GALLERY ENTRY

MacKinnon Building

“It provides balance and response to Johnston Hall and is the first of the new buildings along the new north-south Winegard Walk.  Where Johnston Hall is a traditional courtyard building with prominent façade and centre tower facing the lawn, MacKinnon, in a typical modernist approach, inverts the courtyard type to create a forward-facing green space around which the building’s circulation is organized.   The ground floor corridor is treated as a covered open space and is described as an ‘arcade’ in publications at the time.  Of note are the Corbusian operable ventilation panels and large sliding glazed doors along this circulation route…”

-Ian Panabaker and Wilfred Ferwerda, “The University of Guelph,” in Concrete Toronto: a guidebook to concrete architecture from the fifties to the seventies, M. McClelland, ed. (Toronto, Coach House Books, 2007) 280.