ABSTRACT
Mississauga was a suburb to the west of Toronto, which grew into Canada’s sixth largest city during the twentieth century. On 22 April 1982, the City Council of Mississauga invited Canadian architects to participate in an architectural competition to select the architect and design for a new city hall and a civic square to be built in the city centre. For an architecture which relied heavily on context, Mississauga posed a considerable challenge, surrounded as it was then by a large shopping centre, several 12-storey towers, open parking lots and farmland. Asplund’s stripped-down Nordic Classical work had become of huge interest to the Post-Modern Classicists as they sought a way out of Modernism by studying the architecture which had immediately preceded it. Mississauga City Hall is just 20 miles from Viljo Revell’s Toronto City Hall and yet the two seem half the world away in terms of urban context, architectural response and style.
