Established in 1890, University of Toronto?s architecture school?of which I am an alumnus?has migrated to several makeshift locations over the years before landing in a purpose-built building. It has finally found its permanent home as the new Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto in a remarkable feat of form-making, site planning and city building.
The lead architects, Nader Tehrani and Katherine Faulkner of Boston-based NADAAA, apply the metaphor of ?landscape? to the whole project describing it as an occupy-able ground plane of layered strata whose topography has been manipulated inside and out, seemingly enlarging the terrain. Working with local architects Adamson Associates, heritage architects ERA and landscape architects Public Work, they seized as an opportunity to reshape the edge of the campus ? from hard border to interlacing blurred boundary, fluid and interpenetrating. The historic Knox Building is now integrated into the new structure. The site posed a special challenge for meaningful heritage preservation that acknowledges the cultural memory of the university. Photo by John Horner
The circle known as One Spadina Crescent had been an idiosyncratic punctuation point and 19th-century touch of gentility in a patchwork of streets stitched together in a quasi-grid. Until now this circle has projected the unfulfilled promise of something special. In the postwar era, it was neglected and largely inaccessible, swallowed ...