Westinghouse

The Westinghouse Building at 355 King Street West is a robust and carefully articulated example of early 20th-century commercial architecture in Toronto. Originally designed and constructed in the late 1920s by Bernard H. Prack as the Toronto district office of the Canadian Westinghouse Company, the building was later enlarged in the early 1930s by Prack & Prack, with the addition of three storeys that established its present six-storey form. The building is designated under Part IV of the Ontario Heritage Act.

The architecture combines a disciplined structural grid with a finely worked public face. Masonry façades are organized around tall steel-framed windows set in triple banks, with restrained terra cotta detailing, including a pronounced cornice, parapet signage band, and decorative rosettes, lending civic presence to a utilitarian building type.

ERA acted as heritage consultant and heritage architect for the building’s adaptation as a hotel. The conservation strategy was grounded in the understanding that the façades express the building’s internal order rather than serve as applied ornament. Key character-defining elements were repaired and retained, and new steel windows were fabricated to match the scale, depth, and proportions of the originals.

The project allows the existing building to shape its reuse. Interior planning responds directly to the historic window rhythm and floor-to-floor heights, ensuring that new interventions remain secondary to the authority of the original architecture. Through careful conservation and measured change, the Westinghouse Building continues to assert its architectural presence along King Street West while accommodating contemporary use.