Montreal’s Square Mile

Designed by architect E.J. Lennox and completed in 1914, Casa Loma would go on to have a tumultuous history that in many ways reflects the undulating conventions of Ontario society in general. By the mid-1930s, Pellatt — who had grown rich by investing in the province’s hydroelectricity industry — had lost his fortune. Casa Loma was seized by the city for unpaid taxes, prompting an extended period of public debate about how much of it — if anything at all — should be saved for posterity.

Today the main castle is in decent shape, recently renovated, and respected — though hardly revered to the extent that Pellatt aspired. It is a tourist attraction, available to gawk at or to rent for weddings, parties, and movie sets, a very twenty-first-century fate for a century-old building.

As with Casa Loma, many of the Square Mile buildings were over-thetop in their ornamental excess — but, as MacLeod writes, ostentation was the goal. Even as the first seeds of Modernism were sprouting on the other side of the Atlantic, the upper crust of the New World still relied on corbels, cornices, columns, and every other kind of detail to advertise their wealth. Interestingly, both books at times suggest that this neoclassical building frenzy signalled a kind of beginning for a homegrown Canadian architecture. For this reader, the subject matter is more about the intense last gasps of architectural colonialism.

MacLeod, Annmarie Adams, and other contributors to Montreal’s Square Mile unpack the demographic and gender-related underpinnings and marginalizations embedded in the built landscape of that elite neighbourhood. Casa Loma is more physically descriptive, offering exhaustingly detailed descriptions of the mansion’s architecture, interior design, and construction. So be it: There is more than one way to unpack our built history, although architecture is always a kind of biography of the individuals and the society that have created it.

Both of these essay collections are fine contributions to our understanding not only of architectural history but also regarding the entangled matrix of political, economic, and social histories. Filled with vintage photos and renderings, as well as insightful texts from an array of scholarly minds, the books expand our understanding of architectural history. But arguably more pertinent is the larger story they unpack: about power, ostentation, and the Ozymandian need to write one’s name in the sand.