Sight Lines: Looking at Architecture and Design in Canada

James A. Love is an associate professor of environmental design at the
University of Calgary.

Adele Freedman’s ability to write has been recognized in a national
newspaper award for the article on Toronto architect Peter Dickinson.
Sight Lines is mainly a collection of columns written for The Globe and
Mail. As such, it is more a collection of pieces on the design scene in
Toronto than a contemporary view of architecture and design in Canada.

It includes interviews with many Europeans who passed through the
Globe’s home town, but none with Arthur Erickson or any designer
practicing in the Maritimes. Although the commentary on the jacket
states this is a collection of her best articles, the author, as stated
in the preface, “chose them because I liked them.” This sums up the
evaluative stance, the traditional approach of the popular assessor of
works of art, based on the taste of a presumably cultured palate.

This palate has a predilection for modernism. Hence, post-modernism is
sacrilege, although historic eclecticism is to be preserved. Great
writers, including John Ruskin, have succumbed to this, and Northrop
Frye argued that such dogma is the norm in popular criticism. The
modernist desires change for the sake of change, failing to recognize it
as a characteristic of design in the age of modern thought.

We are fortunate that design gets any attention in the popular media,
but we should also hope to see the advent of a criticism based on a
conceptual understanding of style and of changes in style.