The Toronto City Hall, or New City Hall, is the seat of the municipal government of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and one of the city's most distinctive landmarks. Designed by Viljo Revell and engineered by Hannskarl Bandel, the building opened in 1965. The building is located adjacent to Nathan Phillips Square, a public square at the northwest intersection of Bay Street and Queen Street, that was designed and officially opened alongside Toronto City Hall. Toronto City Hall replaced the neighbouring Old City Hall, which was occupied by the municipal government since 1899 and continues to house municipal offices and courts. The building also served as the seat for the Metropolitan Toronto regional government from 1965 to 1992. History City leaders had been looking to build a more modern city hall to house its growing municipal government since at least 1943, when a report to city council recommended a new city hall and square in the block bounded by Queen Street West, Bay Street, and Chestnut Street. The recommendation was rejected by the electorate in a referendum on New Year's Day in 1947. However, in October 1952, a panel of citizens appointed by city council made the same recommendation. In 1954, leaders selected a partnership of three of Toronto's largest architectural firms: Marani and Morris, Mathers and Haldenby, and Shore and Moffat, to create a design. Presented in November 1955, their design proposed a conservative, symmetrical limestone-clad building in the Modernist style facing a landscaped square. Unlike the design that would ultimately be built, it retained the stone Beaux-Arts Registry Office on the western part of the site and also included a landscaped public space in front of it. The podium of the new city hall was to house the council chambers, and was given columns to complement the eight columns of the Registry Building, with which it was aligned across the new public space in front of it. The scheme was panned by leading architects, including Frank Lloyd Wright (who called it a "sterilization" and "a cliché already dated") and Walter Gropius (who deemed it a "very poor pseudo-modern design unworthy of the city of Toronto"), and all classes of the University of Toronto Faculty of Architecture co-authored a letter condemning the proposal and calling for an international competition. The whole $18 million proposal was scrapped when voters rejected it in a December 1955 referendum. The parti was adapted by the