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Adamson Associates.

Canadian architectural partnership established in 1934 in Toronto by Gordon Sinclair Adamson (1904–86), who practised in the city for 20 years. The firm has been prominent internationally for many decades, and responsible for major, multi-complex modern building projects in Canada, North America and England. In 1949 Adamson Associates was the first architectural group in Ontario to establish an in-house consultancy for the interior design and furnishing of their buildings. In 1962 the company expanded into large-scale structural and site planning. By the 1970s the firm was recognized for its expertise in curtain-wall and cladding techniques, and for state-of-the-art, energy-saving heating and cooling systems. The company’s notable projects include the North York Municipal Building (1974–8), Toronto, Gulf Canada Square (1977–9; now Canada Crescent Corporation; associate architects), Calgary, Alta, and North American Life Centre (1986–8), North York, Ont. Adamson Associates was the architectural company responsible for coordinating all the buildings that comprise New York’s World Financial Center, and architects for the pyramidal-roofed Three World building (1985) and the Winter Garden (1988), both designed by Cesar Pelli. The latter is a glazed, barrel-vaulted public promenade, lined with shops and cafés and decorated with tall palm trees brought from California. The company also acted as executive architects for the Canary Wharf scheme in London’s docklands (from 1987) in association with Cesar Pelli and others. Adamson Associates built the 50–storey Canary Wharf tower, which is clad in stainless steel, and designed the Docklands Light Railway Station there.

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  Reproduced by kind permission of Macmillan Publishers Limited, publishers of The Grove Dictionary of Art.
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