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Copyright of Zeitschrift für Kanada-Studien is the property of Gesellschaft fuer Kanada Studien e.V. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The diffusion of modernist principles in Canadian building and planning occurred through many channels, but among these the Architectural Research Group of Ottawa and Montreal played a crucial role. Formed in 1938 to conduct research into postwar reconstruction, the group produced articles, radio addresses, and exhibitions in an effort to nurture modernist sentiment across the country. For these young architects, the federal government's commitment to replanning and rebuilding postwar Canadian cities presented them with an opportunity to intervene in the future of Canadian practice. They decried the "backwardness" of conservative practitioners while promoting the ideas of a European avant-garde and orchestrating numerous transatlantic exchanges. This article discusses the group's role in politicking for architectural and urban modernism, as well as the contributions of some of its key members. It shows that Canadian professionals were not simply passive receptors of international modernism but played an active part in shaping these ideas during the immediate postwar period, and that Canada's federal government played a unique role in accelerating this process by allowing modernist architects and planners to operate within and through a number of government-sponsored agencies. La diffusion de principes modernistes de construction et de planification au Canada s'est effectuée par de nombreux canaux, parmi lesquels le Groupe de recherche architecturale d'Ottawa et de Montréal a joué un rôle central. Créé en 1938 pour effectuer des recherches en reconstruction d'après-guerre, le groupe a produit des articles, des allocutions radiophoniques et des expositions afin de cultiver un sentiment moderniste à travers le Canada. L'engagement du gouvernement fédéral envers le réaménagement et la reconstruction des villes canadiennes fut l'occasion pour ces jeunes architectes d'infléchir l'avenir de la pratique au Canada. Ils critiquent l'« arriération » des praticiens conservateurs tout en faisant la promotion des idées de l'avant-garde européenne et en organisant de nombreux échanges transatlantiques. Cet article se penche sur le rôle du groupe dans la promotion du modernisme en architecture et en urbanisme ainsi que la contribution de quelques-uns de ses membres clés. Loin d'avoir été de simples récepteurs passifs du modernisme international, les professionnels canadiens ont activement façonné ces idées dans les années qui suivirent immédiatement la guerre. En outre, le gouvernement fédéral canadien a joué un rôle unique d'accélérateur en permettant aux architectes et planificateurs modernistes d'agir au sein et par l'entremise de plusieurs agences parrainées par l'État. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I address the notion of "National Style" in the architecture of Canada's Parliament buildings in Ottawa. Writing in 1968, Alan Gowans named High Victorian Gothic as the national architectural style of Canada, citing Parliament among his prime examples. His work appeared in a volume titled Th e Shield of Achilles, which considered the role that Victorian-era themes and values played in shaping Canada. The volume was published shortly after Canada's Centennial celebrations and captured some of the nationalist sentiment that characterized mid-20th-century Canada. Architectural historians today have largely dismissed the idea that Victorian Gothic is Canada's National Style in the way that Gowans suggested (see particularly Thomas 1997, 2004, and 2011). But the argument still carries weight in some circles; and as Canada approaches its Sesquicentennial, the issue warrants re-examination. Does this style speak to a particular identity, and if so, whose? How have these buildings been interpreted over the years? What messages do they encode? To what extent do these messages diverge from the urban setting in which the buildings are located? These questions tie in to discourses around what it means to be Canadian, highlighting the confl icts between an identity rooted in Northern European (generally British) ethnicity and numerous other identities that popular interpretations of the Gothic style have excluded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the architecture of long-term residential care (LTRC) design in Canada. Because choosing residential care over aging in place is widely perceived as a personal, social, and familial failure, LTRC is fraught with ageist connotations. Relatedly, chronic underfunding and low prestige make many LTRC buildings nearly invisible. Like hotels, university residences, and even summer camps, LTRC buildings try to look residential, but their functional programs are wholly institutional. We examine how these contradictions are legible in Canadian LTRC architecture, drawing on a fictional example—Joan Barfoot’s Exit Lines—that demonstrates how the real LTRC buildings we discuss are popularly understood. We also draw on an extensive set of ethnographic notes from a team-based research project for which members visited sites across Canada, with a promise of anonymity. We argue here that LTRC buildings fade into our neighbourhoods and cities (and even budgets), because their gestures to institutional and to suburban architectural vernacular traditions are unremarkable, but that they require attention precisely because of this uneasy ambivalence. We highlight a handful of Canadian buildings whose architects have broken the mould of LTRC design and offered fresh alternatives to argue that home might not be the only or even the best model for designing LTRC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the rise of historical preservation in the 1970s, Montreal architect and artist Melvin Charney displaced the traditional idea that preservation in architecture consists in the conservation of existing buildings. In his installations of the period, architecture is not located in buildings but in the underlying, unconscious, and presumably universal meaning of architectural figures. His works introduced into conservation practices the radical idea that blending a built image and a narrative may preserve the social content of architecture. In putting back "meaning into the thing itself," Charney demonstrated the efficiency of mythical speech in the creation of a meaningful architecture. His installations of the 1970s teach us that building myths is essential to the creation and preservation of monuments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on the environmentality of the Canadian architecture during 19th century. Topics discussed include the most important Gothic fictional authors in the second half of 18th century, the article "The Limits of the Picturesque," by Ian S. MacLaren on Canada's picturesque, and the novel "The History of Emily Montague" by Frances Brooke. Several photographs which show picturesque characteristic of Canada are also presented.

BACKGROUND: Green building standards are significantly impacting modern construction practices. The resulting structures are more energy efficient, but their impact on occupant health has not been widely studied. OBJECTIVE: To investigate a range of indoor environment and ergonomic issues in green buildings. METHODS: Retrospective post-occupancy evaluation survey of 319 occupants in two Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certified buildings and one conventional building on a Canadian University campus. RESULTS: Results show that working in the LEED buildings was a generally positive experience for their health, performance, and satisfaction. However, the LEED buildings did not always receive the highest ratings for environmental conditions or for health and productivity. Respondents indicated a range of concerns with thermal conditions, office lighting, noise and their overall workstation designs and these were not always better in the green buildings. CONCLUSIONS: These results highlight the need for better integration of ergonomic design into green buildings and into the LEED rating system, and these implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

An architectural review is presented for the design of the building that houses the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) in Ottawa, Ontario.

The article discusses the 150th anniversary of the town hall in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 2013 and the history of Halifax. It examines the construction and architectural style of the town hall and a visit by the then-prince and princess of Wales in August 1863 to dedicate the town hall. The author discusses additions and improvements to the Halifax townscape during the latter half of the 20th century.

This article examines how personhood was shaped in the routine dispositional relations of longhouse life among the Iroquoian societies of eastern North America. Drawing on scholarship that situates the emergence of culturally-specific modes of personhood within relational networks of people and things, I present evidence that over seven centuries, a deep resonance developed between the ‘polyvalence’ of Iroquoian domestic spaces and a broadly ‘fractal’ (sensu Fowler 2004) or ‘part-in-whole’ sense of personhood in Iroquoian societies. An ethnohistoric review of seventeenth-century Ontario Iroquoian concepts of personhood is followed by an archaeological analysis of the development of longhouses between the tenth and sixteenth centuries. I report the results of a kernel density estimation (KDE) analysis of the spatial distribution of post and pit features across longhouse living floors in a diachronic study of 45 hearth areas. The results indicate that everyday practices within the longhouse came to follow several characteristic patterns by the mid-twelfth century ad. These patterns served to define ‘polyvalent’ relationships in which resident persons and nuclear families were at once identifiable as distinct social atoms and as inextricable components of larger hypostatic wholes — most especially house and lineage. A fundamental coherence was thereby established between the embodied experience of domestic taskscapes and a mode of personhood in which any social whole was understood as a dynamic and partible alliance of elements. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

A photo essay which explores visual relationships between the sky and the architecture of large buildings in Toronto, Ontario is presented.

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]

This article examines the history of architectural history in Canada. The authors examine the primacy that the cities of Toronto, Ontario, Ottawa, Ontario and Montreal, Quebec hold in the Canadian psyche and discuss how architecture reinforces this notion. They also explore the influence that being on the edge of the British empire as well as their proximity to the United States has had on Canadian architecture. They discuss the most prominent literature on Canadian architecture and the schools that have embraced and cultivated Canadian architects and architectural history.

Examines how La Casa a la Carta, a rowhouse constructed in Mexico in November 1997, exemplifies a framework for the transfer of industrialized methods of production and the modification of Canadian products to comply with local culture, code jurisdictions and building methods. Background on the construction; Challenge of technology transfer; Product modifications critical to the industrialized production of a unit.

Part I. Presents an information model for the improvement of design coordination for building projects in Canada. Construction of the model around a central library of generalized building components; Increase in consistency of the design process; Implementation into a collaborative design system.

Presents information on Canadian architecture, with emphasis on castles. Details on historical and critical writings on Canadian architecture from World War II; Definition of `High Victorian Gothic'; Discussion on the crucial Victorian period.

The article discusses the customary nationalist definition accorded to the Château style in Canada whose stylistic features are defined as its geographical and historical locations. At the time of the centenary of Confederation in 1967 and the search for a specific Canadian identity, the Château style became interpreted as the architectural symbol of the alliance between the "Two Founding Peoples." It offers a descriptive matrix for the means by which retrospective subjective association can be confused with contemporary cultural intention.

Early Gothic Revival architecture in Canada, particularly from the period prior to the 1840s, when the influence of A. W.N. Pugin and the Ecclesiologists began to be felt, has been little studied. This paper reconstructs a lost monument-St. Mary's, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, as erected 1820-1830--which may have been the first ambitious essay in the Gothic Revival style, especially as it apparently precedes by a few years the single and most famous monument of this time, the parish church of Notre-Dame in Montréal, itself often considered the starting point of the style in Canada. Although the exterior of St. Mary's was modest--essentially it was an exemplar of the rectangular box with "west" tower, definitively formulated by James Gibbs, and ubiquitous since the 1720s-- with Gothic detailing replacing Baroque, the interior, known only from one watercolor and partly surviving today, is of greater interest. Divided into nave and aisles by piers of clustered shafts, the piers' form, plus plaster vaults and pointed arches, helped create an aura reminiscent of the Gothic period. The interior was dominated by the design of the sanctuary (now destroyed), where an unusual congregation of architectural forms suggests both the appearance of illusionistic architecture, with a possible connection to New York, and a further transformation of Baroque forms into their Gothic equivalents, with a possible connection to Québec City. Tenuous, circumstantial evidence will be provided to substantiate the plausibility of such sources. This paper also attempts to place St. Mary's in the context of the Gothic Revival in North America c. 1820-1830. As a result, it will be seen that its exterior, although without precedents in Canada, is typical of Gothic Revival churches of the period in the United States. By contrast, the interior design, especially of the sanctuary, suggests it was one of the more imaginative creations in either context. It therefore emerges as a more significant monument in the history of Canadian and North American architecture than heretofore suspected. [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]

The article reviews the exhibition "Montreal Metropolis, 1880-1930," at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, in Montreal, Quebec, from March 18 to May 24, 1998, and at the National Gallery of Canada, in Ottawa, Ontario, from November 27, 1998, to January 24, 1999.

The article reviews the exhibition "The New Spirit: Modern Architecture in Vancouver, 1938-1963" at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, Quebec, from March 5 to May 25, 1997 and at the Vancouver Art Gallery in Vancouver, British Columbia from November 8, 1997 to January 18, 1998.

Responds to a reader's comment on the review of Janet Wright's book 'The Architecture of the Pictureseque in Canada,' in the periodical 'Canadian Historical Review.' Factors that shaped picturesque in British North America; Relationship between building and society; Issues addressed by the review.