The Government of Canada Building, also known as the Joseph Sheppard Federal Building, is a Government of Canada office complex at 4900 Yonge Street in North York. Built in 1977 to service residents of the former Metropolitan Toronto boroughs of North York and Etobicoke, it houses a branch of the Passport Office in addition to other federal departments.
It is one of several federal building around Toronto:
- Health Canada Building on Midland Avenue and Highway 401 in Scarborough
- Government of Canada Building on Borough Drive in Scarborough
- Dominion Public Building on Front Street West
- Dominion Public Building at 338 Keele Street
The structure, with its multi-layered design, stands out among the surrounding skyscrapers along Yonge Street, which were built during the office boom of the 1990s surrounding the diversification of downtown North York.
Famous quotes containing the words government, canada and/or buildings:
“Consider the islands bearing the names of all the saints, bristling with forts like chestnut-burs, or Echinidæ, yet the police will not let a couple of Irishmen have a private sparring- match on one of them, as it is a government monopoly; all the great seaports are in a boxing attitude, and you must sail prudently between two tiers of stony knuckles before you come to feel the warmth of their breasts.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In Canada an ordinary New England house would be mistaken for the château, and while every village here contains at least several gentlemen or “squires,” there is but one to a seigniory.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The desert is a natural extension of the inner silence of the body. If humanity’s language, technology, and buildings are an extension of its constructive faculties, the desert alone is an extension of its capacity for absence, the ideal schema of humanity’s disappearance.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)