The Isabel Bader Theatre
Address: 93 Charles St. West
Architect: Lett/Smith Architects
Owner: Victoria University

Peter Ellis
The primary consideration for an urban design award is not what a building says about itself - indeed most modern architecture is presently pre-occupied with itself - but what it says or offers to its neighbours. The Isabel Bader Theatre is a quiet yet elegant building that resolves its own program with a minimum of fanfare yet subtly pays homage to its neighbours. The tall vertical rhythm and the cut stone façade, although modern, carry forward the gothic tradition of the university. The theatre does not seek attention on Charles Street, but balances domestic scale with institutional purpose. Taken together with the beautiful McKinsey & Company project across the street, the two buildings resonate and create a whole greater than the sum of the parts. This is architecture in service to the city not architecture speaking to itself.

Larry Beasley
This is an extraordinarily simple and refined building, tuned perfectly to its setting in terms of materials, massing, linkages and orientation. It stitches together and completes an assemblage of very different but mutually compatible buildings up and down Charles Street. The building is gentle, respectful and neighbourly, which is most unusual for a theatre. The results - building and street - are just so very satisfying.

David Oleson
This is a subtle design response in the context of Charles Street and within the University of Toronto's urban campus. It is important to note that one of last year's award winners was the McKinsey & Company project across the street, with a similarly sophisticated palette of materials and urban design qualities, adding to Charles Street's claim as one of Toronto's great streets.

Donna Hinde
This building fits perfectly in its Charles Street context: the setback, building height, materials, relation to adjacent open spaces and landscape treatment, results in a project exhibiting beautiful urban design. This small, elegant building, with beautifully simple materials of stucco, stone and glass, presents a beautiful public face with a humane scale in spite of its interior program requiring a tremendous amount of blank façade.