From the Globe and Mail:
The icon that changed a city turns 40
Sonja Stewart reflects on a childhood affected by a great building
By DAVE LEBLANC
Friday, September 9, 2005 Page G11
Sonja Stewart was just 15 years old when she heard the news that changed her life forever.
It was 1958 and her father, an architect, had just won an international competition to design a high-profile public building in another country and, after his initial scouting mission there, was going to send for his wife and three daughters.
Since the teenager spoke little English, this would be an adventure indeed.
This Tuesday marks the 40th anniversary of the official opening of that building and, just as it changed the life of the Revell family forever, it also changed the life its host city.
New City Hall, designed by Finnish architect Viljo Revell, is the most important building Toronto erected in the 20th century. In many ways, the very provincial Toronto of the middle 1950s probably deserved the Marani and Morris design that had already been approved: A tall, grey, dour slab with little windows sitting on a sad, square podium, it would have blended nicely into the background -- a non-offensive government building in a no-risk government town (as an aside, the design did get built, without the podium, as Imperial Oil's headquarters at 111 St. Clair Ave. West).
Mr. Revell's sensual design, chosen from more than 500 entries to an international competition, shook Toronto out of its architectural slumber by legitimizing and bringing to the surface the undercurrent of new ideas -- the first super-suburb Don Mills, the Parkin office's international style buildings and Peter Dickinson's exuberant "Festival of Britain" style. It also started a trajectory that brought other luminaries such as Mies van der Rohe and I.M. Pei to our shores.
New City Hall was as bold a stroke of abstract modernism as a Jackson Pollock "action" painting, and when our city fathers gave it their official stamp of approval, they stated Toronto's intentions to the world.
Mr. Revell thought Canada was "the land of the future," says his daughter Sonja (who now goes by her married name of Stewart), and when he relocated here in 1958, he chose Don Mills, partly because of his forced partnership with Don Mills-based John B. Parkin Associates (foreign architects must work through a local office), but also because he liked what he saw.
His first residence was a rental apartment on the southeast corner of Don Mills Road and Lawrence Avenue, and when his wife and children joined him in September, 1959, they rented another unit in the same building.
"We had two side by side," remembers Mrs. Stewart; "the children in one and the parents in the other."
Young Sonja Revell attended Don Mills Collegiate, which was not easy. "It was pretty traumatic actually," she says. "There weren't any other foreigners in the school other than my sister and I, and I don't think they would have taken me into Grade 11 if it hadn't been that I was the daughter of the architect."
Her parents, she says, didn't really care about good grades, as the experience of living in Canada was the point, which no doubt suited the school's administration: "Teachers just ignored me. They didn't know what to do with me, and I don't think they felt responsible about me passing or failing."
After a year, the family bought a builder's house. Although modest by today's standards, it was modern and, more importantly, "my mother loved it," says Mrs. Stewart about the 2,000-square-foot house that's no longer at 95 Post Rd. But it wasn't Mr. Revell's first choice.
Like he'd done in Helsinki, his intention was to have his own design built on a lot he'd already purchased in Don Mills, but red tape and backward building codes made things so difficult he eventually gave up.
Unfortunately, things went from bad to worse from there. In addition to innumerable delays getting New City Hall off the ground -- "there was a time when he thought it would never be built," says Mrs. Stewart -- the Finnish and Canadian governments decided to tax the architect on the full amount he'd received for the project rather than his personal salary. In other words, he owed more money than he was making, so he fled, in exile, to teach at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology until the mess was sorted out.
By 1963, the family was back in Finland and Sonja was in love with a Canadian she'd met at the Banff School of Fine Arts, Michael Stewart, who would go on to run a successful furniture design company with Keith Muller. They'd marry in 1965, the same year her father's masterpiece opened.
But, during celebrations on that overcast, late summer day 40 years ago when Toronto officially embraced modern architecture, there was one very noticeable absence. Viljo Revell had died in 1964, unable to see his building given over to the city.
Sonja Stewart, however, has been able to watch the city grow up around City Hall.
The Stewarts raised a family here, living in Cabbagetown, Rosedale and the St. Lawrence Market area over the years, and when they walk by Bay and Queen, they often wonder why our most iconic building isn't being as fully utilized as was intended.
The observation deck at the top of the 27-storey tower was meant to be a restaurant, because Mr. Revell thought a city hall should be alive and interactive 24-hours a day. Instead, it's been closed for decades, and the sole restaurant is on the ground floor, outfitted with cheap plastic chairs.
The drama and interplay between building and square have been severely compromised by years of accumulated clutter, including the much-criticized Peace Garden.
Inside, Mr. Stewart points to the "tacky" literature racks, "garbage disposal things" and the general "junk" that confuse what is an otherwise very majestic space. Recent talk of an international competition to revamp Nathan Phillips Square, with the possible removal of the colonnaded walkways (an integral part of Mr. Revell's overall design) makes them both shudder.
As the University of Toronto's dean of architecture, George Baird, has written, competitions don't work when dealing with "complex existing-site conditions." They also don't work where a unified architect's vision already exists. Perhaps we've blurred Mr. Revell's vision so much we just can't see it any longer.
Maybe now is a good time to refocus on City Hall's future -- the one that a handsome Finn, his wife and three daughters saw quite clearly when they arrived here more than four decades ago.
