Canadian Historic Sites: Occasional Papers in Archaeology and History No. 25

Gothic Revival in Canadian Architecture

by Mathilde Brosseau

Abstract

This study deals with the evolution of Gothic Revival in Canadian architecture. It goes back to the origins of the style, marks its arrival in the country and traces its four mutations ranging over the greater part of the 19th century and even into the first decades of the 20th century.

The first, so-called romantic mutation is expressed by buildings that add certain Neo-Gothic traits to a traditional scheme of composition. This style dominated the first generation of Gothic Revival buildings in Canada and influenced many later constructions in areas removed from the large centres.

Toward the middle of the 19th century, this conception gave way to another approach: the ecclesiological and rationalistic style, which first appeared in the Atlantic Provinces and spread through other parts of Canada. This style is seen primarily in Anglican church construction, due to the influence of the Cambridge Camden Society, a body of Cambridge theologians who were determined to convey to the architectural world an ideal based on a return to the principles of composition of English churches built in the 13th and 14th centuries.

As early as the 1860s, a desire for inventive freedom created a trend toward picturesque visual effects in Gothic Revival buildings. Until the last years of the 19th century, the exponents of Gothic Revival show a tendency toward eclecticism. Various sectors of architecture in Canada still reveal many elements of this third mutation known as High Victorian Gothic.

At the turn of the century, a radical change affects the evolution of Gothic Revival. The widespread influence of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and its academic traditions produce a movement toward a monumental interpretation of Gothic Revival according to strict principles of composition. Religious and institutional architecture, with its inherent ties to the Middle Ages, is almost the only medium for this fourth mutation in Gothic Revival: the Beaux-Arts style. During the 1930s, this final expression of Gothic Revival gradually gave way to the imperatives of modern technology in the architectural world.

Submitted for publication 1977, by Mathilde Brosseau (1946-79), then architectural analyst, Canadian Inventory of Historic Building, Parks Canada, Ottawa.