George Harvey Vocational School (now Collegiate)

John B. Parkin Associates, 1950

Completed in 1950 as a vocational school for the Township of York, it included three separate wings for industrial, commercial and academic training, along with a 500-seat auditorium and two gyms.

The school occupied a site next to existing facilites for the township’s electric utility - some of which were designed by the Parkin office and completed in 1949. The school shared a language of yellow brick and strongly horizontal Modernist massing with the new hydro facility.

John B. Parkin described it in an interview as “strictly Miesian, very pure, and with exposed steel.” A contemporary newspaper article noted its “acres of glass block.” It was published in the American journal Architectural Forum in 1954.

The building was altered and expanded in the 1970s.

As of 2021, it is a TDSB school and subject to a “pupil accommodation review” that could result in its closing.