University of Toronto commissions high profile building

Sir Norman Foster, one of Britain’s most famous architects, has joined the ranks of the star international architects whose firms are designing buildings in Toronto.
The University of Toronto has announced that Foster and Partners will be heading a team to design a new pharmacy building located at the corner of Queen’s Park Crescent and College Street.
The Leslie L. Dan Pharmacy Building will cost $70 million and will be 15,600 square metres. Scheduled for completion in 2005, it will have 16 storeys, and will include laboratories, library, lecture theatre and offices for faculty.
In style, the design harks back to Toronto’s modernist legacy from the 1960s. It is a square, transparent structure, raised on columns and set back from the road. As such it is much more conservative than some of the other recent high-profile projects that are being designed for downtown, such as the jagged glass prism to be attached to the Royal Ontario Museum by Daniel Libeskind (architect of the new World Trade Center in New York), the organic swirling forms of Californian Frank Gehry’s changes to the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the coloured box-on-stilts for the Art College of Ontario being designed by Will Alsop, also of the U.K.
Consultants on the University of Toronto Pharmacy building include Yolles as structural engineers, H.H. Angus as mechanical and electrical engineers, RWDI as environmental and vibration consultants, and Arencon for fire and life safety. Moffat Kinoshita are the Toronto architects.