The architecture of AI: U of T’s new research hub rises

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Artificial intelligence has a new home in Toronto. A tapered block rises 12 storeys from the corner of College Street and Queen’s Park Crescent, its walls slanting inward on the way. Its cloak of concrete scatters sunlight off diagonal facets, evoking the stony majesty of a cliff face.

This enigmatic object is the University of Toronto’s new Schwartz Reisman Innovation Campus. Designed by Weiss/Manfredi with Teeple Architects and landscape architects DTAH, the 250,000-square-foot tower houses event space, classrooms, academic space and AI-related businesses. Its tenants will include the Vector Institute, academic home to the prominent researcher Geoffrey Hinton.

The campus is a contemporary take on a loft, with spaces that can support any activity imagined by a person or a bot. It is a worthy building for its important site, and a welcome sign of architectural ambition from the university.

Its position, overlooking the Ontario Legislative Building, accidentally captures AI’s new importance. “The building is at the intersection of the urban, the institutional and innovation,” architect Marion Weiss said on a recent call from Weiss/Manfredi’s New York studio. “AI will have an impact on the world, and [the building] is going to house the hub of that discovery.”

Weiss/Manfredi has a strong reputation in academic and public architecture; the firm is now building the U.S. embassy in India. Here, their moody, craggy facades wrap a fuss-free interior. Concrete floors, white-painted steel and accents of honey-coloured white oak set the tone, each piece well-proportioned and precisely aligned.

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In the lobby, researchers and passersby can hang out on the lobby’s ochre Saarinen chairs. A café will open here in the spring. Michael Manfredi of Weiss/Manfredi, citing a familiar idea in the architecture of tech spaces, hopes these will allow offhand conversations “and allow folks in different silos to start to find intersections and pathways to work together,” he said.

From there, you can go up one level on the elevator or stairs lined with white steel pickets. In the conference room here, striated white-oak panels and a folded ceiling moderate the acoustics; the walls lean in slightly, matching the cant of the exterior wall.

The rest of the “campus” has fewer surprises. The elevators open onto oversized corridors lined by big, windowed office space. Glassed-in stairs provide visual vertical connections. And on two levels, the designers have carved out dramatic double-height lounges, or “winter gardens” – they are lined with oak and will eventually be filled with a jungle of plants. “These are places of relief, and also places for a different mode of working,” Mr. Manfredi said.

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The work that happens here, says University of Toronto vice-president Scott Mabury, will turn research into commerce. The building “will support and advance scaling AI companies,” says Dr. Mabury, “to capture for Canada the benefits that Geoff Hinton and others have generated around neural networks – and aim to have companies that produce value here.” Here, that is, instead of in Silicon Valley.

Next door, the university and the architects are planning a second phase of this complex, a supersized version of this one, for life-sciences research. (This means demolishing a five-storey 1930 structure by Darling & Pearson, and the university must maximize the reuse of material from that building.)

Certainly, the field keeps changing. When this campus was announced six years ago, AI was a niche subject. Now it’s part of any conversation about the future. Prof. Hinton has become concerned that it could bring about the extinction of humanity.

On that note, the campus also houses the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society, exploring how tech such as AI will alter our culture. (Onex chairman Gerry Schwartz and Indigo CEO Heather Reisman also donated $100-million to make the entire building possible.)

How does the architecture respond to these weighty themes? Quietly. From a distance, Weiss/Manfredi’s building is mineral and pale enough to fit with its neighbours: stone-clad Edwardian academic halls and Modernist boxes for the provincial government. The latter is exemplified by the 1966 Frost Building South, a curved slab by Toronto’s Mathers & Haldenby.

Ms. Weiss and Mr. Manfredi admire the Frost’s fine proportions and the varied shades of its aging limestone. “We hope our building will also acquire a bit of patina that will make the faceting even more pronounced,” Mr. Manfredi said. This is an insight many architects now seem to miss: that a building is not software, but a pile of physical stuff that will change with time.

It’s odd, then, that the ground floor walls are mostly glass, allegedly to connect indoors and outdoors. In fact, these surfaces are highly reflective from the sidewalk, dull and impenetrable. The next phase of the complex should not repeat this error.

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Then there’s the question of colour. The building is overwhelmingly a neutral zone of whites and greys. Weiss/Manfredi is aware of this issue; its early drawings showed bright green carpets in key spaces. But those textiles have turned out to be, like everything else, grey. What do the architects make of this? “We love colour,” Ms. Weiss said, leaving a diplomatic silence.

But this is a place of creation and invention. In time, maybe a sophisticated neural network will figure out how to liven it up a bit.