Canadian Architectural History

[Lightbringer]

Can someone help my friend with a little compare and contrast of Canadian Architectural design in the 1800's to European in general?

[OTZ]

help in what way? reading suggestions? depends on the region - upper and lower canada should probably be the main area of focus. defintiely victorian era comparison, as that will defintiely be the easiest. since actually finding texts on the subject might be difficut, try to locate books that gerneally describe canadian cultural trends of the period.

[Crandar]

Is this a truly Canadian specific question or is it just Canadian-ish because you, your friend, and your teacher are in Canada.

Your best approach may actually be to use parallels with the general pattern of emigration and settlement in Canada and overlay them with the same trends in the US. Architectural trends tend to follow a very similar timeline of influences that you can roughly divide up into periods. The pre-colonial and colonial settlement periods are almost entirely driven by imported copies of architecture from the specific regions where the settlers originated. The colonial cottages, out buildings, and residences for english country settlers follow the same architectural patterns that you would see in small villages and farms from the countryside in England, Scotland, Wales, or Ireland depending on were the emigrants came from. COmmercial architecture follows a similar pattern but has different rules and timing.

Im the earl to mid 1700's you see the emergence of french colonial and georgian influences that come to characterize what we think of as Colonial Architecture as a whole.

In the early 1800's the primary influences are a series of cottage styles that dominate the western expenasion patterns in both Canada and the US. These cottages are basically miniature no-decoartion style victorian archetecture while all the high style examples with turrets, shinglework, and detailed filligre are far less common.

There is considerable documentation for much of the Victorian Architecture that you would find in western frontier towns of the US from the period of roughly 1860 until about 1895 (roughly the period of the Spanish American War) in this period the architectural patterns are fairly consistent with more of the high style versus low style (90% of the examples) patterns of construction. The emergence of the false front commercial archeticture is almost entirely a function of the rapid western exapnsion in both the US and Canada trying to look big and important just like the commercial building left behind in the eastern seaboard cities or in the hometowns back in Europe.

Here is a link to one of the many (there are several hundred) websites that have architectural style summaries and picture examples.

http://www.coloradohistory-oahp.org/guides...e/archindex.htm

you can go to that page and the select and display examples of all the different architectural styles along with descriptions of the time periods they were prevailent as well as where they came from and how they were used.