From Ice Rink to Atrium: How Toronto’s De La Salle College Found Beauty in Reinvention
There is a particular kind of elegance that comes from restraint, from choosing to reveal rather than replace. At De La Salle College in Toronto, Moriyama Teshima Architects have proven that the most compelling design gesture is sometimes simply to strip away what hides a building’s true character. The new John Hunt Student Life Centre, unveiled for the school’s 175th anniversary, takes a 1976 modernist ice arena and transforms it into something far more resonant: a 47,773 square foot heart for student life, built on memory as much as material.
What strikes me first is the honesty of the surfaces. The arena’s bespoke wood truss roof, once painted over and forgotten beneath a utilitarian skin, has been patiently uncovered layer by layer. Now, beneath new skylights, that timber structure becomes the architectural soul of the Student Commons, its warmth and texture set deliberately against the quiet minimalism of the renovation around it. This is a lesson in contrast done with taste. Nothing shouts. The wood simply speaks, and the room listens.
The two new additions, 9,687 and 14,531 square feet respectively, flank the original arena rather than overwhelm it, their pleated, angular facades echoing the arena’s own geometry while breaking down the mass of the gymnasium with careful shadow play. I find this kind of sensitivity rare. Too often an addition announces itself at the expense of what came before. Here, the limestone-coloured ceramic panels instead reach across the quad toward the campus’s heritage Oaklands house, a quiet material conversation between old and new that anchors the entire composition to its place.
Reinstating the arena’s original windows, long sealed for ice temperature control, was perhaps the most poetic decision of all. Light and greenery now move through a space once built to exclude both. The sequence from entry, a new library, a corridor framing views of the quad, and finally the atrium, reads like a composed architectural promenade, each threshold revealing more generosity than the last.
We approached its renewal with care, giving the building new purpose while respecting its history and the values of the College.
That sentiment, from Moriyama Teshima partner Carol Phillips, captures what makes this project worth lingering on. Adaptive reuse is often framed purely as a sustainability metric, and here more than 61 percent of the existing structure was indeed retained. But the deeper success is aesthetic and emotional. The building does not disguise its past as a hockey arena. It wears that history as texture, as proportion, as the very truss lines overhead that now shelter a library instead of a scoreboard.
Spaces like this remind me that architecture’s most luxurious quality is not novelty but memory, reworked with discipline and care until it feels inevitable. The John Hunt Student Life Centre does not try to erase what Oaklands was. It simply gives it a second, more beautiful life.
Source: e-architect, De La Salle College John Hunt Student Life Centre, Toronto
