Toronto U of T: Goldring Centre for High Performance Sport | 51m | 6s | U of T | Patkau

I lived in the McGill Ghetto for about 5 years and I have to say, that area is very, very nice. It's a great place to live and explore. The homes there and up the mountain, are fantastic!
 
junctionist said:
All of U of T's architecture is great. Massey College, New College, the Faculty of Pharmacy Building, CCBR, Convocation Hall, EJ Pratt Library and Robarts are all leading examples of their styles in Canada (if not the world). The diversity of styles makes exploring the campus a pleasure. Its best buildings are easily the best in Canada. The other buildings are generally outstanding as well. The streets, neighbourhoods and public spaces around the ROM are outstanding as well.
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I'd agree about UofT's architectural quality but note that the campus is more than the sum of its buildings.

Looked at in isolation I think the individuals buildings at UofT are really fantastic. (one exception being Robarts, which doesn't function well as a library at all. Too many levels.)

That said, the campus as a whole sometimes feels like less than the sum of its parts. St. George isn't, IMO, a very appealing 'main street' for the campus. Kings' College circle looks nice in convocation photos but is an unusable mud or ice pit for most of the year. The campus' face on Spadina is surprisingly dead. The pharmacy building, while pretty by itself, is just plonked down on the corner with fairly little finesse.

It's not all bad, obviously. Victoria and UC have some really great spaces. Back campus will be much nicer with the new turf. Devonshire is great.

Still, I feel like the campus doesn't do as much as it could to highlight its great architecture and tie everything together. Lots of parts of UofT can be too insular. Massey College, for instance, is basically just a brick-wall from the street. I understand it's beautiful on the inside, but it doesn't do much for the campus.
 
diminutive said:
It's not all bad
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Oh com'on...sure it is. No point in beating around the bush....any competent city (ie Vancouver, Montreal) would have bulldozed the eyesore that is U of T campus, and sold it to developers to replace it with a Cityplace style development.
 
diminutive said:
...one exception being Robarts, which doesn't function well as a library at all. Too many levels.
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Robarts was designed as a closed-stack, graduate level-only library where requests for books were submitted via paper slips and sent through vacuum tubes to the appropriate floor, whereupon runners would receive orders and place the books in dummy elevators. It doesn't "work" because it wasn't designed to work as a library is expected to today.
 
I always thought the criticism of Robarts was overblown considering that it's supposed to be a building that people get to know through repeat visits. You walk in through the less monumental "storefront" entrance on St. George (not up the exterior stairs), walk to the elevators at the back and go up to the stacks. It's not a big deal unless you're just visiting once. It could have been more intuitive, but it's not like its flaws cause daily problems for students.
 
junctionist said:
I always thought the criticism of Robarts was overblown considering that it's supposed to be a building that people get to know through repeat visits. You walk in through the less monumental "storefront" entrance on St. George (not up the exterior stairs), walk to the elevators at the back and go up to the stacks. It's not a big deal unless you're just visiting once. It could have been more intuitive, but it's not like its flaws cause daily problems for students.
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The stacks themselves are the issue. Because of the floor-plate students almost inevitably have to go through a ton of vertical circulation to get the books they need. It makes research much harder than it needs to be. Particularly at crunch times if (when) one of the elevators are down. It sucks being stuck with a dozen books in your arms waiting for the library's (overtaxed) elevator banks to come. There's also a lack of good study space near the stacks. The central study atriums in the stacks are awful.

After using Robarts in high school, undergrad and grad school it really never got better at its job. I'm just happy online collections have improved so much.

fiendishlibrarian said:
Robarts was designed as a closed-stack, graduate level-only library where requests for books were submitted via paper slips and sent through vacuum tubes to the appropriate floor, whereupon runners would receive orders and place the books in dummy elevators. It doesn't "work" because it wasn't designed to work as a library is expected to today.
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Robarts almost never actually operated as a closed stack library. It was stupid to design a campus' main library around the premise of not allowing students in. Closed stacks are ok for rare book libraries, but it's silly for reference libraries.

It's unfair to judge a building for conditions which changed decades after it was built. That said, if a building's entire concept has to be abandoned within a few years of it opening, and its not adaptable enough to work well in its new role, it's a bad design.
 
I had a different experience as an undergrad circa 2010. When I did research, I found most of my books on a single floor, though my research was often broad enough to require getting a couple of books on other floors and at college libraries. In my final year, they completed some of their renovations for large study spaces on the stacks floors, which were great improvements.
 
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