{"id":249401,"date":"2025-10-30T05:07:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-30T05:07:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/249401\/"},"modified":"2025-10-30T05:07:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-30T05:07:07","slug":"new-book-looks-at-the-how-and-why-of-ontario-architecture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/249401\/","title":{"rendered":"New book looks at the how and why of Ontario architecture"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The cover of architectural historian Shannon Kyles\u2019s new book, The Story of Ontario Architecture: What We Built and Why We Built It.Shannon Kyles\/Shannon Kyles<\/p>\n

In 1978, an unusual BBC television show hit U.K. screens. Connections, hosted by science historian James Burke, would begin each episode with Mr. Burke uttering a seeming bizarre statement such as: \u201cIn this episode, I\u2019m going to show you how a group of French monks and their involvement with sheep rearing helped to give the modern world the computer.\u201d Then, he\u2019d connect the dots through history.<\/p>\n

Architectural historian Shannon Kyles\u2019s new book, The Story of Ontario Architecture: What We Built and Why We Built It, is rather like the architectural version of Mr. Burke\u2019s groundbreaking show. For instance, on pages 22 to 24 of the heavy, 380-page tome, she shows readers Maple Grove, a house at Upper Canada Village in Morrisburg, Ont. On top of a fence post sits a seemingly innocent urn decoration, but she whisks readers back to the rediscovery of Pompeii in the mid-1700s. She then posits that while in medieval times architectural beauty was \u201cprimarily reserved for the glory of God\u201d and \u201cmedieval man spent most of his life either immersed in relentless warfare of trying to escape plagues,\u201d the Renaissance era was about the \u201cenjoyment of life.\u201d <\/p>\n

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The Pompeian funeral urn at Maple Grove, Upper Canada Village, in Morrisburg, Ont.Shannon Kyles\/Shannon Kyles<\/p>\n

The Pompeian funeral urn and its role as a reminder that life is short and so people should enjoy themselves, \u201csifted through France during the 16th and 17th centuries,\u201d and arrived in England. \u201cIn the 18th century,\u201d she writes, \u201cRenaissance attitudes of humanism and the value of the individual were taken to \u2026 North America.\u201d <\/p>\n

Sitting down for coffee with Ms. Kyles last week, the affable, retired Mohawk College architectural history teacher explained her motivation.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of architecture books, I find, are so dry,\u201d she said while picking at a scone. \u201cAfter trying to teach students who are only vaguely interested \u2026 you have to get them engaged and you have to say, \u2018This is what these people were doing at the time.\u2019 In a proper Georgian home, you would not have a doorknob on the door because it\u2019s outside the range of possibilities that somebody would toddle on up the steps and open the door \u2013 you have to be received by either the butler or the head maid.\u201d<\/p>\n

Earlier that day, Ms. Kyles took me on a little walking tour to show me Georgians, and many other architectural styles, in downtown Toronto. I met her under the gargoyles at 299 Queen St. W., the former Wesley Building, a Methodist book publisher, built in 1913. Looking up, she said: \u201cMost people don\u2019t know that gargoyles are, in fact, functional \u2013 they take the water away from the building.\u201d <\/p>\n

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The former Wesley Building at 299 Queen St. W., built in 1913.Dave LeBlanc\/The Globe and Mail<\/p>\n

Admiring the terracotta cladding and the carvings of books and trefoils, Ms. Kyles explains that simply calling this building Gothic would be inaccurate. \u201cThere\u2019s loads of Gothic detailing, but it\u2019s a steel structure. So if it\u2019s Gothic and built as if it were the 1400s, then it\u2019s Gothic Revival, and if it\u2019s got a steel structure, then it\u2019s neo-Gothic.\u201d<\/p>\n

We walked next to Osgoode Hall. Standing in front of its Georgian fa\u00e7ade, we discussed engaged columns (no, not to be married, but partially buried in the wall) and symmetry. We reflected on how these proportions came from Vitruvius, and then by Alberti and Palladio, so they\u2019re the same in England, or South Africa, or Canada, and why non-native plants such as acanthus were carved by Canadians.<\/p>\n

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Osgoode Hall on Queen St. W.Dave LeBlanc\/The Globe and Mail<\/p>\n

\u201cHave you ever seen an acanthus shrub growing here?\u201d she laughs. \u201cAnd then [John] Ruskin and [Augustus] Pugin were saying, \u2018Why are we building this stuff?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Before heading to the Concourse Building, we stopped briefly at Old City Hall to discuss Henry Hobson Richardson (1838-1886) and his influence on Toronto architect Edward James Lennox (1854-1933).<\/p>\n

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The tile mosaic by J.E.H. MacDonald at the Concourse Building.Dave LeBlanc\/The Globe and Mail<\/p>\n

Under the sparkling tile mosaic by Group of Seven painter J.E.H. MacDonald at the Concourse Building (1928), Ms. Kyles gave me her take on the style: \u201cThis is so optimistic,\u201d she begins. \u201cArt Deco is the first step toward true democracy, where everyone has the same amount of money.\u201d <\/p>\n

And speaking of money, we both laugh when, on our way to Santiago Calatrava\u2019s installation at Brookfield Place, we pick out the carved, top-hatted businessman with his hand in the pocket of the factory worker at the former 1937 stock exchange. Under Calatrava\u2019s crisscrossing white metal limbs \u2013 which have always looked like trees to me \u2013 she explained that they are really groin vaults.<\/p>\n

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The former 1937 Toronto Stock Exchange, showing a businessman’s hand in a factory worker’s pocket.Dave LeBlanc\/The Globe and Mail<\/p>\n

After admiring the Hockey Hall of Fame (housed in the former 1885 Bank of Montreal building), we finished our tour admiring both the castlelike, Romanesque qualities of the 1876 St. Andrew\u2019s Church at King and Simcoe streets and Arthur Erickson\u2019s expressive Roy Thomson Hall (1982). Had we had all day, I\u2019d have asked to see an Indigenous long house (she features one on page 4) and then the swoopy, Jetsons-like Lord Lansdowne Public School (pg. 337) to understand how those architectural dots connect.<\/p>\n

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The 1876 St. Andrew\u2019s Church at King and Simcoe streets.Dave LeBlanc\/The Globe and Mail<\/p>\n

In addition to being an educator for more than three decades, Ms. Kyles began gathering the information that would become this book in 1999, for ontarioarchitecture.com<\/a>. The next year, she received a $10,000 grant to continue the work and purchased a then-expensive digital camera. Additions to the website \u2013 which now contains more than 4,200 photographs \u2013 continued until about 2016. After being rejected by publishers, Ms. Kyles decided to publish The Story of Ontario Architecture with her own money and, thankfully, sold 450 copies in the first six weeks.<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t surprise me, since I\u2019ve always thought the \u2018why\u2019 we build to be far more interesting than the \u2018how,\u2019 or, sometimes, the \u2018who.\u2019 \u201cIt\u2019s not that architects aren\u2019t important; they are,\u201d Ms. Kyles finishes. \u201cBut you can find that on the Internet. The book gives you context.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: The cover of architectural historian Shannon Kyles\u2019s new book, The Story of Ontario…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":249402,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[967,76,354,355,49,48,356,75,968],"class_list":["post-249401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-architourist","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-real-estate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=249401"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249401\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/249402"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=249401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=249401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=249401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}