Re-greening the campus: Landscape of Landmark Quality, University of Toronto, Ontario

PROJECT Landscape of Landmark Quality, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario

ARCHITECT KPMB

LANDSCAPE MVVA

A celebrated University of Toronto Landmark Project construction photo calls to mind a patient on the operating table, viewed from above. Salina Kassam’s image, a 2023 Canadian Architect Photo Award of Excellence winner, captures King’s College Circle, the core of the St. George Campus’s heritage precinct, after 372 boreholes had been drilled to a depth half the height of the CN Tower under the rounded Front Campus lawn to construct a massive geo-exchange system. We see a frame-filling grid of mushroom-capped columns, each topped with a frizz of rebar. These are the roof supports for the 236-car garage that will sit atop the geo-exchange field and nestle under the lawn.

Two years later, it’s clear that the ‘operation’ Kassam documented was a resounding success. The Landmark Project, led by KPMB Architects and Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA), has yielded substantial sustainable health gains—and the improvements in how U of T’s historic centre looks are spectacular.

Late-19th-century views show University College, the circle’s oldest building, in an idyllic woodland setting, reflected in a pond created by the damming of Taddle Creek. By the early 1900s, however, the creek had been buried and the automotive era was about to go full throttle. For most of the 20th century and well into the 21st, a wide asphalt donut for vehicular circulation and parking divided the circle’s perimeter-hugging sidewalks from the central lawn. U of T’s 2015 design competition sought to remove all but service, maintenance, and emergency vehicles from the circle and reclaim it as pedestrian-priority terrain.

When Brooklyn, NY-based MVVA and Toronto’s KPMB won the competition, MVVA was already seven years into leading Toronto’s huge Port Lands Flood Protection Project, which is re-naturalizing the mouth of the Don River and creating new parkland and complete communities on the city’s central-east waterfront. While what’s happening in the formerly industrial Port Lands is a radical transformation, the Landmark Project somehow feels both surprising and inevitable: it’s as if U of T’s heritage core finally looks the way it was supposed to look all along.

When they did some initial calculations, KPMB and MVVA were pleasantly surprised to discover that the total area outside the central lawn was actually larger than the lawn itself. MVVA has reconfigured much of this perimeter as the “Necklace”: a network of gardens, branching footpaths, and seating areas, meandering along the circle’s north and south sides. If you remember this spot when pedestrians typically passed through it en route to somewhere else, revisit it and be amazed: students are actually hanging out at little tables and chairs under the trees, and even holding yoga classes on the lawn.

Although St. George Campus graduations involve a procession across King’s College Circle to Convocation Hall, Michael Van Valkenburgh’s first impression of the heritage precinct was that it lacked ceremony. “It didn’t feel very good as a landscape,” he says. “We put a lot of effort into establishing reciprocally beneficial transitions between the buildings and the landscape.” 

“Trimmed within an inch of its life” is his term for the previous overall state of the vegetation. MVVA has dramatically increased the diversity and range of species, especially perennials and shrubs. Although the new plants still need years to mature, the landscape already looks a little wild, even romantic. It provides year-round seasonal interest, and is now, as MVVA principal and project manager Adrienne Heflich says, “far more supportive of critters.”

In addition to King’s College Circle, the Landmark Project encompasses part of Hart House Circle (which retains a vehicular drop-off route); green space west of University College; and footpaths and multi-modal routes linking to surrounding streets and transit stations. (Hart House Circle is now also home to Ziibiing, a separate project that has created dedicated Indigenous outdoor space on the campus.) 

Within the Landmark Project, granite is the signature hardscape material. On the main pathways, granite pavers in a subtle dappling of shades complement the heritage architecture’s weathered stonework and brickwork. (Concrete pavers were substituted on secondary pathways for budgetary reasons.) The circle is distinguished as pedestrian-priority terrain through a combination of the granite pavers, curbs, and parking-fine signage; in a few places, subsequent to the project’s completion, the university has positioned outsize flowerpot planters as a temporary measure to reinforce the division between places where cars are and are not welcome. A statement from an U of T spokesman notes that a “permanent measure” is under consideration to replace two pathway-spanning rows of planters added south of the Soldiers’ Tower.

In an era when universities must ardently court private donors, the Landmark Project created a multitude of sponsorship opportunities, ranging from engraved individual pavers to naming rights for the myriad, pocket-sized new gardens. Sloped granite slabs embed donor names and brief messaging into each garden.

Accessibility was also a big driver, and the care and ingenuity that went into grading is impressive. “The rule was ‘no ramps’, and a universal grading of five percent or less,” says KPMB associate and project manager Nick Jones. The grade modulates gently and seamlessly throughout the site, with curving granite seat walls emerging almost like natural outcroppings at points where the most significant changes in elevation occur within the new, variously sized plazas.

KPMB partner-in-charge Shirley Blumberg readily acknowledges that while her firm’s name comes first in the official credits, this is really a modest architectural project and a major landscape project. “Of course, one has to access the garage, and that’s where we came in,” she says. KPMB in fact does deserve praise for unobtrusively tucking the vehicular entrance to the underground garage into a bank just east of King’s College Circle, and for providing well-considered access points within the circle for people to exit and enter the garage. As Van Valkenburgh says, the precinct’s buildings range from “some real beauties to some modern clunkers.” The brutalist Medical Sciences Building lands squarely in the latter category. The main garage-access point—deftly placed in front of MedSci—is a graceful, de-materializing little pavilion with a green-roofed canopy and mullion-less glass walls that echo the sinuous lines of the Necklace’s gardens.

Along with its visible improvements, the Landmark Project’s offstage machinery commands respect. Providing heating and hot water to 30 older campus buildings, the new sub-garage geo-exchange system is key to meeting U of T’s target of becoming climate-positive by 2050, and recently helped the institution top the QS World University Rankings as the world’s “most sustainable university” for the second consecutive year. The geo-exchange system incorporates snow-melting technology that reduces campus needs for salting and shovelling. The manufactured soil of the garage’s rooftop lawn is designed to bounce back from events ranging from graduations to concerts to recreational sports. On average just over 400 millimetres thick, the soil rests on geofoam that contours the lawn for optimal shaping and drainage. The garage’s asymmetrically pitched roof directs water in the subgrade into a cistern, for repurposing as the primary source for drip irrigation to the circle’s planting beds. Among the site’s formidable existing challenges was what KPMB’s Jones calls a “bird’s nest” of underground utilities. Only partially documented prior to construction, this subterranean infrastructure complicated the important task of finding suitable places to plant new trees. 

In the 2025 Toronto Urban Design Awards, the Landmark Project received an award of merit. (Ziibiing received an award of excellence.) The jurors described the Landmark Project as “a transformed public realm that feels quieter, safer, more beautiful and inhabitable,” but were critical of “the investment in a buried parking garage that seems to encourage car-dependency at this transit-rich, downtown location.” In time, however, this may look like a necessary first step rather than a questionable decision: after all, we often have to put objects out of sight for a while before we’re ready to discard them.

CLIENT University of Toronto | ARCHITECT TEAM Shirley Blumberg, Chris Couse, Goran Milosevic, Olga Pushkar, Brian Melcher, Nick Jones, Adam Jennings, Matthew Krivosudsky, Fotini Pitoglou, Christiana Apanapa, Ramon Janer, Shiyang Wang, Aurora Chi, Brent Wagler, Donia Barai, Erik Skouris, Arminé Tadevosyan, Olena Chorny, Anne Kwan, Andrew Barat, Nicolas Green, Leah Kim, Nick Choi, Thom Seto | TRANSPORTATION/TRAFFIC BA Consulting Group Ltd. | STRUCTURAL RJC Engineers | MECHANICAL Crossey Engineering Ltd. | ELECTRICAL Mulvey and Banani International Inc. | CIVIL SCS | HERITAGE ERA Architects | PROJECT MANAGERS Infrastructure Ontario | LIGHTING Tillotsen Design Associates | WAYFINDING/SIGNAGE Harakawa Inc., DBA Two Twelve | COST Turner & Townsend | ACCESSIBILITY SPH Planning & Consulting Ltd. | AREA 17 acres | BUDGET withheld | COMPLETION September 2024

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