What does heritage look like?

In Toronto, you might immediately suggest a gabled Victorian house. You would not, probably, think of the St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts. Built in 1970, this Brutalist complex in the downtown is a legacy of the Centennial boom in Canadian culture. Now it is beat-up and unloved. The public agency that runs it wants to tear down the 70,000-square-foot building and replace it.

Tura Cousins Wilson has a better idea. I asked the architect, a partner in the talented young firm SOCA Design, for his view on the building – he thinks the centre deserves to be saved, and came up with a design to renovate and expand it. “Can a contemporary arts institution reimagine itself, without purging the past?” he asks.

The answer is yes. Mr. Cousins Wilson’s design provides a model of how we should be approaching Modernist public buildings: with a critical eye and creativity about how to renovate and build on them.

The SLCA, designed by Toronto architects Gordon S. Adamson and Associates, is in the Brutalist style. This is frank, concrete-heavy Modern architecture. It faces Front Street with walls of cast-in-place concrete, which bears the grain of the wood that was used to form it. Above, the building steps back to a set of skylights and a penthouse that has a birdlike profile. It is a tough, sculptural and carefully composed work of architecture.

It consists largely of two large performance spaces, whose size, proportions and technical amenities all present problems. Its owner, the City of Toronto agency TOLive, has a plan to tear it down and build a new cultural complex with a budget near $200-million. (It doesn’t yet have most of this money.)

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