Ahalf-dozen years ago, a condominium developer battled with preservationists over the fate of a simple two-storey Georgian building that most people had never seen, since it was situated at the end of a laneway near Bedford Road and Bloor Street West.
While the back-alley brouhaha took on the usual David vs. Goliath tone when it was reported on at all, the preservationists' issue wasn't so much the 1920 building itself, which had been altered a fair bit, but rather its architect, John MacIntosh Lyle, who operated his practice there until his retirement in 1943. A Beaux-Arts trained architect, Mr. Lyle was responsible for the design of Union Station (with Ross & Macdonald and Hugh G. Jones), the Royal Alexandra Theatre, Runnymede Library and countless Southern Ontario bank branches and private residences during a career that started in 1896 and lasted almost five decades.
Had Glenn McArthur's excellent book, A Progressive Traditionalist: John M. Lyle, Architect (Coach House, 2009), been on bookstore shelves at the time, it may never have come to verbal fisticuffs. A portrait so lovingly crafted and detailed - which finally places Mr. Lyle, rightfully, in the pantheon of 20th-century Canadian architects - would have underlined the worth of a memorial.
Born in 1872 in Connor, Ireland, young Lyle grew up in Hamilton, Ontario, after his father became pastor of the city's Central Presbyterian Church in 1878. After the Hamilton Art School, Mr. Lyle would attend Cornell and Yale before enrolling at the renowned École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, which, in addition to having an enormous effect on his architecture, would also inform the way in which he would teach the craft decades later in Toronto.
After working at firms such as the prestigious Carrère & Hastings in New York, he moved to Toronto in 1905, convinced the Great Fire of 1904 combined with the Grand Trunk and Canadian Pacific railways open call for a new station meant great opportunity.
He was right. After landing the job to design the Royal Alex the next year (the first air-conditioned building in Canada), he began churning out dozens of classically styled banks and entering all sorts of competitions for grand public buildings.
He did houses, too, though not in the same staggering quantity as arts-and-crafts architect Eden Smith. From his first for William Hendrie on Hamilton's Aberdeen Ave., and his father's on Glenfern Ave. (also in Hamilton) to his own 1908 home on Avondale Rd. in Rosedale, his approach was always the same: Start with the plan, stressing "simplicity and ease of circulation," and all else would follow. This approach is illustrated to great effect by Mr. McArthur on pages 54 and 55. On one page, Mr. Lyle's clear and uncluttered Avondale Rd. floor plan is featured; on the opposite page, architect George W. Gouinlock's Walmer Rd. residence, completed the same year, displays a warren of tiny rooms, closets, curved walls and an general sense of confusion.
The book has fascinating sections that detail a failed proposal for the Bloor Viaduct and the co-design of Union Station - a process that seems to have been just as drawn out and messy as the current one for its redesign.
The author then spends considerable time on Mr. Lyle the educator. Shortly after moving to Toronto, Mr. Lyle set up a Beaux-Arts club and an atelier for aspiring architects to promote the "development of art ability and the love of art and incidentally a feeling of companionship among the younger men." This led to the University of Toronto Architectural Club and a lifetime of lecturing, writing, judging student work and advocating for the profession (and for a more beautiful Toronto; he hated Yonge St. and its messy storefronts in particular).
Advocacy also came informally in the form of the so-called Diet Kitchen School of Architecture, named after a Bloor St. eatery where Lyle held court with Martin Baldwin (of Baldwin & Greene), Eric W. Haldenby (of Mathers & Haldenby), Mackenzie Waters and others.
If that weren't enough, in the 1920s he travelled to Europe to better understand the new modern movement and how it could be adapted to Canadian architecture. This led to a lengthy exploration as to what made Canadian architecture distinct. In his sketches for a 1935 retirement house for himself (never built), we see an architect at ease with the new modernist forms; at Runnymede Library, we see his Canadian Style at its peak.
Mr. McArthur, 57, a graphic designer who first experienced the "power of architecture" working night security at the Don Jail in the 1970s, has done a masterful job of steering the reader effortlessly through a very turbulent time in architectural history using Mr. Lyle as our witness. With his own contemporary photographs, archival material and unpublished memoirs given to him by the architect's daughter, Norah Harris, to guide his pen, it's not dry or scholarly like similar tomes. Rather, A Progressive Traditionalist is a vivid, easy-to-read account with the heft and scope usually reserved for giants such as Frank Lloyd Wright. "That's what I felt Lyle deserved," says Mr. McArthur.
As such, it's a perfect page-turner to curl up with at the Lyle Café, opening soon behind his office's old facade in a new condo at the corner of Bedford and Bloor.
Dave LeBlanc