When Mississauga city hall first opened in 1987, it was the tallest building in the area. Today, the downtown population has nearly 36,000 people living in 58 'towers' over four-storeys tall.Dave LeBlanc/The Globe and Mail
It’s usually impossible to pick up on excitement when reading scholarly papers, but the words written by Anne Murray de Fort-Menares in the December, 1985 Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada nearly jump off the page.
“Mississauga City Hall promises to be a phenomenal building,” she begins, and, despite bringing up archetypes and hierarchical structure and the work of Roland Barthes, her enthusiasm for the then-unfinished building by architects Edward Jones (English born) and J. Michael Kirkland (American born), and what it would represent for the new city – in 1985 Mississauga was just 11-years-old – continues unabated for four pages.
On Page 2, she writes “[t]his building demands a process of discovery,” so, not wanting to disappoint, I made some inquiries and, a few weeks later, found myself standing in the Great Hall with Mississauga’s director of strategic communications Rob Trewartha, and John Dunlop, manager of Indigenous relations, heritage and museums. And, wanting to give aesthetics their due, one of my first questions was about the marble: it’s rich, it’s veined, it’s emerald green, and it’s absolutely everywhere.
“Italian,” Mr. Trewartha said with a laugh. “I believe the quarry where this marble came from, we drained it … so we’re really hopeful that nobody damages any of this.”
Switching gears and thinking of Ms. de Fort-Menares’s suggestion that the architects faced a design “crisis” since there was an “absence of context in the suburban void,” I brought up the old chestnut that only Mississauga would think to build a city hall beside a shopping mall.
Yes, Square One was there in the mid-80s (it opened in 1973), says Mr. Trewartha, but it was significantly smaller, and rolling hills dotted with trees as well as farmer’s fields filled with roaming horses were still a brief stroll away. “They saw this as an opportunity to build in a place that wasn’t one of the three founding villages. … Nobody would have dominion over it.”
“You have to remember this was all conceived right after the city came into being,” added Mr. Dunlop. “When you go to Streetsville, you’ll still talk to people that will identify themselves as ‘I’m from Streetsville, I’m not from Mississauga.’”
So, within this “neutral territory,” Mr. Jones and Mr. Kirkland – winners of a 1982 design competition that received almost 250 entries – had to create something that spoke to all, referenced the area’s agricultural past while anticipating the future of the new metropolis, and be a gathering place.
And the Great Hall, which once contained an arboretum on the other side of the giant arch, now contains a café, where people are gathered on this late winter day in 2025: “This building continues to grow and change, it’s definitely not a static place,” said Mr. Dunlop.
Outside, too: while the building’s forms still represent a silo (the council chamber), a windmill (the clock tower), farm building (office tower) and, according to Ms. de Fort-Menares, a “suburban ranch house … blown up to billboard scale” for the gabled building (former U of T architecture dean Anthony Eardley suggests it was inspired by a stretched gable 1886 house by Charles McKim), the public square has grown and changed as the city’s need for it has changed.
And as much as I was enjoying the circling skaters through the café windows, it was time to visit the council chamber. Like Toronto City Hall, its round shape denotes a lack of pecking order – no front or back means no important and unimportant – and, above our heads, an amazing domed mural by Sharon McCann depicting the First Nations legend of the Great Bear and Six Hunters reminds occupants of the larger universe outside.
Next, we climb the great stairs. The stairs, explained Mr. Trewartha, are 20-feet wide at the bottom and six-feet wide at top: “It’s meant to create an optical illusion that makes them look taller than they are; they’re only 79 steps.” At top is a chapel with a stained-glass window reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright, a gym for employees and elevators to the 12th floor of the office building, now offered as a rentable space with panoramic views.
“We’ve hosted the Princess of Japan here, Takamado, when we did the 90th anniversary of Japan-Canada diplomatic relations,” said Mr. Trewartha. While here, Mr. Trewartha pointed to all of recent construction that has obscured views of downtown Toronto (when Mississauga city hall was new, it was the tallest building in the area).
Back in the Great Hall, we talked about Mississauga’s growth since the building opened in 1987, and how much more is expected. Today, the downtown population is “about 36,000 people” living in 58 “towers” over four-storeys tall. By 2051, said Mr. Trewartha, the prediction is “a 100 towers and 89,000 people.”
Yet, surrounded by those towers, Mississauga Civic Centre (its actual name), with its wheat-gold brick, shadowed colonnades, distinct architectural ‘parts’ spreading over a raised plaza, and very postmodern clock tower punching into the clouds, is still a commanding presence from Burnhamthorpe Road, Confederation Parkway, and even Highway 403. And the closer one gets, the larger it seems – yet it is never unfriendly. And, symbolically and much like Toronto City Hall did in 1965, it announced that Mississauga had arrived on the world stage.
Ms. de Fort-Menares finishes her 1985 article thusly: “Here is something of an anomaly in the doldrums of the eighties: a beautiful, intelligent building capable of grabbing public attention in a big way, in an unexciting suburb like Mississauga.”
Still beautiful and attention-grabbing, but an unexciting suburb? No way. Which is exactly what the dreamers of doers of Mississauga knew would be the case almost 45 years ago.