Newfoundland Modern: Architecture in the Smallwood Years, 1949–1972 by Robert Mellin (review)

Modern was a distinct period in architecture that occurred during the middle half of the twentieth century. It was global in reach and was often called ‘the International Style.’ Many recent studies have identified its varied regional properties and practices, fragmenting its apparent worldwide uniformity. For instance, Kenneth Frampton has popularized a version of contemporary practice allied with a revisionist history of modern architecture. He champions a ‘critical regionalism’ for architecture that is resistant to any unified style. In this way, a revised history of the modern is used to influence contemporary building design.

In Newfoundland Modern: Architecture in the Smallwood Years, 1949–1972, Robert Mellin has an intriguing situation. At the very moment that modern architecture was being accepted across the Western world, Newfoundland voted to confederate with Canada. The buildings in this book are fine examples of the modern, perhaps unique in the way that architectural change is explicitly aligned with political change. They represent and embody a remarkable opportunity to study the social, cultural, technological, or political terrain. The potential abounds: an island nation, a distinct nation joining another, a time before and a time after confederation, a political leader powerfully remaking the land in a new image.

Mellin’s earlier book, Tilting: House Launching, Slide Hauling, Potato Trenching, and Other Tales from a Newfoundland Fishing Village, exhibits his clear affinity with the vernacular outports and the regional traditions of building. In Newfoundland Modern, he describes a considerable understanding of the local vernacular–‘buildings appeared to perch tentatively on the land without changing it … [space] was open and dispersed …’ – and contrasts it with the modern institutional architecture of the Smallwood years that ‘aspired to permanence.’ These modern buildings, in Mellin’s view, have ‘informal spatial fluidity,’ often with an inward focus that ‘created nearly the opposite spatial orientation’ to the vernacular, and is associated with top-down planning. This is a strong comparative framework modern architecture must have resonated in Newfoundland in many other ways. It was fraught with social reform, austere form, moralities of transparency, technological progress, and the politics of confederation and internationalism. Newfoundland Modern describes buildings well but without much analysis of the social, cultural, technological, or political issues they represent. The arguments that favour the modern are never fully drawn. Mellin equivocates, arguing to preserve the modern and the premodern but never identifying his position in the contested terrain between the vernacular and the modern.

The three parts of the book are distinct types of history. The first three chapters read as a cultural history and introduce several interesting hypotheses and comparisons. Then, the book is a descriptive survey replicating the chapter titles and illustrations of the 1966 government publication Newfoundland: Canada’s Happy Province. This part is inclusive, re-describing the buildings and assessing them from Mellin’s point of view as an architect and as a historian. There are delightful vignettes where Newfoundlanders encounter the modern, as in 1945: ‘The board was convinced that a fireplace was all that was required for heating the house, and that only a wall sink was required in the kitchen … In each house, the air-return duct to the furnace was located in the floor of the hallway. Residents unaccustomed to hot-air central heating swept debris into these floor grills. Naturally the ducts became blocked. When word got around about the purpose of the floor grills and ducts, problems with the central heating suddenly disappeared.’ The final part is two separate chapter-long biographies that move beyond mere biography into fascinating micro histories.

On the one hand, this structure is able to cover numerous and varied buildings sustaining the reader’s interest. On the other hand, it reads as three separate parts. Like the best descriptive histories, the book opens up huge potential for future scholarship. It creates a foundation for future histories where architecture is an important window into the history of ‘modern’ Newfoundland. And finally, it begs the question: what about Newfoundland...