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ESSAY | ESSAI NARRATING CANADA’S MODERNISMS From Grain Elevators to Museums RHODRI WINDSOR LISCOMBE, Ph.D., is > RHODRI WINDSOR LISCOMBE professor emeritus in the Department of Art AND MICHELANGELO SABATINO History, Visual Art & Theory at the University of British Columbia. Awarded a J.S. Guggenheim fellowship, his books include monographs on William Wilkins (1980), Francis Rattenbury PLACE AND POWER (1983), Robert Mills (1994), and an exhibition and book for the Canadian Centre for Architecture arratives of Canada’s modernisms are inevitably predicated upon by entitled The New Spirit. Modern Architecture in N its vast and diverse geography yet con- Vancouver 1938-1963 (1997, The MIT Press). fined by its location in the Americas. The His most recent book is Architecture and the territory that was dismissed by Voltaire Canadian Fabric (UBC Press, 2011). as “a few acres of snow” shares what has been defined as the world’s long- MICHELANGELO SABATINO, Ph.D., is professor est border with neighbouring United and director of the doctoral program at the Illinois States. Arguably among the oldest mod- Institute of Technology in Chicago. His first book, ern nations, with Confederation in July 1, Pride in Modesty: Modernist Architecture and 1867, predating German federation and coinciding with the reconsolidation of the the Vernacular Tradition in Italy (2011, University United States post the Civil War, Canada of Toronto Press), was recognized with the Alice was among the earliest to divest colonial Davis Hitchcock Award. Forthcoming publications subaltern status (while still maintaining include: Arthur C. Erickson: Architecture into governmental and commercial relations Landscape (McGill-Queen’s University Press, with the United Kingdom). Yet across 2016) and Canada – Modern Architectures in the gamut of measures, from economic History (Reaktion Books, 2016, with Rhodri to cultural, its contribution is still subject Windsor Liscombe). to a colonialism of financial and political power. Even if Sir Arthur Currie at Vimy Ridge implemented military strategy far more intelligent and effective than his British counterparts, and Canadian regi- ments landing at Juno Beach outper- formed both British and American units on D-Day 1944, Canadian achievement tends to be displaced in the hierarchy of historical narratives (fig. 1). The memory and outcome of those conflicts lie at the chronological core of our new survey book, Canada – Modern Architectures in History (Reaktion Books, London, 2016). WARFARE AND MODERNISM The World Wars successively rendered modern movement theory, and practi- ces relevant to designing and efforts at postwar social improvement. If the First FIG. 1. CANADIAN NATIONAL VIMY MEMORIAL, FRANCE (WALTER ALLWARD, 1920-1936). | PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF LANE BORSTAD. JSSAC | JSÉAC 41 > No 1 > 2016 > 3-10 3 RHODRI WINDSOR LISCOMBE AND MICHELANGELO SABATINO > ESSAY | ESSAI FIG. 2. CANADIAN GOVERNMENT GRAIN ELEVATOR AT OGDEN, ALBERTA (1911), FIG. 3. ERNEST CORMIER HOUSE AT MONTREAL, ENTRANCE (ERNEST CORMIER, 1930-1931). | ILLUSTRATED IN LE CORBUSIER, VERS UNE ARCHITECTURE (1923, CHAMPS-FLAMMARION). | PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF SANDRA COHEN-ROSE AND COLIN ROSE. PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF PROVINCIAL ARCHIVES OF ALBERTA, HARRY POLLARD ARCHIVES. War ruptured cultural (including religious) fabric continued into the reconstruction, recognition of Canadian modernist enter- tradition, it also privileged technology and modernization, of the social fabric over prise, we concentrated on its narration. materialism. Those phenomena were com- the baby-boom decades. Indeed, one fig- We recognized that it was the relatively pounded through the Second World War ure central to post-1945 Reconstruction in small number of “publicists”—critics and that in Canada also saw the formulation Canada, C.D. Howe, had become wealthy historians—rather than the quality or the of Reconstruction policy. Two anecdotes as engineer-builder of these grain ele- variety of Canada’s modern architectures may suffice to indicate warfare’s legacy vators that inspired the formulation of that have resulted in larger bodies of criti- on design thinking. It concerns Walter modernist “New Spirit” design aesthetic. cism and scholarship on other nations like Gropius before he took up direction of This episode (discussed in the third chap- the United States, Britain, or even Australia. the Bauhaus. Being buried alive during ter of our book) is just one of the many Thus, instead, our objective was to relate an artillery barrage when serving as a that belong to a remarkable compass of the pattern of evolving modernity in young sergeant of signals, he had visceral modernist architecture, and planning Canada. We sought to explain how the idea reason later to embrace modernism’s stress which remains less acknowledged in of representing the present shifted from on transparency and spatial interpenetra- wider territory of modernism’s historiog- reformed historicism and craft sensibility tion. Le Corbusier, working in aeronaut- raphy beyond Canada. Such international toward more thoroughgoing moderniza- ical war production alike rethought design exposure through early modernist polemic tion, as especially envisioned in Art Deco (as processes and objectives in terms of trans- and its early criticism not only increased seen in Ernest Cormier’s House at Montreal, parency and spatial innovation. Moreover, Canada’s visibility, it also went counter to 1930-1931) and Streamline Moderne, and in company with Gropius, Le Corbusier had the wilderness nation cliché. on to a more comprehensive adoption of already recognized the need for thor- modern movement praxis (fig. 3). Here we oughgoing recalibration of architectural HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES endeavoured to clarify some of the fuzzy practice. Toward that end, they shared terminology, modernity being especially admiration for Canadian application of Nonetheless, while wishing to recover the elastic: being applied to architecture on concrete technique and functionalist aes- full compass of Canadian architectural and which advanced building materials and thetic, particularly in the construction planning production and re-position it in internal function were dressed with histor- of larger-scale grain elevators, or silos the main discourse of modernism’s wide ical articulation as well as to architecture described by Le Corbusier as “fruits of the travel throughout the global, we spurned which derived its formal composition from new age” (fig. 2). The association with rad- the trope of historical victimhood. Instead function, structure, and materials while ical, modernist, reconstitution of the built of attending to the absence of proper eschewing historicist iconography. 4 JSSAC | JSÉAC 41 > No 1 > 2016 RHODRI WINDSOR LISCOMBE AND MICHELANGELO SABATINO > ESSAY | ESSAI FIG. 4. REGENT PARK SOUTH HOUSING AT TORONTO (PETER DICKINSON AND CMHC CENTRAL [CANADIAN] FIG. 5. POSTER FOR CPR RESORTS C. 1926, SHOWING THE BANFF MORTGAGE AND HOUSING CORPORATION (1957-1961). | PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF HUGH ROBERTSON PANDA ASSOCIATES, SPRINGS HOTEL, BANFF, ALBERTA. | BRUCE PRICE 1888; WALTER PAINTER CANADIAN ARCHITECTURAL ARCHIVES, UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY. 1906-1914; AND J.W. ORROCK, 1925-1928. TRACKING MODERNISM’S Toronto, and Vancouver, carried modern- source of demolition, displacement, POTENCY ist design thinking into the spatial scen- congestion, and pollution so powerfully ery of usual activity. Albeit contributing excoriated by adoptive Canadian Jane By the same token, we argue for a more to the embourgoisement of the societal Jacobs. Recall the anti-Spadina express- liberal understanding of modernism’s and aesthetic idealism of the originating way campaign she and others led that generative potency. We track the quite modern movements, these processes also ended with the cancellation in 1971 of rapid reflexive critique of conventional- accompanied the evisceration of civic core the proposed project that would have ized modernist architecture—posited as often for expressways and poorly serviced bulldozed nineteenth-century neighbour- partly caused by orthodoxies in pedagogy social housing schemes. Politics more than hoods of Toronto. But we do not celebrate at the expanded architectural schools, architecture precipitated degradation modernism’s demise amidst the end-of-it- and typified by repetition of motifs or (not unlike notorious American examples all critique of the 1970s. Instead, we read standardized solution for building types like Pruitt Igoe in St. Louis) in several of the evident counter- or so-called post- like apartments and offices. Indeed, by the Central [later Canada] Housing and modern phase as more reactive than pro- the beginning of the 1960s the Royal Mortgage Corporation projects; the active. We posit that urban design, more Architectural Institute of Canada (RAIC) negative factors were chiefly insufficient than historicist pastiche, was the positive was concerned by the diminishing agency maintenance funding and community result of a re-thinking of some of mod- of architects in the build-out of urban- and retail facilities. A case in point is the ernist’s abstract—a-contextual—qual- izing Canada, while students at McGill recently re-invigorated modernist hous- ities. Moreover, we allow for the ongoing railed against modernism’s apparent ing of Regent Park in Toronto (fig. 4). And potency of modernist design thought— collusion with crass capitalism and con- automobile design and manufacture that especially its emphasis on analysis of ends sumerism.

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