The City of Toronto has an annual Doors Open event this time of year. During this year’s Doors Open, I finally went inside the amazing RC Harris Filtration Plant, which we posted about seven years ago here: DESIGN FOR THE PEOPLE.

Doors Open @ RC Harris Filtration Plant, 2025Doors Open, 2025, looking towards the Rotunda

And I learned something interesting. One issue that we didn’t discuss in that previous post was the motivation behind building arguably opulent The Palace of Purification during the Great Depression. This nickname was conjured up by the critics of the day.

I had assumed the motivation was to raise the spirits of the struggling citizens of Toronto with a beautiful gift. According to documentation inside the plant, it was not uncommon for contemporary municipal projects built elsewhere in North America to be beautifully designed and built.

It turns out that in the early 1900s, Toronto’s municipal water system was terrible. People were dying of typhoid fever, cholera, dysentery and possibly hepatitis A, from drinking it. This is a situation that today’s Canadians can’t imagine could happen. So the new water facility had to look like a palace so that the people of Toronto would trust its purity.

I had the motivation for the creation of the RC Harris Filtration Plant wrong. I believe I have it right now. If there were other similar municipal water facilities built in North America at the same time that were anything like it, they don’t still exist.

What we did get right was the premise of our original post. Design something beautiful for the people and you will always get a return on investment. But maybe we weren’t thinking big enough. Maybe there’s a bigger message in this for marketers as well.end-of-post-symbol

 

“

The life of the arts, far from being an interruption, a distraction, in the life of a nation, is very close to the center of a nation’s purpose—and is a test of the quality of a nation’s civilization.”– John F Kennedy [1]

Notes and references:
  1. From remarks made during a special convocation honoring the poet Robert Frost at Amherst College in 1963, less than a month before his assassination.
  2. Feature image credit: photo by Samuel Kolber.