Small Modernisms: Reassessing Architecture and Urban Life in Postwar in Canada
| Where: Carleton Dominion-Chalmers Centre, 355 Cooper Street, Ottawa |
| When: May 12-13, 2022 |
| Organizers: Michael Windover (Carleton University) & Dustin Valen (McGill University) |
What is “Small Modernisms”?
“Small Modernisms” is a two-day symposium that brings together students, scholars, and community members from across the country to reflect on the role of the built environment in shaping postwar society in Canada. The event combines critical and timely scholarship with architectural walking tours that together challenge the dominant discourse of postwar reconstruction reproduced in architectural historiography. Through an emphasis on the small-scale and intimate, the symposium invites readings of Canada’s postwar built environment that pluralize its discourse, and foregrounds the complexities of social and spatial practices in an era of fast-paced urban and suburban change. In so doing, it aims to shed light on under-represented actors, sites, and design theories during the pivotal period from roughly 1945 to 1980.
Learn about Canada’s post-war built environment from scholars:
The symposium features paper presentations by thirteen researchers organized into three, thematic sessions
Session 1: “Rural Modernities and the Urban Periphery.”
Session 2: “Gender, Identity, and Loss in the Modern City.”
Session 3: “Activist Spaces and Participatory Modernisms.”
Explore Ottawa’s architectural history on our walking tours:
Following the paper sessions both days, participants will embark on guided walking tours of the Carleton Dominion-Chalmers Centre and surrounding city. Organized in collaboration with the Village Legacy Project and People’s History Walking Tour of Ottawa, these tours are designed to revise our understanding of modern architecture and urbanization by highlighting the complexities of class, gender, and racial politics in postwar Canadian society. Together with the paper sessions, they invite reflections on the methodologies, historiography, and pedagogies that comprise our understanding of modern architecture and urban life in postwar Canada and beyond.