Why wasn't it right for Wright?

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"The bastard... He took my flying saucer."
[image: Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation]

It is curious that Frank Lloyd Wright, one of the paragons of modern architecture, was approached for comment on the matter of Toronto's new city hall. Toronto then was still a parochial, industrial town in which the already minimal focus on the built form was pointed predominantly at infrastructure, factories, and warehouses. Some notable designs were achieved. But, architecture and urban design as catalyst and vehicle for civic enrichment was a concept barely considered and even more rarely allowed to achieve a tangible form. (Witness the graveyard of failed grand avenues, public squares, and aspiring spires that died as mere ideas on paper.)

That the plan for Toronto's municipal seat attracted not only the attention of Wright, but that of Walter Gropius, as well, indicates there must have been palpable rumblings of change through Muddy York and the city hall was to be the nucleation.

Wright, however, was disappointed with the result; the seismic upheaval turned out to be only a minor bump. Of the proposal produced in 1955 by Marani & Morris, Mathers & Haldenby, and Shore & Moffat, Wright said "it's a sterilization, a cliché already dated." Fair enough. Gropius called it "a very poor pseudo-modern design unworthy of the city of Toronto." And apparently most people agreed. The denizens rejected the plan in a referendum and the design was scrapped, thus paving the way toward the launch of the international competition and the building we know today by the Finnish architect Viljo Revell.

Despite Revell's scheme being selected as a finalist by Eero Saarinen himself, Wright didn't appear to be happy with that iteration, either. He called it "a headmarker for a grave and a future generation will look at it and say: 'This marks the spot where Toronto fell.'"

Now, that's curious, too.

Though most people who know of Wright will associate him with his Prairie Style, he also had a penchant for the science fiction-y, especially from the mid-1940s on. In his later renderings, he depicted structures Kenneth Frampton said “seemed intended for occupation by some extraterrestrial species.” These came life in full glory by way of Wright’s Flash Gordonesque Marin County Civic Center, with its ribbed, tapering spire and low, inverted saucer dome over the central rotunda set between two asymmetrical, but balanced, administrative wings. It was conceived in 1957, only a year before the Toronto City Hall design competition chose Revell’s entry, with its low, inverted saucer dome over the council chamber set between two asymmetrical, but balanced, administrative towers.

Of course, the Marin County building is horizontal and set snugly into an undulating, natural landscape, whereas Revell’s Toronto building is vertical in an urban context. But, still... Early on, Toronto City Hall was called (though, in a pejorative manner) “not of this world”. Later, it was actually used to depict a building occupied by an extraterrestrial species in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

left: Toronto City Hall council chamber (Viljo Revell)
right: Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church (Frank Lloyd Wright)
[image left: ERA Architects Inc.; image right: Stephen Matthew Milligan]

Consider also Wright's Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church, which he conceived of in 1958. Save for a few details, its saucer could fly from the four piers that cradle it and land on the Toronto City Hall podium without causing much notice.

The entire concrete element of Revell’s council chamber pod and its supporting column was clearly intended to be the anchor to the whole of City Hall, rather like the organisational and symbolic role the fireplace and chimney played in houses by Wright. It is also decidedly stumpier and chunkier than the columns in Wright’s Johnson Wax Administration Building, which rise two and a half stories to flare dramatically at the top into wide, lily pad-like plates. But, the basic shape of Toronto City Hall's axle—its vertical rise to a sweep outward at the top into the circular floor of the council chamber—still shows it is the obese cousin of the columns by Wright.

left: Toronto City Hall rotunda (Viljo Revell)
right: Johnson Wax Administration Building (Frank Lloyd Wright)
[image left: James Marsh; image right: Decoration as Composition]

Similar, too, are the spaces in which these columns stand: deeply mezzanined perimeters and natural light sourced from above, around the columns’ “capitals”. What Henry Russell Hitchcock said about the Johnson Wax building’s main space—“There is a certain illusion of sky seen from the bottom of an aquarium”—could apply equally to the rotunda of Toronto City Hall. Frampton was kinder, likening Wright’s room to a “monastic place of work,” tying in with what he saw as the architect’s notion of workplace as a place of sacrament. I don’t believe it’s unreasonable to say there is a chapel-like quality to at least the sunken Hall of Memory that hugs the base of Revell’s central pier.

left: Toronto City Hall ceremonial ramp (Viljo Revell)
right: Guggenheim Museum interior ramp (Frank Lloyd Wright)
[image left: kristina c; image right: US Department of the Interior]

Outside, the plateau of Nathan Phillips Square, the placement of it on axis with City Hall, and the flanking colonnades are altogether reminiscent of the Midway Gardens by Wright. It comprised flat terraces centred on a larger structure (housing a restaurant and winter garden) and bordered by arcades on either side. (This layout was also employed by Wright in his Imperial Hotel in Tokyo.) Then there is the ceremonial ramp placed by Revell to sweep VIPs in their limousines up to the podium roof for grand entrance into the council chamber. It, again, is not identical to, but has the echo of, the ramp that is the key element of the famous Guggenheim Museum by Wright. The parti of that opus was itself derived from Wright’s unbuilt 1925 plans for the Gordon Strong Planetarium, which was the Guggenheim inverted and turned inside out, the curving ramp being an exterior means for cars to ascend to the planetarium’s peak.

Wright desired his architecture to be a catalyst for society’s evolution toward ‘Usonia’, the name he gave his envisioned egalitarian society. Revell may not have been quite as grandiose, but, his city hall for Toronto did insert a new egalitarianism that diluted a civic society traditionally structured by class strata. This was achieved by way of the project’s vast civic square; its council chamber not only exposed to public view, but made the definitive focus by the architecture of the whole; its ground-level entrance (no monumental stairs); its amphitheatre seating for the pubic in the council chamber; its placement of the mayor’s office not in the towers, but on the second level of the podium, with only transparent glazing as separation from both the public lobby inside and the city—the square, no less—outside. A flyer produced for the opening of City Hall stated the building “owes its very existence to the indomitable spirit and foresight of our citizens... It cannot help but shape the future of this Metropolitan area.”

top: reflections on Toronto City Hall tower glazing
bottom: light and shadow mingle on Toronto City Hall podium roof
[image top: Duane Schermerhorn; image bottom: Lú_]

Toronto City Hall even possesses the artful and occasionally whimsical qualities Wright said should be part of modern architecture; he wrote in 1928: “Usonia wanted romance and sentiment.” In his 1901 lecture ‘The Art and Craft of the Machine’, Wright conceived of built environment as a machine that was “the thing into which the forces of Art are to breathe the thrill of ideality! A SOUL!” And of glass: “Let the Modern now work with light, light diffused, light reflected, light for its own sake, shadows gratuitous.” The curving forms of the ceremonial ramp, the towers, the rotunda, and the spiral stairs just off it; the free expression of natural material textures and the harmony of all together; the indirect light sources; the shifting of transparency and reflectivity in the curtain wall’s glass and nickel-plated mullions; the light bounced off the concave, faceted glazed planes in play with the towers' shadows on the podium roof as the sun moves through the sky—how can these not be seen as artful, humane elements and effects of Revell’s architecture?

Perhaps all this isn’t entirely fair. Wright died in 1959, six years before Toronto City Hall officially opened; there’s aspects of Revell’s design Wright could not have known about when he made his “headmarker for a grave” quip in 1958. However, the competition renderings and model certainly showed enough to determine there are fairly strong associations between Wright’s work and Revell’s. The Finn's proposal certainly stood apart from the Miesian derivatives that made up the near-total bulk of the other finalists (the only other one not adhering to the International Style being John Andrews' pharaonic temple).

Indeed, Revell was evidently inspired enough by Wright’s work that, after he’d won the commission in Toronto, he and the team from John B Parkin and Associates—the Canadian firm with which Revell partnered—met with none other than W.F. Johnson Jr., the head of the Johnson Wax Company, in Racine, Wisconsin, where Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson Wax building is located. (Revell ended up himself designing a sauna for Johnson; his only other project in North America.) Perhaps Wright being one of only two American architects to have works regularly published in the Association of Finnish Architects’ journal, Arkkitehti, before 1948 contributed in some way to the Wrightisms in Revell’s design.

Thai parade at City Hall
[image: Alfred Ng]

Who knows? Maybe Wright didn’t like parts of his vocabulary and ethos being appropriated. Maybe he had indigestion. Or maybe—just maybe—we’ve been reading Wright’s tombstone remark the wrong way all this time. It could be he saw the echoes of his own work in Revell’s design and Wright, believing his architecture was the vessel necessary to carry humanity toward a more egalitarian, streamlined society, meant Revell’s city hall would mark the end of Toronto as it was then: ramshackle, sooty, near-monocultural Hog Town. Simultaneously, the building would be monument to the birth of multicultural, worldly Toronto. If that was what he meant, in that, Wright would’ve been right.

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• Armstrong, Christopher (2015). Civic Symbol. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. pp 51, 60.
• Filey, Mike (2004). Sketches 8: The Way We Were. Toronto: Dundurn Press. p. 135.
• Frampton, Kenneth (2007). Modern Architecture. 4th ed. London: Thames & Hudson. pp 57-59, 186-191..
• Hume, Christopher. “The city halls we almost had”. Toronto Star. 22 September 2015.
• Quantrill, Malcolm (1995). Finnish Architecture and the Modernist Tradition. Taylor & Francis. p 99.