Adams, Annmarie

English

University of New Brunswick: Centre for Digital Scholarship Journals

museum-based projects. Here Frisch assesses the limitations and strengths of traditional and consumer-oriented museum programs, sug-gesting that they should be studied closely for their value in revealing inventive ideas for public presentation. There are plenty of exam-ples of exhibits which actively engage the vis-itor's imagination in the presentation of history. Of one project he says that "the exhibit closes by ... asking visitors to think about their own family history of work, tools, and neighbour-hoods, businesses and industry and to think of things the exhibit might have missed - things that might actually be in their own attic" (p. 255). The idea was not so much to acquire donations as to make the link between past and present. From his observations of American museums and their audiences, Frisch points out that his-tory appears to be enormously popular in the American public consciousness. If this is true, the "issue for museums and historians who care about them," he argues, "would seem to be less a matter of generating interest than of learning more about what drives an existing interest, and thereby finding ways of meeting it with historical interpretation on mutually meaningful common ground" (p. 262).Readers are thus invited to question the effectiveness of museums that cater solely to entertainment, and consequently dismiss the ability (and will-ingness) of their audiences to understand com-plex historical concepts. In one museum, cura-tors refused to "see imported academic concepts and dazzling design techniques as ends in their own right..." They "consciously used them for resuscitation" and "deliberately sought a topic that would require them to collect new artifacts, intending to show how 'exhibit-driven collecting' could be used as a way 'to refocus and reenergize the collecting process'" (p. 256). In their theoretical and practical orienta-tion A Shared Authority and Presenting the Past are welcome contributions to an old debate about the nature and role of historical inter-pretation in public institutions. Both books promise to broaden our appreciation for the pre-sentation of history in museums, and will no doubt enrich future heritage-based programs in the process. Leslie Maitland, The Queen Anne Revival Style in Canadian Architecture ANNMARIE ADAMS Maitland, Leslie. The Queen Anne Revival Style in Canadian Architecture. Ottawa: Minister of the Environment 1990. 303 pp., 136 ills. Paper $19.95, ISBN 0-660-13599-X. (Disponible en français sous le titre Le style néo-Queen Anne dans l'architecture au Canada. Paper $19.95, ISBN 0-660-92969-4.) In 1876, a paper on the Queen Anne style of architecture was read to a group of British architects. As the lecturer finished, according to decorators Agnes and Rhoda Garrett, an irate professor asked the speaker where one might find examples of the so-called style, "with a sneer in the pronunciation of the last word which it is not possible to express by any form of print." Toronto, Charlottetown, or Kamloops might have satisfied the professor's curiosity, according to Leslie Maitland's The Queen Anne Revival Style in Canadian Architecture, al-though he probably expected directions to Chelsea or South Kensington. The professor's hesitation to call Queen Anne buildings a style was typical of the period; architects practicing in that mode often found themselves under fierce attack from their col-leagues. As Maitland notes, the buildings had little to do with Queen Anne, the seventeenth-century British monarch. Rather, the architects of the large brick houses of the late nineteenth century - with crisp white window frames, turrets, porches, and rambling, open plans -actually combined aspects of many other styles, particularly motifs from the Gothic Revival and the Arts and Crafts Movements. It was this absence of stylistic "purity" to which the pro-fessor, and many others, objected. Maitland's The Queen Anne Revival Style in Canadian Architecture is a significant contri-bution to the scholarship on this international movement. Although there are relatively few studies of Queen Anne buildings, the two major works are both deservedly classics in the field of architectural history. Mark Girouard's Sweet-ness and Light: The Queen Anne Movement 1860-1900 (1977) and The Shingle Style and 72 the Stick Style (1955; revised éd., 1971) by Vincent Scully were both, at the time of their publication, innovative interpretations of Queen Anne architecture in England and the United States respectively. Both scholars included brief chapters on buildings in the other's country; nei-ther author mentions the pervasiveness of the style in Canada. Both the strength and the weakness of Maitland's book are in its breadth. Like other publications on architecture produced by the Architectural History Division (formerly the Canadian Inventory of Historic Buildings) of the Canadian Parks Service, Environment Canada, the mandate of the book is the docu-mentation of an architectural style across the entire country. As a result, the bulk of the book comprises 136 black and white illustrations with brief descriptions of buildings roughly related by style. The advantage, obviously, is that the book includes buildings from coast to coast. The unfortunate result is that the analysis is limited to brief descriptions of the buildings. The Queen Anne Revival Style in Canadian Architecture begins with concise essays on the development of the style in England and the United States, followed by an introduction to the Canadian version of Queen Anne. The English and American sections are drawn largely from Girouard and Scully, contributing relatively little to a new understanding of the style; they serve, however, to set the social and historical contexts for the Canadian analysis. While this Canadian section includes several new ideas and poses valid questions for ana-lysis, it is far too cursory. Based on a thorough reading of two popu-lar architectural journals, Construction and Canadian Architect and Builder, Maitland per-ceptively notes how the Queen Anne style was adapted to Canada. Regional characteristics were expressed in the use of different materi-als and the Canadian plan was more compact, making the buildings easier to heat in winter. Because Canadian families employed fewer domestic servants, architects eliminated the extensive servants' wings commonly found in English Queen Anne houses. In a two-page section on the cultural meanings of the style in Canada, Maitland alludes, tantalizingly, to the imperialistic overtones of Queen Anne archi-tecture, noting that "traditional, indigenous differences in architecture from one Dominion or colony to another [were] underplayed, in favour of an imperial image." Such questions will hopefully lead to more cross-cultural stud-ies of this international style. Maitland's commentary on Queen Anne buildings in Canada is ordered by building type; the section on domestic architecture -houses were, by far, the style's most common manifestation - is subdivided by region, fol-lowed by essays on apartment, recreational, institutional, and commercial buildings. These essays, although clearly written, bear the enor-mous responsibility of commentary on the sub-sequent photos; at times they read like lists rather than thematic essays. The field of architectural history has gone through enormous changes in the last 20 years; before the revolutionary work of the 1970s (pioneered by historians like Girouard), archi-tectural historians most often explained build-ings in terms of style, as a succession of observ-able patterns in the way things looked, fol-lowing the sequence established by art his-tory. Since then, buildings have been seen by most historians as enterprises very different than paintings and sculpture, with complex relationships to economics, class, and social structures. As a result, most architectural his-torians are far less dependent on the facades of buildings, but rather analyse the contexts and plans of buildings for keys to their social sig-nificance. While the decision in 1990 to base a book on an isolated style is old-fashioned, in this sense, it is much harder to understand why the photographs show only the buildings' front elevations. The Queen Anne Revival Style in Canadian Architecture documents 116 Cana-dian buildings. Only one floor plan appears in the whole book and very few of the photos show the buildings' contexts. Similarly, the section on interiors includes photographs of architectural details - fireplaces and stairways - rather than documenting the novel spatial relationships between rooms real-ized in these houses. Significant connections to class, the history of family life, and the posi-tion of women in these houses have thus been neglected by the focus of die illustrations on the front elevations of buildings. The battle over whether Queen Anne build-ings actually constituted a style, as recounted in the beginning of this review, is long over; hopehilly the publication of The Queen Anne Revival Style in Canadian Architecture will inspire others to look beyond style and national boundaries in an interpretation of nineteenth-century architecture. 73 

Leslie Maitland, The Queen Anne Revival Style in Canadian Architecture

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Leslie Maitland, The Queen Anne Revival Style in Canadian Architecture

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