The two-day symposium features paper presentations by twelve researchers, organized into three, thematic sessions: Session 1: “Rural Modernities and the Urban Periphery,” Session 2:“Gender, Identity, and Loss in the Modern City,” and Session 3:“Activist Spaces and Participatory Modernisms.”
Browse the directory below, and click on the names of each scholar to view their abstracts.
Presenter Directory
Paper Session 1: Rural Modernities and the Urban Periphery
Jan Hadlaw (York University) & Ben Bradley (University of Northern British Columbia)
Paper title: “Fruit Stand Ahead: Vernacular Commercial Architecture as Rural Modernism”
Family-built, owned, and operated roadside fruit stands have been a signature feature of BC’s southern Interior landscape for more than half a century. From a handful (at most) in 1950, fruit stands proliferated along the region’s major roads so that by 1960 there were more than 350 in operation. With their diverse forms and colourful hand-painted signage, fruit stands had an anti-modern appeal, and some operators cultivated this image. Yet as this presentation shows, fruit stands in BC were modern economic phenomenon, linked to the province’s highway modernization program and its complex new regime of agricultural marketing. Surveying historical and contemporary examples of fruit stand operations, this presentation traces the emergence, evolution, and persistence of this familiar yet often-overlooked form of vernacular roadside architecture.
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Hilary Grant (Carleton University)
Paper title: “Remembrance and Reclamation: The Fisherman’s Memorial Room, Lunenburg, Nova Scotia”
The Town of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, is simultaneously peripheral to progress and thoroughly modern. Lunenburg’s founding is inseparable from colonialism, capitalism, and industrialization. Yet, Lunenburg is also heavily folklorized, positioned as outside modernity. This paradox is evident in the Fishermen’s Memorial Room (FMR), created by local marine artist Joseph Purcell and his wife Tela in 1959. This paper will explore the contrast between the FMR and the annual Nova Scotia Fisheries Exhibition, of which it was a part. While the Fisheries Exhibition focused on technological progress, the Memorial room commemorated local fishermen lost at sea. The Purcells used familiar religious and nautical themes, alongside handcraft and reclaimed objects, to create a space out of step with modernity’s severing of past, present, and future.
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David Monteyne (University of Calgary)
Paper title: “Blueprints for Survival: Canada Faces the Nuclear Threat in the Early Cold War”
Under the imagined threat of nuclear war, Canadians looked to civil defence planners to provide advice about how to find safety in their built environments. With the development of the hydrogen bomb after 1953, Canada made big plans to evacuate entire cities when an attack was imminent, with warnings coming from small radar stations across the wide expanses of northern Canada. Once it was realized that evacuation would be both impossible and futile, civil defence planners urged Canadians to build family shelters: the smallest possible space in response to the biggest possible threat. This research compares representative “blueprints” for Cold War survival, from radomes and remote living conditions on the DEW line to the architectural plans for the standard family fallout shelter distributed by the federal government after 1960. By recourse to small architectures distributed across its vast suburban and subarctic spaces, Canada could endure the threat of nuclear war.
Paper Session 2: Gender, Identity, and Loss in the Modern City
Tanya Southcott (McGill University)
Paper title: “Photography and the Transforming Post-war Landscape of Montreal”
This project explores photography as a mode of architectural investigation in Montreal during the 1960s and 1970s that prompted a more critical view of the social consequences of the city’s rapid transformation. By imaging the shifting physical and socio-political terrain of the post-war urban landscape, photographers engaged in critical responses to urban redevelopment and renewal practices, but they also helped to bind these discussions to broader social, political, and cultural questioning. This project considers affinities between urban activism and the movement towards women’s liberation that are revealed through the photographic record of this time. It looks specifically to the work of different women who used photography as both social and spatial practice and an opportunity to renegotiate their place in a society and a city under transformation.
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Cynthia Hammond (Concordia University)
Paper title: “La ville extraordinaire: Memories of Urban Change and Diversity in Montreal”
Janina Gosseye asserts that “the stories that people tell about… buildings can provide different, more intimate insights.” What might diverse, older residents teach us about how the city has transformed over time? Through a SSHRC Partnership Development project, I am gathering “spatial stories”: older Montrealers’ accounts of different neighbourhoods prior to and during the major public infrastructure projects and sweeping demolitions of the 1960s and 70s. I am also asking participants how they believe their particular community has shaped the city over time. Testimonies gathered to date with Haitian and Filipino community members reflect the city’s rich immigrant history, while interviews with older sex workers and urban activists reveal spatial stories of change and resistance. My paper will highlight how personal narratives entwine with the spaces of the city, and how the intimate geography of such narratives can illuminate the city as a whole.
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Jeffrey Thornsteinson (University of Manitoba)
Paper title: “The Architecture of Decentralization: Big Dreams for Small Cities”
From 1976-80 the federal government executed a new policy known as decentralization, relocating units out of the National Capital Region and into smaller cities. This program brought federal jobs to regions suffering from low employment in the resource and industrial sectors. Reflecting a changing workforce, a key aim was creating jobs for women. To entice this new labour market, Public Works Canada sought to reimagine its approach to office building design, outlining the need for an abundance of intimate lounge and dining spaces and connections to the local environment. The buildings that resulted from this program pursued these strategies in unique ways, translated by an array of local architects. Part of a larger effort to deepen national unity and regional equality in a time of economic and political tension, “big fish in small ponds” were created to remake the physical and employment landscapes of small cities from coast to coast.
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Olivier Vallerand (Université de Montréal)
Paper title: “Once upon a Time: Unearthing Stories about Spaces used by LGBTQ People”
Urban and cultural transformations in Montreal in the 1960s have often been linked to the international vision brought by Expo 67. However, at a local level, changes were already happening, as made visible for example in the social landscapes grounding Michel Tremblay’s theater, depicting both working-class neighbourhood life and red-light district nightlife, including representations of the experience of LGBTQ people. One of the challenges associated with LGBTQ heritage is the lack of physical traces left of the often ephemeral spaces that have anchored communities. This paper explores how “non-architectural” artefacts such as the movie “Il était une fois dans l’est” (1973)—a film adaptation of the early plays of Tremblay—offer an opportunity to get a glimpse into some of these spaces and to understand how the postwar representations of interior and urban spaces used by LGBTQ people have been both ignored in major discourses and mythologized in LGBTQ communities.
Paper Session 3: Activist Spaces and Participatory Modernisms
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Leslie Korrick (York University)
Paper title: “Thinking Big, Building Small: The Overland Drive Public School Adventure Playground”
The adventure playground has been called “the most radical product of the postwar investment in play.” In Toronto, the earliest such playground emerged during 1968 at Overland Drive Public School in the modernist suburb of Don Mills. A project of the local Home and School Association in collaboration with designer Thomas Lamb on a shoestring budget, Overland’s adventure playground took inspiration from the Children’s Creative Play Centre at Expo 67 by landscape architect Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, contemporary adventure playgrounds in New York, and sculptor Joseph Brown’s play equipment. It was also conceptually ambitious, deliberately aimed at developing in children a sense of collective responsibility alongside their budding individualism and minimizing divisions between ethnicities and nationalities. By thinking big but building small, at child’s scale, the playground’s proponents underlined the project’s grassroots origins, made it affordable, and manifested a utopian imaginary born in the afterglow of Canada’s centennial.
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George Kapelos (Toronto Metropolitan University [formerly Ryerson University])
Paper title: “The Britannia Community Services Centre: Testing the language of Small”
In 1958, Canadian Architect editor James Murray challenged architects to concern themselves with the intimate and personal aspects of living in cities, remember the individual and build for human scale and interpersonal relationships. The Britannia Community Services Centre, a small, neighbourhood project initiated in 1967, tested these ideas. Located in a multi-ethnic Vancouver district, the Centre arose from local needs. Britannia Architects, led by a member of Christopher Alexander’s Center for Environmental Structure, initiated the pilot project. Working with the community and associated with architects Downs Archambault, they created a place that embedded principles of Alexander’s “Pattern Language.” In recognizing the needs of neighbourhood residents for diverse services, leisure activities and recreation, the Centre is an exemplar of a culturally-responsive humane modernity. Conceived in the 1960s, the Centre represents an evolving modern architecture that was democratically conceived, well designed, and in tune with the daily life of Canadians.
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Sara Stevens (University of British Columbia)
Paper title: “Vancouver’s Local Urban Renewal: Freeways, Chinatown, and Redevelopment”
This paper studies how Vancouver, famous for never having built the extensive freeway networks of other metropolises, nonetheless committed racial injustices typical of urban renewal. The modest areas demolished in the 1960s for proposed highway construction included the only Black neighborhood and the edges of Vancouver’s Chinatown. While the Black neighborhood was never reconstituted, the story of Mau Dan Gardens Cooperative housing tells a different tale for Chinatown. Designed by local architect Joe Y. Wai and opened in 1981, the low-rise housing intended to promote strong community ties among residents. It represents a deeply local approach to development and, under the influence of local and international examples, the promise of multi-family housing at the time. This paper will connect urban renewal, new cooperative multi-family housing, and the city’s trajectory (favoring glass condo towers) that followed. What do these different eras of development tell us about Canadian cities and architecture?
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Trina Cooper-Bolam (Concordia University)
Paper title: “Storied Transformations: Decolonizing Inherited Space through Memorial Performance”
Responding to the priorities of the Survivors of the Shingwauk Indian Residential School, “Storied Transformations: Decolonizing Inherited Space through Memorial Performance” is a research program of collaborative transdisciplinary investigation of the evidentiary landscape of the Shingwauk Indian Industrial and Residential Schools using methods of praxiological museology and research-creation, to support Survivor-driven, technologically-enhanced, in situ interpretation, memorialization, and Indigenous place-(re)making. Intertwined with Survivor objectives to culturally and spiritually remediate this site of trauma and reclaim it as a space for “reconciliation through education,” the museology-oriented research objectives of “Storied Transformations,” are critical, pedagogical, and methodological. A project of spatial justice, “Storied Transformations” will contribute to: 1) Survivor-led recovery, reclamation, and mobilization of a historical site via research-creation works employing immersive virtual reality storytelling technologies, 2) new critical museological praxis and curatorial pedagogies for addressing difficult histories, and 3) the development of reciprocal Indigenous/settler research networks and relationships.