Push to preserve University of Guelph greenhouse continues

There are renewed efforts to save a community landmark at the University of Guelph, despite the city’s approval of the school’s demolition plan.

The D.M. Rutherford Family Conservatory remains closed to the public after the structure was deemed unsafe. The school said it intends to tear down the historic greenhouse and replaced it with a garden.

Walter Kehm, who served for 14 years as director of the University of Guelph’s School of Landscape Architecture, remembered teaching inside the conservatory.

“We did seminars on the relationship of landscape to public health, to individual health,” he recalled. “The students would come in and measure their temperature, their blood pressure and then would go into a concrete cinder block classrooms and notice the differences in the human biology simply by being immersed in a green environment.”

Kehm has joined the group behind an online petition to save and restore the greenhouse.

“I was alarmed because I think the university is missing a very great opportunity,” he said.

The school estimated it would cost over $5 million to fix the structure, which they felt was too costly.

Kehm believes that figure was inflated.

“I've also done research with the leading greenhouse companies in North America, and I have quite a dossier of people who have spare parts, know exactly about this building,” he explained. “I feel that the price that was listed at $5 million is totally off base.”

Kehm would like to see the building used as a rental venue for weddings and other special functions so the school could get a return on its investment.

The University of Guelph told CTV News: "In this fiscal environment, the university cannot devote resources towards maintaining a building that it ultimately cannot afford to keep."

The University of Guelph greenhouse, also known as the D.M. Rutherford Family Conservatory, on Jan. 3, 2025. (Dan Lauckner/CTV News)

Formal process

City staff recommended the building be granted heritage status last fall, but after getting push back from the school, council agreed to a compromise.

“A building permit to remove the wood and the glass has been issued, but not a full demolition permit. That has not been issued or applied for at this point in time,” Krista Walkey, the city’s general manager of planning and building services, told CTV News,

City staff initially recommended keeping the entire structure in place.

“Staff took a report to council on Nov. 13th that recommended designation of the conservatory and council, at that time, did not follow staff's recommendation, but came up with an alternative recommendation, which was requested by the university to be able to remove the wood and glass and maintain the salvageable steel, and to then use that in a commemorative structure that would be built on, on the site at some point in the future,” Walkey explained.

She added the salvageable steel within the greenhouse has been granted heritage permission and cannot be removed at this time.

The greenhouse issue will be brought back to Guelph’s Heritage Committee in February.