City Hall Project by Marani & Morris, Mathers & Haldenby, Shore & Moffat

In 1955 City Council decided to ask the electorate to approve spending $18,000,000 on this proposal for a new city hall drafted by a consortium. The three firms (Marani & Morris, Mathers & Haldenby, Shore & Moffat) were noted for substantial institutional buildings of refined materials but conservative form. Their design called for two formal tree-lined public squares above an underground parking structure—one square with reflecting pools for the old Registry Office, a larger one without for the proposed City Hall. For the Hall itself they would have put a tall office slab across the back of the site, but reduced its impact through a U-shaped structure of three storeys in front. The low building would house public-access areas, aldermanic offices and committee rooms, with the Council Chamber in the middle (behind a shallow balcony for ‘certain public functions’); it would also enclose a courtyard through open colonnades on three sides as shown in these original renderings by a leading American delineator, Schell Lewis.

When the City Hall project was published in the autumn of 1955, architectural students at the University of Toronto denounced it as ‘dull and uninteresting and indistinguishable from…insurance buildings’ by these firms, an ‘inhuman pile of stones,’ ‘a funeral home of vast dimensions,’ comparable to Russian institutional architecture. Coverage in the student newspaper, The Varsity, was picked up by Toronto dailies and undoubtedly influenced the plebiscite in which the proposal was defeated. This final outburst on voting day described the need for detailed requirements, the ideal city hall, and the desirability of an international competition following careful guidelines.