Graduate House is Toronto’s first aggressively deconstructivist building. Architect Thom Mayne, from the Los Angeles firm Morphosis, collaborated with Toronto-based Stephen Teeple to win an invited design competition for the project in 1998. Strict site guidelines and a rigid volumetric envelope were prescribed by the City of Toronto, generating major design challenges; and the University of Toronto required that the project be realized quickly on a modest budget.

The architects responded with a set of tightly packed, efficient urban blocks composed around a central courtyard and reflecting pool. Graduate House accommodates 450 students in three- and four-bedroom apartments and includes a restaurant at the southwest corner. The building is clad in charcoal-coloured precast concrete with a perforated aluminum skin draped over the north and east facades. A skew in the south block generates positive agitation and “delaminates” the facade into overlapping planes of texture. The signature feature of Graduate House is a multi-valent, two-storey truss element with the words “UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO” featured in Pop-scale, fritted glass lettering. This dramatic, tectonic element cantilevers over Harbord Street and serves simultaneously as cornice, corridor, lounge, sign, and western gateway to the University of Toronto’s St George campus. This controversial project has won three design awards from: the Canadian Architect, Progressive Architecture, and the Los Angeles Chapter of the American Institute of Architects. Architecture critic Christopher Hume called the Graduate House Toronto’s “first architectural landmark of the 21st century.”

Larry Wayne Richards