Dozens of visitors braved the pouring rain on June 3 for a preview of the Leslie L. Dan Pharmacy Building at the intersection of College Street and University Avenue, which will open this fall.
Pharmacy students led tours to show off the building’s design features. Its architects aimed for a design that would bring in a lot of natural light, and a floor plan that made it likelier for faculty and grad students to bump into each other.
To this end, they did away with most of the horizontal divisions between floors, making for dizzying canyon-like views and letting in plenty of natural light. Leslie Dan’s top seven floors contain labs and teaching space (on the southern side of each floor), and faculty and grad student offices (on the northern end). Put plainly, the floor layout makes it tough for faculty members to hide from their students (and vice versa), since to get from their offices to their labs, researchers must cross narrow open corridors in open view of anyone several floors above or below.
From street level, it’s Leslie Dan’s distinctive concrete pillars that pedestrians notice most. There are 20 of them altogether, and they create a four-story tall atrium that contains two giant egg-shaped pods, which serve a dual purpose. Inside each pod is a lecture hall; on top each, there is a lounge area for faculty (atop the “small pod”) and students (atop the “big pod”). And anyone lounging there will be in plain view of anyone else prowling the corridors on the research floors above.
“It’s amazing,” said Nam Dang, who was touring the building with his wife, Thu Tran, and young daughter, Theresa Dang-who he hoped might one day study pharmacy here. But whether Leslie Dan still retains its current sheen when Theresa walks through its doors, 15 years down the road perhaps, depends on one thing.
Glass-clad buildings require regular washing to prevent acid rain from etching their windows, as noted in Crumbling Foundations, a 2002 report on U of T’s maintenance backlog problem put out by the department of facilities and sevices. It warns that “signature buildings will rapidly become eyesores, if no investment is made in window cleaning.”
