Homeplace: The Making of the Canadian Dwelling over Three Centuries

Laurie C.C. Stanley-Blackwell is an associate professor of history at
St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia.

In 1958, Alan Gowan’s seminal work Looking at Architecture in Canada
opened the door for the serious study of Canadian architecture.
Homeplace, the latest addition to this expanding field, moves beyond the
simplistic linearity and faзadism of traditional architectural
histories and delves into the complexities of house form as both concept
and object. Ennals and Holdsworth provide a convincing critique of the
deficiencies of elitist histories, which prominently feature “high
style” examples of architectural virtuosity. The authors opt for a
more conceptualized and balanced approach by directing their attention
to ordinary Canadian housing from the 17th century to the 1930s.
Eschewing the “high style” lexicon, the book is organized around a
flexible “folk-vernacular-polite” continuum that serves as the
analytical backdrop for a discussion of the impact of European and
American influences, ethnicity, environment, technology, class
structure, and economics on Canadian domestic architecture.

In their study, the authors demonstrate that the traditional European
folk idiom, which dominated Canadian housing throughout the 17th and
18th centuries, was eventually eroded by social and economic forces.
During the late 19th century, vernacular designs were pushed to the
forefront by industrial capitalism, consumerism, mass-marketed housing
designs, factory-produced building components and prefabricated houses.
Even the ancestral housing traditions of later immigrants like the
Mennonites and Ukrainians succumbed to Canada’s mainstream vernacular
culture and the homogenization of distinctive regional landscapes.
Although Homeplace focuses largely on single-family dwellings, the
authors also explore such dwelling forms as cook rooms, shanties,
bunkhouses, collier row-housing, coolie cabins, and company houses; all
shaped no less by cultural and economic factors.

This book provides many fascinating insights into the phenomena of
cultural borrowing and adaptation, as well as into construction
techniques, technologies and tastes. The discussions of the symbolic
meanings of room arrangement, the connections between architecture and
power, and Canada’s slow response to architectural modernism, however,
are tantalizingly brief. Aboriginal house forms are treated in a
somewhat dismissive way. Also striking is the scant reference to
military barracks, apartments and multiplex housing, and to the training
and tools of house builders. Readers will also be puzzled by the
authors’ facile attribution of the persistence of the “Canadien”
style to the isolation and backwardness of Quebeckers rather than the
politics of survivance.

With its lucid prose, ample endnotes, and attractive line drawings,
Homeplace is a thought-provoking examination of the complex bonds
between Canadians and their dwellings. It should, however, be read in
tandem with Harold Kalman’s two-volume study, A History of Canadian
Architecture (1994), which offers a more expansive overview of
Canada’s built landscape.