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You can be forgiven if you\u2019ve never heard of the Canadian Museum of Architecture.<\/p>\n
Not to be confused with the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal \u2013 the scholarly behemoth founded by Phyllis Lambert in 1979 \u2013 the CMA is so new to the scene, its first exhibit, Architecture in Three Dimensions at Todmorden Mills (67 Pottery Rd.) has been put on display at the quaint, tucked-into-the-trees city-owned museum.<\/p>\n
The show, which closes on August 24, 2025, takes visitors on an architectural world tour utilizing models of various scales, beginning with a 1:200 version of the Roman aqueduct in N\u00eemes, France. But rather than showing it as it looks today, it depicts tiny workers chipping away at limestone blocks, assembled scaffolding, ladders, and hand winches\/rope pulleys as the bridge rose in the first century. <\/p>\n
\u201cSo, the arches here, those are printed in resin,\u201d says CMA model-builder Jo Vincent-Evans. \u201cThese brown wood pieces and latticework was all printed in plastic and then repainted to look like wood; the landscape is developed by us \u2026 these are real rocks.\u201d<\/p>\n
While interesting for its meticulous detail, it\u2019s also a wise choice to begin a conversation about the importance of architecture, which is one of the CMA\u2019s mandates. <\/p>\n
This is confirmed with the next model, which takes a hypothetical southern Ontario landscape and presents it in two ways: untouched, and how (European) settlement\/industrialization creates change, usually negative, vis-\u00e0-vis the creation of factories that produce greenhouse gases, the redirection of (now polluted) waterways, farm monoculture, fragmentation of the landscape and ecosystem loss due to suburbia, and so forth.<\/p>\n
Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n Toronto City Hall, from above.Dave LeBlanc\/The Globe and Mail<\/p>\n The next model challenges gallery-goers to consider the life cycle of a typical 10-storey condominium building, from the manufacture of its various components (much of it concrete), its useful life, all the way to demolition or refurbishment. \u201cThe building exists for [an average of] about 57 years,\u201d says Ms. Vincent-Evans. \u201cAnd each of these [cycles] has a small graph explaining how much energy is used \u2026 the vast majority is used during the building\u2019s operation.\u201d<\/p>\n To avoid becoming too preachy, the exhibit takes a detour to the evolution of wood in construction via brush huts near the Sea of Galilee from 23,000 years ago\u2013which may or may not be the beginning of architecture\u2013to the hammerbeam ceiling at Westminster Hall (England, 1393) and, finally, to today\u2019s engineered wood products. The same is done for brick, tracing the oldest mudbricks from 11,000 BCE in T\u00fcrkiye to St. Anne\u2019s Church in Lithuania (1500) and Grundtvig\u2019s Church in Denmark (1940). Stone\u2019s evolution is depicted as well, with a model of the Lower Temple of Unas in Egypt and a fun little row of tiny columns to help gallery-goers identify the differences between Doric, Ionic, the Roman versions, and the thin cast iron columns that held up Victorian buildings.<\/p>\n To keep folks guessing (and learning), there are models of typical saltbox houses, the rowhouses of St. John\u2019s, Nfld. Known as \u201cJellybean row,\u201d the sustainably-overachieving Bullitt Center in Seattle (2013), and Toronto City Hall (1965) and Corbusier\u2019s Notre-Dame du Haut (1955) to represent Modernism. <\/p>\n The exhibit also deals with the \u2018failure\u2019 of Modernism by discussing the infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in St. Louis, which was so hated it was demolished in 1976 after only 21 years of service. There is also the Comfort for All model, a transparent tower showing the guts of a typical high-rise building: plumbing, electrical, chillers, boilers, sprinkler systems, natural gas lines, and wastewater handling.<\/p>\n There are 18 models on display, but these, says Ms. Vincent-Evans, represent \u201cjust a taste\u201d of what the CMA hopes to exhibit when they achieve their ultimate goal of a permanent bricks-and-mortar location; with limited funding and a small staff, however, when the CMA will be able to welcome visitors year-round is anyone\u2019s guess. <\/p>\n