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Edmonton and the Bauhaus celebrates functionalist architecture and female ingenuity

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Edmonton has a well-deserved reputation for letting its classical architecture landslide into rubble, often accompanied by some hopeful profiteer pushing it off a cliff when no one’s looking too closely.

For how could we citizens possibly expect civic boosters to be enthusiastic inside our politically-endorsed, real estate industrial complex if they aren’t first given carte blanche to boldly wrecking-ball and bulldoze the familiar, then triumphantly slide their own new products into our faces at the expense of all other neighbourhood and/or historical concerns?

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All sarcasm aside, buildings — like people — do have lifespans, so it’s especially gratifying when some of them survive the predictable middle-age, willful neglect and unrepaired broken windows phase that’s a sure sign a developer is licking its lips somewhere, circling a cursor around on Google Maps.

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Enter Edmonton and the Bauhaus, Harcourt House Artist Run Centre’s addition to 2019 Alberta Culture Days and, oddly enough, the only gallery celebration in Canada of the 100th anniversary of Bauhaus School, one of the most influential movements in modern design history. (Take a look at pretty much any skyscraper from the mid 20th century on for examples.)

Founded by the understandably forward-thinking architect and world-builder Walter Gropius in 1919 after the cataclysm of the First World War, Bauhaus was, to varying levels of philosophical success, meant to be an entirely new way of thinking and living — merging affordable methods of mass production with a functionalist ideology that meant to do away with flashy, top-down declarations in Roman marble of ruling class immortality.

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So, yes, Bauhaus too hoped to buck the past, something the OG Nazis took issue with as this sort of radical thinking conflicted with their own nostalgic, nationalistic, make-Germany-great-again branding efforts — and the jackboots predictably shut the school down in 1933, clearly afraid of its influence.

Edmonton and the Bauhaus includes some prime examples of the movement’s iconic furniture design.
Edmonton and the Bauhaus includes some prime examples of the movement’s iconic furniture design. Photo by Fish Griwkowsky /Postmedia

And here’s where Edmonton comes in. Because, as Harcourt’s executive director and show curator Jacek Malec notes, Bauhaus’ teachers then fled to the west, spreading their ideology worldwide, including to North America.

Specifically, Bauhaus and International Style batons were passed on to two avant-garde architectural firms in Edmonton, which designed a number of our notable buildings after the third-last oil boom in 1947, through the ’50s and ’60s.

Dennis & Freda O’Connor Architects, for instance, cut the ribbon on the Harcourt House building itself in 1960, where this show of blueprints, photographs and furniture is currently on display, every day through Sunday (10 a.m.–5 p.m., 10215 112 St., third floor).

Rule Wynn and Rule Architects, meanwhile, raised the iconic green-glass AGT Building (aka the Legislature Annex, 9718 107 St.), the Northwest Utilities Building with its distinctive concrete rectangle (aka Milner Building, 10030 104 St.), and the Ellis Building (10123 112 St.), clear descendants of the Bauhaus intellectual HQs in Germany.

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“Edmonton was actually a leading city in Canada in terms of architectural thought,” explains Malec, an architecture and history buff formally trained in Poland. “Around 1929/30, the University of Alberta opened the Department of Architecture, and, this is a made-in-Alberta story, Rule Wynn and Rule were graduates of that school in the late ’30s. They were connected to the Bauhaus literature circulating the globe at the time. There was a lot of (academic) clinging to Victorian and Edwardian style, but when they graduated, they were practically the first firm that was embracing those modernist ideas.”

Honing in, he notes, “In the building a block away from Harcourt House, the Ellis Building, you can see is a miniature of the Fagus Factory that Gropius designed in 1911, using the inexpensive brick for the façade, the horizontal windows, very open in terms of the natural light coming in.

“In 1953, they also designed what is now the Annex with the curtain glass wall, which was at that time very inexpensive, and repeated that form of design found in the Bauhaus Building in Dessau that Gropius designed in 1926. Again, lots of natural light and very logical floor plans.”

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He takes us off the official tour. “On the north side of MacEwan University, there is the Northwest Utilities Building, the offices and ship for the meter repairs.” He notes, “The building is currently abandoned — it’s heartbreaking to see the dilapidated state of the building.”

The abandoned Northwestern Utilities Building at 10540 112 St.
The abandoned Northwestern Utilities Building at 10540 112 St. Photo by Fish Griwkowsky /Postmedia

A walk by the structure at 10540 112 St., owned by ATCO, confirms Malec’s description with an impressive collection of dead pigeons visible through its dirty and broken windows.

You’ll have to seek this one out on your own, but a walking tour of the active buildings examined in the show starts at 1 p.m. Saturday, hosted by Craig Henderson — architect and historian of modern and contemporary architecture. This is free of charge.

Inside the gallery, meanwhile, are blueprints of the noted buildings supplied by Canadian Architectural Archives of the University of Calgary and Maltby & Prins Architects in Edmonton. As well on the walls, photos of Bauhaus architecture taken by Lucia Moholy, Bauhaus’ often uncredited photographer and ex-wife of Bauhaus icon László Moholy-Nagy, who had to battle Gropius for her original glass negatives, which were featured in his 1938 show at MoMA, again without credit. “It was not until the 1970s the whole thing was settled,” Malec explains.

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A selection of of Lucia Moholy’s photographs up at Edmonton and the Bauhaus through Sunday.
A selection of of Lucia Moholy’s photographs up at Edmonton and the Bauhaus through Sunday. Photo by Fish Griwkowsky /Postmedia

To symbolically right some of this often intentional neglect, Edmonton and the Bauhaus also gives biographies of notable female contributors to the movement, and further makes special note of Edmonton architect Freda O’Connor. Besides her work on the Harcourt space, she was the first woman ever elected to the Alberta Association of Architects in 1966, and in 1974 became president of the Alberta Association of Architects — the first female architect in Canada to be so honoured.

“She was behind a number of good designs, small schools, small format buildings — but very progressive in terms of the design, the simplicity, erogonomics, economics. Her approach was very badly needed in the architectural community. Stop that rat race, work together with the idea of what architecture is all about: how we can transform cities with logical urban planning.”

fgriwkowsky@postmedia.com

@fisheyefoto

PREVIEW

Edmonton and the Bauhaus

Where: Harcourt House (10215 112 St.)

When: 10 a.m.–5 p.m. through Sunday; walking tour 1 p.m. Saturday starting at gallery

Admission: Free of charge

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