The building has been home to the Canadian Museum of Nature for many years. In 1919, former Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier laid in state in the interim Chamber, and in1920 government business returned to Parliament Hill. It was built on unstable clay, and the original tower over the front entrance had to be torn down to save the building from sinking and cracking. The building was designed by David Ewart to mirror the doomed Parliament Building, using the same locally sourced Nepean sandstone. Prior to Parliament taking occupancy, it housed the Geological Survey of Canada and the National Gallery of Canada. It was Canada’s first purpose-built national museum, erected in honour of the recently deceased Queen. The temporary home of Parliament was the Victoria Memorial Museum Building, at the opposite end of Metcalfe Street from Parliament Hill.
Victoria Memorial Museum Building (1916-1920) Only the Library of Parliament, with its fireproof iron doors, survived. Then, on February 3, 1916, a fire consumed the Parliament Building and forced elected and government officials to flee through thick smoke. The building was completed in 1876-77, when the new Dominion of Canada was almost a decade old.Īs the nation grew so did its seat of government, and various additions were made to the building. The first stone-locally sourced Nepean sandstone-was laid in the spring of 1860, and materials included red sandstone, Ohio freestone, and grey and green slate. Thomas Stent and Augustus Laver were awarded the contract for the Eastern and Western Departmental Buildings. Their design addressed the need for two legislative chambers, offices, a library, committee rooms, reading rooms, an office for the Clerk, a picture gallery and the Speaker’s apartment. On August 29, 1859, it was announced that Thomas Fuller and Chilion Jones would be the architects for the original Parliament Building. The structure had seemed destined to be built in the larger centres of Montreal or Toronto, until Queen Victoria chose Ottawa as the capital of Canada, as it was further from the American border.
"I know no modern Gothic,” the English writer Anthony Trollope wrote of Canada’s original Parliament Buildings, “purer of its kind or less sullied with fictitious ornamentation.”
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