This month an exhibition, a series of talks, an online exhibit and a new book start to unpack some of this complex history – which has lessons for Toronto today.

Toronto in the mid-1950s was much smaller, still deeply Protestant and colonial. The project began with political infighting and a mediocre design. And during the eight years from design to opening day, it evolved through Toronto’s contrary strands of boosterism, parochialism, parsimoniousness (there were extended political battles over the furniture and the Henry Moore sculpture on the square) and prudery. (The idea that alcohol might some day be served at a City Hall restaurant prompted angry protests.)

Somehow, it worked out.

The exhibition Shaping Canadian Modernity, which runs until Oct. 9 at Ryerson’s Paul H. Cocker Gallery, looks back to the design competition of 1957 that gave Mr. Revell the job. Mayor Nathan Phillips had successfully pushed for a global competition that would produce “a symbol of Toronto, a source of pride and pleasure to its citizens.” And with more than 500 entries from 42 countries, it captured a cross-section of the world of architecture. “The competition has global significance,” says Ryerson architecture professor George Kapelos, one of the exhibition’s curators. “City Hall becomes a petri dish for new ideas about the making of the city.” ... There is an elegant tower-and-pyramid by the Japanese architect Kenzo Tange; a lozenge-shaped slab by the Indian B.V. Doshi; a low, hollow square by future Pritzker Prize winner I.M. Pei; and a sculptural, environmentally sophisticated design by a group of Harvard students led by John Andrews, who would design the CN Tower. (All 500 of them deserve to be published, and this has never happened. Civic Symbol, a new history by Christopher Armstrong, and Competing Modernisms, by Mr. Kapelos, each capture a slice of this rich trove.)

...

The curvy, unusual building had to be redesigned for economic reasons, and still wound up substantially more expensive – at around $25-million – than the city had originally intended. In the end it went modestly over budget, was finished years late, and the process was punctuated by bickering between the city, the architects and the contractors, who went into bankruptcy in 1967. (Mr. Revell was hammered financially, too.)