When Alex Bozikovic ’01 reviewed Trinity’s new Lawson Centre for Sustainability in The Globe and Mail this past August, he called it one of the best institutional buildings Canada has seen in years. It’s the kind of judgment that carries weight coming from Bozikovic, who has been the Globe’s architecture critic since 2013 — but it also carries something more personal. Long before he was assessing the building professionally, he was a Trinity undergraduate finding his own sense of place on this same campus.
When it comes to judging whether a building brings people together, Bozikovic’s test is disarmingly practical. “I’ve come to have a firm belief that if a building is meant to accommodate people, people will tell you whether it works,” he says. “If it’s busy, it’s successful.” This fall, he’s watching that play out at the college where he first learned to look at buildings this way.
A campus that taught him to look
Bozikovic arrived at Trinity as an English major and lived in residence during his first year, in a room that looked out over the playing field where the Lawson Centre now stands. Thinking back, he says Trinity and the St. George campus offer something few other places can. “You are cloistered in the middle of what is the most spectacular campus in the country, in the middle of the country’s biggest city.” That combination shaped how he saw everything around him. “You can’t walk around Trinity or the St. George campus and not start to notice where you are,” he says. “The campus is a museum of architecture.”
“A physical manifestation of community”
For Bozikovic, that sense of belonging is physical, not abstract. He describes “bumping into people on the way to class” as something that felt ordinary as a student but that he’s come to value more with time. Such direct encounters with one’s community become rare later in life, he points out, especially for those whose daily lives are spent driving from place to place.
“Trinity, and the U of T campus, are a physical manifestation of community,” he says, “that intersection of a physical place and a community. That’s the gift that being on campus can give you. Community is something he feels strongly about —and in some ways that’s at the core of his work, which emphasizes public buildings and public space. Those opportunities for face-to-face connection, he suggests, can shape our social realities and influence our politics.
From close reading to criticism
At Trinity, Bozikovic studied poetry with professor Linda Munk, whom he calls “fantastic” and “much beloved” by generations of students. It’s a course he points to directly when explaining how he ended up writing about buildings at all. “Studying literature and learning to read a text closely for its form, for its literary devices, and then in its historical context,” he says, “was a very transferable skill,” and one he now uses in a very different setting. “It’s the work of criticism, which I’m lucky enough to get to do.”
He completed an MA in English at the University of Toronto and briefly started a PhD before graduate school gave way to something else: a fascination with cities that had taken root during his time as a student journalist. He built a career freelancing before landing at the Toronto Star, and eventually The Globe and Mail, where he has served as architecture critic since 2013.
Bozikovic is also the author or editor of three books: Toronto Architecture: A City Guide (2017), a new edition of the definitive guide first written by the late Patricia McHugh; House Divided (2019), which he co–edited, and which helped spark a national conversation about city planning; and 305 Lost Buildings of Canada (2022, with Raymond Biesinger), a national bestseller. He teaches the history of Toronto’s urban form in the master’s program at U of T’s Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design.
Another treasured Trinity connection Bozikovic mentions was with the late Stephen Otto ’61, C.M., a historian and heritage advocate he came to know professionally later in life, through his work with the Friends of Fort York, which Otto helped found. He credits Otto, who was appointed to the Order of Canada for his work preserving Ontario’s historic buildings (and who funded the major renovation of the Trinity Quad in 2006), with deepening his own sense of a city’s layered history.
What makes a building work
Ask Bozikovic what makes a building succeed at bringing people together, and a few things come up repeatedly: shelter and something to look at outdoors, natural light and materials indoors. “Almost everybody loves wood and stone,” he reflects. But the most successful places, he suggests, allow people to linger without a reason. That’s where a café comes in: “It provides a license. You don’t need to explain yourself or make a plan — you can just sit down. Maybe you order a meal, maybe you have a cup of coffee, or not.” That kind of social flexibility, he says, makes informal gathering spaces really powerful.
On the Lawson Centre for Sustainability
It’s through that lens that Bozikovic assessed the Lawson Centre, both in his Globe review and in conversation with Living Trinity. He describes its gathering spaces as “porous” — places you feel able to walk into and simply spend time. He points to its café and fireplace lounges and its extensive use of wood and stone as elements he looks for in a successful building. He’s also drawn to the decision made early in the project by lead designer Francine Houben of the Dutch firm Mecanoo to build a low, four-storey building organized around shared open space instead of a tower, one that builds on the campus’s tradition of “quads.” “I think it was absolutely the right move,” he says of the decision.
He’s not without a critique: he finds the landscaping “a little undercooked” for now, though he expects it to look better as the plantings mature. Buildings, he notes, tend to look their best on day one, while landscapes take years to come into their own.
What does he hope the building gives a first-year student moving in today? Something close to what he valued himself: “being able to live on campus, in a building with good shared space, where you’re going to be able to meet your floormates and fellow students and socialize comfortably. I think that’s really important,” he says.
Coming home to Trinity
Asked whether being an alumnus changes how he sees the campus now, Bozikovic pauses before answering. “I don’t think I understood how special it was as a student,” he says. “There is essentially no other campus in the country that can compete.” Now, whenever he returns to teach, it feels like a privilege. “The university campus is a kind of utopia,” he says.
For Bozikovic, the Lawson Centre offers a lesson that extends beyond its walls: “There are new ways to solve old questions,” he says. A successful new building is a reminder that each generation answers the same fundamental needs, for shelter and belonging and community, in its own way. It’s a fitting thought from someone who first learned to notice those questions on this campus, and who has now watched Trinity answer them again for a new generation of students.
by Jennifer Matthews
