SUMMER 2013 ABSENCE
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an expansion of the undergraduate program, the new Dean Richard Sommers was able to reserve this site for a very ambitious project. A site that used to be on the margins of Toronto is now at its center but also to find the boundary between the institutional hub of the university of Toronto, that you see on the right, and the neighborhoods that support it and become part of its community to the left. Spadina running north south is one of the major civic axes of the city that connect it back to the lake. You can see here in this animation some of the major arteries that connect down to the lake with the Spadina Circle being the main one. The southern elevation of that building is complete but the northern part of the building needs a face, an identity, and the new school of architecture will become that opportunity using the landscape as a mediator between the existing conditions and the newly proposed conditions. In fact, the site has gone through many iterations — it has been a monastery, it has been a hospital, it has been an art school, but never has it been complete. This is the one opportunity to integrate the relationship of the building, the campus, the community, and the urban condition of Spadina Circle. What is also important to recognize is that there are a lot of buildings that have been built over time in its backyard becoming part of its heritage, though they are not of any value. With great debate we were able to purify the building in the south in order to be able to instigate an evolution of the circle by breaking some rules ourselves. Taking the U conditions that ended two pavilions and in essence completes the building, wrap the building, and treat the new building not so much as a new building but a completion of a type. By doing that we get to provide the framework for a north façade, if you like northern light. This is the perfect light for studio space within which a new infrastructure has to be placed (bathrooms, elevators, cores, etc.) that, in a way, articulates the circulation space that needs to go around. Within this gets nested the single darkest space in the building which is the multipurpose hall, the space that we are in, except, in a way, can function as three or four lecture halls and a kind of multi-value room. And in relationship to the site of the city, one of