Or Empires Within, Empires Without
Yes, I realize the title sounds like the name of a lacrosse team (but it’s only to insure that my compatriots read this.) Nevertheless…
A summer ago, I spent a few days in Toronto giving a little talk at IdeaCity and shooting a television program. Being in Toronto was akin to going back to a place one has never been before, one of those reassuring and slightly troubling moments where you realize that (of course) the superficiality of familiarity is enough to enhance any strange city, as long as you have some tenuous link (in this case, the entire population fiddling with their BlackBerries while walking.) So, in a way, back in a Canada to which I’d never been. Which, as it turns out, was very a propos…
In Queen’s Park*, on the way from the hotel farther downtown towards the Royal Ontario Museum, stand the Ontario Parliament Buildings. My hurried strides, and the most promising-looking shortcut on my free city map, carried me past there. Something about them was so unsettling, otherworldly and fascinating that I returned and spent two afternoons in their company.
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A bit of background to prime the canvas:
Dates and numbers: The Confederation of the Dominion of Canada was proclaimed on July 1, 1867. The new building on Parliament Hill in Ottawa became the Federal seat of government and Toronto was named the capital of the province of Ontario.
In April 1880, it was announced that a competition would be held for architects to design a new provincial legislative building. No one who entered the competition could stay below the prescribed cost of $500,000. 1885, The Legislature approved a budget of $750,000 for the new legislative building project submitted by an American architect, Richard A. Waite. Construction of the Queen’s Park building commenced in 1886.
The Legislative Building was inaugurated on April 4th, 1893, after six years and 1.4 million dollars consecrated to its construction. An enthusiastic crowd of 20,000 gathered for the ceremony.
The architect in charge of the project, Richard Alfred Waite, was born in England in 1848. The Waite family emigrated to the U. S. in 1856 where Richard was put into apprenticeship, forgoing formal schooling. He trained as a mechanical engineer under John Ericsson, (the inventor of the ironclad Monitor) and worked for an architectural firm in New York. He moved back to Buffalo and established himself in 1871.
Waite was the first American architect to be commissioned by the Canadian Government. American architecture was all the rage at the time, and dreams of Boston elegance north of 49°40. Besides the legislative building in Toronto, he also designed the Grand Trunk Office in Montreal and the Canadian Life Insurance Buildings in Toronto and Hamilton.
The Ontario Parliament was one of the largest public buildings on the North American continent at the time. It immediately created a fair stir of controversy: why hadn’t a Canadian architect been chosen, why wasn’t it in a “Canadian” spirit? (whatever that might have been considered to be at the time, something more identifiably British, one would assume.) Why was it in “Richardsonian Romanesque”?
Henry Hobson Richardson was born in Louisiana in 1838. After graduating from Harvard, he went to Paris to study, only the second American to enroll in the Beaux-Arts de Paris.. The Civil War briefly postponed his return to America (friends in the North, family in the South), and he eventually established himself in New York in 1865. He died in 1886. Frank Lloyd Wright had just built his first house. Architecture in America (and the rest of the world) was about to leap headlong into a new era of glass, concrete and steel. The Wainright Building would be inaugurated a few years later, followed by New York’s Flatiron, heralding a “folie des hauteurs” not seen since the age of the Gothic cathedral.
Back to Toronto. Hobson had obviously caught some serious glimpses of the Pre-Raphaelites, Morris without a doubt, and must have fallen enamoured of Romanesque art in southern France (far worse things have happened to people; it’s a contagious bug to be sure.) His work bears the stamp of the proportions and design elements of Romanesque northamericanized, though he goes rather deeper than many (and numerous) neo-Gothicists of the time who plastered pilasters and scribbled in triforiums on structures largely less imaginative, rather like felt-tipping in black eyebrows and lipstick on portraits. At any rate, he left his mark.
As did Waite, who, though classified perhaps in a genus to which he does not wholly belong, took his Old-World élan, spiced with a dash of Celtic Revival, from the 12th century via New York and Buffalo, and turned it into stone in Toronto.
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Now, Rinascimento is hardly a new face in town. Neo-thises and Neo-thats have been the fare of millennia, though the Italians were of course the first to put a name on it, simultaneously inventing and consecrating the notion of a return to “classical” architecture and the establishment in rusticated stone of an ideal golden age. (All those Roman and Greek ruins, another easy bug to catch.) Then, around 500 years later and hard on the heels of Neo-Classicism, which had eagerly crushed Rococco as much for political reasons as those, more prosaic, of taste: Gothic Revival, Neo-Byzantine, Egyptian Revival, Neo-Grec, Chateauesque, Neo-Classic (again): Adam and Empire, Tudorbethan (or Mock Tudor if you prefer, which sounds like a style Lewis Carroll would contrive), Jacobethan, Queen Anne and Shingle Styles, Mayan, Moorish, Mediterranean and Mission Revivals, American and Dutch and Spanish Colonial and many more – all this in the century spanning 1840 to 1940, it’s enough to make one’s head spin. One wonders what critics of Waite meant when they said the style was “too American”. Fair enough, but WHICH?
But, back to Toronto. That first coat is dry, time to try to sketch things out. There was precious little information to be had at the information desk. “Do you know if architectural renderings from the construction exist?” “I don’t know sir.” “Can I find out information about the sculptors?” “I don’t think so sir.” “Do you have any literature on Waite?” “No sir.” “Is it possible to visit the upper floors?” “No sir.” (No, I didn’t suggest the sign be changed to “Noninformation Desk” but I did supply a lengthy explanation to the security guard who took a brief but keen interest in me on my third trip around the building.)
When the government decided it needed a parliament in 1880, it must have been seen as a golden opportunity for Kivas Tully, Ottawa’s architect and engineer of the Department of Public Works of Ontario. Tully submitted two projects, one in a Neo-Gothic style reminiscent of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa and another in a mix of Second Empire and Classical styles. The government decided to put the project up for competition. Tully was confined to an advisory role in the proceedings. Sixteen architects submitted projects in the first round, half a dozen were invited to participate in a second. The (only) two Canadian competitors (a little backstage partisanship, perhaps) were invited to refine their proposals – both came in seriously over the allotted budget. The government let the whole affair sit for three years, then retained Richard Waite, who had been judge in the initial round, to review the two projects. Waite was chairman of the committee responsible for selecting an architect. He selected himself. Tully must have suppressed serious heartburn at this turn of events, but frankly, one grim grey Neo-Gothic parliament is plenty for any province, and Second Empire hasn’t anything more to recommend it than its predecessor.
Waite went for a rather warmer touch. The pink sandstone came from Fleming and Logan Stone Quarries, some 30 miles from Toronto in Credit Valley. And a good deal of it too. The building “emphasizes clear strong picturesque massing, round-headed “Romanesque” arches, often springing from clusters of short squat columns, recessed entrances, richly varied rustication, boldly blank stretches of walling contrasting with bands of windows, and cylindrical towers with conical caps embedded in the walling”. Nicholas Pevsner (“A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture. Nearly everything that encloses space on a scale sufficient for a human being to move in is a building; the term architecture applies only to buildings designed with a view to aesthetic appeal.”) has argued that it constitutes a type of break from naive historicism and is therefore “quasi proto-modern”. “Quasi proto-modern”? In other words “Pretty close but not quite almost”? Or perhaps “pseudo post-traditional”? And what is “naive historicism”? (Or the implied counterpart: “savvy historicism”…) Oh well, no matter.
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“Strong picturesque massing”, though, without a doubt. But what’s more, there is a paynim element even in the proportions of his work. Taking architectural elements from the ecclesiastical to the secular realm means dismissing any notions of faith in favour of some form of spirituality , the latter of course having a rather wider range to roam in search of inspiration. (Or at very least, in favour of some form of morality, though thankfully, apophthegms are still considered more appropriate for inside decoration than out.) It is a hybrid, a medley of Romaneque Revisted and Regular Secularized, of Celticism and Canadiana, a sort of provincial Valhalla, an Ontario Heorot. Whatever it is, it does not belong – it belongs in some fantasy world. Or perhaps more accurately, it belongs on the marches, on the frontier. It embodies those foreshortenings of frontiers geographical, jugglings of borders idealogical, juxtapositions of culture and individual yearnings and endeavours, all those places where things that do not normally abut are suddenly juxtaposed.
While it’s a hazardous exercise to define the aesthetic history of a land based on bits and pieces of arbitrarily chosen architecture, it’s exactly what we do to define lost civilzations, although by necessity we leave the role of arbiter to time and happenstance, then analyse and preserve the scraps. Only when faced with choice do we tend to don the robes of arbiter elegantiae. It seems to me even our recent past is better defined by those examples that escape easy definition and the categorization of style. They are the aleatory touchstones of the sublime ache that drives much artisitic endeavour. An occasional and serendipitous foehn never hurts in a land where culture is an affair of sub-polar earnestness. On such chance winds, blendings of circumstance and individuality, so much depends.
In 1909, on the afternoon of September 1st, tinsmiths who were repairing the galvanized roof of the west wing accidentally started a fire that destroyed the west wing interior, including the legislative library. The buidling was repaired, a North Wing added by 1912, and another chunk tacked on in the ‘30’s. The style is resolutely more “Canadian”, and alas wholly conventional – more beavers, moose and maple leaves, less inspiration.
The fire that destroyed the library may have also burned the plans and drawings of the buildings. No renderings of the sculptures are left, locating the names of the sculptors would mean scouring dusty archives and out-of-print books (I asked), hardly within the scope of a web site newsletter. It’s a shame, it would have been a treasure to share – a crowd of masons and sculptors posing atop scaffolding for a daguerrotype, almost as good in terms of Canada’s short history as a snapshot of masons taking a break while building Notre-Dame de Paris.
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*Queen’s Park is one of those places that is “of interest”, generally meaning that the public relations department is hard-pressed to distribute superlatives or meaningful statistics. The many statues are unremarkable, with the exception of the Northwest Rebellion Monument, created in 1895
by Walter Allward. Bronze on granite base, it has a lyrical and esoteric air that suits Canadian history.
✝Waite died in 1911. Perhaps his most meritous claim to fame might be that he hired Louise Blanchard Bethune as a draftsman for a couple of years, until 1881. Louise Bethune was the FIRST American woman to work as a professional architect. She was also apparently a strong-headed female, as you would have had to be in those days to make your way in a world of condescending males. In 1891, she refused to compete for the design of the Woman’s Building at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Male architects were paid $10,000 to design exposition buildings, but women had to compete for the honor. Those who won would receive a $1,000 prize (the also-rans likely a hearty handshake – ha ha ha jolly good for a woman, eh? – or not even that). In 1888, Louise Bethune became the first female associate of the American Institute of Architects and a member the following year. She died in 1913.
HERO FOR A DAY
Well, for a page for a month anyway…
Mélanie Delon is a French illustrator whose work appears regularly in ImagineFX.
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AMAZON ASSOCIATES
On an unabashedly commercial note, I’ve put up links to amazons far and wide – the UK, the USA, Canada, France and Germany, for pretty much everything that I can find where a picture of mine can be used as an excuse to indulge in on-line purchases. Naturally, if you go to amazon via the link and spend tons of hard-earned money best kept for something else if only you had adequate self-restraint, not only can my conscience deal with it, but I even get a minuscule percentage, which may allow me to go to amazon and spend tons of hard-earned… you get the picture.
As Erasmus said: “If I have a little money I buy books; and if any is left, I buy food and clothes.”
Direct from Amazon
