Toronto City Hall - History

History

Toronto had been looking to build a more modern city hall to house its growing municipal government since at least 1943, when a report to city council recommended a new city hall and square in the block bounded by Queen Street West, Bay Street, and Chestnut Street. The recommendation was rejected by the electorate in a referendum on New Year's Day in 1947. However, in October 1952, a panel of citizens appointed by city council made the same recommendation. In 1954, a partnership of three of Toronto's largest architectural firms was selected to do the design: Marani and Morris, Mathers and Haldenby, and Shore and Moffat. Presented in November 1955, their design proposed a conservative, limestone-clad building in the Modernist style. It was symmetrical and faced a landscaped square. Unlike the design that would ultimately be built, it retained the stone Beaux-Arts Registry Office on the western part of the site and also included a landscaped public space in front of it. The podium of the new city hall was to house the council chambers, and had columns complimenting the eight columns of the Registry Building, with which it was aligned in facing the new public space.

Yet the plan did not satisfy Mayor Nathan Phillips, who called for an international design competition. A joint letter was sent by all classes of the University of Toronto Faculty of Architecture condemning the proposal and calling for an international competition. Frank Lloyd Wright called the design a "sterilization" and "a cliché already dated", while Walter Gropius criticized it as "very poor pseudo-modern design unworthy of the city of Toronto". It died when voters rejected plans for a new $18 million city hall in a December 1955 referendum, though the design was adapted and built as the Imperial Oil Building elsewhere in the city.