The 1960s saw a wave of Brutalist-style architecture sweep through educational campuses across the globe, and over a half-century later, many of these monolithic concrete structures stand as testaments to the optimism of the era.
Opened in 1965 as Scarborough College, the campus now known as University of Toronto Scarborough, or UTSC, quickly grew to become a beacon of modernity in what was then a rural pocket on the outskirts of the city.
Right from the get-go, the jewel in the crown of this new campus — and by that I mean its only building for the college’s first few years — was the Andrews Building.
Designed by award-winning Australian architect John Andrews, the same architect who would later help design Toronto’s iconic CN Tower, the enormous structure was completed in 1964 and first hosted classes the following year.
John Andrews envisioned his building as an alternative to winter campus life, with students and faculty walking indoor streets instead of shuffling through the cold and snow.
The structure was built with its two wings, known as the Humanities and Science wings, connected via a grand central atrium known as the Meeting Place, set below an enormous concrete coffered skylight that allows natural light to fill the space.
The acclaimed architect got a lot of things right in this design philosophy, but what he probably could have never predicted was a six-decade legacy of film and television appearances that celebrate the building’s striking design and meticulous attention to detail.
Perhaps the most prominent feature of the building is the stepped concrete pinnacle rising from the main structure’s sloped walls, terminating in three striking chimneys.
Concrete is used to express both the broader form of the imposing structure, but also the finer details. Board-formed concrete can be seen throughout the complex, bearing details imparted by the grain of the natural wood used as formwork during concrete pours.
Rivalling the iconic exterior views, interior spaces like stairwells with sweeping curves allow students and faculty to experience the building’s architectural details up close.
It’s these distinct features that have made UTSC such a versatile filming location for television and movies across several genres, ranging from science fiction and horror to drama and even comedy.
In fact, UTSC is now approaching the 60-year anniversary of the first major motion picture shot on campus, as more productions continue to be churned out at the educational institution.
Even from its earliest days as a new building in a then-nascent satellite campus, the Andrews Building attracted filmmakers from near and far.
The Andrews Building was thrust into the Hollywood spotlight just three years after it opened, with a bit of local assistance from Toronto-born filmmaker David Cronenberg, who cast the structure in its first major film appearance with his feature-length directorial debut in 1969’s Stereo.
Owing to the building’s distinct architectural style, it has stood in for various government institutions over decades of filmography. However, it was Cronenberg who first put this cold institutional aesthetic to work, transforming the fledgling campus into the Canadian Academy of Erotic Enquiry for his film debut.
The campus has since appeared as similarly shady institutions, like in blockbuster flicks such as Total Recall and Resident Evil, and has been chosen by some of the top directors in Hollywood to portray everything from futuristic space colonies to dystopian/Orwellian settings.
Celebrated Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve may be the first to have actually cast the campus as itself in his 2013 surrealist film Enemy, where lead Jake Gyllenhaal plays a troubled U of T professor.
That same year, Director and screenwriter Guillermo del Toro — who has a long love affair with Toronto — filmed portions of the blockbuster American kaiju film Pacific Rim at UTSC.
Thankfully, UTSC was nowhere to be found in the franchise’s disastrous 2018 sequel, which del Toro walked away from the project after production of the film in Toronto was scrapped in favour of sound stages in China.
But, Guillermo would return to UTSC for his 2017 romantic fantasy, The Shape of Water, where the imposing Brutalist Andrews Building was used to portray a Cold War-era aerospace research facility.
The director would yet again use UTSC to shoot exterior shots for the seventh episode of his Netflix miniseries Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities.
Not everything shot at UTSC is going to pan out though, as was the case with the box-office bomb Suicide Squad, another 2017 film produced at the campus.
More filming followed in the late 2010s the following year with the 2018 science fiction thriller Anon starring Amanda Seyfried.
The campus’ most recent major appearance on the silver screen came in 2023 with the release of Norwegian filmmaker Kristoffer Borgli’s black comedy, Dream Scenario, produced by acclaimed indie studio A24.
UTSC is also a popular set for television, and proved a regular filming location for streaming sci-fi series The Expanse starting in the show’s second season in 2016. As a testament to the building’s lasting futuristic aesthetic, portions of the Andrews Building’s Science Wing were used as a stand-in for a Martian Embassy.
It has also been used for the filming of major television series Suits (2011-2019), The Hot Zone (2019-2021) and The Handmaid’s Tale (2017-Present), where it is dressed in varying degrees of dystopian set design to help in world-building.
But UTSC hasn’t gone all Hollywood on us yet and still makes room for local productions, like the short-lived Canadian space drama, Killjoys. It may be a popular filming location for U.S. productions, but UTSC also does a great deal to help Toronto-based productions achieve otherworldly settings on a budget.
Even those who abstain from cinema, television, and the wealth of streaming options these days may still know the campus from its on-screen appearances in music videos. One notable example was The Weeknd’s Secrets video (alongside the Toronto Reference Library) from his global smash-hit 2016 album Starboy.
UTSC doesn’t shy away from its various alternate on-screen identities, and the school has published articles and videos covering the history of cinema on campus.
