One Spadina Crescent
by Marc Gotlieb
All great urban universities struggle with a common urban challenge. How does a university define its terrain within the larger fabric of the city? At one time the answer was simple: isolation. In the classic "town and gown" cultures of the medieval university, nothing more eloquently expressed this attitude than the long, high walls encircling its perimeter, punctuated by a single door guarded by that occasionally fearsome fixture of collegiate culture: the porter.
Today, those walls survive mainly as a metaphor, an expression of the university's intellectual freedom, but also of the sometimes disabling isolation of academic culture. Certainly the classic isolationism of collegiate architecture has lost its authority, its last expression at the University of Toronto being Ron Thom's Massey College — an outstanding building that nevertheless projects a rather secretive, even intimidating image. Today, by contrast, urban universities face a different challenge: how can they enhance the urban fabric of the campus without building a wall around the campus?
The doctrine of isolation may have had its day, but the reverse raises problems in its own right. The reality at the University of Toronto is that we probably have not done enough to identify the campus as such. This vast academic metropolis has not fully established its precincts as a living campus — a campus defined in part through architectural and landscape markers that promote the sense of lived and imagined community. Hence the important role recently assigned to "gateway" or "portal" structures: monuments, arches and the like that function as both ceremonial entrance and marker of what goes on within. Those portals take a variety of forms: the big "O" cantilevered across Graduate House, the new gates at King's College Circle and, of course, the redevelopment of the St. George streetscape, a critical intervention that radically transformed a street possessing all the charm of an East Berlin boulevard in the 1960s.
A building, too, can function as a potent gateway, signaling to the community what the university stands for and what stands within. Perhaps no building at the University of Toronto has the potential more expressively to convey this message and to revitalize a university and an urbanscape than 1 Spadina Crescent, whose 115 foot tower, surrounded by an impressive array of dormers, turrets and gargoyles, offers a commanding prospect over an historic district of unparalleled richness and diversity. Few grand structures in the university — or for that matter in the city — have led lives at once so interesting and, for lack of a better word, so discontinuous.
Designed by the prominent Toronto architectural firm of Smith and Gemmell, the Gothic Revival building was erected in 1875 to house Knox College; four decades later, the Presbyterians relocated eastward, on St. George. The structure then became home to the Spadina Military Hospital for convalescing World War I soldiers, to the armories of the Toronto Regiment, to the Connaught Laboratories, which conducted drug research and development, and finally to the university itself.
Additions would be built on as each new tenant sought to adapt 1 Spadina Crescent to its own purposes. If the building's main facade remains remarkably intact, the more delicate north facade, facing Bloor Street, has almost vanished. Any serious restoration will have to take down the additions, which would unveil an entirely new prospect onto a building that we all have seen, and yet in key respects simply do not know.
It is not only the building's striking design and stunning location that mark it out for special treatment. By virtue of its dedicated circle and soaring tower, it is hard to imagine a more impressive gateway to the university. The building and its situation could not be more different than those long college walls that, historically, could seem to nurture a university's culture of secrecy and isolation.
True, it needs a renovation — a project that should encompass not only the building itself but also the entire historic site. But what makes this building a unique gateway is the work that goes on within its walls. In this respect, 1 Spadina Crescent's spiritual renovation is well underway, although scarcely along the lines that would have been envisioned by John Knox or his followers. The future home of the fine art department, the building is already a locus for artists working across a variety of traditional and new media. Art students have thoroughly colonized its strange and unpredictable sequence of interiors, assimilating the sometimes bizarre detritus of the building's past lives into their own intellectual and creative practices. Before long, the artists will be joined by art historians, archaeologists and architectural historians, an intellectual constellation that has discovered in 1 Spadina not just buff-bricks-and-mortar but a site that almost by its nature seems structured to serve the special demands of the visual arts. Precisely the building's liminal location — at once part of the campus and part of the city — precisely its storied, diverse and sometimes tragic history — make 1 Spadina Crescent the kind of place where the visual arts can thrive. And with the Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design right down the street, the intersection of College and Spadina has the potential to emerge as the city's newest precinct dedicated to the visual arts.
From the history of art across cultures to the latest developments in studio practice, the disciplines of the visual arts thrive on the freedom and intellectual exchange that universities offer. But those same disciplines require to no less degree stimulus from the community at large, both the global network of museums, galleries and arts infrastructure, and the immediate environs of the bustling street. Call it redeveloped, repositioned, rebranded, restaged, renewed or restored, 1 Spadina Crescent offers just such a prospect.