Dear Ryerson, what have you done for me lately?[rssbreak]
Well, if the talks between Loblaw and the university announced two weeks back go well, the answer could soon be “We saved Maple Leaf Gardens.”
For eight years, the historic yellow arena has just sat there, stalled on its way to becoming a grocery store, until its recent re-entry into our excited urban building consciousness. Now there’s talk of the two entities turning the beloved hockey shrine into a sports-rink-cum-supermarket.
But should we be afraid, given some of Ryerson’s loser projects over the past few years? For all the university’s talk about participating in city-?building, it sure has been responsible for some architectural faux pas. Can it overcome?
Take the Ted Rogers School of Management at Dundas and Bay, for example. The university gets praise for coming up with a mixed-?retail solution back in 2006, but this suburban concrete bore fails the landscape through big-box retail tenants – Canadian Tire and Best Buy – and general lack of grace and style.
Yes, it’s a business school, but nothing about the edifice excites the mind or the entrepreneurial spirit. Instead, it’s an invitation to buy stuff in big, impersonal, garishly lit retail dungeons. And it fails to mollify mall-ified Eaton Centre life in fact, the only entrance to the school from the mall is a desolate tunnel.
The visually gorgeous glass George Vari Engineering and Computing Centre, built in 2004 at Church and Dundas, has its own problems. Its interior has good window-?to-?street action and stunning design details. But talk about doing in an entire block – the back of the building is a dead zone, with no doors, windows or other ways of connecting to Dalhousie Street, leaving the space nothing more than a urine-drenched alley worth avoiding on a trip to Metro.
And who can forget (or is willing to admit) that Ryerson swung a deal to exchange air rights for AMC theatre classroom use at 10 Dundas East, the grey beast Toronto Life would like you to quickly cut from your memory as its Square. Why would a university associate itself with this bland, thoughtless subway entrance that only succeeds in showing we’ve lost our grip on the idea that public spaces should uplift the senses.
But that was then, right? The new Ryerson has a plan, and snagging Maple Leaf Gardens could be its chance to make good.
“Ryerson has a very small but visible footprint in the city,” says David C. Perry, director of the Great Cities Institute in Chicago and co-?editor of The University As Urban Developer. “It is Toronto, and Toronto is Ryerson. But most people don’t think of it that way.”
Of T.O.’s universities, Ryerson is most interwoven with public life, directly abutting high-?traffic Yonge and Church Streets.
The gatelessness of the campus gives a sense of common Toronto ownership to what in fact is really Ryerson’s space. This gives rise to some high expectations, but Perry stresses that a reciprocity needs to come into play when development plans are considered. “It’s not a one-?way street, laying it all on universities,” he says. “The area has to be willing to engage with the university in the act of improvement.”
Future plans look pretty terrific. The new Ryerson is everyone else’s old stuff, like Sam the Record Man, which is just rubble at the moment but will become the new entranceway to the university according to 2008’s RU Master Plan Vision.
More good news: it seems the man at the helm has a clue. In a speech to the Canadian Club of Toronto in 06, Rye president Sheldon Levy declared, “Within five years, everyone will know where Ryerson University is. And more of you will want to spend time in my neighbourhood. That’s what ‘university as city-?builder’ means to me.”
The Master Plan has a three-?legged frame for success: urban intensification (build up, not out), people first (squeeze out the car in favour of the foot) and a commitment to excellence (stop making fugly buildings).
“Ryerson is what I’d call an anchor institution,” says Perry. “It behooves the city to be respectful to the university, just as it behooves those institutions to understand and be fully vested and embedded in the production of the urban,” he explains.
By the way, Levy in that same Canadian Club speech said, “I would have bought Maple Leaf Gardens, given the chance, not only for Ryerson but for the community, too.”
Now Ryerson’s president’s got his big opportunity.
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