Joseph Storey - Building A Career

Building A Career

After graduation from university, Joe Storey worked for one year in Toronto in the office of John Land Architect. After winning $750 in a Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation competition, he returned to his hometown of Chatham, and at the age of twenty-four he established the practice of Joseph W. Storey, Architect in the fall of 1947. The reputation of the office was quickly established by Storey’s skilled translation of the functional clarity, simplicity, and elegant forms of modernism to the urban form of the then small town of Chatham.

As Chatham doubled in size over the next twenty-five years, many of its new buildings found their origins in the office of Joe Storey. Landmark buildings of Chatham such as the Ursuline Convent, Ursuline Motherhouse Chapel and Ursuline College (1958–1962) the head office of Union Gas (1965, major addition in 1973), the Kent County Courthouse (1949), the Chatham YMCA (1962,) Kent County Municipal Building (1967), the Federal Post Office Building (1955), and the Chatham Civic Centre (1975) came from a close-knit dedicated core of talented people brought together by Storey. Bob Tyndall, Wally Stewart and Roger Duchene worked with Storey's firm from the early 1950s until Storey’s untimely passing in 1975. This team was joined by many other talented people through 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, such as architects and OAA members Douglas Hanley, Robert Steele, and James H. Jorden.

Joe Storey brought a level of design and technical excellence that was consistent not only to landmark buildings, but also to elementary and secondary schools, churches, band shells, senior citizen residences, industrial buildings, and to Storey’s favourite challenge, the single family home. Scores of modest ingeniously-planned and executed residences dot the neighbourhoods of Chatham. Examples of his work can also be found in Windsor (The Energy Conversion Plant, University of Windsor), London (Brescia University College), Sarnia (YMCA) and in many other small towns in southwestern Ontario.

Although Storey practised architecture out of the spotlight of Toronto, his work was innovative and progressive. His design for the Federal Post Office building (1955) featured the first use of curtain wall in Ontario. One of Storey’s more interesting unbuilt projects of his career is his design for the conversion of four abandoned sugar beet silos on industrial lands into apartments. This idea and the search for investors carried over a number of years. The value of recycling our industrial heritage is well known today, but the silos were unfortunately destroyed after Storey’s death.