Toronto architect Stan Heinonen got a chance to flex his creative muscles with his designs for the University Settlement Community Centre.Heinonen Family
Despite being a little unsteady on his feet in his 93rd year, retired architect Stan Heinonen rises periodically from his chair to pick a photograph from the pile for closer examination. And just as many times his daughter, former landscape architect Sara Heinonen, quietly urges him to sit back down.
But Mr. Heinonen’s passion for the work he produced for 40-plus years is palpable, and soon our little group is standing and sifting, oohing and aahing, and sharing favourites. Many of the photographs that strike this writer come from Mr. Heinonen’s early years with Gordon S. Adamson & Associates, a firm that switched to the International Style in the 1940s – Mr. Adamson (1904-1986) designed the 1944 Hobbs “Sun House” in Rosedale, which was recently demolished – and eagerly employed the Eric Arthur-trained modernists coming out of the University of Toronto in the immediate postwar years.
Architect Stan Heinonen left his imprint on many notable buildings across the GTA over his 40-year career.Sara Heinonen
Mr. Heinonen graduated with honours in 1954 (Raymond Moriyama was a classmate) and, after a few months with Irving Boigon (a 1951 graduate), went to work at Adamson, where he would remain until 1959.
By the baby booming late-1950s, and just like competitors John B. Parkin Associates and Peter Dickinson Associates, Adamson was racking up commissions for schools, churches, hospitals and community centres. After working on a few boxy-yet-modern industrial buildings (one being the 1957 Honeywell complex at 740 Ellesmere Rd., now demolished), young Stan got to flex his creative muscles at University Settlement Community Centre (23 Grange Rd.). Even more than 60 years later, the crisp, white geometry of the main building and the bold, folded plate concrete roof over the pool stand in stark contrast to the greenery of Grange Park. But, at two storeys, the complex doesn’t lord over or overwhelm park visitors.
“The roof wasn’t just a stunt,” Mr. Heinonen explains. “Being a swimming pool, if you use any kind of steel there’s corrosion, and this [also] did away with columns; Peter Dickinson had just done that down at the Exhibition [with the Queen Elizabeth Building].” Inside, ceiling lights that Mr. Heinonen designed – made with waterproof porcelain enamel – fold snugly into each bend.
The work didn’t change much when Mr. Heinonen moved to again join the very active Irving Boigon (in the 1970s Boigon served as president of the Ontario Association of Architects and the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada). During his 13 years there he’d fully or partially work on 13 institutional/commercial buildings, 26 schools and 12 large-scale housing projects.
Described as a “ground-breaking” public housing commission on the City of Toronto’s website, the Robert J. Smith Apartments in Etobicoke were being finished around the same time the firm changed its name to Boigon and Heinonen Architects. The complex represented “a shift in thinking” as it no longer regarded seniors as fringe members of society and incorporated communal dining rooms and recreation areas. Even its architecture was lively: the trio of buildings dance around the verdant site, the round building taking the lead by facing Kendleton Drive; balconies thrust forward rhythmically; and wide, clever sunshades swirl over a sunken courtyard. And other than blue balcony railings on one building, it all looks just as good today as it did then.
The architecture of Stan Heinonen. R.J. Smith Apartments, Toronto.Heinonen Family
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Smaller projects, such as the Aurora Public Library (1963, demolished 2018) or the Simcoe County Museum (1962, still standing but altered) show Mr. Heinonen’s mastery of warm, domestic-scale modernism. Structure is expressed – emphasized even – on the outside of each building, allowing opaque walls of fieldstone or brick to ‘float,’ while fully glazed walls practically disappear. The Aurora building featured a semi-sheltered courtyard that gave library patrons a view of plants and trees. Both call to mind Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, although Mr. Heinonen says the Manhattan-based Ieoh Ming Pei was more of an influence.
Moving to a much larger scale, Mr. Heinonen is justifiably proud of his work on the Meteorological Service of Canada (MSC) headquarters, which the firm began planning in 1966 (it opened in 1971). The new suburban campus at 4905 Dufferin St. would contain offices, warehousing facilities, classrooms, a lecture theatre, cafeteria, and, of course, scientific facilities such as observation domes and a wind tunnel.
“They actually released weather balloons for a while but that didn’t last long,” Mr. Heinonen says.
Today known as Environment Canada, most Torontonians use Ron Baird’s 33.5-meter high metal sculpture – one of the tallest metal sculptures in North America – as the local wayfinding tool.
A short drive south is the North York Centennial Centre (opened 1966, now Herbert H. Carnegie Centennial Centre), a rakish, debonair, undulating, four-sided building that’s handsome from any angle – even the shipping/receiving side is stepped like the front façade and just as crisply detailed. “The whole idea was that it was multipurpose, and it could have a stage, and I think right after it was built they held the Miss Canada pageant.”
Before Mr. Heinonen ended his relationship with Boigon to become the Ontario regional architect at Public Works Canada, he designed Scarborough’s towering and Brutalist Adanac Aparments (opened in 1972, Adanac is Canada backwards). Despite 16-storeys of concrete, lightness is achieved by breaking the building into two ‘separate’ structures joined by a recessed, glazed middle section.
At Public Works, where the Toronto-born Mr. Heinonen would spend 22 years, an architectural cornucopia was on offer. “We did all kinds of things,” he remembers. “I didn’t do very many buildings on my own, but I did some, we did most of [the work] with consultants.” For instance, he remembers asking fellow U of T grad Jerome Markson to design three different sizes of post office while Mr. Heinonen and his team developed standards for their interiors. And, based on his experiences with Environment Canada, he designed a smaller facility for them “out in the bush” near Egbert, Ont. in the 1980s.
Most of the pile sorted through – and apologies there isn’t room to cover all of it here – and with Mr. Heinonen’s voice hoarse from this writer’s barrage of questions, one peculiar late-1980s document catches the eye: “Tempo,” an internal publication for Public Works Employees, and an article titled “Stan Heinonen ties one.” In it, the unnamed author describes the architect’s penchant for neckwear, from bowties to colourful Marimekko numbers picked up in the swingin’ sixties. And while the piece goes on to mention that Mr. Heinonen was instrumental getting computer aided design (CAD) into Public Works – ”the first to use CAD computers in the city” – Mr. Heinonen interrupts the conversation to bring us over to his closet.
There, the collection of ties still hangs proudly. Some worn around the edges from being favourites, some almost pristine. Some conservative, some bold and brash. And a few good ones, sadly, just a memory.
Just like Mr. Heinonen’s wonderful buildings.