A Commerce of Taste: Church Architecture in Canada, 1867–1914 by Barry Magrill (review)

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the spread of architectural pattern books featuring both medieval and medieval revival English church buildings facilitated the spread of the Gothic style for church architecture in Canada. A Commerce of Taste examines how architectural pattern book production and dissemination intersected with the practice of building churches in Canada to influence social development and the spread of religious ideologies in the newly formed country, all under the guise of “taste.”

The book is divided into ten elements: an introduction, seven chapters, a conclusion, and an appendix, which provides short biographical information for several pattern book authors. The introduction of the book outlines the author’s methodological approach, which draws on his background in business and architectural history to consider how commerce and the marketing of architectural taste through pattern books combined to spread design ideas, religious ideologies, and the Gothic style as the most appropriate mode of building for churches. These themes are considered through an analysis of specific architectural case studies for their importance in the development of a Canadian national and architectural identity.

Chapters 1 through 3 examine how church architecture in pre-Confederation Canada used English country churches as models, creating an imagined return to a pastoral life rooted in historical precedents. While the idea that pre-Confederation Canada is ostensibly linked to Britain is commonly found in Canadian architectural debates, Barry Magrill’s approach to this subject matter is entirely new. He posits that the creation of English-inspired churches depended on modern economic systems, wherein architects who produced pattern books advertised architectural fashion by marketing superficial variety in the form of architectural plans and appealing to the sensibilities of commercial society. Essentially, pattern books can be understood to have compressed time and space by disseminating architectural fashion and taste across vast distances, spreading with them ideas surrounding the medieval revival, ecclesiology, solutions to perceived social problems, and colonialism. The churches that resulted from this system came to represent pre-Confederation social status, religious institutions, and British imperial power, while the pattern books themselves can be viewed as practical building guides, training manuals, purveyors of taste, and representations of new nineteenth-century commercial and consumption practices in pre- and immediately post-Confederation Canada. Overall, these chapters introduce us to the colonial situation, the major pattern books in circulation at the time, the authors who wrote them, and the people who read them, to demonstrate how architectural knowledge, and concomitantly style, became commercialized in the nineteenth century.

Chapter 4 discusses the business behind the building of churches in Ontario. This includes an examination of the practices surrounding the purchasing of land, the financing of building projects, and the formation of building committees and advisory boards, as well as the importance of these institutions after the secularization of the Clergy Reserves in 1854. Magrill provides specific examples of each, demonstrating the ways in which church groups modelled their committees after a corporate paradigm, appointing affluent members of society, including businessmen, lawyers, architects, people with political clout, and men with access to land, as their board members, virtually guaranteeing access to money, free professional services, and property while cementing the relationship between religion, property, and privilege in early Canada by demonstrating the wealth and social connections of this elite group.

The remainder of the book examines westward expansion in the years following Confederation. The development of the Canadian Pacific Railroad into provinces west of Ontario is considered in terms of settlement, the establishment of a network of booksellers, and church-building, which ultimately combined to control land and social development in the west. Magrill also analyzes the effects of westward expansion on the First Nations and the ways textual materials, pattern books, and ultimately architecture became tools of First Nations colonization. In addition, as pattern books became available in the west, architectural taste was marketed to all, affecting not only the architectural landscape but also the spread...