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  • Building the West: The Early Architects of British Columbia
  • Rhodri Liscomber (bio)
Donald Luxton, compiler and editor. Building the West: The Early Architects of British Columbia Talonbooks. 560. $60.00

This is a truly handsome book that matches the architectural legacy it celebrates. Well conceived, designed, and produced, the contents contain a wealth of data both historical and visual that constitute an intelligent, comprehensive, and highly readable account - or interwoven narrative - of the architectural fabrication of British Columbia from the late nineteenth century to the onset of the Second World War. The structure comprises a sequence of biographical essays on architects active in the province, vignettes of architectural practice, and assessments of design achievement, all reinforced by historical summaries of the contextual factors that determined the construction of the built environment. The methodological approach is a combination of the chronological, centred on the regional architectural production of individual designers, and the thematic, organized around major economic and political eras. Consequently the processes underlying the development of the province, and thereby the ideological presumptions read into architectural design through iconography and structural system, are noticed but not dwelt upon. The preference for material conditions and technique nonetheless provides a new reading of later imperial enterprise without ignoring its erasure of prior traditions. Two leitmotifs are economic migration and unstable finances, reflected in the extensive travels undertaken by architects within the former Dominions, alike subject to market volatility. Indeed, their lives were often testaments to the precarious nature of architectural endeavour at the vanguard of capital investment and its related commercial enterprise, compounded by resistance to legislative definition of professional authority. The personal geographies of many of those architects who came to British Columbia also reflect the emergence of the media-driven consumption of architectural fashion and the important emblematic work ascribed to architecture in settler societies.

The late imperial generation clearly recognized the legitimating force for the modern colonial agenda embedded in the iconographic coding and cultural association of ancient architectural tradition. The referencing of well-known edifices and building types, supported by a broad bibliographic and journalistic knowledge base available to the immigrant society, supplied an instant sense of heritage and durability in the new, rapidly constructed communities that enacted the once prevalent idea of progress through the exploitation of natural resources and modernization of indigenous custom. These factors are also articulated through the excellent illustrations. These range from art photographs to press lithography and show the extent to which buildings, especially those associated with [End Page 467] governance or personal status, were and remained central to projection of collective and individual identity. Since an important aspect of collective value was then the civilizing dynamic of expansion, it is entirely appropriate that the biographies include surveyors, engineer officers and priestly builders who shared confidence in measurement and symbol. Another dimension of the interplay between the text and the past it resuscitates comes in the variable type and length of the entries. Together they constitute a veritable streetscape of the evolving built environment. Especially in pre-1950s British Columbia, that environment was generally as opportunistic as predetermined. And the diversity of subjects and writers - from descendants of architects to architectural historians - corresponds with the variety of style, scale, and location of the provincial architecture. Through such a catholic approach, bonded to close attention to detail and a wide knowledge of West Coast design, Donald Luxton, compiler and major contributor, has illuminated the history of the general social no less than architectural, development of Canada's West beyond the West.

Rhodri Liscomber

Rhodri Liscomber, University of British Columbia

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