Location: Toronto, Ontario

Architecture Practices: Teeple Architects (Architect of Record; now Teeple Architects Canada Inc.) and Weiss/Manfredi Architecture/Landscape/Urbanism (Design Architect)

The Schwartz Reisman Innovation Campus West (SRIC) reimagines the research building as a vertical campus where discovery, enterprise, and public life converge. 

Its flexible, loft-like interiors support shifting teams, evolving research models, and emerging partnerships. A continuous social circuit and multi-storey winter gardens counter the tendency toward insular research cultures, creating spaces for encounter and debate. A generous public ground plane and tapered civic form establish a new gateway to the University and the city. Durable materiality and long-life planning anchor innovation in permanence.

The design dissolves conventional boundaries between institutional and commercial research environments, creating a hybrid typology that supports academic inquiry alongside enterprise and venture activity. Urban height and shadow constraints are transformed into a continuous tapered form, challenging Toronto’s typical podium-and-tower condition with a singular civic mass. 

 

Jury Comments

"A creative urban design response that strongly and more convincingly relates to its context than the conventional and default podium and tower solution. Flexible floorplates with sectional connectivity between them, as well as outdoor terraces at various strategic points in the building, provide opportunities for casual, serendipitous interaction and collaboration – essential for innovation."

 

Check out our BLOAAg article for more information.

Publish Date : 2026/Jun/15