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 American architect Robert Venturi advocated an architecture open to historical references, ornament, and allusions to popular culture.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.