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Toronto Architecture From The 1960's and 70's

Ontario Government Buildings, completed 1969

According to TOBUILT, the Ontario Government Buildings complex was designed by a consortium of the following architectural firms:

Gordon S. Adamson Associates
Allward & Gouinlock
Shore & Moffat
Mathers and Haldenby

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thecharioteer said:
One of my favourite buildings in the Financial District has to be the Montreal Trust Building at 11 King Street West, designed by Page & Steele, completed in 1965. It is now on the Inventory of Heritage Properties.
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yes that's a great one, still looks remarkably fresh. i love how it's nestled between the late-modern building, and the classic skyscraper opulence of Commerce Court North.

btw, when it opened in 1965, what would have been on the SE corner of King and Bay? would this building have been visible?

in any case, in the years before Mies' Toronto-Dominion towers, this building must have seemed like a real taste of the future.
 
Another style of "brutalized" architecture as seen on Augusta Ave.
How about that roof-line?

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^
i'm afraid you're mixing things up Goldie. hack renovations of late victorian homes have nothing whatsoever to do do with Brutalist architecture or late modernism!
i do like that little white brick 60's building on the center right though.
 
Strange how the rendering looked more extrovertedly "Brutalist" than the boxy built reality...
 
thedeepend said:
you are right, there is nothing in Toronto proper that can compete with the epochal world-altering importance of Habitat...

we have a lot of fantastic concrete buildings in the city, but the Safdie is Unesco grade.
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I would agree with this statement had Habitat revolutionized housing the way it promised to. But modular apartment buildings never took off, and Safdie has never built any of the other Habitat-style buildings he designed for various cities. Habitat is an iconic Montreal and Canadian landmark, but I'd hesitate to put it over New City Hall in terms of real significance, not anticipated significance in the 1960s.
 
junctionist said:
I would agree with this statement had Habitat revolutionized housing the way it promised to. But modular apartment buildings never took off, and Safdie has never built any of the other Habitat-style buildings he designed for various cities. Habitat is an iconic Montreal and Canadian landmark, but I'd hesitate to put it over New City Hall in terms of real significance, not anticipated significance in the 1960s.
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Though even there, I'd advise caution re New City Hall; or rather, its "real significance" was more on overriding urban and social grounds that were quite specific to Toronto. In architectural terms, though, it fell short of its "anticipated significance" in the 1950s--essentially, by the time it was finished in 1965, it was deemed more dated than a harbinger of the future: a popular-potboiler version of Great Contemporary Architecture a la Basil Spence's Coventry Cathedral. (Though compared with what it may have been deemed dated relative to--something like Boston City Hall--that circumstance may have been a blessing in disguise.)
 
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