The Victoria Memorial Museum Building 
The Museum building has had a singular history. Ignoring the 
wealth of geological advice available at the time, the authorities 
selected a site which is underlain, as we now know, by about 140 feet 
of unconsolidated material, mostly post-Pleistocene marine clay. The 
type of construction used involved bearing walls of thick masonry rest- 
ing upon piles, but these piles, of course, were merely driven into the 
clay. As a result, the bearing walls sank, but as the internal walls 
in the basement did not sink correspondingly, the floors became dis- 
torted and the partitions sheared. By 1915 the tower which sur- 
mounted the entrance (Fig. 7) had begun to separate from the 
main part of the building, a movement which may have been acceler- 
ated by a minor earthquake. The tower was removed in 1916, giving 
the building a slightly decapitated appearance (Fig. 8). Since that 
time no major movement has been observed. 
On the night of February 3, 1916, the Centre Block of the 
Parliament Buildings was destroyed by fire. Parliament was in session 
at the time, and housing had to be found at once. The Museum 
Building was selected, and in its lecture hall the sittings of the 
House of Commons were resumed. Somewhat later, the Senate took 
over the first floor west wing of the building. This occupation required 
an emergency evacuation by the Geological Survey and the Museum. 
Although the move was carried out as carefully as possible, specimens 
and records were lost, and some have never been recovered. Par- 
liament continued to occupy the building until May 1920, when the 
new Centre Block became available. Many important decisions by 
the Canadian Government during the First World War were made in 
the Victoria Memorial Museum. 
The east wing, second to fourth floors, had been made available 
in 1911 as temporary quarters for the National Gallery of Canada. 
When Parliament withdrew from the Museum building in 1920, the 
Gallery also acquired the first floor of the same wing, dispossessing 
the exhibits of vertebrate palaeontology. With much of the remain- 
ing space in use for offices, laboratories, and drafting rooms of the 
Geological Survey, the amount of space available for Museum pur- 
poses was small. This was reduced stiU further during the depression 
years of the thirties, when the emphasis was on “practical” projects, 
and many Museum offices, laboratories, and collections were moved 
to other buildings. During the Second World War, even the exhibi- 
tion space was largely taken over by war-time agencies. 
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