Building for the Future: A Photo Journal of Saskatchewan's Legislative Building

David E. Smith is a professor of political Studies at the University of
Saskatchewan. He is the author of Building a Province: A History of
Saskatchewan in Documents, The Invisible Crown, and Republican Option in
Canada, Past and Present.

The word journal suggests a daily happening, but the time span of this
book is almost a century. The word photo suggests something pictorial,
yet there is a substantial amount of technical information within its
covers. Album, scrapbook, and log are no more precise. Gordon Barnhart
has produced something unique—a lavishly illustrated history of
Saskatchewan’s legislative building and its setting. In scale (three
times the size of New York’s Central Park) and design (English
landscape), the latter is unlike any other legislative precinct in the
country. But so too is the restrained and refined Beaux-Arts structure
the grounds complement.

The legislative building, designed by the Maxwell firm of Montreal, and
the provincial university (at Saskatoon), designed by Darling and
Pearson of Toronto (who were unsuccessful in the Regina competition),
stand as permanent reminders of the confidence and esthetic taste of the
province’s founders. What raises this book from the ranks of a mere
photo album is its thesis: the legislature holds (and has always held) a
central place in the affections of the Saskatchewan people. The handsome
library, the elegant chamber, the mammoth rotunda, the extensive art
galleries: all of the physical structure is here, but there also
references, for example, to public demonstrations in front of the
beautiful facade and the introduction of radio-transmitted debates (the
first in the Commonwealth) to people across the province. As
Saskatchewan approaches its centenary in 2005, no pictorial memorial
could be more welcome or more fitting to the occasion.