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Toronto’s Perkins&Will (P&W), with Smoke Architecture, a growing indigenous-led Hamilton firm, are wrapping up working drawings for the rebuilding of the Dawes Road Branch of the Toronto Public Library (TPL) in the Woodbine Gardens area of East York. The existing branch and 6-unit condo on the site now will close and construction will start later this year. P&W’s project lead Architect Andrew Frontini has given UrbanToronto an update on the design, since we covered this last summer.
The new 3-storey, 26,300 ft² facility replaces an aging library for new needs. It features a plaza at street level, a youth hub on the second floor, and a rooftop garden and community spaces on the top floor. The building is symbolically wrapped in an indigenous star blanket, a traditional gift showing support and respect for the community and ancestors.
The recent site plan submission indicates simplified utility lines and services, increased permeable surfaces and landscaping, and seating areas, creating a generous outdoor plaza for gathering. The building commands the street corner at Dawes Road and Chapman Street and offers a gracious front entry.
The building is clad with overlapping parallelogram shingles of zinc. The architects worked with suppliers in a Design-assist capacity to detail the envelope and bring a sculptural expression to its form, “really optimizing the compound curves so it looks organic but is more simply built.” The building envelope is curved in one dimension, in plan rather than in plan and in section, and through a process of construction optimization, they have managed to bring the envelope in on budget.
The envelope is optimized in terms of performance too; high-performing with triple glazing and a low window-to-wall ratio lends the star blanket a solid appearance. Diamond-shaped windows are strategically positioned and integrated into its pattern. Inviting views and daylight, larger glazing is used in key locations: overlooking the garden, at street level where the blanket is ‘lifted’, at the east-facing atrium, where the blanket ‘peeks open’.
New interior renderings show a more fully developed concept. The interior face of the blanket is expressed using a wood paneling that echoes the exterior diamond-shaped modules. “The wood liner helps one to understand the continuity of the blanket as a kind of fluid organic, exterior envelope,” notes Frontini. “Like a quilt, it has a pattern on the outside and is neutral on the backside, but you see that stitching through. It's the same structure, but it's a different expression.”
The programming of the roof level as a teaching and gathering space is central. It is anchored by a roundhouse, a circular ceremonial gathering space for the community, indigenous and others. It connects to a City of Toronto Community Hub, which offers meeting and consultation rooms, and a learning kitchen. Sharing many of the same patrons, like after-school youth, the hub has a synergy with the library, speaking to community needs. The spaces open onto a lush rooftop garden with a ceremonial fire pit.
The TPL aspires to achieve some of the City’s highest sustainability goals, targeting a net zero carbon building, working with a combination of electrification of systems, air source heat pumps, and photovoltaics. “The TPL deserves kudos for structuring a brief that was so clear about what they wanted: a net zero carbon operational building and an Indigenous Architect on the design team. It’s not just lip service… the success of the project really begins with that commitment on the client side,” says Frontini.
“It's an interesting period in time when there's increasing demand to integrate indigenous perspectives into the built environment,” adds Frontini. This partnership brings together two very different firm cultures: P&W, an established institutional firm of 100 (as part of a global firm of 3,000), and Smoke Architecture, an emerging Indigenous practice, with a half a dozen people. This project provides an example of how firms and communities can co-create, uncovering and cementing much overlap in perspectives: Smoke fuses indigenous ways of knowing and thinking about space in the use of it, and P&W brings what it calls its ‘living design framework’, a kind of holistic sustainability approach. Aligned in their vision, both sides have learned a lot from each other.
The library is scheduled to welcome patrons in late 2025 or early 2026.
UrbanToronto will continue to follow progress on this development, but in the meantime, you can learn more about it from our Database file, linked below. If you'd like, you can join in on the conversation in the associated Project Forum thread or leave a comment in the space provided on this page.
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