Joseph Storey

Joseph William Storey
Joseph William Storey
Born	July 5, 1923 Windsor, Ontario
Died	August 12, 1975 Rondeau Provincial Park
Nationality	Canadian
Alma mater	University of Toronto School of Architecture
Occupation	Architect
Practice	Joseph W. Storey, Architect

Joseph William Storey (July 5, 1923 – August 12, 1975) was an internationally renowned architect based in Chatham, Ontario, Canada. He graduated from the University of Toronto School of Architecture in 1946. He designed hundreds of unique homes, stores, offices, and public buildings, and many of his designs from the 1950s and 1960s are still strikingly modern today. His working career spanned three decades, in which time he was also a popular member of Chatham city council. His dedication to his community made the profession of architecture synonymous with that of civic leadership and public service. Storey died suddenly on his way to work in 1975 at the age of 52. The Joseph Storey Architectural Conservancy celebrates his many contributions to his home town every summer with a walking tour of homes he designed.

After graduation from university, Joe Storey worked for one year in Toronto in the office of John Land Architect. After winning $750 in a Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation competition, he returned to his hometown of Chatham, and at the age of twenty-four he established the practice of Joseph W. Storey, Architect in the fall of 1947. The reputation of the office was quickly established by Storey’s skilled translation of the functional clarity, simplicity, and elegant forms of modernism to the urban form of the then small town of Chatham.

As Chatham doubled in size over the next twenty-five years, many of its new buildings found their origins in the office of Joe Storey. Landmark buildings of Chatham such as the Ursuline Convent, Ursuline Motherhouse Chapel and Ursuline College (1958–1962) the head office of Union Gas (1965, major addition in 1973), the Kent County Courthouse (1949), the Chatham YMCA (1962,) Kent County Municipal Building (1967), the Federal Post Office Building (1955), and the Chatham Civic Centre (1975) came from a close-knit dedicated core of talented people brought together by Storey. Bob Tyndall, Wally Stewart and Roger Duchene worked with Storey's firm from the early 1950s until Storey’s untimely passing in 1975. This team was joined by many other talented people through 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, such as architects and OAA members Douglas Hanley, Robert Steele, and James H. Jorden.

Joe Storey brought a level of design and technical excellence that was consistent not only to landmark buildings, but also to elementary and secondary schools, churches, band shells, senior citizen residences, industrial buildings, and to Storey’s favourite challenge, the single family home. Scores of modest ingeniously-planned and executed residences dot the neighbourhoods of Chatham. Examples of his work can also be found in Windsor (The Energy Conversion Plant, University of Windsor), London (Brescia University College), Sarnia (YMCA) and in many other small towns in southwestern Ontario.