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  • Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize
  • Kari Ronning (bio)

We are pleased to announce that the winner of the Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize for 2014 is The Architecture of Saskatchewan: A Visual Journey, 1930–2011, by Bernard Flaman, a beautiful and thoughtful look at the built landscape of a part of the Great Plains. Flaman situates the architecture within international styles and influences, tracing the lingering influence of the revivalist styles of the early twentieth century, as well as modernist styles and their later developments. He also makes clear the impact of economic and even political considerations on these buildings, both subtle and overt.

Readers from other parts of the Great Plains will recognize in this book many similarities to their own built landscapes— to which most of us are closer in our daily lives than to the natural landscape. One of the many virtues of this book is the way it can make us look afresh at the buildings around us, to understand what traditions and movements and local influences may have shaped them. The analogy that kept returning to me as I read this book was to a geology course I took as an undergraduate, which taught me to look at the natural landscape with a new understanding of what had shaped the hills and streams around me.

Traditionally we assume architecture to mean high art— from Gothic cathedrals, Renaissance palaces, and classically inspired public buildings to the skyscrapers and avant-garde homes of the wealthy today, and (on the Plains, especially) we often expect it to be elsewhere—New York or London or Berlin or Barcelona. There’s architecture in Saskatchewan?, I confess, might have been my very first reaction to the title of this book. Flaman’s book shows us how everything here from gas stations to middle- class homes to hospitals and commercial structures (and yes, churches, courthouses, and college buildings) on the Plains fit into these larger aesthetic and cultural movements. The striking building on the [End Page iii] book jacket (which I at first vaguely assumed was a church) turns out to be a heating and cooling plant.

As the book’s subtitle indicates, The Architecture of Saskatchewan is a visual book: the photographs are in both color and black and white, and include historical photographs— of demolished buildings but also of structures as they were first built, contrasted with contemporary photographs that show how buildings have settled into their surroundings or how they have been altered. Some of the architects’ renderings of their designs have been included as well. The photographs taken especially for this book are noteworthy: they are always clear but varied in angle and perspective as well as size; some show buildings at night, others show interiors and interior courtyards. The seasons shown tend to be predominantly spring and summer, but there is a particularly stunning full- page view of a park’s interpretive center across a landscape of prairie grasses and trees under ice and snow.

However, this is not just a pretty-picture book. In addition to brief introductory essays for chapters covering the various time periods, the identifying captions are followed by informative paragraphs that explain the design elements of each building and relate them to the broader cultural movements that shaped them and which in turn each building reflects. (This too enables readers in different parts of the Plains to understand their local examples.) In this way, the book makes its case for the appreciation and preservation of midcentury architecture on the Plains, as its predecessor, Historic Architecture of Saskatchewan (1986), did for the architecture of an earlier time period, which had also come to be perceived as old- fashioned and out of date.

The book prize committee this year was confronted with an unusually large field of nominees— almost thirty. Thus each member of the committee—and each member of the subcommittees formed to assist in the choice of finalists—had nine or ten books to read. There were many worthy contenders in each subcommittee’s set of choices; each subcommittee had to settle on one choice as one of the three finalists. Then each of the three committee members—this year, Mila Saskova...

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