Architecture plays a powerful role in nation building. Buildings and monuments not only constitute the built fabric of society, they reflect the intersection of culture, politics, economics, and aesthetics in distinct social settings and distinct times. From first contact to the postmodern city, this anthology traces the interaction between culture and politics as reflected in Canadian architecture and the infrastructure of ordinary life. Whether focusing on the construction of Parliament or exploring the ideas of Marshall McLuhan and Arthur Erickson, these highly original essays move beyond considerations of authorship and style to address cultural politics and insights from race and gender studies and from postcolonial and spatial theory.

Canada is a country of massive size, of diverse geographical features and an equally diverse population—all features that are magnificently reflected in its architecture. In this book, Rhodri Windsor Liscombe and Michelangelo Sabatino offer a richly informative history of Canadian architecture that celebrates and explores the country’s many contributions to the spread of architectural modernity in the Americas. A distinct Canadian design attitude coalesced during the twentieth century, one informed by a liberal, hybrid, and pragmatic mindset intent less upon the dogma of architectural language and more on thinking about the formation of inclusive spaces and places. Taking a fresh perspective on design production, they map the unfolding of architectural modernity across the country, from the completion of the transcontinental railway in the late 1880s through to the present. Along the way they discuss architecture within the broader contexts of political, industrial, and sociocultural evolution; the urban-suburban expansion; and new building technologies. Examining the works of architects and firms such as ARCOP, Eric Arthur, Ernest Cormier, Brigitte Shim, and Howard Sutcliffe, this book brings Canadian architecture chronologically and thematically to life.

Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (RAIC) President's Medal Award (multi-media representation of architecture). Canada's most distinguished architectural critics and scholars offer fresh insights into the country's unique modern and contemporary architecture. Beginning with the nation's centennial and Expo 67 in Montreal, this fifty-year retrospective covers the defining of national institutions and movements: • How Canadian architects interpreted major external trends • Regional and indigenous architectural tendencies • The influence of architects in Canada's three largest cities: Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver Co-published with Canadian Architect, this comprehensive reference book is extensively illustrated and includes fifteen specially commissioned essays.

In this monumental, two-volume set--the first comprehensive study of Canadian architecture--Harold Kalman presents a rich panorama, treating the vast range of Canadian building, from the native peoples and first settlers to the recent past to the present day. He describes the country's architectural history in a lucid and engaging narrative, placing the buildings firmly in a social and cultural context to illuminate distinct characteristics of Canadian architects and architecture. Lavishly illustrated with over eight hundred black and white drawings and photographs, this work will be an essential reference for anyone interested in architectural history.

"Drawing on the vast archival resources of its Architecture and Design Collection, the UCSB Art, Design & Architecture Museum (University of California, Santa Barbara) presents an assessment of 50 years of design by Barton Myers (b. 1934), beginning with his work in the Toronto firm A.J. Diamond and Barton Myers (1967-1975) to his own offices in Toronto and Los Angeles, Barton Myers Associates (1975-present). Myers's strongest architectural ideas come out of the planning strategies of his early neighborhood activism in 1970s Toronto, his grounding in history, and his training in the classical traditions of site and space planning. Barton Myers is an avowed urbanist--a self-described radical in his early advocacy of old-fashioned qualities like density, mixed-use of new and re-purposed materials, and contextual planning in the late 1960s when that fundamentally conservative position was considered counter-culture. Myers' urban manifesto was codified in "Vacant Lottery," the title of the Design Quarterly issue co-edited by Myers and Canadian architect and educator George Baird in 1978 and which led to a renewal of interest in urban planning and offered a strategy for increasing population densities within cities while preserving the existing residential fabric. The term lived on long past the journal's circulation cycle as both an urban infill strategy and an acknowledgment of the ceding of city planning responsibility to the "lottery" of private developers. Myers's design practice has thus always been a social justice practice as well. Myers is also a brilliant designer of residential houses that take advantage of local landscape contexts and adaptive reuse of building materials, including steel and glass. Five essays - on urban planning, civic structures, reuse of historic buildings, single- and multi-family housing, and theaters - reinforce Myers's commitment to urbanism and reveal his flexibility with modes of modernism. Natalie Shivers introduces the early planning work in Toronto and traces the "vacant lottery" idea of neighborhood infill to the influential Grand Avenue project in Los Angeles. Howard Shubert examines the architectural and planning strategies, and political complexities, of several civic structures in Canada and the United States. Luis Hoyos explores Myers's additions and adaptations to historic buildings in diverse urban contexts. Lauren Bricker focuses on the use of steel and other industrial materials in Myers's houses and analyses the neighborhood-based designs of his multi-family housing. Charles Oakley describes the technical innovations, site planning, and historical underpinnings of Myers's theaters and performance complexes."