It's not a trompe l'oeil, but incongruous might describe the York Room - a stately wood panelled interior (circa 17th-18th centuries) removed from a English country house and relocated to York's Ross Building. In the mid-1960s the room was dismantled, shipped across the Atlantic in crates, and reassembled on Ross' 9th floor during that building's construction. At the time, the architect's plans had to be altered to accommodate the new guest.
"I think Murray Ross [York's first president] saw the room as a way of putting tradition into a new university that didn't have any," says Jim Gillies, Schulich School of Business professor. "The idea at the time was that universities are 'old, old', and when you're new...well...you have to institutionalize tradition. The York Room was a way to do that."
The room boasts a small, ornate marble fireplace that worked (wood was collected from Osgoode Hall Law School's woodlot, according to Bill Small, former vice-president of University services), walls of pine panelling (unusual for an English house of the time, but probably from Norway), and its original doors and fixtures.
There are several versions of the story of how the room came to be at York, but legend has it that a house either on the campus or nearby the University of York (U.K.) was being torn down. Some York University VIPs were in England visiting our English cousins (among them Robert Winters, after whom Winters College is named and who was Chair of York's first board of governors), and the room caught their attention.
