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If any one building in Toronto may mark the transition from the 19th century to the next, that building is Old City Hall (1899, E.J.Lennox). Lennox’s masterwork marks the culmination in the city of Romanesque Revival, a style influenced by the works of McKim, Mead, and White, and H.H.Richardson, particularly his Allegheny County Courthouse (1884). Other local examples of this genre include the Gooderham House (1892), designed by David Roberts, and the Ontario Legislative Building (1892, known also as “Queen’s Park”), by R.A.Waite. These buildings share the robust Richardsonian complement of rusticated stonework, massive rounded arches, steep gabled roofs, and richly ornamented interior woodwork. More generally, Old City Hall marks the culmination of High Victorian Toronto, which, in addition to the Romanesque style, looked toward an eclectic array of Renaissance Revival, Second Empire, Italianate, and Queen Anne. These templates were modified by a web of influences, including a constructional idiom founded on the versatile red and yellow brick produced from local clay pits and the ever-present specter of winter. The most enduring legacy of this period is the near ubiquitous semidetached housing type known as Toronto Bay-n-Gable, variations of which continued to be built throughout the 20th century.
Into the new century, Lennox would continue to match the ambitions of his patrons with the flamboyance of his designs. A case in point is Casa Loma (1911), commissioned by Sir Henry Pellatt, a pioneer in the development of hydroelectric power from Niagara Falls. Here, Lennox forged an elaborate confection composed of French Medieval and early Renaissance that may well have found favor with King Ludwig of Bavaria. Such extravagance was the exception to the rule in Edwardian Toronto, for although the explosive accretion of wealth and population continued along its Victorian trajectory, the opulence of Richardsonian Romanesque gave way to more subtle shades of English domestic architecture. The dominant model for the first two decades of the century was neo-Georgian, all red brick and white trim, although it is in the Cottage style that we recognize two of the city’s most significant neighborhood models: Wychwood Park and Riverdale Courts.
Wychwood Park was founded by Marmaduke Matthews, an English-born landscape painter who envisioned an artists’ idyll set amid ten acres of ravine land west of Casa Loma. Most of the development dates from after 1907, when the architect Eden Smith, in addition to building his own residence, designed a further half dozen houses in the park. All were executed in the Lutyens-inspired Cottage style, comprising deceptively simple assemblages of sweeping rooflines, stucco walls, and timber de-tailing. Smith employed this combination throughout other affluent neighborhoods that were then taking shape in the city, but it is to his credit that he was able to apply the fruit of this experience to an altogether different challenge. Riverdale Courts (1914) was the inaugural project of the Toronto Housing Company, a coalition of political and philanthropic organizations concerned with the lack of affordable housing. Set among a solidly middle-class area east of the city (and soon to be connected across the Don valley by the Prince Edward Viaduct, 1918), Smith’s picturesque Cottage vocabulary provided a palatable image to both residents and neighbors. The original phase included 208 units, varying in size from one to four bedrooms, in three-story blocks arranged around quadrangles. These courts had the double advantage of providing every unit with a veranda-level entrance while maximizing the amount of land set aside for lawn and play space. The careful articulation of common and private spaces enabled a balanced sense of community and provided a role model for many of the successful publicly assisted in-fill projects built subsequently: the Garden Court Apartments (1942, Forsey Page and Steele), Sherbourne Lanes (1976, Diamond and Myers), and the much larger St. Lawrence Neighborhood (1983, various architects).
The prosperity of Toronto in the early decades of the century was perhaps most clearly embodied in the head offices of the banks that grew in importance as both domestic and foreign investment fueled the development of railways and manufacturing and the exploitation of natural resources. An early example of this is the Traders’ Bank Building (1905), designed by the New York firm of Carrère and Hastings, which was later known for the design of the New York Public Library (1911), designed in association with John M.Lyle. The bank building is composed of a series of layers. A ground level of polished granite supports a double-height banking hall encased in a Doric colonnade. Above that, eight floors of office space are clad in smooth stone and punched windows and crowned by a broad cornice. The Dominion Bank Building (1914), designed by the Toronto firm of Darling and Pearson, is noteworthy for its pair of banking halls, the upper hall featuring double-height arcuated piers suggestive of an Albertian basilica and combined with a richly coffered timber ceiling. Commissioned by Edmund Walker and soaring to 34 stories, the Canadian Bank of Commerce Building (1931) remained the tallest building in the British Empire for more than 30 years. York and Sawyer, on the heels of its headquarters for the Royal Bank in Montreal (1928), designed a subtly tapering office shaft clad in piers of buff limestone. The tower is wrapped by a banking hall, its gilded coffered vault modeled on the Baths of Caracalla. Across King Street, the construction site of John Lyle’s Bank of Nova Scotia (begun 1929, redesigned by Mathers and Haldenby, 1951) was mothballed, as the crash of 1929 abruptly halted the upward urge of Canadian banks for a quarter century.
Edmund Walker the banker was also a founding patron of the Royal Ontario Museum, and for that institution the firm of Darling and Pearson chose an equally exuberant modern Romanesque style in which to garb its original wing (1914). The facade features a rich brick and terra-cotta matrix, enlivened by an articulated profusion of fretwork, corbeling, and friezes, offset by projecting bays and recessed three-story arched windows. More typical of public buildings in the first half of the century was Beaux-Arts classicism, as witnessed by the Toronto Public Reference Library (1909, with significant additions, 1929), by A.H. Chapman with Wickson and Gregg, and Union Station (1927). Although planning for the new station began in 1905, technical complexities, combined with financial and legal entanglements, delayed the opening of the station for a total of 22 years. John Lyle, in collaboration with Ross and McDonald, architects of Union Station in Ottawa (1912), and Hugh G. Jones, created one of the most imposing yet urbane public buildings in Canada. As with the Bank of Commerce Building, a grand vaulted hall is modeled on the Roman imperial baths, replete with Tennessee marble and Missouri Zumbro. Light floods this space both through north and south clerestory openings and at the short ends of the hall through four-story arched windows, their filigree of rippled- glass-and-steel trusswork doing double duty as glazed corridors bridging office wings flanking the hall to the east and west.
The most intriguing public building in the city, without reservation, is the R.C.Harris water filtration plant (1937), named for the public works czar responsible for its construction (he was a kindred spirit of Robert Moses and William Mulholland). Designed by English architect Thomas Pomphrey and constructed during the leanest years of the Depression, its hydrological panoply of pumps, impellers, Venturi tunnels, and filter pools is housed in a sumptuous neo-Byzantine fortress. Calling it “the Palace of Purification,” the building is memorialized by Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion: “Harris had dreamed the marble walls, the copper banded roofs. He pulled down Victoria Park Forest and the essential temple swept up in its place, built on the slopes towards the lake.” The building still functions with its original equipment, capable of delivering a billion liters of clean water a day. Its audacity was the exception to the rule of the middle third of the century, when the city appeared to have entered a state of suspended animation, its energies sidetracked by the Depression and the global war.
The arrival of the International Style, that hallmark of postwar economic recovery, was slow to make its mark in Toronto. A few worthy examples include the Anglo Canada Insurance Building (1954, James Murray) and the Shell Oil Tower (1955, George Robb), both since grievously demolished. Peter Dickinson’s Benvenuto Place (1955) established a paradigm for modern apartment dwellings, as the planned community of Don Mills (begun 1953) did for suburban development. However, it was not until the onset of the 1960s that a critical mass of influences and projects decisively marked the second great wave of expansion and experimentation in the city. Beneifiting from a massive buildup in postsecondary education, a new generation of architects sought to advance and adapt modernism in an academic setting. A supreme example of this synthesis is embodied in Massey College (1962), a graduate residence of the University of Toronto. Ron Thom combined the tradition of Collegiate Gothic (a nearby example, Sproatt and Rolph’s elegantly functional Hart House, 1919, was endowed by the same Massey Foundation that sponsored Thom’s design) with modernist influences from the Netherlands into a superbly crafted environment of total design, right down to the silverware, that is reminiscent of Wright’s Prairie period. Scarborough College (1965, John Andrews Architects and Page and Steele), a satellite of the University of Toronto, challenged existing notions of what constituted a campus. Arranged along the northern brow of a forested ravine, the college is essentially a single building extend-ing along the contours of the valley and interconnected along an internal, temperature-controlled pedestrian spine. The heroic scale of the Brutalist in situ concrete forms, conceived of at the scale of the landscape, is balanced by skillfully modulated spaces of public gathering arranged in succession along the central “street.”
At the center of the city, sustained immigration, particularly from southern and Eastern Europe, progressively enriched the realm of public space. The Colonnade (1964, Gerald Robinson) cast in a modernist idiom the often antimodernist concept of mixed use, reflecting in a single complex the more incremental transformations taking shape in neighborhoods such as Yorkville and Kensington Market. The symbolic apotheosis of Toronto’s cosmopolitan metamorphosis was the arrival of New City Hall (1965), which saw Finnish architect Viljo Revell’s design emerge from a competition field of 520 entries. Unremittingly modern yet sinuously sculptural, the building was matched in impact by its accompanying urban square, which continues to provide a sustained and lively focus to civic events and public gatherings. Equally significant was the Toronto- Dominion Centre (1969, Mies van der Rohe, with John B.Parkin Associates, and Bregman and Hamann), Mies’s final, and perhaps finest, corporate tower complex. Set on a gray granite podium, two characteristically prismatic towers offset the supremely elegant banking pavilion, a 150-square-foot clear-span essay in Miesian refinement. Their dramatic effect on the skyline was equaled by an initially more subtle intervention: that of the commercial services buried beneath the podium. Joined with similar underground adjuncts to a cluster of subsequent towers (including Commerce Court, 1972, I.M.Pei, with Page and Steele, and the Royal Bank Plaza, 1976, WZMH Partnership), this concourse grew to encompass most of the subterranean area of the downtown core, including a half dozen subway stations. Along with a similar development in Montreal, it represents a uniquely Canadian response to the nexus of metropolitan life and the forces of nature.
Increasingly identified as the “livable city,” Toronto took steps to forestall the blight plaguing American urban centers. Curtailment of the Spadina Expressway saved several historic neighborhoods while simultaneously privileging public over private transportation. Similarly, government-sponsored initiatives favored in-fill and renovation rather than the tabula rasa of “urban renewal” that local transplant Jane Jacobs had castigated in her seminal Death and Life of Great American Cities. Situated on artificial landfill, Ontario Place (1971, Craig, Zeidler, and Strong) was a publicly sponsored amusement park inspired by the success of Expo ‘67 in Montreal. Designed as a showcase for the burgeoning province, Eberhard Zeidler created a broad array of high- tech follies set amid a picturesque landscape of linked islands and lagoons: giant white pods cantilevered on slender pylons several hundred feet above water, a hyperbolic paraboloid “tent” for outdoor concerts (ignobly demolished), and a geodesic sphere containing the first-ever IMAX cinema. It was also instrumental in focusing public attention on the city’s shoreline and led to the establishment of Harbourfront (begun 1972)—a 100-acre strip of abandoned piers and warehouses that became Canada’s first urban national park. Here, Zeidler’s renovation of Queen’s Quay Terminal (1983) followed on the heels of the immensely influential Eaton Center (1979, Bregman and Hamann, with the Zeidler Partnership). Connected at both ends to the main subway line running beneath Yonge Street (and to the subterranean concourse begun by Mies), this urban mall offers a parallel climate-controlled “street,” a 900-foot-long glazed vault enclosing five levels of retail from street level down, as many office and parking levels above, and 20 million visitors annually. Like the now ubiquitous profile of the CN Tower (1976, John Andrews, with WZMH Partnership, and E.R. Baldwin), this “street” has served as a lightning rod for critics and boosters alike, joining Revell’s City Hall in the pantheon of postcard symbols of the city.
A severe recession in the early 1980s, followed by a lengthy economic downturn through much of the final decade of the 20th century, brought to an end the dynamic experimentation of the postwar period. As elsewhere, although the relative merits of Postmodernism were discussed in academic circles, historicist pastiche began to dominate the sprawl of subdivisions and shopping malls engulfing the exurban hinterland. Notable exceptions buoyed the hopes of conscientious objectors: A.J.Diamond’s Central YMCA (1984), a taut assemblage of Platonic volumes with nuanced references to Roman thermae, among others, and Mississauga City Hall (1987, Jones and Kirkland Architects), which drew on both vernacular and modernist influences. Financially squeezed local governments lost influence over powerful developers, resulting in projects that ran counter to the spirit of consultation and compromise that had been the cornerstone of the “livable city” formula. The practice of architecture itself increasingly fell to the sway of bottom-line economics of design-build management, eroding the traditional role of the architect. Despite all of this, the city continued to be an enviable place to live, with rich cultural deposits, vibrant neighborhoods, an invigorating waterfront, and an economy poised to meet the challenges of the coming decades. A new generation of architects waits in the wings.
JEFFREY BALMER
Sennott R.S. Encyclopedia of twentieth century architecture, Vol.3 (P-Z). Fitzroy Dearborn., 2005. |
