CANADIAN CHURCHES: An Architectural History
By Peter Richardson
and Douglas Richardson
Photographs by John de Visser
More Arts Stories
Firefly, 440 pages, $85
OLD CANADIAN CEMETERIES: Places of Memory
By Jane Irwin
Photographs by John de Visser
Firefly, 320 pages, $75
These big, handsome books from Firefly Books, each illustrated by well-known architectural photographer John de Visser, survey the extant buildings in which Canadian Christians have worshipped for the last 250 years, and some places where Canadians of all religious traditions (and none) have buried their dead for much longer. They are generous banquets for both eye and mind, architectural field guides for the curious, treasuries of information about realms of Canadian material culture that, to my knowledge, have never before been given popular treatments more ample.
Peter Richardson and Douglas Richardson's Canadian Churches catalogues sacred spaces throughout Canada, though the emphasis is on religious structures in the provinces settled by European Christians longest ago: the Maritimes and Newfoundland, Quebec and Ontario. All of Canada's most culturally important churches are here: St. Paul's in Halifax, the Victorian cathedrals of St. Michael (Roman Catholic) and St. James (Anglican) in Toronto, the huge basilica of Notre-Dame de Montréal, and Douglas Cardinal's St. Mary's in Red Deer, Alta., among many others.
While the authors give over most of the book to high-style urban architecture, many of their most charming examples were done by anonymous or local craftsmen working with limited means: See especially St. Saviour's Anglican, in Barkersville, B.C., the Old Stone Church (Presbyterian) near Beaverton, Ont., and the Ukrainian Catholics' tiny timber Assumption of the Mother God in rural Manitoba. A couple of non-Christian religious structures also made it into these pages, notably the imposing Aztec-Deco Mormon temple, from 1913-1923, in Cardston, Alta.
Each of these buildings, whether grand or simple, is a complex weave of current architectural fashion, styling that looks back to ancient precedents, and theological conviction. Each presents a lesson in what its designers and their clients believed to be the most adequate presentation of the Christian message.
For Anglicans, that meant both preaching and Holy Communion: St. James's Chapel, a sturdy little Georgian étude from 1841-1843 in New Brunswick, features a central pulpit that soars above a communion table visible from all parts of the church. In the hefty, too-serious Roman Catholic Basilica of St. John the Baptist (1841-1853), in St. John's, Nfld., the eye is forcefully directed (as in most Catholic churches constructed before the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s) toward the altar, not the pulpit. Ontario's splendid Sharon Temple, built between 1825 and 1831 after a design dictated by God to the Quaker visionary David Willson, gathers the congregation into a democratic circle around a central ark, thereby insisting on communal prayer and singing, not preaching or a priestly rite, as the central fact of Christian worship.
The authors' running commentary on the churches is informative and genial, and, as you might expect, mostly positive. I would have preferred more acute criticism. They give a pass, for example, to Toronto's Cathedral of St. Michael, a pedantic and uninspiring piece of mid-Victorian Gothicism devoid of the staid, imperial breadth Frederic Cumberland gave to his similarly Gothic St. James Anglican Cathedral, nearby.
Occasionally, however, the Richardsons allow themselves a negative sentiment or two. Commenting on the electric lighting added to Montreal's Notre-Dame in the mid-20th century, they describe it as "extravagant and gaudy, analogous to a 1920s Wurlitzer jukebox." But even this is too kind, and it misses the most important point: With its ham-fisted stress on the altar area, this church turns Catholic worship into a theatrical performance by priests, and badly slights the traditional communal character of Catholic liturgy.
But if light on critique, Canadian Churches succeeds as a worthwhile overview of the country's religious architectural heritage. And it does a little bit more: A final chapter provides a short, handy look at the development of ecclesiastical building from the earliest known example - a house-church in Syria from around the year 230 - through the English neoclassicism of James Gibbs and Christopher Wren, and the various modernisms now popular among church designers.
The title of Jane Irwin's Old Canadian Cemeteries: Place of Memory suggests that the book is merely another nostalgic ramble through crumbling graveyards. And, indeed, John de Visser's pictures feature much mist rising among the monuments, late-afternoon sunlight raking across solemn, autumnal lawns dotted with tombstones, and the like.
But this hefty coffee-table slab is far more than a trip down a well-trod memory lane. In her affectionate yet crisply written, well-researched essays, Irwin treats a wide range of topics related to the inevitable human task of the disposal of the dead. This is surely the last general-interest Canadian book that will need to be written on such matters for years to come.
In a chapter I found particularly interesting, for example, Irwin looks at the architectural changes undergone by the culture of Canadian burial from 7,500 years ago - a rock cairn built at L'Anse Amour in southern Labrador to shelter the grave of a child from a wealthy family - down to the present day. Once past the rough, makeshift conditions of early settlement, the French and English settlers in Canada began laying out clearly marked burying grounds, though the long heyday of the formal, grandly ornamented Canadian graveyard really began after the inauguration in Paris, around 1804, of the immensely influential Père-Lachaise.
By the mid-19th century in North America, the fashion in graveyard design had begun to swing away from the neoclassical park, with its streets of villa-like mausoleums, toward what Irwin calls (following standard architectural history) "the rural cemetery ideal." (Toronto has a wonderful embodiment of this ideal in picturesque Mount Pleasant Cemetery.) Recently, the high cost of burial real estate has made cremation popular. And more recently still - Irwin's book is very up to date - "green" burial, without embalming, in natural woodlands where tombstones are prohibited, has become fashionable. "The trend away from investment in individual monuments and burial sites is not entirely new," Irwin tells us, "but in some ways a return to a much older tradition of communal burials and unconcern about permanently marked graves."
Most of Old Canadian Cemeteries, however, is devoted to the conspicuous burial places we have inherited from the past, and where our famous (or infamous) dead are interred. At the heart of the book is a detailed tour of famous sites ranging across Canada, from the Old Burying Ground in Halifax, through Notre-Dame-des-Neiges in Montreal and Toronto's Necropolis and Mount Pleasant, to Ross Bay in Victoria. National historic and military memorials get careful separate attention.
And for fans and more serious students of graveyards, Irwin provides a rich section on the traditional symbolism of funerary monuments: doves, hands, flowers, angels, lambs and so on. Irwin has done a masterful job of retelling Canadian graveyard history, and she has given us an outstanding compendium on topics - literally, the last things we must think about - that have long delighted and intrigued her.
John Bentley Mays is a Toronto writer on architecture and visual art. He is currently at work on a book about Toronto.
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