Toronto Architecture From The 1960's and 70's

[LowPolygon]

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[LowPolygon]

Toronto Star, March 4, 1966.

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[LowPolygon]

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[LowPolygon]

Rochdale College, Elmar Tampõld & John Wells, 1968

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[adma]

Actually, that modernist Shell station's oddly impressive in its own right.

 

[k10ery]

Maybe but I prefer the Shell building in the photo above it.

 

[someMidTowner]

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Is that the Imperial Oil building on the left??? 2 city hall proposals in one shot!?

 

[k10ery]

Shell not Imperial. Yes, there's a passing resemblance.

 

[someMidTowner]

I was going to say, St Clair couldnt be that close to Queen

 

[LowPolygon]

Simpson Tower, 1969
Architects: John B. Parkin Associates and Bregman & Hamann

© NE2 3PN

 

[LowPolygon]

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[mattelderca]

Nice article, I'm sitting in a Webb Zerafa building right now! Although it is a late 80's design built in 1990.

 

[Long Island Mike]

Deepend: First-I like that picture of Toronto New City Hall showing the PCC Streetcar,Bus and automobile that looks to be
a late 1960s Chevrolet...Three modes of transport in just one picture...

Second: The Toronto Star articles about the four architects are interesting...Are they also the same WZMH firm architects
that designed my personal favorite new style Toronto building complex: The Royal Bank Towers/Centre?

These are both good finds...LI MIKE

 

[LowPolygon]

Manulife Financial, 1968
Architects: Marani, Rounthwaite & Dick

 

[junctionist]

Except that by 1965, what you call "expressionistic Modernism of the 1960s" was commonly deemed "dated", at least by professional tastemakers--i.e. to them, it was in fact an "expressionistic Modernism of the 1950s" that met its symbolic "credible" end w/the death of Eero Saarinen. By 1965, it would have been all-too-easy for hypercynical architectural wags to view this as (superficially/inadvertently, of course) a more hifalutin version of 64/65 New York World's Fair cheese; or at least as somethng whose courant-ism was tainted by said cheese.

Actually, I wouldn't be too hard on the City Hall jury for supposedly "populist" decision-making; after all, it was the international cream of its field in the late 50s. However, the presence of Saarinen both within said jury and as the "hot" North American architect of the moment would likely have weighed heavily, all the more so given that it was his reported personal intervention that resulted in the chosen scheme--which just so happened to be a conveniently "more Saarinen than Saarinen" scheme by a fellow Finn. And given that Toronto couldn't have an Eero Saarinen City Hall on account of his being on the jury, this was "the next best thing" (almost like Randall Stout being the next best thing to Gehry relative to the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton).

Which, in the end, shouldn't weigh fatally against City Hall as built--but we're talking about 1958 vs 1965. And in some ways, the taste-fate of this kind of Saarinen/Revell neo-expressionism was not unlike how Jewish Museum/Ground Zero-era Daniel Libeskind was *the* architect of that post-Y2K moment, yet now seems an overwrought artifact of the High Starchitecture age...

It might have been dated among many of the elite tastemakers, but given how many buildings appeared with neo-expressionistic Modernist architecture in the decade, it can be said that it was part of the style of the time. Such architecture even appeared in prominent places like certain Expo 67 pavilions--an event conceived of in the 1960s. It's normal for a decade or more to go by for what's current among visionaries to alter the architectural landscape through actual projects in the mainstream. Robert Venturi started to advance his Postmodern vision in the 1960s, but some of the most current and significant Postmodern buildings didn't appear until the 1980s, when that style became dominant.