The Koffler Scientific Reserve Operations Centre in King City, Ont., provides a place for University of Toronto graduate students to rest during fieldwork.Doublespace Photography
Impeccably dressed as always, Prince Philip addressed the crowd of 1,500: “The dressage part is the dullest. I hope you all come back to see the more exciting parts, like the cross-country and the jumping.”
There were sunny skies and temperatures in the mid-20s in King Township, Ont., for the three-day Jokers Hill Horse Trials and Continental Championship of North America, held in August, 1973. Princess Anne’s husband, Capt. Mark Phillips would come to judge the event in 1978 and stay at the estate of Murray Koffler, the Shoppers Drug Mart founder, and his wife, Marvelle. Luminaries such as Pierre and Margaret Trudeau, architect Raymond Moriyama (who designed a gazebo for the Kofflers), the Eaton family, other captains of industry, and dozens of future Olympians would all spend time wandering the Koffler grounds.
The complex has 20 outdoor bunkies for students.Doublespace Photography
Architect Robert Davies said the intent was to make it 'like a college.'Doublespace Photography
Since 1995, University of Toronto graduate students have combed the 350 hectares of Oak Ridges Moraine at the Koffler Scientific Reserve at Jokers Hill to unlock the secrets of ecology, evolution, genetics and the environment.
As U of T professor Art Weis told the King Township Historical Society in 2019: “Jokers Hill contains patches of just about every habitat type in Southern Ontario. It is a rather biologically diverse area, including everything from recently cultivated fields going back to nature, to old growth forest that have never been cut since the last glacier.”
Today, the Koffler Scientific Reserve also boasts an elegant new Operations Centre, where students will shed muddy boots, shower, unwind, cook a meal, play a board game and bunk down for the night before field research begins again with the rising sun.
“We realized what we were dealing with in terms of the things that the students were researching. … That we’re making a communal house which is like a college,” says architect Robert (Bob) Davies, a principal at Montgomery Sisam. “That’s why I kept thinking of a cloister.”
Looking away from the symmetrical dots of an acoustic panel to how sunlight temporarily draws parallel lines on the concrete floor, Mr. Davies gets Romantic, with a capital R: “To See a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the Palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour,” he says, quoting English poet William Blake (1757 – 1827). “That scale transformation became a really big part of the theme that we were always using whenever we came to make a design decision.”
The architects have aimed for LEED Gold green building certification.Doublespace Photography
Long, rhythmic windows allow air to escape at the very top.Doublespace Photography
A walkabout of the space on a bitterly cold January day confirms this. Not only do small architectural things inform big (and the other way around), there is a poetry in the visible things: How the building is aligned with true north; the ordered, soldierly glulam beams and posts in the soaring fireplace lounge; the compression of the hallway that leads to the bedroom wing; or the whimsical, wiggly-walled showers.
In the nonvisible things, too: Interior heat is retained due to the R40 insulated walls; the summer sun’s heat is blocked by an overhang. Cross-ventilation is encouraged via window placement and operability. On the roof, a solar array brings power to batteries. Underfoot, an unseen ground source heat pump and an earth tube encircle the building. (An earth tube is a low-tech, buried ventilation system that passively warms air temperature in winter or cools it in summer before passing it along to the main system. It’s something “the Romans did,” says Mr. Davies).
“The upper part of the barn was where the hay was stored,” he says. “And you know those gaps that existed in the boards? The purpose of that was that when you stack hay, it heats, and you can get spontaneous combustion. So the gaps were to allow for air [flow]. In a big way, that has inspired the form of this building. It’s like a barn that’s been taken apart and reassembled in a different way.”
The roof shape. Those rhythmic, long windows, where air can escape at the very top. The use of swirly-patterned yet unadorned plywood. And those little bedrooms, like mini-barns with their own peaked ceiling and operable windows.
Because the University of Toronto is a “demanding client” – on a site as sensitive as this one, would expect nothing less – the architects have aimed for LEED Gold green building certification.
Each bunkie rises on little columns so as to minimize interference with the landscape.Doublespace Photography
“We have to have it operating for a year to prove this out, but it’s targeted net-zero energy,” says Mr. Davies, who credits Mongomery Sisam’s Karine Quigley with much of the sustainability work. There are still a few kinks to work out, deficiencies to fix and a little more spit-and-polish to be applied before students can claim this handsome, well-designed complex and the 20 bunkies outside as their own.
Crunching our way through virgin snow to admire the bunkies a little lower down on the site, Mr. Davies points out that, while we can’t see it, each one rises on little columns so as to minimize interference with the landscape.
Of course, looking at the grouping of little cabins and thinking of warmer days ahead, Mr. Davies waxes poetic once again: “These buildings are made for people who would rather be outside,” he finishes. “A couple of them bring out their guitars [and] I’d imagine there’ll be the start of the occasional romance in a place like this.”