On Saturday, June 6, around forty participants gathered at the Gardiner Museum for a Decoding Toronto knowledge stroll titled “Heritage Victorian College Building Styles at the University of Toronto,” led by Ron Shieh, an OAA architect and Life Member of the RAIC. The route ran through the university’s St. George campus, reading the old college buildings as arguments, not just as architecture.
Four colleges, one university
The University of Toronto began as King’s College, established by royal charter in 1827 at the urging of John Strachan, then Archdeacon of York and the future first Bishop of Toronto (see also the article “The Bishop and the Rebel: The Two Scotsmen Who Defined Toronto’s Soul”) to educate youth in the principles of the Church of England in the colonial town of York. But Toronto’s citizens, largely Scottish and English Protestant settlers, resisted the idea of knowledge and education being sanctified by any one church. In 1850 King’s College was secularized, and in 1853 the colony got its first fully secular public college: University College.
That conviction shows in the stone. University College was built in the Romanesque Revival style, with its rounded arches standing for a more progressive ideal of liberty and equality, a deliberate challenge to the Gothic Revival’s pointed arches and their association with sacred royal authority.
Toronto was the Queen City of Britain’s sixty-three-year Victorian age, and home to so many Christian and Catholic congregations that it earned the name “City of Churches.” That is why the colleges that federated into the university from 1890 onward kept the chapels and churches that carried their separate beliefs, even as they joined a shared, secular campus.
Architecture as institutional self-image
The buildings aren’t just decorative. They are stone-and-brick statements of what each college believed education should be. Walking the separate quarters of St. Michael’s, Victoria, Trinity, and Knox brings the differences alive: Catholic, Methodist, Anglican, and Presbyterian, each shaping stone to carry the ideal it wanted to pass on.
Victoria carries the warmth of Richardsonian Romanesque. Knox turns inward, Collegiate Gothic wrapped around a cloistered courtyard with its chapel at the heart. Trinity sets a Gothic-inflected frame, its chapel serving as a strong religious marker.
One thread of the walk, drawn out by Ron, followed that language across the ocean: George Leslie Mackay, the Presbyterian missionary, studied at Knox before founding his mission in northern Taiwan in 1872, and Ron connected it to the traces of Western missionary architecture that surface in Formosa.
A reflection beyond the walk
The following is the writer’s own reflection, prompted by the walk rather than presented during it.
The route passed McLuhan Coach House, named for U of T media theorist Marshall McLuhan, who gave us the phrase “the medium is the message.” His argument was that a medium shapes society through its own form, not just through what it carries.
With that idea in view, the chapels become hard to ignore. They sit packed together, almost shoulder to shoulder, a density still visible on the ground today. In the nineteenth century, before broadcasting or the internet, churches, colleges, and newspapers were the platforms through which society was shaped, and whoever controlled them held real influence over the next generation.
Seen this way, Victoria, Trinity, and Knox aren’t only distinct campus buildings; they are the physical embodiment of competing information networks. The institutions have changed. McLuhan’s question hasn’t: whoever controls the medium through which people communicate holds tremendous influence over where society goes next.
Further Reading
