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A Native Canadian architect talks about his building projects, how they were influenced by his cultural traditions and the teachings and advice of the Elders, the spiritual nature of creativity, giving a building power by designing it as a living being, and linking tradition with the latest technological tools. (SV)

Gordon Joseph Culham (1891–1979), a landscape architect and town planner, was instrumental in the professionalization of both his disciplines in Canada. He helped lead the disorganized practitioners of the 1930s into the modern age and enabled them to assume their professional role in the improvement of Canada's urban centres. The discovery of an archive of Culham's papers provides a previously unavailable insight into the conceptualization and creation of the professions of landscape architecture and town planning in Canada. Culham characterized this as leading a ‘useful life’. He prepared, practiced and enjoyed the power associated with the professions he helped found in leading this useful life. He was a Harvard graduate who worked with the greatest landscape architectural firm in America, the Olmsteds and with the premier British town planner, Thomas Adams. Culham returned to his homeland on the eve of the Depression with an unrivalled reputation. He brought with him a strong sense of professionalism and helped elevate a small, dispirited community of Canadian landscape architects and town planners into one united organization for almost two decades. Professional specialization was an inevitable outcome but Culham continued to bridge the divide between his chosen fields throughout his ‘useful life’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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Architects as teaching artists working with teachers in Montreal public schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After making a comparative historical survey of contemporaneous responses to her 1964 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Klemek concludes that Jane Jacobs' ideas were anticipated by urbanists in Great Britain and West Germany, and were embraced more readily by influential planners and architects in these nations and Canada than was initially the case in the United States. Unlike the almost reactionary outsider and opposition figure she seemed to be in New York, Jacobs was accepted by many types of planners and architects in these other nations, illustrating that her ideas were not as inherently anti-planning, antimodernist, or NIMBYist, as they appeared in the context of the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]