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The article provides information for the International Confederation of Architectural Museums (ICAM) and the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) and approaches to curating architecture. Topics include the foundation of the ICAM, proposed by former museum director Juhani Pallasmma, and CCA in 1979, the four elements of the CCA, such as a library, photographs, and archives, and details related to several architectural exhibitions at the CCA.

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]

Archaeological excavations from 2005 to 2007 on the site of the Château Saint-Louis uncovered evidence for the official residence of Canada's Governors General during the colonial era. The chateau underwent several changes in the course of its existence, and by the end of the French regime had become one of the colony's most prestigious buildings. The archaeological evidence shows that the layout of the chateau and its secondary buildings followed from an earlier spatial organization model applied by Champlain in 1626, apparently derived from an architectural tradition of north-west France. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the decades following the Second World War, Inuit of the Canadian Arctic were introduced to Euro-Canadian architecture in communities that were scattered throughout the North. These houses, and the settlements in which they were situated, were spatially designed around Euro-Canadian concepts of family, community, economics and administrative control. Direct observations of space use by Inuit families were carried out in a remote Canadian Arctic community, and interpreted using space syntax analysis and agency theory. The results of this study indicate that the programmatic categories typically used to structure Euro-Canadian houses, such as bedrooms, kitchens, living rooms and porches, are rarely adhered to by Inuit families. While this apparent mismatch between intended versus actual uses of space may appear arbitrary, it is, in fact, systematically matched to the spatial structure of the houses they inhabit. These interpretations have important implications for the development of aboriginal housing policy in northern Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current quest for affordable housing in North America has focused on reducing the size of the housing lot and on downsizing the house itself. Proponents of the small home maintain that given the diminished size of today's family compared with the traditional and larger family household of the postwar era, the smaller home does not in fact represent a diminution in space standards. When we consider available living space on a per person basis, the smaller family inhabiting a smaller house belies the notion that affordable housing directly signifies any real reduction in living standards. This article uses the wartime home as a research model to explore how people meet their spatial needs within a restricted housing space. Using the wartime home as a paradigm of the small house (no larger than 1,000 square feet) we investigated this housing type as a prototype of affordable housing. Our research included interviews with the owners of twenty-five wartime houses that had retained their original footprint, drawn from three areas on the island of Montreal. The field study determined the types of spatial conflicts that arose in these homes and demonstrated how they were resolved. The study also reinforced the proposition that people are willing to make several trade-offs when choosing to live in a smaller home and that as soon as household finances permit, the owners will modify the layout to suit their lifestyle requirements. The spaces in the wartime home that underwent the most significant degree of change during the household life cycle (that is, kitchen, bedrooms, and storage) indicate their critical status in the accommodation of users' needs and suggest that they should therefore become central priorities in the teaching and design of future affordable housing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]