[URBAN NOTE] "Artscape Youngplace: Creative spirit haunts the halls of Shaw Street School"

[rfmcdonald]

The Globe and Mail's Dave Leblanc writes about the Artscape Youngplace on Shaw Street, once a school but now an art centre.

A black hole sucks away everything – light, energy, warmth – until nothing remains.

In architecture, an abandoned building performs in much the same way. And, like the ripples from a stone tossed into a pond, repercussions can be large or small based on the size of the black hole building: an empty house, and perhaps a half-block feels it; a 75,000-square-foot school, and a whole community hurts.

Such was the case in 2000, when the Toronto District School Board declared the former Shaw Street School – a handsome, three-storey, cruciform-shaped structure built in 1914 – as “surplus.” Residents on Argyle, Givins, Rebecca, Bruce and Halton streets felt the thrumming void daily.

Luckily, a pulse remained, says Artscape president Celia Smith, as neighbours fought “so strongly” to keep the 1957 addition at the rear of the site in operation, since, “as some of them would say: ‘The heart closes in a community when you close a school like this.’”

Local resident and architect Chris Radigan and Teeple Architects, his employer, performed the necessary surgery: by removing the bricks-and-mortar umbilical cord between the two buildings, the Givins/Shaw Junior School could continue to enjoy the echo of little footsteps and gleeful shouts against its walls while the old building could be sealed up and given a siphon containing just enough heat to survive.