HEADQUARTERS: TTC’s McBrien Building

2026 CONTACT PHOTOGRAPHY CORE EXHIBITION
BAY BLOOR SUBWAY STATION
TORONTO

HEAQUARTERS opened in 1958, and within a few years will cease to serve as TTC headquarters. Named in honour of William McBrien, a long serving TTC chairman and key proponent of the Yonge subway, which opened in 1954, the same year McBrien died.

HEADQUARTERS is a portrait of a Modernist workplace, built in an era when no one worked from home. In this series, Don Hewak, acts a ghostly “stand-in” for the ubiquitous bureaucrat, wandering the halls, occupying boardrooms, and lost in thought at his rich wooden desk. Like the television series Severance, HEADQUARTERS seeks to immerse the viewer in a now-receding environment at once familiar and distant, banal and intriguing.