.

What does the 21st-century version of this attitude look like? Begin with the new ramps. The original building, organized into a square with an open quadrangle at the centre, has many half-levels: four stairs up here, five stairs down there. Kohn Shnier and ERA eliminated the stairs along one quarter of the building, replacing them with wide, gentle ramps paved with marble in a herringbone pattern. At the edges of two ramps, the original stairs are revealed under glass. “It’s a bit of archeology,” Mr. Shnier said.

Meanwhile, the design elevates quotidian details. In several major rooms, freestanding black steel columns stand proud of the walls containing in one place technical bits and bobs such as fire alarm pulls and new electrical outlets. The oak paneling remains largely untouched.

The project altered roughly 25,000 square feet of the designated national historic site, creating fully accessible routes via new ramps and an elevator.Handout

To one side, the Croft Chapter House got a dramatic new intervention: a sort of chandelier, designed by the architects and fabricated by local makers Eventscape. Its 24 tines combine lighting and acoustic treatments. (Mr. Shnier’s business partner, Martin Kohn, gives credit here to project architect Maggie Bennedsen.)

The key spaces are two double-height rooms on the second floor, known as East Hall and West Hall. The college decided to relocate its library into its original home in East Hall, taking advantage of the spectacular quality of the room: high ceilings, exposed wood trusses and spectacular stained-glass windows by Toronto makers Robert McCausland Ltd.

The rebuilt library has a strong central aisle leading to a showpiece spiral stair – a clearly Modernist element with a white steel wrapper that divides at the top to form a sort of palisade. A red-carpeted mezzanine leads between bookstacks with blackened steel shelves. Each stack is punctuated by angled mirrors – a device that shows up in each of Mr. Shnier’s projects, always adding a splash of perspectival whimsy.

The only bit of new design visible on the exterior of the building is in the quadrangle. Here, the architects added an elevator tower to the yellow brick façade, clearing up access routes to the library. The tower is wrapped in a coat of faceted copper that evokes perhaps eagles’ wings or the scales of dragons. (Cumberland & Storm’s stone ornament on the building includes a dragon.) The elevator was controversial among some professors, Dr. Ainslie said, “but we are not trying to fool anyone that this is a 19th-century elevator. And now that it’s done, and the copper is aging, it just feels right.”

The redesign, completed during the pandemic, takes an exemplary approach to heritage architecture.Handout

Such conversation between contemporary architecture and that of previous eras may be the defining trait of Toronto architecture since 1950. This includes Mr. Shnier’s early employer, Barton Myers, who practised with Jack Diamond in the 1960s.

Mr. Shnier’s work with Mr. Kohn has carried on that tradition. Their work is subtle and responsive, opinionated but never pushy or dogmatic. This has not left them with a clearly recognizable brand, so their work has often been underrated. “We take a rhetorical and discursive approach,” Mr. Shnier said, in his typically discursive manner. “There isn’t a polemic, there isn’t a manifesto. … There is an idea, but that idea is something nuanced that transforms over time.”

And transform is what buildings do, through a fire or a rethinking. With Kohn Shnier and company, a great building has been in good hands.