The Daniels Building has won the SCUP/AIA-CAE Excellence in Architecture for Building Additions or Adaptive Reuse Honor Award. Congrats to our team! See this year’s winners in all categories HERE.
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On this Earth Day 2019, the AIA has announced the recipients of the 2019 AIA COTE Top 10 Awards which includes the Daniels Building. The COTE Top Ten Awards is the industry’s best-known award program for sustainable design excellence. Each year, ten innovative projects are recognized for their integration of design excellence with environmental performance.
The Daniels Building at the University of Toronto embodies a holistic approach to urban design and sustainability. As the new home for the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, its purpose is to engage students and the broader community in dialogue with the built environment. At the center of one of Toronto’s few circular parcels, the project anchors the southwest corner of the University and opens the circle to the public after years of inaccessibility. It restores the historic building while adding a new addition with integrated stormwater management, green roof, voided-slab floors, and ample daylight.
Read more on the sustainable and pedagogical aspects of the Daniels Building including the integration of community voices and needs, the ecological curriculum, water systems, energy and resources usage, and economy of means HERE.
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“These projects showcase innovation across the entire learning continuum, displaying how architects are creating cutting edge spaces that enhance modern pedagogy.”
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Raymund Ryan writes for The Plan on the Daniels Building:
“To design a school of architecture is an enticing albeit formidable prospect for any thinking architect. In the United States alone, there is the legacy of Mies van der Rohe at IIT, Paul Rudolph at Yale, and John Andrews at Harvard. These buildings from several decades ago were signature, standalone monuments to professional bravura and to the respective institutions. Three or four decades later, out in Los Angeles, SCI-Arc pursued a different, radically less expensive path, colonizing warehouses or factories first in Santa Monica, then in Playa Vista, and now in LA’s rapidly urbanizing Downtown. Echoing mid-century notions of the Museum as Temple and this more recent appropriation of industrial space for artistic production and display, these dueling typologies of the architectural academy find a synthesis in the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto.”
“There, a grand Gothic Revival building – an isolated urban icon with many gables and embellishments – has been extended in line with the cardinal axes marking the site. Whereas this older edifice contains many small individual rooms, the new structure is essentially one contiguous studio instigating, on this rather tight lot, that modern dream of multifunctional, open floorplan.”
“The new floor plate ascends to allow for a barrier-free mega-studio in which student activity is ideally unimpeded. An extraordinary new roof floats overhead:” it spans in the long direction without the intercession of columns and warps. It is filleted to allow for natural illumination.”
“It is a bravura gesture, this porous canopy sailing free above the heart of the reinvigorated institution. The architects worked through one-to-one mockups – with straight metal stud frames skinned in unusually thin gypsum – to determine curvature and to convince the contractor that this unorthodox construction technique was indeed feasible. Such lissome elements are telltale characteristics of this and other NADAAA projects, whether at the scale of a ceiling or a window or a handrail. The language of each building is not imposed through some academic or artistic diktat but emerges through a scrutiny of fabrication options and the ways in which these components meet one another, not unlike the words in a paragraph.”
The Daniels Building has won the 2019 National CSLA Award for Small-Scale Public Landscapes. A big congratulations and thank you goes to our landscape architecture collaborators Public Work!
“The complete transformation of One Spadina enables profoundly different civic relations, more fluid community connections, and new social and ecological environments embedded within a landscape for learning. With its prominent location and dramatic topographical landscape, the project charts a new role for the institution within the campus and the city.”
-Canadian Society of Landscape Architects
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Congratulations to our team, especially conservation specialists, ERA Architects, for winning the Lieutenant Governor’s Ontario Heritage Award for Excellence in Conservation for the Daniels Building. The Ontario Heritage Trust writes: “One Spadina Crescent is one of Toronto’s most prominent architectural sites. The historical building, site rehabilitation and new addition re-establishes One Spadina as a gateway to the University campus and reintroduces it to the public perception […] a showcase for the city and an international focal point for education and research on architecture, art and the future of cities. The rehabilitation and new addition at One Spadina Crescent provides a significant expansion to the heritage building for use by the faculty and its students as design studios, fabrication shops, a multi-functional principal hall, library programs, social spaces and offices.”
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Hong Kong based Perspective Magazine’s Rebecca Lo includes the Daniels Building in a Toronto round-up honing in on the building’s “key civic spaces that are simply extraordinary […] As episodes, each of these contributes to the larger narrative of Toronto, because they operate as public spaces for the city.” Read the full feature HERE.
The Daniels Building is the winner in the Education category of the 2018 A|NBestofDesignAwards. The jury also awarded Daniels an honorable mention in the Building of the Year category! See what the jury loved about Daniels HERE. Daniels is also featured in the Architect’s Newspaper December BestofDesignAnnual issue. Flip through the full Awards issue HERE.
