St. Antoine Daniel Catholic School

Toronto Catholic District School Board

North York, Ontario

Located in the Toronto suburb of North York, this new 500+ pupil elementary school replaces an existing school, originally opened in 1970, while adding a new child care, accommodating 88 children.

The design leverages the learning potential of all spaces in the school and school yard – from flexible classrooms, to hallways, to shared gathering areas, to outdoor touch-down areas – providing exceptional programmatic flexibility to nurture a collaborative and
community-based learning environment.

Site and budgetary constraints necessitated a compact, rectangular plan, unlike the high perimeter-to-area ratios often used to maximize schools’ access to natural light. At St. Antoine Daniel CS, the school is organized around the school gym and central student commons, both re-imagined, with extensive sawtooth skylights, as an interior ‘Courtyard’. This large-scale community space, bringing natural light deep into the floor plate, is the social heart of the school. It is designed to be not only a great recreational space, but equally important, a dignified flexible space suitable for various school community-based programs.

Interrupting the gym’s typically isolating fire-rated block walls, a rated glazed screen on the ground floor, provides views and links to the double-height entry/student commons/assembly area. On the second floor, the Library Learning Commons breakout area occupies
what would conventionally be an unfunctional hallway. This active collaborative space overlooks the ground floor student commons and has views into the Gym. The Library Learning Commons shelving, equipment, and admin occupies a smaller adjacent lockable
volume. Even when the Library proper is closed, the breakout area provides spill-out space for other activities, and can be directly accessed from the surrounding classrooms.

Throughout the school, spaces open onto one another, maximizing connection and flexibility: at classrooms, the learning space expands into hallways via double doors aligned with group work alcoves so that adjacent teachers can collaborate and supervise students in these breakout areas; on the other side, all ground floor classrooms open to exterior gathering spaces; on the ground floor,
the classroom adjacent to the Student Commons is provided with a connecting garage door; within the gym, the stage can be used independently as a general purpose room or can be connected to the gym.

Outside, flexible use of space continues with the shared use of a bus drop-off, as play space and outdoor classroom. Parking was kept away from the building frontage, thus bringing the bus drop-off close to play space. By providing a gate between the parking lot/
loading zone and the bus area, we’ve created a safe and innovative transformation of the bus drop-off zone into a learning space available between drop-off times.

The school’s classroom blocks, support spaces and hallways are then organized around this central space. From these perimeter spaces, bay windows with bench seating and other glazed screens provide views into and through the ‘Courtyard’, connecting the school across these community spaces.