As the Toronto slums were being bulldozed in the 1950s, the City entered into a controversial period of public housing and modern planning. Peter Dickinson’s maisonette towers, located just south of Shuter, on Blevins and Belshaw, formed part of the second phase of the Regent Park redevelopment which was well under way by 1955. Regent Park was seen as a community that would be protected from the old, unredeeming slums of nearby Cabbagetown and, to signify a break with this past, Dickinson based his design on modernist planning set forth by Le Corbusier and others. Dickinson’s towers for Regent Park South were executed while he was chief design architect with Page and Steele in Toronto.

The project is comprised of five 14-storey apartment towers sited around a central park known as Saints’ Square. The chief planner for the project, Ian Maclennan, abandoned through streets in favour of dead-end streets. Walking around the site today, the towers seem to be sited randomly with no relationship to Dundas or Shuter Street, or the edges of Saints’ Square. One does notice, however, that they are aligned carefully with the path of the sun, although at ground level, the pedestrian is barely aware of this fact.

Dickinson won national recognition for these towers when he received the prestigious Massey Silver Medal in 1958. He was proud of the open spaces created around the towers. On paper, the spaces looked attractive, but in reality, they were unadorned and empty of life. The inconvenience of poor shopping facilities and poor taxi, ambulance, and truck delivery access further isolated these towers and their communities, despite the proximity to a major thoroughfare. At Belshaw Place, for example, three or four token services are meant to satisfy several towers. Next to these insufficient services, Dickinson designed a heroic glass curtain wall exposing the mechanical plant on the ground floor.

Influenced by Le Corbusier, the interior design of the towers was innovative for its use of hallways on every other floor, allowing apartments to be built on two floors, with an internal stair connection. Le Corbusier first used this concept in the Unité d’habitation in Marseilles. The large apartments had at least two bedrooms that would work well to accommodate the population boom in post-war Canada. One curious design feature is the small balconies that give exterior access to adjoining units. In the event of a fire, one exits to the common balcony, then through their neighbour’s apartment. In case the neighbour was away or the door locked, Dickinson designed a glass box to house a hammer that could be used to break into the neighbour’s apartment, so an escape could be made.

Despite faults, Dickinson’s maisonette towers are seminal buildings in the history of public housing in Toronto.

Ian Chodikoff