Description

The Thorncliffe Park residential area on the edge of Toronto has been expanding over the last ten years. As the school increased, 45 portable classrooms were gradually introduced to extend the existing school facilities around the quarter’s original school building. This ‘temporary permanence’ has been a familiar economic exigency not only in Canada. Now as the provision for good quality educational environments has been widely recognised as being a fundamental ingredient in raising standards, new provision for children has tended towards smaller scale neighbourhood facilities catering for around 500 children; however at Thorncliffe Park Public School, all the neighbourhood’s required accommodation has been consolidated to create the largest kindergarten to grade 6 school in North America. The facility provides places for 400 kindergarten children alone.

A significant challenge here was to create a building that was finely scaled, welcoming and anti-institutional to avoid intimidating young and potentially vulnerable children. At the same time, the reality of a large building which would be capable of functioning smoothly and efficiently placed competing demands on the designers; the plan needed to be compact yet full of light and colour. One of the key generators of the design was the existing school building; as it had expanded organically, it consisted of smaller bites of accommodation. These accretions formed slots and courtyards of outside space, which were turned into small gardens and landscaped courtyards by teachers and children. Thus, almost by chance, this process has established a spatial template, a basis upon which the new building has been set out.

The major new expansion extends the idea of pocket courtyards. Captured outside space, or as the designers put it, ‘lines of landscape’, help to unify the experience of old and new without compromising on the functional efficiency of the whole. The new addition is organised as two wings of accommodation, one containing the library and the other a bar of classrooms, with linear gardens running between each. As children move around the school, these lines of landscape create stimulating views from indoors to outdoors; a sense of nature permeates each child’s experience of the entire school, the old and the new melt harmoniously together. The gardens become learning environments in their own right, each one with its own unique theme, using special colours, textures and landscaping ideas. One new wing contains classrooms which are organised into clusters of four each with its own small gathering space also containing cloakroom areas. Coloured shafts of natural light mark these as focal points within the building’s circulation system. The library is located in the second new wing, strategically at the centre of the new plan, with natural light and views to both landscaped courts either side, a fitting focal point for the new school. A second floor link to the library brings this symbol of learning within reach of all students. A new double gymnasium acts as a major public room in the school. Old and new are bound together by a simple circulation loop which creates a clear path between all parts of the school.

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Originally published in: Mark Dudek, Schools and Kindergartens: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2015.