Building Canada

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University and an avid outdoor recreationist. She is the
author of several books, including The Mountain Is Moving: Japanese
Women’s Lives, Kurlek and Margaret Laurence: T

This intriguing historical introduction to our nation uses the buildings
that shelter us to reveal the many peoples who make up “Canadians.”
As immigrants came here over the last 300 years, they naturally brought
with them the concepts of architecture with which they were familiar,
and they did their best to reproduce familiar surroundings in a strange
land.

Bonnie Shemie, author of the Native Dwellings series, is a graphic
artist and writer with a special interest in architecture. For her,
architecture is an embodiment of history. Her beautiful color sketches
of buildings across Canada become the embodiment of the lives and events
they contain.

The text begins with New France, proceeds to the arrival of English and
American settlers in the Maritimes and Lower and Upper Canada, and heads
west as the railway unites the Dominion. Shemie shows how architecture
reflects cultures and values as well as history. Her sketches, which
manage to be both accurate and imaginative, include the Richard Carr
house in Victoria (1863), the childhood home of Canadian painter Emily
Carr; and Main Street, Barkerville, British Columbia, in the 1860s,
whose population exploded to 10,000 within a year after a sailor named
Billy Barker found gold there.

The book includes a timeline, a three-page glossary with small
illustrations of specialized terms, and information about modern
building materials, restoration work, and city planning. Building Canada
is an excellent introduction to a subject too often neglected in social
histories. Highly recommmended.