Canadian Architecture

A

Art Deco

The first echoes of European modernism reverberated in Canada in the 1920s. Art deco, a sleek, geometrical style popularized at a 1925 exposition in Paris, influenced the design of skyscrapers in Canada as elsewhere. Prominent examples of Canadian Art Deco include the Aldred Building (1929-1931) in Montréal by E. I. Barrott and the Marine Building (1929-1930) in Vancouver by McCarter and Nairne. The art deco Toronto Stock Exchange (1936-1937) by George and Moorhouse with S. H. Maw, now the Design Exchange, features a flat facade and a decorative pattern of tall, narrow windows. Montréal architect Ernest Cormier designed his own home (1930) in the art deco style. Composed of two blocky masses, the Cormier house is built of reinforced concrete and faced with granite, with elegant flat relief sculptures as decoration. By the 1930s the streamlined aspects of industrial design, a style often called moderne, had become popular, especially for commercial buildings such as movie theatres. Rule, Wynn and Rule, one of the leading architectural firms in western Canada, designed the Varscona Theatre in Edmonton, Alberta, in the moderne style. Art deco and moderne also influenced architects working with more traditional forms. A series of elegant bank interiors by Beaux-Arts architect John Lyle displays an extremely simplified, stripped-down classicism, as for example his Bank of Nova Scotia (1929) in Calgary. In Vancouver the firm of Sharp and Thompson (with Adrian Gilbert Scott) combined Romanesque detail and planning with a moderne concrete structure for Saint James’ Anglican Church (1935-1937).

The leading Canadian architect of the 1920s and 1930s was Paris-trained Ernest Cormier. Seaplane hangers (1928) designed by Cormier in Montréal, with their thin exterior shells of concrete, reflect his education as an engineer, while the Supreme Court of Canada (1938-1946) in Ottawa demonstrates his skill with handling rich materials (stone and marble) and traditional forms that reflect the Parliament buildings nearby. At the Université de Montréal (1924-1950), Cormier combined engineering and art to produce a masterpiece of planning and design. Its nontraditional design—a symmetrical complex of right-angled projecting wings with a central tower—symbolized the increasingly modern nature of Québec society.

Another architectural innovator was Belgian monk Dom Paul Bellot, who came to Canada in the mid-1930s. His work on the dome and the massive concrete vaults of Saint Joseph’s Oratory (1937) in Montréal combines old forms and new engineering techniques. He based this building for Roman Catholic worship on a modern interpretation of Romanesque and Gothic architecture. His follower Adrien Dufresne used brick in a similar combination of old and new in the Église Saint-Thérese-de-Lisieux (1936) in Beauport, Québec.

B

Functionalism and the International Style

World War II (1939-1945) curtailed most building activity in Canada not related to the war effort. After the war, leading designers turned to functionalism: a belief that a building’s structure should clearly express its function or purpose. These architects made use of boxy shapes, large sheets of glass, and flat, unadorned building surfaces—design features associated with a widely followed architectural trend known as the International Style. Québec architect Robert Blatter and Montréal architects Henri Labelle and Marcel Parizeau had explored features of the style before the war. After the war, the International Style was encouraged in university architecture departments: by John Bland at McGill University in Québec, by Eric Arthur at the University of Toronto, and by John “Jack” Russell at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg.

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Examples of buildings in the International Style include the Vancouver Vocational Institute (1948-1949) by the Vancouver firm of Sharp & Thompson, Berwick, Pratt; the Elizabeth Dafoe Library (1950) in Winnipeg by the Winnipeg firm of Green, Blankstein and Russell; and the National Printing Bureau’s plant (1949-1957) in Hull by Cormier. In the 1950s many modern buildings appeared in Canada, including Ottawa City Hall (1958) by Rother, Bland and Trudeau; the Ortho Pharmaceutical Plant (1955-1956) in Toronto by John B. Parkin Associates; and the Vancouver Public Library (1956-1957) by Semmens and Simpson.

C

Regionalism and Expressionism

The repetitive, uniform quality of mainstream modernism led some Canadian architects, as early as 1953, to search for a regionally based architecture that reflected local conditions of geography and climate. The lozenge-shaped B. C. Electric Building (1955-1957) in Vancouver by Thompson, Berwick and Pratt and the works of Ron Thom reflect the emergence of a regionalist sensibility rooted in modernism yet sensitive to the building’s site in choice of materials, shape, landscaping, and color. Thom’s plan for Massey College (1960-1963) at the University of Toronto arranged brick and limestone buildings around a traditional campus quadrangle. The materials were chosen for their ability to age gracefully, and they integrate crafts such as ceramics, woodwork, and silverwork in their surface finish. Thom’s buildings for Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, reflect the glacial topography of the land on which they stand.

The regionalist sensibility, especially the responsiveness to environment, reached a high point in the work of Vancouver architect Arthur Erickson. His modernist houses, such as the Gordon Smith house (1965) in Vancouver and imaginatively sited university buildings, brought him worldwide attention. Erickson’s design for Simon Fraser University (1963-1965) in Burnaby, British Columbia, included a quadrangle with a reflecting pool at its center. Openings on the ground floor of buildings surrounding the quadrangle frame views of the nearby mountains. His Museum of Anthropology (1973-1976) in Vancouver took as its starting point the post-and-beam forms of west coast Kwakiutl villages.

In Toronto, Finnish architect Viljo Revell won an international competition to design a new city hall. The success of his two curved towers of reinforced concrete and glass for the Toronto City Hall (1961-1965) introduced a wave of expressionist architecture—architecture with complex and unusual, often curvilinear, shapes. Expressionist churches include Montréal architect Roger D’Astous’s Notre-Dame-des-Champs (1962-1963) in Repentigny, Québec, and Alberta architect Etienne Gaboury’s Église du Précieux Sang (1967-1968) in Saint Boniface, Manitoba. Gaboury’s design features a spiraling double helix of wooden beams. Edmonton architect Douglas Cardinal incorporated geology in his curved buildings. Fossils are embedded in the limestone exterior of Cardinal’s Canadian Museum of Civilisation (1983-1989) in Hull, Québec, and the building’s shape echoes the landscape of the late Ice Age, when the first humans arrived in Canada.

D

Urban Projects

A high point of Canadian modernism was reached with the planning and design of the Montréal International Exposition in 1967 (Expo ‘67), for which several islands in the St. Lawrence became a showpiece of innovation. Expo ‘67 included a monumental geodesic dome of interlocking metal parts that served as the American pavilion and was designed by American inventor R. Buckminster Fuller; a prefabricated housing project of stacked concrete modules, known as Habitat 67, designed by Israeli-born Moshe Safdie; a tentlike German pavilion covered in fabric; and a series of large-scale exhibition buildings. Montréal was transformed for Expo ‘67 by the construction of a subway system with many spectacular stations and by a series of large downtown complexes linked by underground concourses. Place Bonaventure (1964-1967), for example, by architect R. T. Affleck, is a multipurpose retail, hotel, and residential complex in downtown Montréal. Toronto’s core experienced similar development. It included the Toronto Dominion Centre (1964-1968), a glass-walled skyscraper designed by German-born American architect Mies van der Rohe, and Commerce Court (1968-1972), a high-rise office building designed by the American firm I. M. Pei and Associates.

Improving technology and the rigorous, northern Canadian climate encouraged the construction of large, climate-controlled, multifunctional megastructures. Toronto-based architect John Andrews explored the idea of connected structures in his design for Scarborough College (1966), a branch of the University of Toronto. The Toronto firm of Craig, Zeidler and Strong designed commercial, health-care, and performing arts centers, starting with McMaster University Health Sciences Centre (1969) in Hamilton, Ontario. In the 1970s Canadian architects and engineers became world leaders in designing large-scale urban structures, such as Andrews’s CN Tower (1975) in Toronto, a broadcasting tower with an observation deck, and Maurice Sunderland’s West Edmonton Mall (1981-1986) in Edmonton, one of the world’s largest shopping malls. They also developed works of technical ingenuity, such as the SkyDome (now known as Rogers Centre) in Toronto by Robbie, Young and Wright Architects, the first stadium with a fully retractable roof, and mixed-use complexes with retail and office space, such as the Eaton Centre (1973-1981) in Toronto by the Zeidler Roberts Partnership.

V

Postmodernism and Other Recent Trends

By 1970 architects in Canada and elsewhere had begun to search for alternatives to modern planning, which was replacing old neighborhoods with impersonal high-rises and highways. American-born writer Jane Jacobs, who lived in Toronto, encouraged an urban complexity in which housing and commerce coexisted side by side. American architect Robert Venturi advocated an architecture open to historical references, ornament, and allusions to popular culture. Venturi’s ideas led to the architectural movement known as postmodernism.

As cities took steps to protect historic neighborhoods, a range of new approaches appeared in architecture. Architects Ray Affleck and Julia Gersowitz placed a new building behind the facades of older buildings at the Maison Alcan (1980-1983) in Montréal. The Sinclair Centre (1983-1986), by Vancouver-based architects Richard Henriquez and Toby Russell Buckwell and Partners, turned four historic buildings in downtown Vancouver into a shopping center. Toronto architect Barton Myers, with Rick Wilkin, designed the Citadel Theatre (1975), a large regional theater complex in Edmonton with five performance spaces. The Toronto firm of A. J. Diamond and Donald Schmitt Architects designed user-friendly spaces with a warm palette of brick and stone, such as the Earth Sciences Centre (1989) at the University of Toronto. The firm of Jones and Kirkland employed a modernized image of a Greek temple facade in the Mississauga City Hall (1982) in suburban Toronto. Safdie created a striking if controversial monument in downtown Vancouver with his Vancouver Public Library (1991). The library’s design is derived from the Colosseum in Rome, Italy. In Montréal, architects Peter Rose and Phyllis Lambert, in association with Erol Argun, used local limestone to create the Canadian Centre for Architecture (1985-1989), a museum and study center that is wrapped around a historic monument, the Shaughnessy House of 1874.

Recent Canadian architecture expresses the imaginative viewpoints of its many practicing architects, balancing two distinct yet not necessarily incompatible approaches. One approach conveys the search for an architecture with roots deep in Canada’s social and physical particularities. East coast architect Brian McKay Lyons designs houses and public buildings with features that resemble those of the ordinary sheds, barns, and dwellings of Nova Scotia. Vancouver-based Richard Henriquez created an inventive addition to the Trent University campus with his Environmental Sciences Centre (1990-1991) that has links to the university's landscape in its design. John and Patricia Patkau, who work in Vancouver, have won international attention for their ability to integrate modern construction techniques and materials with complex and unusual spaces and shapes that respond to human needs, as in their design for Seabird Island School (1990-1991) in Agassiz, British Columbia.

The second recurring approach in contemporary Canadian architecture is a heightened sensitivity to urban conditions. For the National Archives of Canada, Winnipeg architect Ron Keenberg created a glass-walled temple with a stainless steel superstructure for storing archives. This Preservation Centre (1997), located in Gatineau, Québec, was built from standard industrial materials. In Kitchener, Ontario, the Toronto firm Kuwabara, Payne, McKenna and Blumberg Architects used familiar Canadian architectural forms for a new City Hall (1988-1994) inserted into a dying urban core. Montréal architect Dan Hanganu combined past and present by excavating a corner of Old Montréal and reconstructing this corner in a new form in the Pointe à Callière project (1994), a museum of Montréal’s archaeology and history. The architect used the excavation’s revelations and other information about the site’s history in determining the shapes and their interplay for his new design.

Younger Canadian firms give evidence of an emerging new sensibility. For example, in Montréal the firm of Saucier & Perotte created an archive and viewing space for film and video, the Cinématheque Québécoise (1997), in which the viewer encounters images in motion at every turn. The Toronto-based firm of Stephen Teeple Architects Inc. made use of multiple textures—stone, wood, and steel—as well as light, water, and landscape in its design for the York University Welcome Centre (2000). The young architects working on these projects employ modern materials, computer technology, and fragmented geometry in pursuit of an ennobling public architecture. Their strong visual sensibility will likely continue to shape architecture in Canada for some time to come.

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