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Reviewed by: Canada: Modern Architectures in History by Rhodri Windsor Liscombe and Michelangelo Sabatino Isabelle Gournay (bio) Rhodri Windsor Liscombe and Michelangelo Sabatino Canada: Modern Architectures in History London: Reaktion Books, 2016. 390 pages, 200 black-and-white illustrations. ISBN: 978-1-7802-3633-9, $35.00, PB In the country-specific series Modern Architectures in History, Canada is a latecomer and a welcome addition. Faced with the relative ignorance—or, at best, incomplete knowledge—of Canadian architecture and architects on the part of their international readership, Liscombe and Sabatino rise to the challenge and demonstrate "the substantial and diverse narrative of Canadian modernism," explaining how the nation transformed from "a scarcely populated colony exploited for its natural resources to a country that habitually exports design expertise" (335). Indeed, living in the Washington, D.C., region, I enjoy three Canadian exports of the highest caliber: Arthur Erickson's Canadian Embassy, Douglas Cardinal's National Museum of the American Indian, and Bing Thom's revamped Arena Stage Theater (illustrated 342), all emblematic of key design personalities. U.S. architecture schools regularly invite Canada's rising stars as lecturers or visiting professors, including, at my own University of Maryland, Toronto's Brigitte Shim and Nova Scotia's "critical regionalist" Brian MacKay-Lyons. Whether gigantic or intimate, in béton brut or weathered wood, recent Canadian architecture has overwhelmingly embraced the modern (as opposed to postmodern or neo-traditional) ethos. Liscombe and Sabatino can therefore deploy an easy-to-comprehend and articulate conceptual triad as a frame for the work they feature in the book: structural socioeconomic modernization, technological and programmatic modernity, and self-referential stylistic modernism. They divide their narrative into five periods, delineated by benchmark events in national and world history. Chapter 1 ranges from the completion of Canada's transcontinental railway in 1886 to the outbreak of World War I. As the architectural profession found its institutional footing and created its first schools, modernity was already percolating through the period's prevailing idioms: the monumental (Beaux-Arts/Edwardian) and the picturesque (arts and crafts). Although the two world wars, which bookend chapter 2, were not fought on Canadian soil, they greatly affected the country in terms of casualties (650,000 in World War I) and of accelerated, but not excessively traumatic, modernization. As stated by politician Vincent Massey in 1937, Canada, "so happily given to moderation," could only be averse to both "extreme" modernism and "pedantic" traditionalism (69). The bulk of the book is devoted to the post–World War II era, which has witnessed a constant rise in Canada's urban population and status as an economic and political world power. The period beginning with the "Reconstruction" imperatives of the late 1940s and ending with Montreal's Expo '67 (a feat of design and geopolitics particularly well explained in this book) receives two chapters, the second appropriately titled "Modernism with a Punch." The following chapter, "Questioning Modernism," leads to another international event, Vancouver's Expo '86. Again, moderation tempered the embrace of the new—in this case postmodernism or, as Liscombe and Sabatino frame it, the reintegration of "typological precedent back into the equation of modernism" (249). This period generally coincided with the progressive tenure of Pierre Trudeau as prime minister. In addition to extolling the "unpretentious quality" of his country's architecture and helping his friend Erickson secure the Washington embassy commission, Trudeau Père funded and supported fashionable but un-nostalgic projects like the now mostly demolished Ark at Spry Point on Prince Edward Island (249), the only example of ecological counterculture illustrated in this book. Upon retirement, Trudeau raised his sons in the art deco gem that Montreal architect Ernest Cormier had designed for himself (98–99). The penultimate chapter, followed by a separate conclusion, leads to the present. Set in a different political landscape and accounting for a globalized mindset, it revolves around the theme of "regeneration" that includes imperatives of sustainability. What makes Canadian architecture special and this book worth reading? It is hard to think of another country, even a more populated one, with such a cosmopolitan, and continually renewed, spectrum of practitioners and educators. Naturally, Canada's modern architecture was affected by...

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