Assignment One Toronto City Hall

8/8/2019 Assignment One Toronto City Hall

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Toronto

CityHa

ll100

QueenStreetWest

Brandon

Berry500374667


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Bibliography

McClelland, Michael and Fram, Mark and Polo, Marco and Mertins, Detlef and Cawker,Ruth and Shim, Brigette and Kapelos, George. Toronto Modern Architecture 1945 1965 Toronto: Coach House

Bookstore, 2002

Lisa Rochan. Toronto City Hall: How Finnish architecture rebranded a city. Globe and Mail, 2010. Accessed 5 October 2010 http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/lisa-rochon/toronto-city-hall-how-

finnish-architecture-rebranded-a-city/article1712186/

Toronto City Hall. Last modified: unknown. Accessed on 6 October 2010. http://www.glasssteelandstone.com/BuildingDetail/81.php

Toronto City Hall Canadian Architect and Builder, 1899. Page 193, Vol. 12 Issue 10 http://digital.library.mcgill.ca/cab/search/search_frameset.htm
http://www.glasssteelandstone.com/BuildingDetail/81.phphttp://www.glasssteelandstone.com/BuildingDetail/81.php


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Lisa Rochon: Cityspace, Globe and Mail, 2 October 2010

Toronto City Hall: How Finnish architecture rebranded a city

Made modern: That was what happened to Toronto when it

launched a 1958 international design competition and landed an

emerging star of Finnish modernism, Viljo Revell, to design its

futuristic City Hall.

It was an alien thing: a building of sublime concrete instead of

Victorian brick; a building mandated by the sophisticated Nathan

Phillips, Torontos first Jewish mayor, in a city dominated by a

Protestant ethos. New City Hall was architecture that imagined

something wide open and worldly for a collective consciousness.

When it opened in 1965, the city was instantly rebranded.

Conceived together with his Helsinki teammates, Bengt Lundsten,

Seppo Valjus and Heikki Castren, Revell proposed two curved tall

towers of asymmetric heights that seemed to cradle the council

chamber in a powerful embrace. It was as if a massive column of

concrete scored with vertical fluting had been cracked open to

reveal a civic surprise: a mushroom, a space ship, possibly a white

pearl.

This September, two birthdays are being celebrated Revells

centenary and the 45th anniversary of City Hall with an

exhibition and symposium, Revell/Toronto/Helsinki: Finnish

Architecture and the Image of Modern Toronto. The exhibition,

curated by Helsinki-based architect Tuula Revell, daughter of Viljo,

kicked off at City Hall on Sept. 13 with impassioned tributes by

Mayor David Miller, former mayor David Crombie and Ambassador

of Finland H.E. Risto Piipponen.

Finland is a land of birch trees and jagged outcrops of rock that

inspires epic pilgrimages among architects. Legendary Toronto-

born architect Frank Gehry, who spoke at the exhibition openingto an overflow audience in the council chambers, has travelled to

the Nordic country seven times.

His first exposure to the Finnish aesthetic one that privileges

craft, innovation and the pleasure of pure graphic form came

during a public lecture in 1946 at the University of Toronto, when

acclaimed architect Alvar Aalto displayed one of his early

laminated plywood chairs, designed during the 1940s.

Three decades later, Gehry travelled for his first time to Helsinki to

visit the Aalto office; Aalto was out of town, but his assistant

allowed Gehry to simply sit in his office chair, soaking up the spirit

of the man, his books, the art hanging on his walls.

Gehry has returned often to tour the heroic but humanist

architecture, make angels buck-naked in the snow after an intense

sauna, and, more recently, to visit his good friend Esa-Pekka

Salonen, the long-time Finnish conductor of the Los Angeles

Philharmonic.

The Revell City Hall scheme was one of 531 entries submitted byarchitects from around the world the largest design competition

ever attempted but wait for it: The jury initially rejected Revells

scheme.

We all know thats hardly where the story ends. Revells F innish

colleague, modernist architect Eero Saarinen, turned up a day late

to help judge the submissions and, alone in the attic of Old City

Hall, pulled the Revell submission from the heaps of rejected

submissions. Saarinen talked the other judges into his choice.

How did the image of modern Toronto come about? The critical

thrust of the design didn't actually originate specifically with

Revell, but with his associates. Bengt Lundsten only now, at 82,

considering retiring from architecture describes this story with

exquisite care when I call him at his Helsinki office.

In Helsinki, at night, Lundsten tells me: The curved towers came

up very quickly, extremely quickly. There were three of us

together in the evening in the office, as we always worked in the

evening. Viljo was away. We had an American architect in our

office at the time and he read through the program as our English

was very poor. That first evening we had the i dea of the curved

towers. And next morning we presented this idea to Viljo and he

accepted it.

Later on, one of the architects noticed the same kind of semi-

circular shapes in the shadow of a curved lamp. We made

photographs of that, says Lundsten.

The Revell submission jumped out at Saarinen. Yale University

architecture professor Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, a guest speaker at

next weeks symposium, says that Saarinen was compelled by the


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ability of architecture to communicate visually and powerfully to

the public.

Saarinens Jefferson National Memorial, a monumental parabolic

arch, still endures as the image of St. Louis, Mo. Revell, too,

wanted to define his architecture as a series of pure forms. For the

way it pops out of context and creates a powerful graphic, Toronto

City Hall is a masterpiece of modern architecture. Seldom does a

colleague feel so happy over anothers victory, is what Aalto

wrote to Revell in his congratulatory note.

With the competition winner decided, a contract to work with

Toronto architects John B. Parkin was signed. At that point, the

vision and reality of the commission set i n. A massive, and highly

prescient, underground parking facility was dug into the ground.

Concrete was treated with European grace, steel forms used to

hold it as it was poured, to guarantee a silky-smooth finish.

While the scale of the building was monumental, there were

myriad ways to heighten human contact: curved wooden railings

of teak and mahogany, Carrara marble lining the flutes of the

towers with off-cuts used as marble i nlays for the interior floor.

Perhaps, says architect Andrew Frontini of Shore Tilbe Perkins +

Will, design partner with Plant Architect Inc. of the Nathan Phillips

Square revitalization, this is a reminder that a democracy is

made of individuals and that City Hall belongs to all of us.

It was not always easy. The tight budget of $18-million (in the end

it reportedly cost $25-million) forced some unfortunate cuts to the

original scheme: a single mushroom stem replaced the three

columns originally designed to hold up the council chambers and

house winding staircases within each of them.

Lundsten recalls that when they moved to Toronto to work on the

commission the three Finnish architects discovered a factory ofarchitectural production at Parkins rather than the synergy of the

studio they knew from Revells office in Helsinki.

We were three young architects from Finland and we were quite

shocked by the atmosphere in the Parkin office. It was very

military, very strict and not at all creative. In Revells office, we

worked all together, everybody discussing together. It was a very

creative atmosphere and thats very important for architecture. I

was very surprised that we were not allowed to speak to the

higher-up individuals in the Toronto office. We had never been

scared of Viljo Revell.

Had Revell lived, he would have turned 100 this year. Tragically,

he died of a heart attack in Helsinki, mere months before the

opening of City Hall in 1965. He had returned home the previous

day after making a final site visit to his civic monument, a gift of

the Finnish imagination that had already changed the face of

Toronto.


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Toronto City Hall began as an international competition opened by the city in 1958 involving

over forty countries, 520 architects and 531 entries. Amongst the crowded mess of submissions,

a Finnish architect by the name of Vilijo Revell pushed his way to the top. With his team of Bengt

Lundsten, Seppo Valjus and Heikki Castren behind him and Canadian architect John B. Parkin,

this newly assembled relationship began to leave their mark on the face of Toronto.

Mainly, the building consists of two towers and a spaceship-like structure on the centre

podium and covers a total of 75, 890 square metres at 100 Queen Street West. The two

surrounding tower house the municipal level of government as the podium holds the CouncilChambers for the city. The shell like structure gives light to an image of the eye and a pupil,

although this metaphor never settled with the people.

Construction of the structure began in 1961 and is comprised of pre-cast concrete cladding,

stainless steel curtain wall, trims, and elevator cabs, aluminum suspended ceiling, wood doors

and rails, and terrazzo (exposed marble with other fine collections) and carpet floors. The

structure is constructed with methods of reinforced concrete slabs, columns and walls, and a shell

structure for the Council Chambers. The building is surrounded by a piazza which holds home to

a reflecting pool, skating rink, and well-groomed gardens.

Other uses within the structure include political and administrative functions, a public

library, the registry office, public cafeteria and observation gallery.1

The competition for the new construction of Toronto City Hall was inspired by the historical

pasts of the previous three city halls. The first was condemned due to fire, second was merely

temporary, and the third quickly became too unimportant in size for the rapidly growing metropolis.

As stated previously, the metaphoric structure of the eye and the pupil did not launch with

fellow Torontonians. Viewers looking at City` Hall interpreted it as a UFO or a burrito. As these

seemingly degrading tags are heard as embarrassment or in mockery, they are meant in great

fondness. They are proud of their seat of government, and rightly so.2


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1 McClelland, Michael et al.

Toronto Modern Architecture 1945 1965 Toronto: Coach HouseBookstore, 2002

2Unknownhttp://www.glasssteelandstone.co

m/BuildingDetail/81.php 5October 2010

Assignment One Toronto City Hall

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