Surrounded by towers, Mississauga Civic Centre still commands attention

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.