Tom Davies Square () is the

city hall In local government, a city hall, town hall, civic centre (in the UK or Australia), guildhall, or municipal hall (in the Philippines) is the chief administrative building of a city, town, or other municipality. It usually houses the city o ...

Greater Sudbury Sudbury, officially the City of Greater Sudbury, is the largest city in Northern Ontario by population, with a population of 166,004 at the 2021 Canadian Census. By land area, it is the largest in Ontario and the List of the largest cities and t ...

Ontario Ontario is the southernmost Provinces and territories of Canada, province of Canada. Located in Central Canada, Ontario is the Population of Canada by province and territory, country's most populous province. As of the 2021 Canadian census, it ...

History

Built in the late 1970s and originally known as Civic Square or 'Place-Civique' in French, the building was part of an

urban renewal Urban renewal (sometimes called urban regeneration in the United Kingdom and urban redevelopment in the United States) is a program of land redevelopment often used to address real or perceived urban decay. Urban renewal involves the clearing ...

movement toward transforming the city's visual image by investing in modern architecture.C.M. Wallace and Ashley Thomson, ''Sudbury: Rail Town to Regional Capital''.

Dundurn Press Dundurn Press is one of the largest Canadian-owned book publishing companies of adult fiction and non-fiction. The company publishes Canadian literature, history History is the systematic study of the past, focusing primarily on the Hum ...

, 1993. . The square consists of a

triangular A triangle is a polygon with three corners and three sides, one of the basic shapes in geometry. The corners, also called ''vertices'', are zero-dimensional points while the sides connecting them, also called ''edges'', are one-dimensional ...

main building with its right angle facing the corner of Brady and Paris Streets and a

glass Glass is an amorphous (non-crystalline solid, non-crystalline) solid. Because it is often transparency and translucency, transparent and chemically inert, glass has found widespread practical, technological, and decorative use in window pane ...

-walled hypoteneuse facing onto an outdoor

plaza A town square (or public square, urban square, city square or simply square), also called a plaza or piazza, is an open public space commonly found in the heart of a traditional town or city, and which is used for community gatherings. Rela ...

in the centre of the complex. This building contains the city hall proper, its administrative offices and the city council chambers. A

diamond Diamond is a Allotropes of carbon, solid form of the element carbon with its atoms arranged in a crystal structure called diamond cubic. Diamond is tasteless, odourless, strong, brittle solid, colourless in pure form, a poor conductor of e ...

-shaped second building located to the west once contained the Sudbury Public School Board and the Sudbury Public Library's Archives branch. It now houses the headquarters of the Greater Sudbury Police Service. Another similar shaped but taller building at 199 Larch, housing provincial government offices, was added to the northeast corner of the site several years later. Completing the square is a fourth building in similar materials, built in a rectangular shape with modern

colonnade In classical architecture, a colonnade is a long sequence of columns joined by their entablature, often free-standing, or part of a building. Paired or multiple pairs of columns are normally employed in a colonnade which can be straight or curv ...

breezeway, housing

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offices. The complex was designed by the local architecture firm Townend, Stefura, Baleshta and Nicholls, with the lead architects being Arthur Townend and John Stefura. Prior to the completion of the current facility, the former city hall was so overcrowded that the civic administration was operating out of several different downtown office buildings, and council meetings had to be held in the auditorium of the Sudbury Public Library's Mackenzie branch. The facility was renamed in 1997 in honour of Tom Davies, the retiring chairman of the

Regional Municipality of Sudbury The Regional Municipality of Sudbury was a regional municipality that existed in Ontario, Canada, from 1973 to 2000, and was primarily centred on the city of Sudbury. It served as an upper-tier level of municipal government, aggregating municipal ...

Redevelopment

In 2017, Greater Sudbury City Council began accepting bids for a construction project to redesign the complex's central plaza,"Bids for Tom Davies courtyard redesign come in millions over budget"
CBC Northern Ontario, April 3, 2017. although all bids received came in significantly higher than the city had budgeted for the project. The city allocated the additional funding necessary, and the project was completed in 2019. In 2023, the city council explored a proposal to shift most city government operations into the now-underused tower building at 199 Larch, while retrofitting the current council building on Brady into a cultural facility that would house the main branch of the Greater Sudbury Public Library and the

Art Gallery of Sudbury The Art Gallery of Sudbury is an art gallery in Greater Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. Established in 1967 by the city's chamber of commerce under the Canadian Centennial projects, the gallery is located in the historic turn of the century Arts and Cr ...

. The project was approved by city council in November 2023, and received $25 million in funding assistance from the federal government in September 2024."$25M in federal funding announced to help with the cost of Sudbury's new cultural hub"
CBC Northern Ontario, September 5, 2024.

References

{{coord, 46.49021, N, 80.99018, W, source:placeopedia, display=title City and town halls in Ontario Buildings and structures in Greater Sudbury Municipal government of Greater Sudbury 1977 establishments in Ontario Government buildings completed in 1977