Cormier was born in Montreal, the son of a medical doctor, and he studied civil engineering at the École Polytechnique in Montreal. After graduation in 1906, he worked in the research department of the Dominion Bridge Company in Montreal. In 1909, he studied at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, in the atelier of Jean-Louis Pascal. In 1914, he was the recipient of the Henry Jarvis Scholarship, awarded by the Royal Institute of British Architects. Through its British Prix de Rome, Cormier spent two years in Rome, where he studied the ancient works. Following his return to Paris in January 1917, he was employed by the engineering firm of Considère, Pelnard et Caquot, specialists in concrete, and he graduated as an architect of the French Government. He was a professor at the École Polytechnique in Montreal from 1921 to 1954. After his death in 1980, he was interred in Notre Dame des Neiges Cemetery in Montreal.
Cormier's major work is the central building of the Université de Montréal on the north slope of Mount Royal. This huge example of the Art Deco style was built between World War I and the middle of World War II, and it has been kept in a nearly pristine shape over the decades. It is a composition of simple forms of planes and surfaces in successive relief, emphasizing vertical lines. The light buff vitrified brick has trimmings of Missisquoi marble. The only major destruction of his designs took place within the interior spaces. These changes occurred in the 1970s, when the great multi-storey hall of the central library was filled up with several smaller, single-storey rooms for the faculty of medicine and its library.
Another important example of Cormier's work can be found on another Quebec university campus, the Casault pavilion of Université Laval, familiarly known by students as the 'Louis-Jacques'. Designed in 1948 but only completed in 1960, it is a massive cathedral-like building, originally designed as Quebec City's Grand Séminaire, which is particularly spectacular viewed from a distance along the impressive mall that runs along the east-west axis of the campus grounds. Despite an unfortunate renovation scheme in the 1970s, which gutted the chapel, filled in the magnificent enclosed courtyard and transformed the interior into an undecipherable labyrinth, the building has become the most recognized landmark of the second-oldest university in North America and home to Laval's faculties of Music and Communications, as well as to Quebec's National Archives.
, on Montreal's Pine Avenue, is one of the finest examples of an Art Deco dwelling in the world. Former Canadian prime ministerPierre Trudeau purchased the building in 1979, and he lived there following his retirement until his death in 2000.
Cormier is also responsible for the classic château-style Supreme Court of Canada Building in Ottawa.
Other commissions
He was a design consultant for the United Nations building in New York City. In Toronto, Cormier designed St. Michael's College School and Carr Hall at St. Michael's College.
