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One of the World’s Most Beautiful Libraries Was Born Out of Tragedy

UmbrellaOn the corner of Yonge Street and Asquith Avenue in Toronto is a rust-colored brick ziggurat. Each floor with windows is a ladder, receding further back as it moves upwards. There is also a repeating pattern from the back of the building. This is the Toronto Reference Library (TRL) and it’s the latest pick for our monthly series, The World’s Most Beautiful Libraries.

I came to the city to visit the TRL, a building I’ve only seen in photos, but always thought it was impressive. While I found that perception reasonable, I also encountered something else within: the democratization of space. Behind the library, as I later learned, was the philosophy of its architect, Raymond Moriyama – whose views on design were forged as a child living in one of the real camps. Japanese practice in Canada.

Toronto Reference Library, outside.

Toronto Public Library

The Toronto Reference Library was commissioned in 1971 to replace the original and limited Metropolitan Toronto Library. Moriyama’s original plan in 1973 was considered too expensive ($30 million CAD) and the size of a new building was too large. The shape is also square and completely glass, which many people don’t like. A new design, as it appears today, was approved in 1974 and used a ladder feature to reduce its presence while still bringing in light.

The library’s atrium is spacious. While the exterior of the building is indented, the inside of the building faces outward, with each upper floor being smaller than the lower one. Each level of the library has a view to the other levels. The floors are only divided by halves of white walls that flow and curve throughout the building, avoiding any hard corners. The recessed windows I see outside – and a large skylight above – light up the skylight.

The library also has an elevator with round windows overlooking the atrium. In my eyes, at least, they are reminiscent of old pneumatic tubes found in a post office. In this case, people instead mailed to five floors of the library.

The building was opened in 1977. In a pamphlet written for the opening of the library, Moriyama acknowledges that the project is a team effort and is informed based on stakeholder input. It was also based on his life experiences during the Second World War, he said. He wants to create a place of “personal peace” where “thinking” is nurtured. He argues that social institutions are blind to “the individual’s real need for personal growth”.

“Canada’s aspiration to achieve unity and unique identity through a policy of multiculturalism,” writes Moriyama, “is not just about tolerance and acceptance of diverse ethnic and community groups. It stems from the active promotion of individual self-improvement. Knowing yourself is self-control, home in the world. National trust begins with the individual.”

Moriyama is a phenomenologist interested in firsthand experience and the visitor’s point of view. In this way, the medium of the library becomes the message.

Moriyama is Born and raised in Vancouver. In 1942, during World War II, his father—a pacifist—was sent to an internment camp in Ontario for resisting conscription: 22,000 Japanese Canadians, with 90 percent of them living in British Columbia, have been in camps. He and his sisters were left to their mother to run the family business. A Canadian Mountie told him he would be shot if he was found outside. He, his mother and sisters eventually lost everything, including the family business, and ended up having to enter an internment camp in British Columbia.

Hatred for Asians spread rapidly in Canada in the early 20th century, especially due to the influence of the movement Asian Exclusion Federationgoods imported from the US. The coalition pushed for the exclusion of Asian immigrants, which eventually led to China’s Exclusion Act of 1923-just was US import. In a documentary about his life, magic imperfectionMoryyama recalls being called an “alien enemy,” adding that “the treatment of the Canadian government during the war will never leave me.”

While in those camps, Moryyama had a life-changing experience.

When he was four, he suffered severe burns from an accident in the kitchen. During the camps at the age of 12, he found himself mocked in the bathroom by his own people due to a significant scar. He decided to take a risky step and started sneaking out to bathe in the Slocan River. To make sure he didn’t get spotted, he built a platform in the tree from lumberyard debris he found and tools he gathered together.

Moriyama recalls finding peace there. “This is the first time I have learned to listen to the Earth,” he wrote University of Toronto Magazine. “I began to understand that I couldn’t hate my community and my country, or else my hatred could crush my own heart and imagination. I have replaced despair with ideas of what I can do as an architect to help my community and Canada.”

He then created his own guiding principles.

“Architecture,” writes Moriyama, “needs to receive a more symmetrical surface treatment. If it is indeed ‘gold’, then architecture must be humane and its purpose is to pursue the ideals of real, true democracy, equality and inclusion of all.”

As I see it, it is the open floor plan of the library that allows everyone to have their place—and the reference library is the epitome of the democratization of knowledge.

It is easy to see how Moriyama’s design tries to bring back the peace he finds in the nature surrounding the river. The original design included a water feature, which is a sort of acoustic to block street noise. Recently, however, those features were discontinued while they worked to make them more sustainable.

Living wall of the Toronto Reference Library.

Courtesy of Brandon Withrow

Similarly, the original library comes with hanging plants on each floor, providing a green element and intended to reflect Hanging Gardens of Babylon. They became difficult to manage and the water system was not good at preventing mold, so they were phased out for a while. However, today there is a new hydroponic system and the plants have grown back. The original natural setting of the library is now clearly alive in the study area, where there is a living wall, where plants act as a biological filter in the library.

Toronto Reference Library. Arthur Conan Doyle’s room.

Courtesy of Brandon Withrow

When you visit today, there are many new elements to experience at the library, such as the fascinating Arthur Conan Doyle Collection, for example. a part of Marilyn & Charles Baillie Special Collections, the Doyle collection features over 25,000 Sherlock Holmes-related items in a room designed to look like a Holmsian library. The remains of the Baillie Special Collection of rare books and archives were found in a clean, glass-walled, connecting room.

The choir and newspaper collections ensure that the library is a space to preserve rare and hard-to-find works from the past, while the glass walls Asquith Center for Digital Innovation and Journalism provides a creative space that allows people to create and publish their own work. There are also glass-walled study boxes. Additional structures like these are built with glass walls, and I’m known to have been designed in conjunction with Moryyama’s company.

But TRL isn’t the only library I’ve come across.

North York Central Library, sister library TRL.

Courtesy of Brandon Withrow

Not far north the Toronto Reference Library is another product of Moryyama’s democratic imagination in the form of North York Central Library. Designed in 1987 by Moriyama & Teshima Architects, the building itself has no real presence on the street. One of its entrances is indoor and unpretentious, outside of what might be considered a shopping mall connected to the Hotel Novotel and the metro. Once inside, however, it’s a different picture and certainly a Moriyama creation, as its floors also feature white half-walls that flow energetically through the building like a river.

The library was renovated and updated by the company in 2019 Schmitt Diamond. The entrance is marked by a “relief from the facade of the old building in 1959 at this site by artist Harold Town”, “depicting six alphabetic symbols from the Runic languages, Roman, Cree, Chinese, Indian and Semitic.” A wide, warm wooden staircase of the atrium leads to even more of that democratization—digital innovation labs, sewing rooms, recording studios, and children’s study spaces.

It’s the clear sister to TRL and the message that Moriyama started from there.

The Toronto Reference Library is a building of metaphorical light meeting light. It provides a place for visitors to come and find themselves. They may not know it, but they are benefiting from a tragic part of history that Raymond Moriyama has turned into equal opportunity—to create both buildings that, he puts it, deliver “products of quality.” price for the mind and the imagination.”



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