Origins of the Scheme
Mississauga is part of the urban "megalopolis." To call it a city will for the in habitants remain a mystery as long as they might remember what a city was. Melvin Weber's characterization of the North American suburb as the "nowhere public realm" would be an accurate definition of the condition that is Mississauga. Notwithstanding its present civic aspirations it remains predictably featureless, spread out along the nineteenth century concession roads, appropriating farmland in an ever-increasing fashion.
The initial sketches for our design were made before the competition conditions were known. (The site had been announced but not the urban design guidelines.) Given its vacuity and the predicament of making a somewhere in this nowhere situation the drawings took on a pessimistic if polemical direction. They should be understood as architectural notes and in some cases they were deliberately referential. The idea of the City Hall representing the memory of the city in miniature came to mind-the explicitness of a Bastide town, geometrically finite Within its own internal logic, indifferent to its surroundings. The drawings described a southern "front" to the lake, a massive perimeter bank or palisade incorporating entrances and parking. Inside is a town square formed by departmental offices as the city fabric and the council chamber and lobby as its public buildings.
In hindsight, the architectural language of these public elements was indebted to Asplund's Court House of 1921 and the Stockholm City Library of 1920. In both cases the retrieval of Nordic classicism in the service of a municipal program was not without interest and/or relevance.
The Brief, its Guidelines and Initial Design Responses
The brief, when it was finally circulated to competitors at the end of June 1982, was an impressive and highly detailed document. The program was for a building of 40,000 square meters with highly exacting requirements and adjacencies. The site was described as a full block of 19,500 square meters in area. It was situated adjacent to a large regional shopping center, which in turn was set within a superblock ringed by 12-story office towers. The ground between, instead of the "espace and verdure" of the radiant city, was covered with the usual parking lots. (The secondary plan for this area follows a design by Llewelyn Davies Weeks, the original planners of Milton Keynes.) The urban design guidelines for the competition were also extremely particular. This degree of formal and organizational assertion by the promoters gave the competition an intelligent framework, thereby avoiding the predictable free-for-all. Reading between the lines of the conditions it was possible to detect an implicit criticism of the state and direction of the contemporary suburb.
In response to the program, we developed two comparative and opposed building organizations for the site-one consolidated at the north end of the square, the other evenly distributed around its three sides. In the former, the square was completed by freestanding arcades, gardens and pavilions on its east and west sides. The consolidated building, apart from making more convenient connections between departments, also gave a greater richness of interior section and public spaces. This promoted the idea of "a building for two seasons": the square as the large public room in summer, versus the lobby as its internal equivalent in winter. The distributed "parti," based on the idea of spatially containing the square, had the advantage of maintaining the continuity of the street surface on three sides. However, it quickly became apparent that it had problems-notably double fronts within a narrow section (to the square and surrounding streets), an intrinsic introspection typical of the suburban shopping mall, cou pied with significant organization and energy doubts. Finally, when we checked it against the historical Ontario model for public building, the singular idea of the square-a political and civic space available 12 months of the year-seemed more appropriate to southern Europe, but antipathetic to the harsh Canadian winters.
The Question of Regionalism
Notwithstanding a near amnesia encouraged by rampant suburbanization complete with a disparate and arbitrary set of references, Mississauga has a memory of distinguished Canadian building. In opposition to these displaced concepts and the condescending populism of the Venturis and their kind concerning the North American suburb, we were intrigued by the possibility of retrieving this memory and building from it.
The site for the new City Hall is on the divide between town and country. If greater Toronto can be understood as the town, it has a strong nineteenth century urban tradition of tree-lined residential streets and public architecture. Its counterpart, rural Ontario, also has a vigorous functional tradition of farm building. In the initial stages of the project we were interested in how these two related traditions one civic, the other agrarian, could be combined. 'Firstly the characteristics of these civic buildings should be mentioned. The old City Hall, the legislative building, the law courts, etc., aIl face south to Lake Ontario. These represent in various forms (generally an aggregation of separate pieces) and styles (mostly quasi-Romanesque) the idea of large honorific houses. The profiles of their peaked and pyramidal roofs are recognizably monumental. Their clock towers can be understood as secular equivalents of the church spire. Their south-facing facades summarize and frontalize ensembles whose asymmetry conveys tentative completion and open-endedness. Unlike their European counterparts th~y are not space containing structures, but stand ruoally at the end of important streets and axes as civic aberrations within the grid. They anticipate a general filling in of the city fabric around them. Secondly, we were impressed by the ubiquitous farm clusters set within the same concession grid. Their finite composition of large and smaU barns, grain silos and water towers are consistently enclosed by regular lmes of trees. Thelr abstract and phileban solidscylinders, cones and cubes-also recall distant memories of classical civic ensembles. Le Corbusier's observations on the Canadian grain silos came tomind. (The tree in Canada's flat lands has become associated with the town.) This is a result again of the concession grid anticipating its own urbanization. Further evidence of this functional tradition, if a little more self-conscious, is found in the municipal buildings of Ontario-notably the installation of dams reservoirs and water purification plants designed by , the board of works up to 1950. The combination of a patrician scale, a beaux-arts composition and the use of durable materials such as stone, copper and brick with the steel window frames of the 1930s, gives these buildings a monumental quality. Their stature provides firstly civic landmarks and secondly a public infrastructure clearly distinguishable from the urban fabric of private building. This might be compared depressingly with the invisible and instrumental condition of similar building today. That a building might be immediately recognizable as civic was for us the key to the question of how to represent the city within its own traditions. The difficult part, of how to achieve this without 'recourse to pastiche or sentimentality', still remains.
The Question of Representation
There has, however, been a continued tendency in recent years to deflate the associative power of forms and the institutions that they might represent. Matters of hierarchy and social ritual that still exist in our institutions, whether they be courts of law, schools, city halls, etc., have been seen as antipathetic to the "democratic" process. To this end, architects have attempted to diffuse or oppose these form-giving characteristics hoping to bestow on their buildings some inevitable egalitarianism. In an attempt to minimize the authority of hierarchical form, modern architecture has neutralized the associative power of built form. The metaphysical power of physically described public ritual has been lost. This tendency has its roots firmly bedded in the social polemics of modern architecture-new forms for a new society or no forms for no society. If Le Corbusier's Radiant City could be seen as a seminal attack on the streets and squares of the traditional city (an attack from which recovery remains uncertain), the later work of Team 10, and particularly the Dutch "structuralist" contribution, continues to influence architectural thought III this "reformist" and supposedly benign direction. It should also be observed that neoclassical forms in postwar Germany have become inextricably and inexplicably associated with fascism-one might ask why have not the objects of industrial production such as the VW motor car or the airplane been similarly abused?
Rather than evading these issues of hierarchy and social ritual implicit in a City Hall; it was our intention to represent them architecturally. Apart from being the "hall" to the city, the building should express its importance as the place of civic power, the place where important decisions are taken as to its legislature, its planning and its future.
The building is composed on a plinth five feet above grade, thereby distinguishing the site from the surrounding area. The square is formed by the pedimented south facade and is defined on its east and west sides by monumental arcades. The arcades are terminated by pavilions and ramps which mark the presence of an underground car park. The principal facade is scaled to form a civic foreground extending to Burnhamthorpe Road and finally toward the lake. This facade is also the mediator between the outdoor civic square (prescribed by the program) and the indoor square or city "hall," (the entrance to the city). These spaces are equivalent, complementary and seasonal. Each has its fronts, its rostrum, its garden and supporting program and civic monuments. Behind this facade are grouped a number of recognizable and principal program elements-the cylindrical drum of the council chamber, the pyramidal roof profile of the grand hall, the office tower and the c10ck tower. In front of this facade on either side of the civic square, the outdoor amphitheatre and public gardens can also be understood as complementary opposites to the council chamber and departmental offices. In the other direction, the amphitheatre occupies the eastern sector of the site with references to European c1assicism as opposed to the garden looking west to the prairies.
(From official publication)
The jurors were impressed by the fact that this submission 50 positively responded to the conditions of the program, in the ordering of its internal elements as well as in its positive, if simple, means of creating a strong relationship between the City Hall buildings themselves and the civic square to the south. They felt that it comprised an integrated scheme for both the building and the square, while at the same time aIIowing for the potential necessity of phased construction of the two parts. Moreover, they felt that it was a design which offered a richness of places to be in, and which succeeded masterfully in meeting the stated intent of the competition ta set a precedent for the pattern of urban form foreseen and encouraged by the City Centre Secondary Plan. Minor reservations were expressed regarding certain inefficiencies of operation in the below-grade portion of the scheme, but these were not considered serious enough 10 affect the submission's capability of meeting the budget requirements of the competition, or its clear superiority to all other entries received.
(From jury report)
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