Modernism in the Toronto Board of Education

Meanwhile in the City of Toronto (which includes the downtown and the city’s oldest house neighbourhoods), the population continued to grow through the 1960s.

The Toronto Board of Education had its own program of school building and rebuilding, which carried its 80-year tradition of high-quality architecture into the Modernist era.

Some of these buildings were designed by private-sector architects. In 1962 Macy Dubois of Fairfield and Associates designed the Art Centre at Central Technical School. This was arguably the first building in Toronto in the Brutalist style and was internationally recognized.

Page & Steele (with the prominent modernist Peter Dickinson as chief designer) completed two significant buildings: a new teachers’ college at 955 Carlaw Ave. in 1955, and a new building for the Toronto board’s headquarters at 155 College St.. in 1961..

But the Board architects designed many addition and renovation projects in-house. The board’s chief architect (until 1965) was Frederick C. Etherington, a Torontonian who had worked at the board since the 1920s. However, the lead designer was a young architect, Peter Pennigton. Pennington was raised and trained in Manchester, England, and emigrated to Canada in 1955.

And they also chose to design roughly 10 schools from the ground up. These buildings are a consistent body of work that show the influence of Le Corbusier and of the decorative, playful British modernism of the 1950s. 

“While it is cheaper to build boxes, it takes a lot more thought to build something that is not a box and still keep costs under control,” Pennington told The Globe and Mail in 1959.

That year, the board was opening Regent Park South P.S. (now demolished), and preparing to construct the new Lord Lansdowne P.S. In the five years to follow, the TBE staff would complete Rosedale P.S. (now Rosedale Junior P.S.), Davisville P.S., Osler P.S., Grace Street P.S., Winchester St. Senior P.S., and Parkway Vocational School.

These show a consistent architectural vocabulary, a high level of craft and a desire to experiment. “A school gives the designer an excuse to let his hair down, to join the wonderful world of children, to laugh at convention,” Pennington wrote in 1962, speaking about the design of Lord Lansdowne school. Architecture must be used “to stimulate and not to stifle.”

Today, two of these buildings have been demolished. The others have largely been altered in unsympathetic ways, and most are likely to face the threat of demolition.