Architect & Engineer

flho ws Emest Comtier~ anyLJaY? British School of Rome. He then re turned to Paris to design fortifica Ernest Cormier, Architect and Engineer tions and other military installations (as he always styled himself), was the for France during the last two years first Canadian modern architect. Of of the Great War. He returned to t.lont the two or three great architects this real in 1919, spent a year as Instruc country has produced, he may have been tor in Architecture at McGill Univer the greatest; he was certainly the most sity, and then devoted his energies to honoured. the practice of Architecture. He was born in Montreal in 1885, the That he succeeded may be judged by the son of a doctor. He studied engineer honours accorded him. Cormier was made ing at L' Ecole Polytechnique, and spent a Fellow of the RIBA in 1929, and of two years working as an engineer at the RAIC in 1930. He was elected RA in Dominion Bridge. In 1908, he was ad 1932. He received medals from the RAIC , mitted to L'Ecole des Beaux-Arts in the PQAA, the American Newspaper Guild, Paris, and studied there for six years. L'Association Canadienne -- Fran~ais e In 1914, he won the RIBA Prix de Rome, pour l'avancement de Sc i ence s, McGill and spent the next two years at the University and la Societe des Archi- ARCHITECT & ENGINEER Peter lanken - Architect 1980 Un vers1te de Montreal Ste. Marguente- Mane The Fifth Column Page 23 tectes diplomes par le Gouvernement limited list of references compared to Fran~ais . In 1947, he was selected to the bibliographies of, say, LeCorbusier be the Canadian representative on the or Gropius. International Board of Design for the United Nations Headquarters in New A second reason for Cormier's compara York. He was made a member of the Or tive obscurity is a corollary of the der of Canada in 1975 . above . It was the writings of the "mas ters of the modern movement", much During his 35 years of practice in more than their buildings, that defin Montreal, Cormier designed only about ed and disseminated the ideas of the 50 projects . Among them are some of modern movement. Architects other than the greatest buildings in Car.ada: the the European masters ~ere building Supreme Court in Ottawa, l'Universite magnificent works (Lutyens, for in de Montreal, and his magnificent house stance), but their separation from at 1418 Pine Avenue West. Mr. Cormier European idealism doomed them to ob died in Montreal on New Year's day, scurity. 1980. Cormier was one of those architects. Well, if he was such a great architect, He was not simply a local proponent of !JJhy isn't he famous? foreign ideas, but a designer of works appropriate to Montreal's climate and When Cormier left Paris in 1919, he history. His buildings were inevitably abandoned a world of idealism for a left out of the histories because they pragmatic one . There was hardly any didn ' t conform to the European canon tradition of critical architectural of modern architecture. writing in Canada; Europe had a back ground of 400 years of written theory. But ... can he be really callet'! a ".md There was little important theoretical el>n" arochi tect? writing in Canada during the 20's and 30's; those decades in Europe saw the There is no question that the six years publication of the manifestoes of Grup Cormier spent at the Ecole des Beaux po Sette and the polemics of LeCorbu Arts, and the two years at Rome, in sier and Gropius (amongst many others). delibly imprinted the principles of Neither Cormier or any other Canadian classical architecture on his mind. In architect really participated in that all his buildings, symmetry and axial outburst of rhetoric. ity are fundamental; the orders appear on several. But symmetry is only the Now, in a culture such as ours, where best tool for organizing space, and language is the solvent of thought, an columns have for too long been used as architect who does not write is at a a test for antimodernism. severe disadvantage. If the critic is not given a convenient set of ideas on ~~ile in Paris, Cormier had become ac which to build his criticism, he does quainted with the designers who were n't criticize. Ernest Cormier thought later to organi:e the 1925 Exposition of himself primarily as a builder; he International des Arts Decoratifs. (It didn't write anything, and apparently was this exhibition which proclaimed cared little for rhetoric. ~hen the to the world the Art Deco style.) He RAre Journal published photographs of had worked w1th Pierre Patout on the the Pine Avenue house in 1Y32, th~ir interiors of an ocean liner as early most interesting comment was that the as 1912. (Patout \\'as later to be de house 1o1as "strict1y functional in char signer of the liner Normandie, whose acter." influence extented as far as Eaton's ninth-floor restaurant. ( For many, As a result, anyone attempting to study Deco '"as to symbolize the t\o.'entieth Cormier today is faced with a very century; its motifs are found in most Page 24 Ernest Cormier ClockwiSe from left: 1418 Pine Ave .W : Palars de .lJstiCe,Montreal; Ecole An thelme Verreau , Unrversite de McrrtreaJ; Saint -Ambrolse of Cormier's buildings. He had also studied and practiced eng ineering, and understood steel and concrete - those basic materials of modern architecture - to an extent that was impossible in the nineteenth century. Structur?.l clarity is usually the beginning of a Cormier design. Finally, he had experienced, at no very great distance, the Great War itself. It was this convulsion of history, more than anything P,lse, that divided the twentieth century from the rest of time. Cormier understood, as did every- The Fifth Column Page 25 one else, that a new era had begun, religious buildings and it recurs and that architecture, like everything throughout his career from St-Ambroise else, had to change. (1923) to the Basilian Seminary in To ronto (1950). The clearest demonstration of his mod ernity is to be found in north ~lontre The second theme can only be called al. There, on the same block (between Deco, and is marked by projecting en Chambord and de Normandville, just trance canopies and columns that are north of Beaubien), Cormier's Ecole rationali~ed to pure cylinders. These Anthelme Verreau (1930) confronts J.O. elements appear primarily during the Marchand's Ecole St-Ambroise (1927). late twenties, at Universite de Mont Marchand had studied at Paris some real (1924-32), the Ecole Anthelme twenty years before Cormier, but the Verreau (1930), and at 1418 Pine Ave world had changed during the interval. nue (1930-32) period. Marchand's school is of dark red brick and sits heavily on the ground. Cor Entrance and procession are always im mier' s is of his favourite yellow brick portant. The visitor approaches the and seems lighter and brighter because court houses by maje~tic stairs and of it. Marchand's building incorporates enters imposing halls through monumen massive stone arches to support the tal doors. In the schools, the grand apparently ponderous weight of the up hall becomes an assembly hall, but the per floors. Cormier' s finely-drawn hor sense of procession is still there. At izontal and vertical lines reflect the the Pine Avenue house, the v1s1tor structure behind and show that it's walks down a simple hall, gradually the concrete, and not the brick, that becoming aware of an approaching cross holds this building up. Marchand's axis. But nothing prepares him for the building could have been built in the stunning effect of that cross-axis: to nineteenth century; Cormier's could his left is a curved stair leading only have been built in the twentieth. down, all marble, glass and stainless steel. To the right are four polished What are the important elements of his marble columns; beyond them, centred architecture? in the gloriously sunlit, twenty-foot high studio is a polished marble fire Appropriateness is initially the most place, tall and noble against the ve striking aspect of Ernest Cormier's neered walls. oeuvre. There is never any attempt to force meaning on a building. If the And here, finally, is the key to Cor project is a commercial building on mier's greatness. His profound know Ste-Catherine Street, it stands unre ledge of architecture enabled him to marked until one notices the careful create monumental and timeless events brickwork and geometrically pure in out of the most basic elements of ar dustrial windows. If a court house is chitecture: stairs, columns, doors, to be built, polished marble, rare wood light. The four columns at the house - and bronze are lavishly used. simple cylinders of dark marble - make a simpleopening into a grandentrance, Two stylistic themes run through the evoking the most fundamental memories entire body of work. The first of these of ancient hypostyle halls and royal is a Byzantine motif, used earlier in processions. The fireplace, in its Montreal by Marchand ( Congregation turn, informs the visitor of the age Notre-Oame, Ste-Cather1ne Street at of Oeco, but behind that its hierar Atwater, 1906). This style was appar chial form and gleeming surface brings ently derived through the studies of back atavistic inages temples Egyptian the Beaux-Arts from the French archi and older, of ceremonies whose words tect Paul Abadic (Sacre-Coeur, Paris, are forgotten but whose meaning is in 1875).

Load more