between 1880 and 1895. Waite was a juror in a closed competition for the design of the Ontario Legislature, and it was he who came away with the commission that resulted in Queen’s Park in Toronto.
New building systems and materials required advanced technical knowledge that could not be learned through apprenticeship. Students were leaving the country to gain experience in Boston, Chicago, even London, England. In 1873, the Ontario legislature had called for the creation of the School of Practical Science, and by 1878 it was offering three-year diplomas in mining, engineering, mechanics and manufacturing. In 1889, the School became affiliated with the University of Toronto. The following year, the first courses in architecture were offered as part of the university curriculum. These courses included basic engineering and design in the Beaux-Arts style.
CHÂTEAU FRONTENAC, Quebec city, 1893, Bruce Price, Architect; CANADIAN BANK OF COMMERCE, Dawson city, Yukon, 1901, in the Beaux-Arts Style.
The Ontario Association of Architects, incorporated in 1890, controlled entry into the profession and set standards for the province. Quebec followed suit later the same year. A new trade magazine was launched, The Canadian Architect and Builder.
While the profession was becoming established, so was the country. With the British North America Act of 1867, the former colonies entered into Confederation to become the Dominion of Canada with a population of 3.5 million. To unite the country, the government promised to build a transcontinental railway and provide ferry service to Prince Edward Island.
In 1885, after five years’ construction, the transcontinental railway was completed, and the country was connected coast to coast. At the western terminus, Vancouver prospered, and Winnipeg – halfway across the country – became a major business centre. Settlements appeared along the rail lines. To keep pace with this growth, the Bank of Commerce shipped prefabricated banks to new towns atop flatbed rail cars, two rail cars per bank. In 1906, a new branch was being erected somewhere in the Prairies every other week.
Most of the population still lived on farms, but towns were growing and the shift had begun to urban life. Larger towns boasted modern conveniences such as gas-powered and horse-drawn trams; theatres were well attended and the level of culture, over all, was on the rise. Women worked with church groups and benevolent societies for the welfare of women working in factories and the homeless and in the realm of medical care. To promote better practical education for wives and mothers, Adelaide Hunter Hood-less established the first Women’s Institute in Stoney Creek, Ontario, in 1897. Other socially minded groups were forming, too: the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the Women’s Suffrage Society of Canada and the Young Women’s Christian Association.
Women were becoming a force. They wanted more say in matters that concerned them, and it was easy to see that political power and education were both essential to that purpose. Victoria College, in Cobourg, Ontario, opened its doors to women in 1877, and University College in Toronto followed in 1884. Frustrated in attempts to enter established medical schools in Toronto and Kingston, women managed to start their own schools in both cities. The earliest professional degrees accessible to women were in the fields of science, pharmacy, law and eventually medicine. Architecture was still in the future.
WOMEN’S BUILDING, WORLD’S COLUMBIAN EXPOSITION, Chicago, designed by Sophie Hayden, 1893; HOTEL LAFAYETTE, Buffalo, New York, 1904, Louise Blanchard Bethune, AIA.
In Europe and in the United States, it was a different story. In 1881, in Buffalo, New York, Louise Blanchard Bethune opened an architectural office at the age of twenty-five. She had learned her trade in the office of Richard Waite, the man whose commissions included the Ontario Legislature. With R.A. Bethune, her husband and her partner in the firm, Louise Blanchard Bethune shared a practice that was responsible for the design of many of Buffalo’s early educational, industrial and commercial buildings – including Hotel Lafayette (1898–1904), a city landmark.
In 1880, the first woman graduated in architecture from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. By 1891, when women were invited to compete for the design of the Women’s Building for the World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago World’s Fair), there were thirteen entrants from around the United States. First prize went to Sophie Hayden, a twenty-one-year-old graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is interesting to note that Louise Blanchard Bethune refused to enter this competition because the honorarium for the winner of the women’s competition was one-tenth that being offered for an equivalent competition open to male architects.
In the 1894 MIT graduating class.map in architecture were three women; one was Marion Mahony. From 1895 to 1909, she worked with Frank Lloyd Wright in his Oak Park Studio outside Chicago. When she started, she was twenty-four and Wright was twenty-eight. Mahony married Walter Burley Griffin in 1911; their architectural firm built an international reputation. On the west coast, in 1904, architect Julia Morgan opened an office in San Francisco. Before retiring in 1951, she had designed over 700 buildings. By 1910, Julia Morgan was one of fifty women architects practicing in the United States.
In Europe, too, women were active in the profession. Emilie Winkelmann opened her own office in 1908 in Berlin, with a staff of fifteen prior to the First World War. In Austria, the first woman architect began a practice in 1917. Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky worked on Frankfurt Social Housing with Ernst May: her work produced the Frankfurt Kitchen, a prefabricated unit that could be inserted into high-rise apartments by a crane. (Ten thousand such units were installed between 1925 and 1930.)
In Finland, Signe Hornborg graduated from the Polytechnic Institute of Helsinki in 1890. In England, Ethel Charles was the first woman to graduate from an architectural program in 1898. The following year, the Royal Institute of British Architects elected by a single vote to admit women, and Ethel Charles joined the RIBA. In 1900, they admitted a second woman: Bessie Ada Charles, Ethel’s sister. In Australia, Florence Taylor was the first woman to graduate in architecture in 1907. Before coming to Canada, Alexandra Biriukova completed degrees in Petrograd in 1914 and in Rome in 1925.
BERKELEY WOMEN’S CITY CLUB, Berkeley, California, 1929–1930, Julia Morgan, Architect; MUELLER HOUSE, Chicago, Illinois, 1910, Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin, Architects.
Women’s interest in architecture was growing. In the United States, it led to an unusual school of architecture and landscape design exclusively for women. The Cambridge School was close to Harvard, which did not admit women. A Radcliffe College graduate requested tutorials in architectural design in the office of Henry Frost and his partner. Several more women applied, and the office turned into a school. That was in 1917. When the school closed twenty-six years later, 500 women had been trained and the Cambridge School had a well-established reputation for excellence.
In Canada, it was a different story, with only limited signs of interest. In Montreal, in the 1890s, Jean Eleanor Howden studied at McGill University for two years, but when she was told a woman could not be granted a degree in architecture, she left the university and joined the office of Edward and W.S. Maxwell, Architects. In 1908, one woman’s application to study architecture was referred to the McGill University Faculty of Applied Science, which decided it “would not be advisable to admit women at the present.” McGill relented in 1937. Women architects were slow to appear in Canada and few in number. Mary Anna Kentner enrolled in 1916 at the University of Toronto, and Marjorie Hill, who had first enrolled in Alberta, graduated from the University of Toronto in 1920.
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