Origin story: All the right angles – how Hamilton Hall returned to its science roots in 2003

In the time it took to walk from one end of Burke Science Building (BSB) to the other, mathematics professor Ian Hambleton had proven that two problems can add up to one award-winning solution. 

In the late 1990s, Hambleton was chair of the Department of Mathematics & Statistics. Faculty and staff were scattered throughout BSB and the neighbouring General Science Building. There was a plan to consolidate the entire department on the third floor of BSB, with faculty and staff shoehorned into a warren of offices. The plan was not well received. 

To show why the proposed move was a non-starter for the department, Hambleton invited Provost and Vice-President Academic Harvey Weingarten to join him for a walkabout. They talked at the end of their quick walk through BSB and Weingarten agreed the department deserved a plan B. 

“It was a very good walk,” remembers Professor Emeritus Hambleton, who marked his 50th anniversary with the department earlier this year. 

McMaster at that time had a much bigger problem on its hands next door to BSB. Hamilton Hall, one of the university’s original five buildings, needed new tenants but was far from move-in condition. Once home to lecture halls and labs and having briefly served as the Science building in the 1940s, Hamilton Hall had been a stopgap student centre for the better part of 40 years. The four-storey building was showing its age. 

Hamilton Hall would empty out once the new McMaster University Student Centre opened in 2002. Letting the historic building sit vacant and fall further into disrepair wasn’t an option, but overdue renovations to 4,270 square metres of floor space was prohibitively expensive. There was talk of moving University Advancement into Hamilton Hall following minor cosmetic touch-ups. 

And this is when two problems added up to a solution. Instead of moving to the top floor of BSB, the Department of Mathematics & Statistics would return to its roots in a fully renovated Hamilton Hall. 

The timing was perfect. In anticipation of soaring enrolments, the Ontario government launched a $742 million SuperBuild Growth Fund in February 2000 to help universities and colleges add new classrooms and labs. McMaster was awarded $22.57 million, with $3.1 million earmarked for Hamilton Hall. 

The renovations would receive an additional $1.6 million from the Ontario Innovation Trust. President Peter George persuaded Professor Emeritus James Stewart – author of best-selling calculus textbooks – to donate $1 million. Stewart had long championed a stand-alone building for the department and had pushed for the university to be the site of the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Science. Other donors followed Stewart’s lead, including Richard Buckingham ‘69, Deloitte & Touche LLP and the McLean Foundation. 

The architectural firm of Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg was hired to reimagine Hamilton Hall – they were retrofitting the Art Gallery of Hamilton and had just designed the Fields Institute on the University of Toronto campus. The Hamilton Hall project would require creating new architecture within an existing historic framework that had been designed more than 70 years earlier by renowned Canadian architect William Lyon Somerville. 

While the Collegiate Gothic stone exterior of Hamilton Hall is stunning, the concrete interior proved to be nothing special. Everything inside – the architects called the collection of offices “a dark labyrinthine” – was gutted. 

Hamilton Hall was now a hollow shell and blank slate. The architects consulted with the incoming tenants. Mathematics requires both public and private spaces for social interactions and solitary contemplation – something that was missing on the third floor of BSB. Hamilton Hall would deliver both. 

Faculty offices would line the perimeter of the building. Every office was built around one of the original stone-framed Gothic revival windows and included added space for research. Oversized hallways became instructional spaces with the addition of tables and floor-to-ceiling slate blackboards. Even the main floor café just inside the main doors with its blackboard walls would double as study and seminar space. And every floor would be flooded with natural light through windows and transparent blue-glass walls. A four-storey atrium in the centre of the building was topped with a skylight to draw in even more light. 

The James Stewart Centre for Mathematics officially opened in September 2003, with the Deloitte Colloquium Room on the main floor and the Richard Buckingham Lab on the fourth. The project was awarded a Governor’s General’s Medal in Architecture in 2004. 

Like fine wine, the building has aged well. Twenty-two years later, Hamilton Hall – with its gothic exterior and modern, abstract interior – remains the envy of visiting faculty, says Hambleton. The Department of Mathematics & Statistics has grown into its home, with 1,100 undergraduate and 135 graduate students. Today, faculty deliver around 80 courses and teach approximately 22,000 students from across McMaster each year. 

The hallway tables remain full of students from morning to night as they work through equations with chalk on blackboards. While student conversations can get loud and leak into offices, Hambleton says there’s nowhere else faculty would rather be. 

Hamilton Hall highlights

• Hamilton Hall, University Hall, the Refectory, Edwards Hall and Wallingford Hall were McMaster’s original five buildings. The buildings were designed in the Collegiate Gothic style found at universities such as Oxford and Cambridge, with features that include pointed arches, buttresses, recessed entrances with stone moldings, steep gabled roofs, and tall, narrow windows with small panes. 
• Hamilton Hall was named in honour of Hamiltonians who contributed $500,000 for McMaster’s relocation from Toronto in 1930. 
• The sundial mounted on the front of Hamilton Hall below a second-storey window was a gift from the Class of Arts 1928. The inscription on the sundial, “Aut Disce, Aut Discede,” is Latin for “either learn or leave.” 
• The gargoyles on the outside of Hamilton Hall – which are actually called grotesques – were made by parliamentary stone carver William Frederik Karel Oosterhoff. According to retired professor Walter Peace, the grotesques depict the students’ transformation from monkeys to angels through the “finetuning of education, they become illuminated”. 
• Professor Emeritus James Stewart, who donated $1 million to the Hamilton Hall renovations, lived in Integral House in Toronto’s Rosedale neighbourhood. HIs home included a concert hall with seating for up to 150 people. It’s been called one of the most important private houses in North America and won a Governor General’s Medal in Architecture in 2012. Stewart died in 2014 at 73 years of age and was posthumously awarded the Meritorious Service Cross the following year.