higher education : Development News

The ice has come back to Maple Leaf Gardens.

This week, the ice has begun to gel once again in the storied space at Carlton and Church, part of a $72.5-million project to make the space into the sports facility Ryerson never had.

The new rink is on the third floor, above the Loblaws on the ground floor and the LCBO on the second. When it’s complete, it’ll seat 2,600 for hockey, and more for other ice sports with seating possible on the floor. The third floor is also home to the new volleyball courts, the floors of which have just been laid. They'll take four to five weeks to settle, roughly the same time it’ll take for the ice to set next door.

Michael Forbes of Ryerson’s public affairs department says work started in December 2009. There’ll be an opening ceremony in August, with the official grand opening on September 6, in time for the new academic session.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Michael Forbes

The "passivhaus" for which Germany has become so famous was actually born in Canada in 1977, says Ross Elliott, the man looking to bring the idea back home.

"Europe took what the Canadians learned back in the early '80s and developed this passive house certification and sort of sent it back across the ocean to us," says Elliott, president and CEO of Homesol Building Solutions. The voluntary certification promotes ultra-low energy buildings with small carbon footprints.

Elliott, alongside Russell Richman, Ryan Abendroth and Graham Irwin, are bringing their own German certification training to Toronto in July to teach their first nine-day course on passive house construction.

The course, which will count for 32 credits, or two years' worth, of professional continuing education for architects and LEED professionals, will teach students how to build houses that use as little as 15 kilowatts per square metre per year for heating. The average house now uses between 150 and 160 kilowatts. The goal for the total energy load for the passive house, including heating, ventilation, lighting and other services is 120 kw. The standard for retrofit houses is 25 kw per square metre for heating annually.

"It's not pie-in-the-sky stuff," Elliott says, pointing out that there are about 25,000 such houses across Europe, and eight now on the drawing board in Ottawa, where he's based, with about 30 likely to be in the works by the end of the year.

The course runs July 31 to August 4 and August 20 to 23 and costs $2,250 plus HST, with an extra $250 charge to take a certification exam.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Ross Elliott

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Last week marked the official re-opening of Osgoode Hall Law School after an extensive redesign by Diamond Schmitt Architects.

"Some cities are built at the right time, some cities are not built at the right time. Dublin was very lucky to be built at the height of Georgian elegance," says architect Jack Diamond. "Unfortunately, Osgoode Hall was not built at the height of architectural elegance."

In tackling the project on the York University campus, Diamond says, "there were several things we had as our objectives. Another flaw in the original building—it wasn't easy to find one's way around, because of the "blind" nature of the building, not only externally but internally; students never knew whether the faculty was in or out. The common room looked like a nasty sports locker room with no windows whatsoever."

The new design is a 215,000-square-foot reorganization of the 44-year-old school around an atrium, with a new 23,000-square-foot single-storey addition.

"The aim of the design was obviously to clarify the plan, to make it accessible and understandable," says Diamond, "to introduce great amounts of natural light and to improve the quality of space so that people would spend more time on campus. That whole lack of a sense of community is exacerbated now by computer, where people can work at home, have access to legal documents, without having to go to the library."

York raised $32 million for the project, which was bumped up by another $25 million through the federal and provincial governments' Knowledge Infrastructure Program.

"The net effect has been quite stunning," Diamond says of the new facility, named the Ignat Kaneff building after the lead donor, a Toronto area developer of Bulgarian extraction. "One of the problem is it's suffering from its success. It's so popular with non-law students that you have to show your law student card to get in."

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Jack Diamond

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The short list has been settled and the winners of the first Sustainable Design Awards open to all OCAD students will be announced tomorrow.

The awards are the brainchild of Mike Lovas, 31, a mature student with an engineering background who entered the industrial design program at OCAD last year and almost immediately realized very little was being said in his classes about sustainable design.

Lovas says, in fact, that he was "shocked at how little sustainable issues were being brought up, considering industrial design is all about mass production, pumping out lots of stuff. There wasn't a whole lot of talk at that point about the implications and impact of mass production would be on society, the environment, and people."

One of the reasons, he realized after he started talking to friends and professors about his idea for a prize, was that sustainability in this context is hard to define. The college was quick to get on board with the prize, which was offered last year but only to industrial design students.

In order to take the difficulty of definition into account, the guidelines are purposely vague, written in the form of a series of questions about material and systems. "Design" itself is open to interpretation, and the five-member jury, headed by New York editor and School of Visual Arts teacher Alan Chochinov, was open to pretty much anything.

The shortlist includes a design for a dish rack that diverts its run-off to water herbs, a plan for an "ecoburb" and another to turn the city's lane ways into green spaces.

There will be prizes for first, second and third, as well as a student choice award, with first prize being $1,000. There were 51 entries.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Mike Lovas

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The walls are going up at the new George Brown campus-with-a-view.

Senior project manager Nerys Rau says the concrete work on the Waterfront campus, next to Corus Quay and Sugar Beach, was finished in July. The structural steel is all up, and the curtain wall is now filling in.

"We’re complete to the second floor on the east side and probably even higher on the west side," she says.

The 320,000-square-foot, $175-million single-building project is set to be substantially completed by July 2012, and to open for students in September.

The parking garage, which is 75 per cent funded and owned by Waterfront Toronto, is mostly complete and is being painted.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Nerys Rau

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One of the city's most iconic buildings is getting a facelift and a new purpose.

Known to a generation of Torontonians as the seat of our Second City troupe, the Old Fire Hall is now undergoing a renovation to become the new home of Complections, a college of make-up art and design.

The building at 110 Lombard Street was originally constructed in 1886, and then rebuilt after the great fire of 1904. It was most recently the home of Gilda's Club (now known somewhat less memorably as the Cancer Support Community), which provides what they refer to as "psychosocial" care for cancer patients.

"They made many little living rooms in the house," says Complections president and co-owner Pamela Earle. "We've taken the walls out and created eight classrooms, and one large classroom for the graduation days."

The renovation will also remove the drywall from the old windows, and undo the dropped ceiling, revealing the original five-metre-high first-floor ceiling.

The building's a big move up for the school, which currently occupies about 8,500 square feet on St. Nicholas Street. Earle figures they'll be able to take about 30 more students a year, increasing the annual enrolment to 200.

The schedule calls for an early 2012 opening.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Pamela Earle

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As of this week, the University of Toronto's Scarborough campus has a little more space for its swelling student body.

The Instructional Centre cost $78 million, of which $70 million came from the federal and provincial governments, will add 13 classroom, 7 labs and 90 offices to the university's suburban campus, whose undergraduate enrollment has grown from about 5,000 in 2001 to 10,400 for the coming year.

Construction began on the 150,000 square foot Diamond and Schmitt-designed buildings in September, 2009, and people started using the buildings last March.

"Once we had occupancy, there was still the moving in the furnishings, getting all the classrooms set up," says UTSC's chief strategy officer Andrew Arifuzzaman.

"It's put us on a firm footing for growth as we move forward," he says.

The centre also has a restaurant facing Military Trail at Ellesmere, which is open to both students and the community at large.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Andrew Arifuzzaman

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The University of Toronto, which proposed a 42-storey student residence tower on College at Spadina, is being told to go back and try again.

"They're being told it's not an acceptable proposal," says ward councillor Adam Vaughan. "They're not going to OMB with it. I'm not sure they totally understand this site, it's a very difficult site to put density on. The property adjoins a two-storey house."

Designed by Diamond and Schmitt, the building will probably end up being considerably smaller in scale to reflect not only the single family dwellings on Glasgow, a little alley-like street adjoining the site that runs between Spadina and Huron, but the whole neighbourhood, which is fairly dense, but not especially vertical.

"The implication for height on this stretch is one which really, really worries us," Vaughan says. "We have a new proposal down the street originally came in seeking similar heights, and then came back much smaller.

"Building downtown densities in midtown is not an appropriate way to go."

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Adam Vaughan

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Victoria College's Wymilwood student union building is doubling in size, thanks to a donation from two monied alumni.

The new structure, with an extra 20,000 square feet of space added on to the original 1952 building designed by Eric Arthur, will be named the Goldring Student Centre, after donors Blake and Judy Goldring, who contributed $4 million to the new project.

This year is the college's 175th anniversary.

The building, designed by Moriyama and Teshima, will add a new quad, a renovated cafe, room for 20 student clubs, an assembly space, a two-storey lounge and lockers.

"It will double in space, but not all the current space is within student use," says Victoria president Paul Gooch, "so they'll actually get significantly more space."

Gooch says that in addition to the student population roughly doubling since Wymilwood was built, it currently exists on several levels, none of which is connected by elevator, so the expansion will also make the space more universally accessible.

A ceremony to announce the gift and the plans was held on campus on Saturday. Wymilwood is closed, and will be until the development is completed, sometime late in the fall of 2012. Gooch expects construction to begin later this summer.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Paul Gooch

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Construction finally finished this month on the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute at Shuter and Victoria.

The latest addition to St. Michael's Hospital, the two-building, $103-million facility, comprised of the 270,000 square foot Keenan Research Centre and the Li Ka Shing International Healthcare Education Centre, are now connected by a 17-metre helix-shaped glass bridge, constructed in Germany from Italian materials and shipped in one piece to Toronto, where it was installed in October. Glazing of the structural glass was just completed two weeks ago.

"When we started, we didn't submit the bridge for approval," says Matt Smith, project architect for Diamond and Schmitt, "because it was unclear whether the city would permit us to build the bridge, and so it was added as an eleventh hour addition to the project linking the main hospital to the knowledge institute, and as it turns out, its everyone's favourite part of the building.

"St Mikes is sort of a three-legged stool of research, education and chair and the bridge has come to represent that connection."

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Matt Smith

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An important part of the first phase of Regent Park's revitalization formally opened on Dec. 1, after several months of getting-to-know-you time that one planning and development co-ordinator says was absolutely necessary.

"There was a lot of confusion, and a lot of questions being asked by residents and other community members," says Alison Chan, who works for the Toronto Centre of Community Learning and Development, which is behind the Regent Park Centre of Learning, of the tumultuous process of re-building a neighbourhood, "so we wanted to give ourselves time to be able to establish a presence in the community before we did a formal opening. You need to have people know who you are before you can celebrate the opening of your centre."

The Centre, on the ground floor of a new building at 540 Dundas Street East, which is connected to 246 and 252 Sackville, seniors and family residential buildings respectively, all owned by Toronto Community Housing.

Though the centre started out as a literacy organization, they have moved into more diverse areas of education, for which the 2,233 square foot centre, with its conference room, multipurpose room, computer lab and classroom, is designed to be a hub. The Dec. 1 launch included what they're calling a community dialogue on creating a healthy community, something they're planning on making a series. The first one stayed general, and included Ontario Minister of Research and Innovation Glen Murray, city councilor Pam McConnell, and architect Ken Greenberg. Chan estimates there were about 100 people in attendance.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Alison Chan

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Work on the foundation for the first building of the new George Brown campus on the waterfront is nearing completion. The 330,000 square foot, 8-storey building with underground parking on the 0.83-hectare site is expected to cost a total of $175 million.

What's currently known as Building A, the larger of two buildings that will house the campus's four health sciences schools, is expected to be able to accommodate its first students in the fall of 2012. It was designed by Stantec and KPMB, and construction is being managed by EllisDon.

"There were many practical reasons for proceeding with the waterfront location," says Lorie Shekter-Wolfson, dean and assistant vice-president for the Waterfront Campus development, "namely the close proximity to our existing St. James campus -- but the fact that Waterfront Toronto was looking for a post-secondary institution to help revitalize the waterfront made our involvement a natural fit."

Once complete, the new campus will be able to accommodate about 4,000 students in its dental, nursing, health management, continuing education and "health and wellness" schools.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Lorie Shekter-Wolfson


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Robarts Library, the fourth biggest academic library in North America with 4.8 million volumes, is being de-booked.

In the middle of a two-year renovation, the massive brutalist library is undergoing a six-floor renovation, replacing stacks with study spaces to maintain the building's utility for students.

Once a sort of physical manifestation of the Internet, Robarts is now feeling the effects of the actual Internet. "Everybody's accessing information online now," says Nadeem Shabbar, the Univeristy of Toronto's chief real estate officer.

So the librarians made a list of the least-accessed books, and they're being moved to a storage facility in Downsview. Students will still have access to them, but only by special order, deliverable in 24 hours.

Four of the six floors have been completed.

The renovation has been budgeted at $24 million, and is due to be completed in early 2011, after which another, larger project will commence to add another pod-structure to the back end of the building, over the loading dock to create even more study space. The new structure will be called Robarts Pavillion.


Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Nadeem Shabbar

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Thanks to some federal stimulus funding, the Mississauga campus of the University of Toronto is getting a new $70-million building.

Built on a former parking lot on the west-end campus, the 150,000 square foot Instruction Centre will include new lecture rooms and larger spaces for such things as exam-writing and other mass gatherings. The building was designed by Shore, Tillbe Perkins and Will.

The design includes distinctive copper cladding for the building, which will appear to be constructed out of stacked blocks. According to the architects, the building is intended to "frame a new entry plaza at the north end of the campus" and create a "new hub of student life."

Work began on the project in March of 2009 and according to Nadeem Shabbar, the university's chief real estate officer, it's one of the few large recipients of the stimulus funding that is expected to be completed in time for the program's stated March 31, 2011 deadline.

This is the second large commission on the UTM campus for the architecture firm, which also designed the Hazel McCallion Academic Learning Centre and Library, a 98,000 square foot, four-storey building completed in 2006.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Nadeem Shabbar

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The Aga Khan and Prime Minister Harper were in town last week to break ground on the $300-million Aga Khan Museum and Ismaili Centre in the city's north end.

"His original hope was to locate this project in London, England," says an effervescently enthusiastic Councillor John Parker, in whose ward the buildings and adjacent park are being built, "but things didn't work out there. Plan B was Wynford Drive, Ward 26." Parker calls the development his ward's largest "by a long shot."

The site, on which construction began last week, was formerly home to a Shell Oil office building and, more notably, the former headquarters of Bata Shoes, a building by John B. Parkin that the Toronto Star's Chris Hume wrote was "reminiscent of an ancient Greek temple. Unadorned yet poetic, the architecture pays homage to the past while extolling the virtues of the future," and the Globe's Lisa Rochon described as "imperfect," "clumsy" and derivative.

According to Parker, the original plan was to build in two phases, but various delays in approvals convinced the developer, a local corporation put together by the Aga Khan, to build it all at once and much more quickly, starting several years later than planned, but finishing up by the original completion date, in 2013.

"Your average developer would move ahead on as many fronts as they could establish, and once they had a critical mass of construction approvals, would get to work building," Parker says. "This developer didn't want to make their first move until they had all their plans fully approved."

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Councillor John Parker

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