St. Michael’s Choir School
- Location Toronto, Ontario
- Client Toronto District Catholic School Board
- Architects KPMB and VG Architects (in joint venture)
- Size 78,500 ft² / 7,300 m²
- Project type Education, Culture
Uniting education and choral tradition
The St. Michael’s Choir School in downtown Toronto is one of a select few Catholic choir schools with direct Vatican engagement. Founded to train the boys’ choir of St. Michael’s Cathedral and enhance liturgical music in parishes across the city, the school has provided elementary and secondary education to musically talented students for nearly a century.
Today, its academic and administrative functions operate under the Toronto Catholic District School Board, while the musical and liturgical program is led by the Basilian Fathers in association with the Cathedral.
A new home for the Choir School was designed by KPMB in joint venture with VG Architects to address important operational and educational needs, improve accessibility, and enable the phased development of the city-block-sized site owned by the Archdiocese.
Consolidating the school — currently spread across four buildings — into an expanded facility on the west side of Bond Street will unite academic and choir activities for the first time. Crucially, it will also unlock future development on the sites currently occupied by the school to the east of Bond Street in accordance with the St. Michael’s Cathedral Block Master Plan.
The new building will provide students and choristers with 21st-century learning and performance spaces. Conceived as a vertical campus for elementary, secondary, and choral education, the school will house key educational needs in a light-filled interior organized around internal courtyards. A key design challenge was accommodating large spaces, like a gymnasium and playground, on the tight urban site.
Drawing on KPMB’s experience designing performing arts venues, the new Choir School will also address the specialized requirements of the music program, introducing an acoustically contained performance hall and practice rooms. Interior surface treatments and the exterior building skin are designed to achieve acoustic isolation within the urban location near a major hospital.
The new architectural interventions respond to the block’s rich architectural character, including the original red-brick school building and the nearby Decorated Gothic-style cathedral.
The design restores the school building’s existing heritage façade and clock tower, while a multi-storey addition is set back from the original building. The addition — composed of a string of glazed, rectilinear volumes — is visually light and unimposing in deference to the original architecture.
