De La Salle facilities

De La Salle College
Oaklands, Toronto
Facility Operations Educational ($5,000 - $1.5 million)
June 2002 - present
Contact: Norman Davies, Dean (416) 969-8771

List of buildings

· Main Building – Classrooms, Gymnasium, Library, Chapel, caféteria, Offices

· Retreat Centre – Lecture Rooms, Meeting Rooms, Offices.

· Dormitory

· Mansion – 150 year old heritage property with offices, residences, kitchen

· Hockey Arena – single pad with bench seating for 350.

· Grounds Keeper – Residence

· Football field – with seating for 800

De la Salle has been developing for over 150 years and contains many buildings that have been constructed as needs and times changed. This has left a mixture of buildings that are grouped around a campus court with some dissimilar architectural styles and displaced programmatic elements.

The challenge has been (over the last 2 years) to review these facilities for the program they contain and to assess the feasibility of re-arranging various elements of the school’s program so that the arrangement of the spaces better supports the school’s academic programs. Because the campus has been built up over the years, the facilities to work with were not conventionally designed classroom spaces and as such we needed a flexible approach to working closely with the specific needs of De La Salle and custom fitting the new spaces to the programs and class sizes that are exclusive to De La Salle. This has led to the relocation of many classrooms, library, music and art programs, and renovations to house them as well as the new science laboratories.

De la Salle Hall

De la Salle Hall
Toronto, Ontario
Renovation/Addition Educational ($1.3 million)
Square Peg Studio Inc. Architect
Feb.2003 - May. 2005
Contact: Norman Davies, Dean (416) 969-8771

Through our assessment of the school’s needs it was discovered that the music program was most in need of a new facility and the old dormitory building (recently vacant) provided a good location to house the particulars of that program. The proposal was to renovate the dormitory building into a building on campus that would house two music rooms, an art room, a large multi-purpose space, and several small lecture or study group rooms. The location was ideal for isolating these specialized classrooms, thereby creating a distinct schoolhouse ‘wing’ dedicated to the arts.

Given the size and prominent location of this space it was also designed to function as a space to host special events for the school. The façade was designed to stand noticeably within the campus having a dialogue with the main school building and completing the court architecturally. We took it as a challenge to save the building; assess what it had to offer and to transform the spaces to suit the new needs of the school. Renovating this building was a step towards bringing all the different architectural elements of the school into a unified campus, both programmatically and architecturally.