Suburban schools
George Harvey Vocational Institute. PANDASuburban innovation
Most of Metropolitan Toronto, and its school boards were, created by the Baby Boom. Between 1945 and 1975, “Metro” grew from under one million to 2.5 million. Much of that expanded population settled in the suburban municipalities, which had been largely rural. Scarborough grew from 25,000 to 335,000 people in a generation.
The school boards of these municipalities were largely independent. Generally they hired private-sector architects for their school buildings. Some of the architects, and many of the ideas, carried between them.
One was the Crow Island model, brought to Toronto by John B. Parkin and Associates. Their Sunnylea School in Etobicoke (1943) followed the Crow Island scheme almost exactly, with “project rooms” in each classroom and links to the outdoors. The school was L-shaped in plan, mediating between street and landscape.
Sunnylea School. PANDASunnylea School. PANDA
Sunnylea School. PANDAThe surrounding landscape, however, was not carefully designed or tended. The highest ideas of the architects would be diluted – particularly with respect to elements of the design (such as landscape and furniture) not viewed as essential.
And yet Sunnylea reflected some architectural ideas that would become common in Toronto schools. Low ceilings, and small cupboards at the floor, matched the scale of a small child’s body. Many interior walls were made of exposed brick, which was highly durable and also attractive.
Other architects achieved excellent results with a similar architectural language. One was Peter Dickinson, a British architect who in the 1950s was the lead designer with established firm Page & Steele. At West Glen Junior School (1953) in Etobicoke, Dickinson revealed thick, textured beams of glue-laminated wood within the classrooms, and marked the school entrance with a generous canopy resting on conspicuously skinny steel columns.
West Glen P.S., 1950s. PANDAWest Glen’s classrooms were organized in linear fashion, a more economical arrangement than the Crow Island plan and one typical of postwar schools. PANDAA classroom at West Glen, with windows that come down to the eye level of small children. PANDAModernism lent itself well to the time and cost pressures of the postwar school boom. However, inventive architects managed to bring more playful influences into their work. At Dickinson’s Lawrence Heights Middle School (1960), the expression of the gridded concrete structure shows the influence of Mies van der Rohe, but the front entrance is marked by another entry pavilion, which cantilevers outward and folds upward. This evokes the decorative modernism that followed the Festival of Britain in 1951 – a seminal influence on Toronto schools.
In Scarborough, John Andrews – the Australian architect responsible for Scarborough College and the CN Tower – designed Bellmere P.S. The school divides its classrooms into individual, pavilion-like structures; each classroom has a pyramidal wood ceiling, implying to children that the classroom is itself a house. This is a rare example of what historian R. Thomas Hille calls “the cluster plan,” following the example of Aldo van Eyck’s Amsterdam Orphanage.
Bellmere PS, photographed soon after its completion. PANDAHigh schools
High schools were shaped by a variety of influences and models. Here too the Parkin firm led the way. bringing the influence of Mies into Toronto schools with George Harvey Vocational Institute (1950, now renamed) in York.
This was the first major building in the city to adopt the language of Mies, combining an exposed structure of steel and concrete with glass block. George Harvey was contemporaneous with the similar Hunstanton School in England by Alison and Peter Smithson, which is widely recognized as a pioneering example of Modern school architecture.
Versions of Mies’s language would continue to shape schools across the city through the 1950s and 1960s, including at Kipling Collegiate (Adamson Associates, 1960), which won a national Massey Medal for architecture, and Don Mills Collegiate (John B. Parkin and Associates, 1959).
George Harvey Vocational Institute. PANDAThe Don Mills M.S./C.I. complex, 2021. DOUBLESPACE PHOTOGRAPHYIn the 1960s and 1970s, the suburban school boards adopted new spatial and architectural models. The boards continued to employ leading architecture firms including Moriyama & Teshima, Craig, Zeidler & Strong and Page & Steele.
John McCrae, 2021. DOUBLESPACE PHOTOGRAPHYPedagogical idea shifted radically in this period. In the late 1960s, the “open classroom” came into fashion in the United States and Canada. In this model of elementary school, communal spaces ruled; classrooms were separated by dividers rather than walls, and large areas of the school were left unprogrammed for independent student work. This approach called for little connection with the outside world.
Arbor Glen P.S., Scarborough, by Moriyama & Teshima. MTAThrough a Metro program called Study of Educational Facilities (SEF), twenty-eight open-plan schools were built using prefabricated building systems. The exteriors of the buildings were standardized – prefab concrete panels, with narrow windows. This program failed to realize promised cost savings; the buildings were widely seen as unattractive; and educators no longer favoured schools with few windows. The SEF program was ended in 1971.