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Reviewed by:
  • Civic Symbol: Creating Toronto’s New City Hall, 1952–1966 by Christopher Armstrong
  • John Lorinc
Civic Symbol: Creating Toronto’s New City Hall, 1952–1966. Christopher Armstrong. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015. Pp. 224, $49.95, cloth

In the years following the Second World War, Toronto politicians began working on plans to create a civic space next to E.J. Lennox’s 1899 city hall, a grand Romanesque structure quickly outgrowing the municipal bureaucracy. In 1946, council froze zoning and land uses on a large block northwest of Queen and Bay and embarked on a process of buying out the small landowners in a famously unloved immigrant arrival area known as the Ward and later as Chinatown.

By the early 1950s, with much of the land cleared for parking lots, municipal officials decided to build a new Toronto City Hall. But when three local architectural firms, led by Mathers and Haldenby, revealed their staid proposal, it was widely ridiculed and not just in Toronto. As Christopher Armstrong, a professor emeritus of history at York University, relates in his meticulous reconstruction of the construction of the new city hall, no less than Frank Lloyd Wright dismissed the plan as a “cliché,” while Walter Gropius, father of the Bauhaus [End Page 606] movement, called it a “very poor pseudo-modern design unworthy of the city of Toronto” (20). Voters soon rejected the plan at the ballot box.

So begins the fabled tale of the gestation of Viljo Revell’s instantly iconic, modernist masterpiece, the curved twin tower concept that emerged from a high-minded international design competition promoted by Toronto’s first Jewish mayor and administered by a visionary professor of architecture. In many ways, this genesis story challenged much about Toronto’s renowned parochialism and its tight-fistedness, although both of those civic traits played assertive supporting roles in Armstrong’s decade-long drama.

On a key detail at the front end of this tale, Civic Symbol offers nothing further to the state of knowledge than what particularly inspired Mayor Nathan Phillips to promote an international design competition for the project. Certainly, such contests had become part of the architecture world by the mid-1950s. But Phillips, a conservative lawyer who, as mayor, authorized the demolition of many of Toronto’s older downtown buildings, did not seem like a public figure conversant in the ways of the design world. Yet, Armstrong writes, “he contended that if a design competition, even one open only to Canadians, had been promised, rather than presenting the voters with a single proposal, they might have approved spending $18 million” (22).

As Armstrong shows, prominent local architects, like John C. Parkin and Eric Arthur, a New Zealand-born professor of architecture at the University of Toronto, had the mayor’s ear. Arthur soon emerges as the hero of Armstrong’s narrative, as he oversaw a 1957 design contest that could have easily gone off the rails. To the surprise of Arthur and others, it proved wildly popular, with more than twice as many entries as for the Sydney Opera House competition, which was held the same year. Armstrong does not offer any theories about what made this commission so popular. While proposals came from all over the world, many, Arthur later wrote, paid homage to Mies van der Rohe and the international style. Arthur, Armstrong writes, “observed that it was just as well that neither of the era’s most famous architects, Frank Lloyd Wright or Le Corbusier, had been jurors” (45).

Arthur’s big juror catch, however, was Eero Saarinen, the Finnish starchitect responsible for the St. Louis arch and the sensuous Trans World Airlines terminal at John F. Kennedy airport; he also served on the Sydney Opera House jury. Having missed some of the early vetting sessions with the Toronto project, he demanded to see the discards and found among them the plan by Revell, another Finnish designer. (In a recent documentary about the fiftieth anniversary of [End Page 607] city hall, some of the architects interviewed questioned the veracity of this now mythic detail.) Armstrong’s reading of Revell, in turn, is full of ambivalence. The architect, he writes, was a...

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