Canada
Authors: Theodore David 
Published: February 2020

The study of architecture in Canada focuses on biographical and aesthetic categories. Early 20th-century scholars adopted systematic methods from art history in order to celebrate outstanding architects, to describe and classify monuments, and, to some degree, to promote knowledge of traditional vernacular buildings. In recent decades, new scholars have sought to expand these methods by incorporating approaches from geography, material culture, folklore studies, and critical theory. In both eras, scholars have studied the built environment in order to distinguish the Canadian built environment from its colonial past (under Britain and France), and from that of its much larger neighbor, the United States. Despite some overlap between the old and the new approaches, there is an abiding tension between scholars who look to understand buildings and cities as aesthetic achievements, wherein progress is classified as a succession of stylistic changes, and those who wish to use buildings as a source for writing a broader social history connected to everyday economic and political life. In addition, much scholarship on buildings has been generated to accompany exhibitions. In such cases, the texts aim both to communicate to nonacademic readers and to entertain visitors to the exhibition. An emphasis on the products and personages of a male-dominated profession means that our understanding of women’s contributions to the built environment is limited. Likewise, indigenous architecture receives attention as archaeological prehistory and as contemporary architecture, but almost no attention is given to indigenous buildings produced between 1700 and today. In addition, there is surprisingly little systematic study of architecture’s role in environmental history. There are few analyses of the structures associated with Canada’s resource industries: mining, fisheries, forestry, and, more recently, the tar sands. Finally, there are few examples of the reliable and robust scholarly monographs or articles on singular celebrated architects and buildings readily available for other nations. Chronologically, a logical first division concerns the federation of the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Upper Canada, and Lower Canada into the Dominion of Canada in 1867, and the completion of a national railway in 1886. Confederation is also a convenient starting place for the issue of modernism, and, subsequently, it is possible to tie the development of Canadian architecture to urbanization and industrialization. A second inflexion point historians invoke often is 1967, marked by both a flurry of federally funded civic projects and the world exhibition in Montreal, Expo 67. One important conception of Canada is that it is an agglomeration of diverse regions, so that a study of architecture in Canada would necessarily include a balanced account of all regions. This regionalism is accentuated by the existence of a French-speaking province with a strong collective identity. Yet even as scholars insist that Canada is decentralized and characterized by its regions and peripheries, their studies to date have overwhelmingly emphasized Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritimes, leaving scant scholarship on the West Coast, the Prairies, and the Arctic.