Lost buildings of Canada: A field guide

Illustrations and text by Raymond Biesinger

Raymond Biesinger is a Montreal-based illustrator, his series of “Lost Buildings” prints, each featuring one of Canada’s nine largest cities, can be found at fifteen.ca.

Not all structures are as lucky as Winnipeg’s old Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce building. It was built in 1899, torn down in 1910, and carefully packed and moved 600 kilometres to Regina, where it stood reassembled until the 1970s. While that CIBC essentially grew legs and walked its columns and pediment to another city (where it stood for most of the century), the average “lost building” story in Canada is less inspirational.

It involves developers and city councils demolishing gorgeous things for parking lots or newer, trendier structures. It involves cities such as Edmonton bulldozing almost all of their neoclassical buildings, nearly erasing an architectural movement from memory and sight. It involves modern cities desperate to express their histories and realizing it’s hard to do that with downtowns of modernist concrete and glass.

Lastly, it involves this artist, bored of what currently exists and wishing to transport some past eccentricities and successes into an over-familiar present. Yes, new buildings are important. But unlike new buildings, old ones can’t be built from scratch.