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<\/a>Some of our modernism is not particularly beautiful and is actively forgotten for a reason, but there were also plenty of Victorian and Edwardian structures that weren\u2019t pretty or were poorly built that nobody lamented losing. Everybody forgets about the junk, like that false adage about antiques says: \u201cthey don\u2019t build them like they used to,\u201d a notion that requires overlooking how people threw out junk and only the good stuff survived. This is one reason we fail to recognize the modernist landscape that connects and defines so much of Canada: a fair amount of it isn\u2019t pretty and was built on the cheap, and simply hasn\u2019t been torn down or revitalized yet. One ugly, unfortunate building can be enough to obscure an entire area. More importantly, Canada\u2019s modernist heritage isn\u2019t talked about because it\u2019s in the teenage phase of its existence, awkward and unloved, the same phase that now-beloved Victorian and Edwardian buildings were in after the war, when nobody cared for the frilliness of those older styles and when the fashion of day was all-mod-cons and atomic age forward thinking.<\/p>\n
Fashion is fickle and destructive though. It was during the immediate decades after the war that we lost a lot of older, unfashionable buildings to the destructive forces of the modernist boom. A lot of the junk went, but so did many of the buildings that have us lamenting or scratching our heads, wondering how we could have ever torn them down. The destruction of the Van Horne mansion in downtown Montr\u00e9al for a modernist tower in 1973 was emblematic of this kind of push for removal, one that also included urban renewal schemes and expressway plans in many of our major cities, all of which resulted in organized resistance. In the Van Horne case, the \u201cSave Montr\u00e9al\u201d movement was born, while in Toronto a similar group coalesced around stopping the Spadina Expressway. These groups and others across the country may have had a particularly Canadian way of tempering the most destructive modernizing forces before too much was lost.<\/p>\n Graeme Stewart, a Toronto architect and modern heritage preservation activist says that the anti-modernist reaction has meant that there hasn\u2019t been much popular exploration and recognition of this aspect of Canadian cities, and what work on the subject does exist is paradoxically related to what modernism got wrong. Speaking about Toronto specifically, Stewart says that \u201cprior to the recent boom of writing about the city there is quite little, and what does exist is largely a result of the wonderful, yet anti-modern, reform movement. Not many books were written during the postwar boom as observations or retrospectives. The general history of Canadian architects books seem to focus on the big guys like Toronto Dominion Bank, and generally ignore the \u2018fabric\u2019 modern architecture like schools, housing, shops that really defined the era.\u201d<\/p>\n The recent boom Stewart speaks of is related to the growing modernist preservation movement in Toronto that the firm he works with, E.R.A. Architects,\u00a0 has helped lead, co-produceding the books Toronto Modern and Concrete Toronto<\/a> with Coach House Books. What these and other publications have done is sound a warning that modernism is at an age when it faces the same risk of becoming as unfashionable as the Victorians and Edwardians did in the decades after the war, when the risk of demolition was greatest. This isn\u2019t to say everything modern is great and worthy of a glossy spread in Canadian Architect<\/em>, but in recognizing how much this era defines our cities we can more honestly access what has worked and what hasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n With this in mind, casting an eye across the country, our modern urban fabric seems much more apparent, and those older downtown neighbourhoods, by comparison, seem a much smaller part of what the Canadian city looks like. Buildings built between the 1950s and \u201970s generally dominate the skylines. In Halifax, the historic waterfront is still there, but what folks from Dartmouth notice are the modernist office towers. Old Qu\u00e9bec City \u2014 save the Chateau Frontenac \u2014 is dwarfed by the buildings adjacent to the Plains of Abraham outside the walls, and the downtown is mostly modernist in nature. Similar skylines exist in Vancouver, Hamilton, Toronto, and other cities. Edmonton\u2019s North Saskatchewan River valley is overlooked by an incredible line of mid-rise apartment buildings, from the legislature to the end of Jasper Avenue, much like Central Park in New York.<\/p>\n Two buildings that house public utilities, built just a few years apart, represent the kind of pride felt during the optimistic modernist age, and can be thought of as modernist totems of sorts. In Montr\u00e9al, along what became Ren\u00e9 L\u00e9vesque Boulevard, the 1962 Hydro Qu\u00e9bec building rose a few blocks north of the old city, complete with its lightning bolt Q logo. In the fantastic book, The 60s: Montr\u00e9al Thinks Big<\/em>, published to accompany a 2004 exhibition of the same name at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the construction of the Hydro building was said to symbolize \u201cthe achievements of the state in the service of Qu\u00e9bec Society,\u201d a kind of concrete version of the Quiet Revolution. Perhaps with a bit less nationalism but equal amounts of pride, Vancouver\u2019s Electra Building opened in 1957 as home to BC Hydro (though now it\u2019s converted to residential). In both these buildings, the exploitation of national resources, a very big part of the traditional Canadian identity, is represented in a most central urban context, so a connection is made between the landscape and urban Canadian identities.<\/p>\n Two other notable modernist buildings have a connection to the traditional identity as well, this time in the realm of transportation. The CPR and the Last Spike are part of our founding mythology, so it makes sense that the second time Canada was bound together by air travel it manifested in an impressive, jet-age way. In Toronto, Aeroquay One was completed in 1964. Designed by preeminent Canadian modernist John B. Parkin, it was a terminal in the round where people could park in the middle, walk only a hundred metres and be at their gate. Also opened in 1964 was Winnipeg\u2019s airport terminal designed by GBR Architects. Both gems are sadly demolished due to the incompatibility of their jet-age elegance with today\u2019s mass transit requirements.<\/p>\n The construction of skyscrapers, along with massive events like Expo \u201967, are just one part of Canada\u2019s modernist landscape. So much of that everyday fabric Graeme Stewart talks about continues to be a living part of our cities. Across the country, major chunks of infrastructure \u2014 unglamorous roads and bridges, or sexy subway stations in Montr\u00e9al that, at times, match Expo \u201967 in capturing the spirit of the era \u2014 still help the country run. Many Canadians went to school in midcentury buildings with terrazzo floors, open concept rooms (often later divided into classrooms), and walls of windows. These schools can be found across the country, still in use and in varying states of care (vintage schools are at high risk of being lost, as heritage preservation is a low priority for boards of education).<\/p>\n The modernist era also saw\u00a0 tremendous growth in post secondary institutions across the country. Many universities and colleges feature some of the most avant-garde modernist designs in Canada. Older campuses got new buildings added while entire new universities like York, Simon Fraser, and Trent were created from scratch. Brutalist UQAM in downtown Montr\u00e9al was woven into the urban landscape. Architect Arthur Erickson\u2019s dramatic University Hall, set into the hills around the University of Lethbridge, is another connection between traditional images of Canadian landscape and new, modernist buildings. Another monumental Erickson work in Vancouver, the Law Courts, dominates the middle of the downtown peninsula like a human-made hill.<\/p>\n Modern city halls, libraries, apartment buildings, cul-du-sacs full of split-levels and ranch houses, community centres, churches, department stores, and entire underground cities in Toronto and Montreal plus a +15 elevated pathway system in Calgary \u2014 these elements add up to an overwhelming amount of modernist geography. Though often loathed for either planning mistakes or subsequent decline in care and maintenance, Canada\u2019s public housing stock is largely modernist, from individual buildings to entire neighbourhoods that include Lord Selkirk Park in Winnipeg, Habitations Jeanne-Mance in Montr\u00e9al, and Regent Park in Toronto (though this is currently being revitalized with entirely new buildings).<\/p>\n Some neighbourhoods in Canada blend modernism and prewar elements into charming and walkable areas. South of downtown Calgary, the railway corridor cuts just below skyscrapers beyond which is an old industrial warehouse district that has become, as these places often do, an entertainment and \u201ccreative class\u201d district mixed with apartment buildings from 10th to about 17th Avenues.<\/p>\n South of 17th Ave. is a remarkable swath of fairly dense residential housing that includes older homes and modernist (and newer) low-rise apartment buildings. Like Los Angeles, there is an unexpected leafy kind of thick urbanity here. Walking down a sidewalk, an older home from the 1920s could have a post-war modern low-rise apartment building as a next door neighbour.<\/p>\n In 2005, I was in Calgary for a week and became friendly with a Calgarian who whisked us in a minivan north across the Bow River to the Crescent Heights neigbourhood. Another nice mix of pre and postwar residential homes, our destination was a party in a modernist bungalow. We\u2019re taught to think these are homes to nuclear families, but inside there were some twenty-something professionals living communally, surrounded by expensive home entertainment electronics: a $20,000 video camera, the first domestic plasma TV I had ever seen, and other luxury toys for adults. Our host whispered \u201coil money,\u201d which seemed to explain everything. The ability of modern homes to adapt to different modes of living, just as prewar houses do, is evidence that mixed living patterns can be replicated in modern neighbourhoods, too.<\/p>\n As Robert M. Stamp writes in his book Suburban Modern: Postwar Dreams in Calgary<\/em>, the city embraced modernism well after WWII. They redefined it and built residential architecture accordingly: \u201cThey moved modernism out of the studios of the avant-garde producers and into the hands (and hearts) of the middle-class consumers, out of downtown art salons and design studios and onto the streets and into the suburbs [\u2026 ]and redefined modernism to include modern homes in modern suburbs, with modern furniture and modern appliances and modern cars. For postwar Calgarians, modernism meant personal betterment, achieving all those material gains that had been delayed or denied by 15 years of depression and war.\u201d Years later, it remains a solid and defining part of Calgary.<\/p>\n This is how we live as Canadians. We are all touched in one way or another by modernism, where we live, play, or conduct business. Is there another element in Canadian cities that is so common? Focusing on our shared modern experience may be a start in uniting the country around its similar urbanity, rather than focusing on the plague of traditional regional divisions.<\/p>\n This article appears in the Spring 2013 issue of Spacing (national edition)<\/em><\/p>\n photos by Brian Carson<\/a> (Habitat 67 in Montreal), Mark Hanoi (Riverdale Hospital), Adam Fagen<\/a> (Hydro Quebec), Steve Scrambler <\/a>(University of Lethbridge)<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"![\"The](\"http:\/\/spacing.ca\/national\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/MOD-halfround-new-600x450.jpg\")
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<\/a>Shawn Micallef is a senior editor at Spacing. He is the author of Stroll<\/a> and Full Frontal TO, both published by Coach House Books and writes a weekly column for The Toronto Star<\/em><\/p>\n