The Globe and Mail

It's safe to say that the door to any "middle of nowhere" jokes about York University slammed shut once and for all in 1991. That's when what many consider to be the campus's much-needed "front door" -- Raymond Moriyama's Vari Hall -- opened directly in front of the imposing, brutalist Ross Building, and began a transformation of the country's third-largest university into a much friendlier place. Since then, the Keele campus has been a hotbed of new construction, resulting in pedestrian-scaled streetscapes and public spaces where there were once windswept and weedy fields, in essence creating a "somewhere" within its boundaries.