Franco Vaccarino, who worked as an Associate Professor in the UTSC Department of Psychology before serving as the campus’ President from 2007-2014, speaks about the lack of instructional space on the original campus and some of the different strategies adopted to deal with this problem.
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0:00
One of the things I noticed when I got to UTSC was that there were these early plans to do the best with what we had.
0:11
Like, in other words, optimize the land that we had and I said, well, and the space that we had, I said, well, first of all, I said,
0:23
we’re one of the architectural marvels of the University of Toronto, built during the brutalism period. The architects had a vision that we, whether you respect that vision or not, you at least need to acknowledge it, that this is part of the journey of you.
0:44
So when we’re doing these band-aid solutions to spaces with the existing space, you need to think about, what are you doing to the space that we had? What are you doing to the visually, the feeling of this campus? How do you feel about this campus?
0:59
You can start putting up utilitarian walls in open spaces and creating, but how does that…how is the student who walks through those doors, how are they going to experience this space? What does it mean? Are they going to be energized, are they going to be excited?
1:15
And the answer to that was, well, what are we supposed to do? I said, “Well, bring portables onto campus”. He said, “Portables?” I said, “Absolutely. Show the world how bad the space situation is”.
1:28
I mean, it’s so bad that we’re bringing portables on. If you don’t bring portables on and you mess around with the original design of these places, what you’re going to…what you’re doing is you’re first of all compromising the architectural integrity of our place.
1:48
You will, without realizing it, affect the feeling of this place in people in a negative way because you’re just compartmentalizing. You’re just using space in a willy-nilly way.
2:01
And thirdly, most important, you’re distracting people away from the fact that we need space. You’re solving a problem with band-aids as opposed to a deeper solution.
2:13
So you need, first of all, so the deeper solution requires the help of the government. So the first thing we need to do is we need to show the world that we don’t have space.
2:25
And I don’t know if those portables are still there, but in that area, just where the principal’s residence is, first of all, they weren’t called portables back then, they were called modular units.
2:41
And it turned out ironically, that when they brought those units in, ’cause that’s the strategy we took, they were more beautiful than the actual space that some people had ’cause they were quite spacious, so people wanted to ironically, people wanted to go into those modular units ’cause the space crunch was so bad.
3:00
But anyway, that is all, so what happened was then there was a review taking place at the level of the government, and I wanted to make sure that when the helicopters flew over ’cause they were taking these aerial photographs.
3:13
I said, “I want that photograph to show the portables right in the middle of campus, and that’s gonna be able to give us the argument, this is how bad things are, we’ve got these portables”.
3:26
And I think it worked.
