McLeod, Jack: Designing Sidney Smith Hall

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MEMOIR:

Memoir pages are intended to provide a personal recollection of life at the University of Toronto or events in the author's life which he or she deemed significant. For this reason, these entries are entirely the work of the authors and are not subject to the normal fact-checking or editing of Encyclopedia entries. The editors request that the pages be approached accordingly.

According to the architect John Parkin, whom I quizzed on the plan at an art show opening at the Isaacs Gallery, Sidney Smith Hall was built to a design very different from its original conception. It was to have had an office tower of twelve stories, but that was squelched by the “Users’ Committee” because it would have necessitated six elevators to move people in the ten-minute intervals between classes, and elevators were expensive. So the chief architect of this firm that had the contract gave up on the project and left it to junior members of his office to complete.

With the twelve stories reduced to six, this meant that relatively small windowless offices or “inside cabins” had to be created, not a happy result. The larger “outside” offices still had large glass windows, which required air conditioning to withstand the heat of the sun in the summer. However, the Users’ Committee regarded air conditioning as unnecessary and too expensive, so it was dropped – until years later, when July temperatures of 43 degrees Celsius or more in the south-west corner offices prompted some re-thinking. Of course, adding air conditioning as a later renovation made it much more expensive than it would originally have been.

If you’ve begun to suspect that this Users’ Committee was not comprised of smart or hip young faculty or brilliant technicians, you’d be right. It was a three-man committee chaired by Dean Vincent Bladen, plus (if I remember rightly) Professor Ken McRae of Philosophy and a senior member of the Department of History, all fine old representatives of the Toronto WASP elite.

Their crowning achievement, I think, again with a view to cost cutting, was to provide for telephones only in the halls, in wall-boxes, and not in offices. Although I risked the stern disapproval of Dean Bladen – I was then only a Lecturer – I asked him why offices had no telephones? “You youngsters are so inconsiderate, not to say ‘impertinent’, he huffed at me. “Don’t you see that a faculty member might be having a discussion with a student, or at his desk writing, and there’d be no telling when some chap might ring him up and interrupt. Wouldn’t do at all.” And so it was not until a few years later that telephones appeared in offices, at no small additional expense.