The Dominion Public Building: Aesthetic Design
Aesthetic Design
www.dominionpublicbuilding.ca/phone/1-fhbro-aesthetic-design.html
Aesthetic Design
"The London Dominion Public Building is an impressive essay in what was called, at the time, "the modern style, the new classicism or modern classicism". (19) This stylistic approach is essentially a variant of the Art Deco style. The latter, named after the Exposition des arts decoratifs et industriels, held in Paris in 1925, expressed a romantic response to the machine era.
The Art Deco style espoused a severe and dynamic handling of massing and an eclectic treatment of decorative motifs which derived from ancient Egypt, archaic Greece, Assyria, and precontact North and South American Indian civilizations. (20) In her Art Deco in North America, Eva Weber has provided a clear and simple schemata for the style, dividing it into three subcategories: "zig-zag," "streamlined," and "classical moderne." (21) It is the third category into which the London Dominion Public Building falls. Classical moderne was the most conservative variant of the Art Deco style, "blending a simplified and monumental modernistic neoclassicism with a more austere form of geometric and stylized relief sculpture and other ornament.” (22)
By the 1920s this style had supplanted Beaux-Arts classicism, previously favoured for large, official structures. Well-known American architects such as Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue and Paul Philippe Cret were building in the classical moderne manner, as were architects John Lyle, Ernest I. Barott, and Ernest Cormier in Canada. As in the London Dominion Public Building, the surfaces of their buildings were sleek and their massing self-contained, with fenestration sharply inscribed and often inset to create a precise pattern of light and shade.
Retaining the classical format of base, shaft, and capital, the London federal building rises from a single storey base in stepped-back volumes. The middle section, or shaft, is defined by multistorey piers which separate the deeply recessed windows. This vertical thrust is contained at attic level by horizontal banded moulding and a smooth cornice. Nevertheless, the stepping-back of the massing on the side elevations and in the corner piers on the facade, and the strong verticals of the window treatment emphasize the height of the building. This effect was underscored by placing the entry on the narrow Richmond Street end, and by giving that elevation an extra two storeys so that an impression was created of a stepped-back skyscraper with a long extension to the rear."
19.- Janet Wright, Building in the Bureaucracy: Architecture of the Department of Public Works, 1927-1939, Masters thesis, Queen's University, 1989, p. 92
20.- Ibid., p. 93.
21.- Eva Weber, Art Deco in North America (London: Bison, 1985), p. 12.
22.- Ibid., p. 12.
Federal Heritage Buildings Review Office | Report: 89-90
Title:
Dominion Public Building, 457 Richmond Street, London, Ontario
Source:
Shannon Ricketts, Architectural History Branch
NEXT: FUNCTIONAL DESIGN
A documentary project by Juan Andres Bello,
with the support of The London Heritage Council
© 2015 TRIANA MEDIA
