As a rule, I admire modernist houses most of all, and the architects who create the best ones. But there are exceptions to every rule. In my book, one is Gordon Ridgely.
Mr. Ridgely is a tall, stout, complex man who designs houses for Toronto's most exclusive clientele, the gruesomely rich. The mansions he provides for them are masterpieces of the exacting art of historical architecture: true to the Georgian manner — among the best and most durable of all premodern styles — they are elegant in detail, and imposing without a whiff of pretension or show-offishness.
Last week, talking the art-historical lingo that is Mr. Ridgely's mother tongue, we lunched at the York Club, where he's a long-standing member (speaking of exclusive). We talked about what fascinates him, and what prompted him to change from a young modernist, fresh out of the University of Toronto architecture school, into a period designer.
"It began around 1975. I had a client who wanted a Georgian house. I said: Give me a month to study Georgian, and if you're prepared to do it properly, with enough resources to do a proper job, I might be interested.
'People are wanting more simplicity. I think we've had our day with adornment, and we might be on the threshold of a new modernism.' (YVONNE BERG FOR THE GLOBE AND MAIL)
Photogallery
"He took me on, and I did it. We were able to achieve the patina of the passage of time, somewhat magically. It was a wonderful house."
The project not only taught him he could do a credible job of making Georgian architecture. It led him to a field of design that had a promising market among Toronto's wealthiest people — "I wanted to do contemporary when I graduated from architecture school," he has said, "but my family would have starved" — and into an artistic practice that had deep personal appeal.
"I am very keen on order, especially in planning, and most of my houses have a great sense of that. Georgian is mostly neo-classical architecture, and we study it — Vitruvius, Palladio and the rest. We also deviate from it as well. Some of my more current work has a rather stripped-down neo-classical look — what I call fascist modernism."
It sounded more like art deco than totalitarianism to me — the final flowering of beaux-arts sculptural styling before steel and glass modernism swept all before it.
"Art deco does have an influence on my work. The last house we've done, now nearing completion, has a very strong art deco element, especially in the interior trims. It's quite different. I find it refreshing. People are wanting more simplicity. I think we've had our day with adornment, and we might be on the threshold of a new modernism. Certainly we see signs of it, more than we did."
So what would a high-end "new modernist" house by Gordon Ridgely look like?
"More glass, I think. A stripped classicism, using the same refined materials as classical architecture, such as limestone. I'd love to get a commission to do something like that — gosh, I'd love to!"
I wondered aloud how he would land such a commission, so long as he was successfully providing the more popular French provincial. I had in mind a large chateau he did a few years ago on Bayview Ridge, in Toronto's ultra-deluxe Bridle Path neighbourhood.
"How do you know about that?" Mr. Ridgely snapped back playfully. (I'd read about it in Globe Real Estate a couple of years ago, when it went on the market for $16.8-million.) "I have a problem with it. I started as a modernist, and I think that's getting very far afield from modernism, even though it's good and well-studied and decently proportioned. French provincial is something I don't want to pursue. I do Georgian because it's close to modern. It's got the order and the proportions that are important in any good architecture.
"But I think we owe it to ourselves to have some response to the era in which we're living. Digging into the past all the time, we're missing something. There's Gehry's Bilbao, a building that would be hard not to love if you've experienced it. Of course, there is this need to have traditional architecture, a traditional expression of ourselves. But it's not totally authentic, is it? We live in 2008."
I believe that Mr. Ridgely's ambivalence about what he does, and his feelings of kinship with the modernism he doesn't do, are very real. But throughout our conversation, I could not escape the sense that this architect is less a man of 2008 than of the 18th century, and most at home in that sunny noon of English country-house Palladianism. In their refinement, simplicity and thoughtfulness, his Georgian villas reveal where his heart is, quite as clearly as his words.
Also telling is the high umbrage he takes at the Georgian architecture of other designers that's not up to snuff.
"It's foul, most of it. Columns that go up into the soft underbelly of a porch, without beams, entablature. It's just nasty detailing.
"If you're going to do it, follow the historic precedents and get it right. I recently saw a house done by a name-brand architect, and I almost crashed my car. It was Georgian, but the window panes were horizontal and not vertical! That is shocking."
Such worry about matters great and small, and the obvious joy Mr. Ridgely takes from his art, contribute to making his mansions the successes they are.
"We do tons of drawings when we do a building," he told me. "We have fun, doing what we do."
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