Perhaps in response to the legendary reputation of nearby Devonshire House residents, Ron Thom’s well-documented and adored Massey College happily banishes the outside world and creates a handsome, small-scaled, cloistered one within its walls. Prismatic and planar on the outside, more open, fluid planes form the courtyard inside. The intent, in the words of the founder Vincent Massey, was to provide a home “for a community of scholars whose life will have intimacy but at the same time academic dignity.”

David Winterton