File:20150705 - 14 - Collingwood, Ont. - Service Canada Centre (fmr Federal Building).jpg

English: The former Federal Building at 44 Hurontario Street in Collingwood, Ontario, Canada, as seen on a July 2015 morning. A work of local architect Philip C. Palin, here we see a Beaux-Arts Neoclassical design that, in the words of Parks Canada, is "marked throughout by a richness of materials and ornament rare in Canada for a building of this type". The bronze-accented white marble façade is centered on a monumental Corinthian portico looking out onto Hurontario Street, crowned successively by an entablature and pediment richly adorned with dentil rows, block modillions, and handsome balustrades, all crowned with a shallow-pitched hipped roof of copper. The original interior design retains an astonishing degree of integrity, boasting a "balanced disposition of spaces around a central axis... enhanced by the use of marble, bronze, oak and ornate plasterwork" (again quoting from Parks Canada) and a grand marble staircase to the somewhat less intact upper level. The building's architectural significance led to its 1984 listing on the Canadian Register of Historic Places.