A tradition
of quality

For most of the 20th century, Toronto public school boards constructed high-quality buildings that reflected the current thinking about school architecture.

Public education in Toronto dates back to the beginning of the 19th century, but grew rapidly in the years after 1880.  School buildings were largely designed by board staff, led after 1890 by C.H. Bishop. Within the small architectural scene of Toronto, these designers were well-respected and well-qualified. Franklin Belfry, for instance, had worked with the prominent firm of Darling & Pearson when they completed the Royal Ontario Museum in 1911.

In 1907, the board staff completed plans for Ogden Public School, near Queen Street West and Spadina Avenue, which became a model.

This was a three-storey brick building, Edwardian Classical in style, with a rough-cut stone base and stone cornice enveloping a brick structure that was T-shaped in plan. Classrooms occupied the first, second and third floors. Each classroom had tall sash windows, placed high on the walls to channel in light without distracting students.

This replicated the classroom conditions of rural one-room schoolhouses, but stacked up to conserve land in an urban setting. This was repeated in a number of buildings that still stand, including General Mercer Public School and the Alexander Muir School.

Air quality was a major concern. Tuberculosis was widespread, often fatal, and well known to spread through the air. In 1927, the Toronto board’s new chief architect Cyril C.E. Dyson wrote that the Muir school would “recirculate and treatment of the air by washing and ozonation.”

Stylistically, these buildings were well-detailed but not showy. The buildings were designed as simple boxes. Ornamentation, such as colonnaded porches and quoined parapets, employed neoclassical motifs.

However, the Orde Street School (1914), which still stands, shows the influence of the Prairie Style, associated with early Chicago modernism and Frank Lloyd Wright. This was one of the most aesthetically radical buildings in Toronto.

Starting in the 1920s, Dyson oversaw another rapid expansion of the school system, building more than 30 elementary and secondary schools. He employed the Collegiate Gothic style, then popular across the continent, to create many large high schools. These included Jarvis Collegiate (1922-23); what is now Danforth Collegiate and Technical Institute (1923); and Northern Secondary School (1930). These showpiece schools featured ornately decorated lobbies, façades, and auditoriums.

The board staff also employed the forward-looking Art Deco and Art Moderne styles. The latter came into play at Bloor Collegiate Institute, where the central wing was completed in 1949. It is scheduled to be demolished in 2021 or 2022.

The Bloor building employed glass blocks – an innovation that became popular in the 1930s for both schools and hospitals, supplying light but no glare. So did an expansion of Brock Public School, nearby, in the same period.

By Canadian standards, this was adventurous architecture. In the years before 1945, the country’s architects were highly conservative. Most of the profession, as scholar Harold Kalman has written, “searched for ways of achieving modernity within a framework that would accept tradition.”

That would change rapidly in the war years. Canada, Toronto, and Toronto’s school boards would face different social and economic circumstances and a new set of ideas: Modernism.