FA Lecture: “Indian Architects and the 1958 Competition for Toronto’s New City Hall and Square”
Speaker: George Thomas Kapelos
About Lecture
The 1958 competition for Toronto’s new city hall and public square was the largest competition of its era, attracting more architects than even the 1956 Sydney Opera House competition. While the outcome is well known – Finnish-born architect Viljo Revell’s complex opened to public acclaim in 1965 – what is lesser known to specialists and to the general public is the amazing variety of projects that were submitted from around the world.
The 509 submissions represent a cross section of approaches to modern civic building and space. This presentation analyzes these approaches found in the entries to Toronto’s competition. The presentation situates submissions in then-current global discussions on the shape of such spaces and the creation of the city’s “heart”, comparing entries by origin and type and discussing their continued importance today.
Toronto’s competition called for the creation of symbolic public space and expressive architectural form. Entrants were challenged to design outdoor and indoor public spaces that would become “a most important element in the life of the city.” This presentation discusses spatial configurations found in selected competition submissions and analyzes civic square designs comparatively by type, considering variants of site compositional strategies, spatial shapes, flows and responses to context, formal and informal penetrations between spaces, and the inter-relationship of enclosure, built form, elevation change and landscape treatment on civic space design.
Of the 509 entries, seven submissions were received from Indian architects (Dr. V.J. Mistry, V.H. Karandikar, P.M. Thacker, A.P. Kanvinde, B.V. Doshi, B.D. Kshirsagar, and J. Narwekar). The lecture will explore these submissions. What designs did these architects propose? How did they anticipate their future careers and design directions?
Weaving a tale that is equal parts civic, cultural, and architectural history, this lecture explores the impact of the competition on the design of public institutions and urban spaces around the globe, and reflects upon the value of architectural competitions as modern architecture developed in the mid-20th century. The presentation posits that Toronto’s competition represents a moment “frozen in time” for modern architecture and civic space. It created a model for public space, set the stage for future architectural and urban design praxis, and gave shape to contemporary understandings of the meaning and importance of well-designed public space.
The lecture presents research developed through support of the Canada Council for the Arts and presented in a book, Competing Modernisms: Toronto’s New City Hall and Square, and 2015 exhibition “Shaping Canadian Modernity: The 1958 Toronto City Hall and Square Competition and Its Legacy” that was mounted at Ryerson University in Toronto to mark the 60th anniversary of the opening of Toronto’s City Hall and Square.
About Speaker
George Thomas Kapelos, OAA OPPI FRAIC MCIP
Professor, Department of Architectural Science, Ryerson University, Toronto Ontario Canada
George Thomas Kapelos is an architect and planner, and teaches architecture and planning at Ryerson University in Toronto. A native of London Ontario Canada, he is a graduate of Princeton University (magna cum laude) where he studied architecture and urbanism. He received his Master of Architecture from Yale University and a Master of City Planning from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He is a Registered Professional Planner in Ontario and a member of the Ontario Association of Architects and practices architecture and planning from his offices in Toronto.
As Professor in Ryerson’s Department of Architectural Science, he is an accomplished educator and researcher. He teaches in the Department’s undergraduate and graduate programs, lecturing on contemporary history and theory and leading design studios on a variety of topics. His teaching has been recognized nationally. In 2013 he received an Award of Merit presented jointly by the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects and the Canadian Institute of Planners, for An Architecture of Civility, a school-wide charrette in Architectural Science, that proposed the creation of public places across the city to offer Torontonians civic places of light and repose during their busy lives.
His research focuses on the interrelationship between humans and their environments, through critical investigations of architecture, landscape, and urbanism in the modern and post-modern period. Themes of phenomenology, health and environment, architectural education and Canadian modernity are explored. Research outcomes, including refereed publications, presented initially at conferences and developed through exhibitions, charrettes, symposia, funded research and peer-reviewed publications, have considered ideas of nature, human imaginings and constructions of the built and natural world, diachronically and synchronically, and human perceptions and understanding of community, place and time. Studies of health and environment have focused on environmental health, specifically the linkage between ultraviolet radiation (UV) and skin cancer. He has curated a number of exhibitions on themes of architecture, urbanism and landscape. He curated the exhibition Course Studies – Tracking Ontario’s Thames mounted at Museum London Canada that explored the interrelationship of the river and people in southwestern Ontario. Research on the 1958 Toronto City Hall and Square Competition led to an exhibition, Shaping Canadian Modernity, and a book Competing Modernisms, published in 2015 by Dalhousie Architectural Press.
He was Chair of the Ryerson University Department of Architectural Science from 2002 – 2007, during which time he oversaw revisions to the undergraduate curriculum and introduced two new graduate programs. He is past president of the Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada and became a Fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada in 2007. Currently he is the Chair of Toronto Public Health’s Ultraviolet Radiation Working Group, where he is organizing an international conference on UV and environmental health to take place in May 2018.
He is continuing his research into the participants in Toronto’s City Hall and Square Competition, of which his visit to India is a part. His lecture and travel are supported by Ryerson University and the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute.
