The Architecture of Douglas Cardinal by Trevor Boddy (review)

HUMANITIES 183 Trevor Boddy. The Architecture of Douglas Cardinal NeWest. '50, illus. $29.95 paper Byany conventional standard, Douglas Cardinal is a compellingsubject for a biography. Born in Alberta in 1934, he has made his name as the creator of an architecture of shaped enclosures and curving masses such as St Mary's Church, Red Deer, which opened in 1968. Since the 1970S he has also been known as a social activist, closely associated with the assertion of a cultural voice for Canada's Native people. More recently he has been celebrated as architect ofthe high-profile Canadian Museum ofCivilization (CMC), which opened in Hull, Quebec in 1989. Ever since Cardinal appeared on the architectural scene in the late 1960s, he has been the object of attention in the popular and professional media. Consequently, it is surprising to report that this is the first biography or monograph on Cardinal to appear. As such, it brings into one place for the first time a review of the whole range of Cardinal's output, from the work of his early days in the Edmonton office of Bissell and Holman Architects to the focused designs of the last ten years. Many of these projects are illustrated by plans, drawings, and photographs so that we are able to get a feeling for the general pattern of his architectural development. This sense of progression is reinforced by the roughly chronological organization of the book. We begin with a short description of Cardinal's studio house built outside Edmonton at Stony Plain, Alberta. The author describes the house with its unfinished concrete floors and undulating brick walls as 'a strange creature on the prairie: After this we retrace our steps to learn of Cardinal's education at the University of British Columbia, where he was introduced to the paintings of Lawren Harris, and later his departure for the University of Texas at Austin in 1957. In 1963 Cardinal returned to Red Deer to start a practice, subsequently producing his widely praised design for St Mary's Church. With this, Cardinal found his artistic voice, and ever since he has explored the themes first found there in a series of projects including Grande Prairie Regional College at Bear Creek (1974), the Ponoka Provincial Building (1977), and the CMe. Fascinating though these neo-expressionist buildings are, they are in a sense what one has come to expect of Douglas Cardinal. What is surprising, and this is something which emerges from this book, is that during his career Cardinal has designed many buildings which lie much closer to the architectural mainstream than the buildings for which he is best known. Many, such as the Stettler Hospital, were commissioned by the Alberta government. These simple buildings raise an important question: why is it that whenever he has been given the opportunity, usually because of the possibilities of the brief or the presence of a sympathetic client, Cardinal has turned away from the conventional forms of modernism, which he is so obviously able to handle, to explore a highly personal, one might say 184 LEITERS IN CANADA 1990 idiosyncratic vocabulary of soaring curves, serpentine walls, strata-like masses and irregular plans? Certainly, this has not been an easy path to take. Contractors and clients alike have balked at the unconventionality of his designs. Often these buildings have been completed only at great personal and financial cost to Cardinal himself. The answer to this question, Boddy suggests, lies in Douglas Cardinal's personality and his experience of life. It is the dominant theme of this book that Cardinal's architecture reflects above all the architect's search for self-definition and,in a less direct way, perhaps, the soft contours of the Alberta countryside. There are two ways of approaching this architecture, we are told: one is through landscape; the other 'axis of interpretation' is biographical. Boddy seems particularly interested in the relationship of Cardinal's personal life to his professional development. As a result, long passages describing Cardinal's marriages, break-ups, and psychological difficulties are set between other sections which deal with architecture per se.We hear of his feelings of alienation, of how his discovery of traditional Native culture...