A church that looks like a grain silo. A spherical building that inspired the discovery of a molecule. Apartments arranged in a pyramid. These are some of the 11 architectural wonders you shouldn’t miss in Canada.
Earlier versions of the descriptions of these buildings first appeared in 1001 Buildings You Must See Before You Die, edited by Mark Irving (2016). Writers’ names appear in parentheses.
St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church
St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church in Red Deer, Alberta, is widely known as the building that established Canadian-born architect Douglas Cardinal’s career. The church was on the outskirts of Red Deer when it was built in 1968, but it has long since been enveloped by suburban sprawl. The change in landscape notwithstanding, the church’s forms are clearly derived from the rolling hills of central Alberta. This design language evolved not as a sculptural pretension but as a pre-design process that has come to epitomize an architect assuredly linking his buildings’ users with the natural landscapes that surround them.
Cardinal reconsidered the event of the Roman Catholic mass by promoting the feeling of a primitive church. An undulating double-brick wall with a concrete cavity wraps all of the plan elements. The cable-suspended roof creates a sense of open procession in and out of the windowed highest volumes. From the entrance the roof slopes down low to cover the altar and confessionals. The altar is a six-ton slab of Manitoba Tyndell limestone, illuminated by light piercing through the sloping roof. The spatial effect is one of somber spirituality.
In 1995, to Cardinal’s dismay, St. Mary’s parishioners enlisted the help of a local architectural practice to build an awkwardly conceived addition. The church entrance and one side have lost much of their visual power and elegance. The addition was designed in a pastiche of Cardinal’s own distinctive style. The cloned forms visitors see today obscure the boundary between the 1960s original and 1990s addition. Despite all this, St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church stands proud, evoking the memory of a stoic prairie grain silo. (David Theodore)
Catton House
Catton House juts out of a hill high above a railway line in West Vancouver, its canted profile echoing a rocky site that slants to the sea. Arthur Erickson, a Vancouver native, tied the house into the slope using a tactic that appeared in his well-known and almost concurrent design for Vancouver’s Museum of Anthropology. The visitor enters private, inward-focused rooms at the top and descends through a series of platforms and levels to public rooms with floor-to-ceiling windows.
The house, built in 1969, is the culmination of a series of West Coast buildings by Erickson that explored an elemental, Bauhaus-inspired design approach. His work balances this abstract method with painterly effects derived from careful attention to site-specific phenomena: climate, vegetation, topography, light.
The house shows off Erickson’s well-structured planning, but his higher aim was to design in the tradition of fine art: his buildings should evoke emotional responses. Catton House is covered inside and out with treated cedar, which makes it appear as if the living spaces and outdoor terraces are carved from a solid wooden rhomboid. Catton House’s appeal is certainly sculptural, but above all it is poetic. (David Theodore)
Canadian Centre for Architecture
From the beginning, a building designed to house the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) was integral to the concept of establishing an architectural research center and museum. The most basic need was to provide a place that was large enough to store a growing collection of books, prints, drawings, and photographs and to make them accessible. Since there was no model for such an institution, there was no precedent for such a building.
The architects of the CCA—Peter Rose, Phyllis Lambert, Erol Argun, and Melvin Charney—sought to create a contemporary building that would relate to the history and culture of the city. The new building also needed to reknit the urban tissue of an area made derelict by highway construction in the 1960s: it had to add to, and heighten, the architecture of its neighborhood.
The CCA building and gardens, completed in 1989, have become icons of Montreal. The building and wings, built around the historically listed Shaughnessy House (1874), relate to architecture past and present through their scale, siting, and use of Montreal’s traditional gray limestone juxtaposed with structural aluminum. This dialectic of old and new—rusticated old mansion and smooth ashlar new museum—is transposed to the interior, where aluminum, limestone, maple, and black granite from the Lac-Saint-Jean region of Quebec are all in evidence. The building and gardens resonate with how the past informs the present and the present informs the future. (Phyllis Lambert)
Montreal Biosphère
In 1965 the U.S. Information Agency commissioned R. Buckminster Fuller to design the American Pavilion, now known as the Montreal Biosphère, at the 1967 World’s Fair in Montreal. Fuller and Shoji Sadao designed a 200-by-250-foot (61-by-76-meter) three-quarter sphere. From ground to equator it is a series of parallel metal rings, above which the structure is entirely geodesic. A two-layer skin of steel rods creates an outer triangular panel system atop an inner hexagonal layer. Each panel was sealed with an acrylic sheet. A scientist who visited it in 1967 was inspired by its structure to discover the “buckminsterfullerene” carbon molecule; he, along with two others, was awarded the Nobel Prize.
Mechanically energized environments were an artistic pursuit in the 1960s, but only Fuller took the idea beyond theatrical display to living laboratory. The interior climate of the Biosphère was dynamically adjusted via internal computer-controlled shades. Fuller’s eventual plan was that the dome would evolve to include “biomimicry,” by which each panel would act as a cell to shield, breathe, and photosynthesize. In 1976 a fire destroyed the acrylic panels, leaving the steel latticework intact. The dome now encloses a museum dedicated to environmental issues. (Denna Jones)
Habitat 67
Despite this project’s Modernist credentials, architect Moshe Safdie took much of his inspiration for Habitat 67 from medieval hill towns in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. This homage can be clearly seen in the formation of the apartments, as though they have grown organically via centuries of population growth. It is also suggested by the rich greenery of the trees and communal garden areas, which contrast strongly with the pale-colored brick.
Safdie was just 29 when he designed Habitat 67. He hoped his vision would bring an end to what he saw as the claustrophobia and uniformity of modern urban living. Picturesquely located in Montreal’s harbor on the St. Lawrence River, Habitat 67 was designed as a city of the future. Its name comes from the Montreal World Expo of 1967, the theme of which was “habitat,” for which the project was created. Montreal 67 is composed of more than 350 prefab blocks, or “modules”; these make up more than 150 apartments that range in size from one to eight blocks. Safdie placed the apartments in a seemingly disordered manner, but it becomes apparent when viewed from certain angles that the overall shape is that of a series of pyramids.
Safdie began his idea for Habitat 67 when working on his university thesis, the theme of which was “A Case for City Living, a Study of Three Urban High-Density Housing Systems.” Expo 67 allowed him to bring those ideas to fruition. The complex is divided into three sections connected by high walkways, stairs, and elevators. Aware that the project would be lived in by families as well as single people, the architect provided children’s play areas and pedestrian streets. The placement of each apartment, at an opposing angle to the one beneath, means that each apartment’s roof provides an outside area for its upstairs neighbor. (Lucinda Hawksley)
Palais des Congrès
Perhaps big-box buildings such as arenas, stadiums, and convention centers have no place in any city’s downtown, but the Palais des Congrès in Montreal turns size to its advantage. Completed in 2003, it engulfs three historic buildings, including the 10-story Art Deco Tramways Building, a metro station, a fire station, and an exhibition space. By straddling the metro line and the trench of the Ville-Marie expressway, the Palais des Congrès knits together Old Montreal with downtown offices and shops, and it sparked urban renewal in the surrounding Quartier International. Inside, a 1,000-foot- (300-meter-) long promenade leads from the metro station on the east to a pair of giant glass canopies cantilevered over the sidewalk at the west entrance. The promenade links pedestrians to Montreal’s celebrated underground city.
Mario Saia led the architectural consortium responsible for the design, which preserves the unloved 1983 convention center by Victor Prus—a linear, brutal concrete form. Their tour de force is an 80-foot- (24-meter-) high lobby on the west end, known as Hall Bleury, fronted by a quirky multicolored glass curtain wall—a glittering counterpoint to Prus’s iconic glass and steel tubular space frame. Glazing set in a grid of large panels makes sunlight dance over the interiors in green, yellow, orange, blue, and pink hues, brightening up drab convention proceedings.
This exuberant behemoth, stretching three city blocks, sprang from the enduring Modernist ambition to create architecture out of infrastructure. The architects took on daunting technical challenges and overwhelming functional requirements and turned them into an urbane and vibrant showpiece. (David Theodore)
Toronto City Hall
Described in a letter to a newspaper as “two boomerangs over half a grapefruit,” the winning proposal for Toronto City Hall by Viljo Revell proved to be both controversial and popular. The Finnish architect’s design, selected from over 500 entries from 42 countries by a jury that included Eero Saarinen, was a new and expressively Modernist vision of what democratic government could be.
Completed in 1965, Toronto City Hall comprises a domed circular Council Chamber bracketed by two curved towers of unequal heights. Rising from a two-story horizontal podium containing public areas and a library, the towers are oriented toward each other with glass and stainless steel on the inner surfaces and textured reinforced concrete on their concave outer surfaces. Slightly offset, they appear both as protective wings around the saucerlike Council Chamber and as open arms toward the city, a curvaceous counterpart to the surrounding rectangular urban forms. A generous public square with a reflecting pool, gardens, and public art serves as a forecourt to the building, its borders defined by an elevated walkway. Upper and lower plazas are joined by a ramp that swoops down from the podium roof to meet the square below.
The bold sculptural forms of Toronto City Hall embody the optimism of the postwar era. Proving wrong Frank Lloyd Wright’s prediction that the new City Hall would mark “the spot where Toronto fell,” Revell’s design set a precedent for mindful civic buildings and Modernist architecture in Canada. (Alexandra McIntosh)
University of Toronto Graduate House
This compact residential ensemble is a rare North American example of perimeter housing. Rooms for 434 students are distributed in four interconnected blocks whose sizes respond to disparate elements in the complex’s jumbled urban neighborhood. Municipal requirements dictated an accessible public space, rendered here as an interior courtyard ringed by narrow pools of water and set one floor below street level. Graduate House, built in 2000, sports some of architect Thom Mayne’s most rambunctious facades: layered variegated surfaces of ribbed precast concrete, corrugated aluminum screens, perforated metal scrims, and mustard-colored stucco. The residence’s showstopping feature, visible from afar, is a two-story corridor glazed in ceramic fritted glass that spells out “University of Toronto.” The corridor brashly cantilevers over a side street like a Pop art billboard, marking the entrance to the campus. The designers, Morphosis and Teeple Architects, overcame the project’s notoriously low budget through dense and skillful planning. The skip-stop elevator scheme in the 10-story block, for instance, requires public corridors only every third floor, efficiently maximizing living space. A provocative landmark, Graduate House has had an important legacy in Toronto, opening the gates for other international architects to work in the city and kick-starting a 21st-century debate about the role of contemporary architecture in civic life. (David Theodore)
Sharp Centre for Design
Described as “Canada’s version of the Pompidou Center” by Lisa Rochon, journalist for the Globe and Mail, the Sharp Centre for Design at the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto was a jolt for the staid reputations of its school and city. The first Canadian project by British architect Will Alsop, the Sharp Centre is an addition to the 130-year old Ontario College in downtown Toronto. Completed in 2004, it primarily houses classrooms and studio spaces.
The center is a two-story box that is impossible to miss, measuring 100 by 28 feet (30 by 8.5 meters) and lofted 85 feet (25 meters) into the air by 12 slender steel caissons. The box is linked to the preexisting school below and to one side by umbilical circulation towers. The caissons, built of steel tubes used by the petroleum industry, are tied to concrete foundations that run 65 feet (20 meters) deep. On its sides and underside, the box is clad with metal siding painted black and white, and it has a randomized pattern of doors and windows.
The center is a dramatically horizontal expression—in contrast to Toronto’s best-known landmark, the CN Tower, which is one of the world’s tallest buildings. Budgetary limitations resulted in spaces that are largely conventional and simply appointed. Visitors are whisked up to the center in an elevator, and the windows present views that do not differ from those found in the surrounding buildings. Critics complain of a missed opportunity to highlight the procession from the ground to the rectangular volume and to create a sense of floating above the city below. (Abe Cambier)
Museum of Anthropology, University of British Columbia
Once confined to a few rooms in the library basement, the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver has become a hub of coastal Northwest culture. The elegant building, completed in 1976 and located in a stunning natural location, is a distinct and powerful architectural statement that convincingly springs from a thoughtful consideration of its collection and the visitor’s experience. Despite its urban location, visitors arrive at the museum through a lush forested landscape. From a secluded entry, the building unfolds down a broad ramp flanked by large carvings from the coastal Northwest. At its base the ramp opens up to a light-filled Great Hall that boasts a 40-foot (12-meter) wall of glass with a view of the Strait of Georgia and the North Shore Mountains.
The hall also features a series of now iconic concrete posts and beams with skylights between them, inspired by the log houses and totem poles of coastal indigenous people. The museum’s favorite method of display was inspired by the astonishment of its architect, Arthur Erickson, that only 10 percent of an average collection is available to the public at any given time. He suggested that the entire collection be available via an original system of storage and presentation. In the rooms to one side of the Great Hall, large display cases present a vast array of objects. Beneath these cases, a series of drawers contain still more items that the visitor can explore. (Abe Cambier)
Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics
On the shore of Ontario’s Silver Lake, the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics is a philanthropic private research institute built on land donated by the city of Waterloo. The impressive four-story building is an important example of contemporary Canadian architecture and was awarded a Governor General’s Medal for Architecture in 2006. Geometric equations were used to formulate the “random” locations of windows that punctuate its severe slate-black metal facade. Facing east toward the city, this attractive but anonymous wrapping belies a richly designed plan. Open and glazed to the north and south, the west facade frames a wide garden courtyard. Three bridges cross this public space and enter the main building at informal meeting spaces.
Many of these elements were put forward by the client, who wanted to move away from the stereotypical notion of laboratories and create a feeling of warmth and informality. He specified open desk spaces, lounges, wood-burning fireplaces, espresso machines, and creative rooms lined with blackboards. The design was inspired in part by theoretical physics itself, a subject rich in knowledge and information but somehow of uncertain form and substance. The institute is a dynamic contribution to the cityscape, intended to raise the bar of both architecture and intellect for the city. (Beatrice Galilee)