In 1932, construction began on Toronto’s Victoria Park Water Filtration Plant and Pumping Station. Designed by architect Thomas Canfield Pomphrey and engineers Gore, Nasmith and Storrie, it held forty filtration beds, making it the city’s largest facility for cleaning and disinfecting water drawn from Lake Ontario, for safe use as drinking water. By the time it was completed, in 1941, it was known as “the palace of purification.” A few years later, it was renamed in honour of Ronald Caldwell Harris, the visionary Commissioner of Works that conceived of the plant.
Over the course of a year, architectural photographer Amanda Large documented the buildings and grounds of the R.C. Harris Water Treatment Plant. “I wanted to spend some time revisiting a place over and over, getting to know how it changes in the light and in the seasons,” says Large, who first became aware of the plant when an architecture professor assigned Michael Ondaatje’s novel In the Skin of a Lion. Her photographs, taken with film, digital cameras, drones, and polaroids, capture the plant’s enduring architecture, but also its ongoing life as a working facility—and a place integral to the life of the city.
