architecture, distinct from that of Britain and the United States. One style promoted as distinctly Canadian was the Château Style, also known as Railway Gothic. This style first appeared in the late nineteenth century with grandiose railway hotels such as the Château Frontenac and Banff Springs Hotel. It was a mix of Victorian Gothic Revival with castles of the Loire Valley in France. The railways were seen as symbols of Canada, and the mix of French and English ideas was also considered distinctly Canadian. During the Interwar years the Château style was used in several prominent public structures, such as the Supreme Court building. Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King was a prominent supporter of the style. The third and current Hotel Vancouver, the last of the great Gothic railway hotels, was also completed after the start of the Second World War, though it had been under construction until 1929 (its predecessor was Italian Renaissance, a common style in late Victorian and Edwardian British Columbia). The desire for a unique Canadian style also led to a revival of the Neo-Gothic style during the interwar period. In part because of the prominence of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa and the CPR's "railway Gothic", Gothic architecture had become closely associated with Canada and while the United States embraced Art Deco Canadian architects returned to the Middle Ages for inspiration, by way of John Ruskin's writings on Neo-Gothic, the most Victorian of all styles. When the Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings burnt down in 1916 it was rebuilt in a similar Gothic style to that that had been used fifty years earlier. At the same time, Modernism inspired the Gothic style employed, and the Neo-Gothic buildings of the era often saw more sparse ornamentation and incorporated steel frames in their construction. Modern period At the same time developments, especially those in United States, were not ignored. Toronto closely followed Chicago and New York as the home of skyscrapers employing new steel framed construction and elevators. In the latter half of the twentieth century, Toronto's influence on other Canadian cities, largely because of the control of capital (especially banks) meant that Western Canadian cities, particularly Vancouver, became filled with lesser versions of their counterparts in Toronto (e.g. TD Tower (Vancouver), Bentall Centre (Vancouver)) which displaced the city's older and distinctly Edwardian flavor. Modernism appeared in a number of guises. In the 1920s and