rdaner
Senior Member
I think this is relevant for this site because it gives a glimpse of what may be in store for Ryerson and UofT as they embark on new performance and athletic facilities over the coming year. As well, Ontario as a whole is in the midst of a remarkable exercise of placing univesity facilities in traditional downtowns as seen in Brantford, K-W, Cambridge, Burlington (maybe), Toronto waterfront, Stratford and Oshawa. This will have tremendous longterm consequences on the vitality of those areas in the future.
BTW, Lisa Rochon has an interesting site at www.lisarochon.com
CITYSPACE: ARCHITECTURE: THE SHINY NEW WORLD OF UNIVERSITY CAMPUS DESIGN
Higher education, with yoga
LISA ROCHON
lrochon@globeandmail.com
E-mail Lisa Rochon | Read Bio | Latest Columns
September 6, 2008
The beer-swigging and all-night games of caps will never die. Maybe it's harder to flunk out of university these days. But whether they're bleary- or bright-eyed, the truth of the matter is that university and college students in Canada and the United States represent a powerful class of taste arbiters. And once they unpack at university, they're a captive audience for at least four years.
It's no longer enough just to keep students on campus. Now, university planners are strategizing about ways to offer big-city pleasures wrapped up in welcoming, occasionally daring architecture. Worried that your young Ashley or Jacob might be bored away from home? Sorry to disappoint you. Across the continent, universities are spending billions to impress students with their state-of-the-art science laboratories, plush new residences and, high up on the list, out-of-classroom experience.
"Out-of-classroom experience" is the latest catchphrase from the mouths of university architects and administrators, and a key locus of competition between institutions these days. At Queen's University in Kingston, Ont., the hotshot Norwegian architecture firm Snohetta, catapulted to international fame for its stunning, competition-winning designs of the Alexandria Library in Egypt and the Oslo Opera House in Norway, has been hired to design a performing-arts centre on a spectacular site on the shore of Lake Ontario within a stone's throw of the university campus. A 600-seat concert hall is planned along with facilities for Queen's performing-arts departments.
It's too early to see design renderings by Snohetta and the Ottawa firm EMA Architects, but newly appointed Queen's principal Tom Williams says the goal is to make the $50-million centre one of the best acoustical facilities in eastern Canada. A gift of $14-million from philanthropists Alfred and Isabel Bader allowing the purchase of the waterfront site has kick-started the building campaign. If Snohetta is given the creative licence to align the design with the Kingston waterfront the way the firm has done, for instance, along a fjord in Oslo, a powerful cultural generator can be expected. Whether or not the centre can be built to the exacting standards of Snohetta with construction competently managed is still up in the air, but Williams's ambition is impressive: "We're trying to position the centre as part of a cultural tourism mecca, given the location of Kingston. We could within a 2½ hour drive draw on some 15 million people if you include Ithaca, Syracuse and communities in upper New York State."
'I don't want to live with the memory of this all my life'
The folks across the border in Ithaca, however, are already well served by the $1.5-billion (U.S.) worth of building under way at Cornell University, including a newly completed life-sciences building - very white, very modern - by American architect Richard Meier. Rem Koolhaas's box-connector addition to Cornell's College of Architecture, Art and Planning is an uninspired gesture, no matter how the concept is spun by the marketers at the Dutch superstar's Office for Metropolitan Architecture. It is the third attempt to expand the college's spaces and, as it has yet to receive a building permit, perhaps it is also doomed to fail.
Cornell, though, can be lauded for its far-reaching master plan recently completed by Toronto's Urban Strategies, an attempt to look seriously at the big picture in a way that hasn't been undertaken since the 1930s. New buildings are being seriously interpreted as part of a larger landscape, and people-gathering atriums such as the one at Duffield Hall have been included of late. Bicycle paths and delightful gardens with teak furniture have been added, and the concept of how to get a good cup of coffee has been given serious consideration. To please its demanding urbanite students weaned from the breast on Starbucks, coffee carts may soon start appearing in the vast, bucolic courtyards at Cornell.
If you build, they will come - or so the current planning dictate goes. At Queen's, an athletic and student facility extending over two Kingston blocks is being constructed for $230-million, just shy of what was spent on the renovation of the Royal Ontario Museum or the Art Gallery of Ontario. The Queen's Centre has suffered serious cost overruns, but the foundations are poured and the first phase is expected to open late next year. At that point, Queen's will join the ranks of American universities, where giant athletic-student centres are now commonplace.
In fact, the Queen's Centre is similar in its breadth of programming to the Zesiger Sports and Fitness Center, built about five years ago at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, Mass., for approximately the same amount of money. "One of the things that we've seen over time is that students want a variety of social options," says David Dymecki, of the Boston-based Sasaki Associates, which designed both the MIT centre and the Queen's Centre working in collaboration with B + H Architects of Toronto and Shoalts and Zaback of Kingston. "They'd like a place to hang out, to study, to eat, to meet their friends, to work out. Ten or 15 years ago, you might have only seen only one-third of the student population thinking about working out, about wellness. Now about three-quarters of the students say they want to work out and socialize."
To that end, the Queen's Centre will house a new aquatic centre, a gymnasium and a 1,700-seat varsity centre that can host convocation ceremonies, as well as dozens of dance, fitness and yoga studios. There will be volleyball, basketball and squash courts, as well as a food court, space for clubs, meeting rooms and a new home for the university's school of kinesiology emphasizing physical education and, that other favourite catchword of the decade: wellness.
The population of Queen's hovers around 18,000 but, like the majority of those attending colleges and universities, the students are being treated to a feast of architecture filled with as much natural light as urban amenities. Compared to the grand but somewhat stolid stone architecture of 100 years ago, the Queen's student centre emphasizes seamless connections to the street and is designed to achieve LEED recognition for its sustainability. Though massive (its footprint spreads over about 700,000 square feet), it rises only three storeys in keeping with the rest of the low-lying campus; the scale is broken down into five collegiate-type buildings.
What does all of this mean? That newly graduated high-school students are being exposed to the most delectable aspects of cities. That they are being served remarkable amenities as imagined by an impressive roster of architects. And that, if they open their eyes to the change happening at their historic campuses, perhaps today's students will eventually become tougher, more demanding clients for architecture in the future. Or, maybe they'll simply be extra-critical of the meals when they move back home.
BTW, Lisa Rochon has an interesting site at www.lisarochon.com
CITYSPACE: ARCHITECTURE: THE SHINY NEW WORLD OF UNIVERSITY CAMPUS DESIGN
Higher education, with yoga
LISA ROCHON
lrochon@globeandmail.com
E-mail Lisa Rochon | Read Bio | Latest Columns
September 6, 2008
The beer-swigging and all-night games of caps will never die. Maybe it's harder to flunk out of university these days. But whether they're bleary- or bright-eyed, the truth of the matter is that university and college students in Canada and the United States represent a powerful class of taste arbiters. And once they unpack at university, they're a captive audience for at least four years.
It's no longer enough just to keep students on campus. Now, university planners are strategizing about ways to offer big-city pleasures wrapped up in welcoming, occasionally daring architecture. Worried that your young Ashley or Jacob might be bored away from home? Sorry to disappoint you. Across the continent, universities are spending billions to impress students with their state-of-the-art science laboratories, plush new residences and, high up on the list, out-of-classroom experience.
"Out-of-classroom experience" is the latest catchphrase from the mouths of university architects and administrators, and a key locus of competition between institutions these days. At Queen's University in Kingston, Ont., the hotshot Norwegian architecture firm Snohetta, catapulted to international fame for its stunning, competition-winning designs of the Alexandria Library in Egypt and the Oslo Opera House in Norway, has been hired to design a performing-arts centre on a spectacular site on the shore of Lake Ontario within a stone's throw of the university campus. A 600-seat concert hall is planned along with facilities for Queen's performing-arts departments.
It's too early to see design renderings by Snohetta and the Ottawa firm EMA Architects, but newly appointed Queen's principal Tom Williams says the goal is to make the $50-million centre one of the best acoustical facilities in eastern Canada. A gift of $14-million from philanthropists Alfred and Isabel Bader allowing the purchase of the waterfront site has kick-started the building campaign. If Snohetta is given the creative licence to align the design with the Kingston waterfront the way the firm has done, for instance, along a fjord in Oslo, a powerful cultural generator can be expected. Whether or not the centre can be built to the exacting standards of Snohetta with construction competently managed is still up in the air, but Williams's ambition is impressive: "We're trying to position the centre as part of a cultural tourism mecca, given the location of Kingston. We could within a 2½ hour drive draw on some 15 million people if you include Ithaca, Syracuse and communities in upper New York State."
'I don't want to live with the memory of this all my life'
The folks across the border in Ithaca, however, are already well served by the $1.5-billion (U.S.) worth of building under way at Cornell University, including a newly completed life-sciences building - very white, very modern - by American architect Richard Meier. Rem Koolhaas's box-connector addition to Cornell's College of Architecture, Art and Planning is an uninspired gesture, no matter how the concept is spun by the marketers at the Dutch superstar's Office for Metropolitan Architecture. It is the third attempt to expand the college's spaces and, as it has yet to receive a building permit, perhaps it is also doomed to fail.
Cornell, though, can be lauded for its far-reaching master plan recently completed by Toronto's Urban Strategies, an attempt to look seriously at the big picture in a way that hasn't been undertaken since the 1930s. New buildings are being seriously interpreted as part of a larger landscape, and people-gathering atriums such as the one at Duffield Hall have been included of late. Bicycle paths and delightful gardens with teak furniture have been added, and the concept of how to get a good cup of coffee has been given serious consideration. To please its demanding urbanite students weaned from the breast on Starbucks, coffee carts may soon start appearing in the vast, bucolic courtyards at Cornell.
If you build, they will come - or so the current planning dictate goes. At Queen's, an athletic and student facility extending over two Kingston blocks is being constructed for $230-million, just shy of what was spent on the renovation of the Royal Ontario Museum or the Art Gallery of Ontario. The Queen's Centre has suffered serious cost overruns, but the foundations are poured and the first phase is expected to open late next year. At that point, Queen's will join the ranks of American universities, where giant athletic-student centres are now commonplace.
In fact, the Queen's Centre is similar in its breadth of programming to the Zesiger Sports and Fitness Center, built about five years ago at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, Mass., for approximately the same amount of money. "One of the things that we've seen over time is that students want a variety of social options," says David Dymecki, of the Boston-based Sasaki Associates, which designed both the MIT centre and the Queen's Centre working in collaboration with B + H Architects of Toronto and Shoalts and Zaback of Kingston. "They'd like a place to hang out, to study, to eat, to meet their friends, to work out. Ten or 15 years ago, you might have only seen only one-third of the student population thinking about working out, about wellness. Now about three-quarters of the students say they want to work out and socialize."
To that end, the Queen's Centre will house a new aquatic centre, a gymnasium and a 1,700-seat varsity centre that can host convocation ceremonies, as well as dozens of dance, fitness and yoga studios. There will be volleyball, basketball and squash courts, as well as a food court, space for clubs, meeting rooms and a new home for the university's school of kinesiology emphasizing physical education and, that other favourite catchword of the decade: wellness.
The population of Queen's hovers around 18,000 but, like the majority of those attending colleges and universities, the students are being treated to a feast of architecture filled with as much natural light as urban amenities. Compared to the grand but somewhat stolid stone architecture of 100 years ago, the Queen's student centre emphasizes seamless connections to the street and is designed to achieve LEED recognition for its sustainability. Though massive (its footprint spreads over about 700,000 square feet), it rises only three storeys in keeping with the rest of the low-lying campus; the scale is broken down into five collegiate-type buildings.
What does all of this mean? That newly graduated high-school students are being exposed to the most delectable aspects of cities. That they are being served remarkable amenities as imagined by an impressive roster of architects. And that, if they open their eyes to the change happening at their historic campuses, perhaps today's students will eventually become tougher, more demanding clients for architecture in the future. Or, maybe they'll simply be extra-critical of the meals when they move back home.
