Triangle Gallery

Architecture from the birth of modern Canada on display at Triangle.

DETAILS

Mid-Century Icons: Architectural Photography from the Panda Collection
Museum of Contemporary Art Calgary
Thursday, September 3 - Thursday, October 22

More in: Visual Arts

Remember when the suburbs were just a sparkle in a city planner’s eye? Although it seems hard to imagine a time before there were ‘burbs,’ it was only in 1953 that the first self-contained Canadian community went up in Don Mills, Ontario. In addition to suburbia, the ’50s saw the rise of a big chunk of our high schools, office buildings and institutional buildings such as the Alberta College of Art and Design, Glenbow, and what is now the Telus World of Science, which were designed to be icons of the modern era.

What’s funny is that we hardly had the chance to see them as the pristine, indestructible and monumental buildings they were envisioned to be. From the get go they’ve been populated by activity, weathered by natural events, crowded by neighbouring developments and now dwarfed by more recent feats of civic engineering.

About 60 promotional photographs of modernist architecture, captured in newborn sheen, are on view at the Triangle Gallery in an exhibition called “Mid-Century Icons: Architectural Photography from the Panda Collection.” Promising social reform and progress, these images were highly subjective, composed and manipulated. Both photographers and architects were busy selling the look of a future that never really happened.

One of the most well-known photographers of modernist architecture in Canada was Hugh Robertson. Shortly after the war he formed a photography firm called Panda Associates with fellow Royal Canadian Air Force photographers. Their total output comprises over 100,000 photographs of the built environment, which is kept in its entirety at the University of Calgary’s little-known Canadian Architectural Archives. With a current staff of one and no exhibition space, chief curator of the archives Linda Fraser is thrilled to have the exhibition come to Calgary for Artcity after its run at the University of Toronto in 2007.

Fraser curated “Mid-Century Icons” with Geoffrey Simmins, associate dean of research and planning at the U of C’s faculty of fine arts, and recently graduated U of C art history major Rebecca Lesser. Simmins says the initial motivation to create this show was “to introduce people to this major collection, one of the most important in the country of architectural photographs.”

“Mid-Century Icons” consists of large-scale reproductions of the original documents photographed by Robertson and his firm in Ontario and Quebec during the post-war boom. Most of the prints show off the work of prominent modernist architects John B. and John C. Parkin. Panda Associates soon came to be the leading photographers of modern architecture in Canada and contributed as much as the architects did towards capturing the ideals and look of the modern era.

“If the photographs look critical of modernist ideals, it is only from our perspective now,” says assistant curator Lesser. Only through hindsight can we see how the ideal of the transparent glass box, the square grid and the organization of domestic life that was at one point attractive, is now kind of sterile and oppressive.

Many of the photographs were taken immediately after or during construction in newly furbished lots before grass and trees were planted. That fact, combined with not having any people around, make the shots look especially post-apocalyptic. Another tactic used to heighten the sense of the manufactured and infallible design, according to Lesser, was to use Sharpie marker right on the negative to black out the skies, creating a stark nature to reflect a man-made “perfection.”

The most common reaction to the exhibition in Toronto, says Lesser, was one of people saying, “I know that place, or I remember when I was there… but it never looked like that.” Another reason the photographs look somewhat surreal or even cartoonish is the use of the extreme perspectives where sky rises or cement awnings jut out at a 45-degree angle, slashing through the entire picture plane.

It’s easy to be critical of the era that invented suburbia, megamalls and buildings without a single curved line. It’s also fascinating to see in these photographs how many factories, apartment buildings, schools, convenience centres, airports, museums, high-rises and houses went up in such a short time, with a singular look. Scary. “Mid-Century Icons” is worth a visit just to see the severe beauty of a vision that foretold of its emptiness before it was ever fully realized.