In scale (18 floors), style (Brutalist), and function, Tartu College is a two-year-younger sister building to Rochdale College. It was built as a general undergraduate student co-op combined with a library, archive, and study centre serving the Estonian-Canadian community. Having escaped the melodrama that befell Rochdale, Tartu remains to some extent a microcosm of dormitory fashion of its time. The basic housing unit is a spartan six-person suite, and there are five suites on each residential floor. The arrangement is fundamentally modular, as was fashionable in student housing during the 1960s and 1970s. Surprisingly little of this type of student housing was built in the University of Toronto environs (due to funding cutbacks and changes in the political and planning climate), although it is a leitmotif of newer campuses, such as York, Waterloo, and Trent universities. Tartu’s compact, conventional apartment-building form overcomes the overwrought, Skinner-maze effect that plagues many of its contemporaries to a greater or lesser degree. Meanwhile, the Corbusian architectural overtones remind us of how Le Corbusier’s “machine for living” ethic achieved some of its purest, most appropriate expression in 1960s and 1970s student housing – as those who’ve spent any time in it will readily attest.

A somewhat purer, if less self-consciously monumental rendition of concrete Brutalism than Rochdale (with Aaltoesque “Scandinavian” traits that must have suited the building’s sponsors), Tartu also suffers more from the heavy-handed urban narcissism that soon gave Brutalism a bad name; its entrance is overly dark, steep and tight, and the building turns its back to the corner of Bloor and Madison, a far cry from the generous corner plaza offered by Rochdale. On the other hand, these sins are easy to overlook because Tartu has survived the years and can now be cherished for the nature of much of its detailing – most especially, the superscaled, cast-in-place concrete lettering flanking the entrance. Ironically, Tartu’s placid history has led to its becoming, in lieu of Rochdale’s ghost, an evocative reminder of the long-gone, sideburns/bell-bottom/Wallabee era in university culture.

Adam Sobolak