Carved in Stone
Image: Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York City – a stone carver working on a capital with an angel.
Photo: Bain News Service Public Domain Image from Wikimedia Commons
In Ontario, stone has traditionally been employed in the construction of buildings that were intended to last a hundred years or more. In some communities, including Guelph and Kingston, the availability of nearby stone quarries meant the material had broader use. For banks, insurance companies, institutions and government buildings, stone was a first choice. It was synonymous with stability and permanence.
For centuries, stone provided the opportunity for artists to contribute to the overall architectural vision. Stone was often used as the decorative or functional ornamentation on buildings – an intrinsic part of the building. The language of architecture includes words such as keystone, quoins, frieze and bas-relief as a result of the sculptural use of stone.
The Bauhaus, founded in Germany in 1919, ignited the Modern Movement. In North America, the sterility of the Modernists’ purist designs was not quick to catch on, but, beginning in the 1920s, Ontario architects started turning away from classical motifs and looking to other means to create texture, shadow, relief and interest. Architect John Lyle went further, crusading to create a Canadian expression in his work. The means was sculpture and the use of Canadian motifs carved into friezes and basreliefs on his buildings.
At the same time, a series of exceptional sculptors that had been born around the turn of the century were coming of age, having immigrated to Toronto or graduated from the Ontario College of Art. Among others, they included: Emanuel Hahn, Cleeve Horne, Florence Wyle, Elizabeth Wyn Wood and Jacobine Jones.
From the 1930s to the 1960s, excluding the war years, there was a strong involvement of artists and architects in the design of major buildings and monuments. Sculpture was incorporated as part of the Modern Movement, as an integral part of the building skin. Margaret and Merilyn McKelvey’s book, Toronto: Carved in Stone, probably best chronicles the impact of this phase in Toronto.
Following Canada’s 1967 centennial, public sculpture and the use of stone cladding on buildings gradually ceased. The Toronto Dominion Centre and the glass office towers that followed demonstrated a less costly means of cladding buildings. The stripped minimalism of the glass towers had cost advantages.
My father, Louis Temporale, was a quiet and talented sculptor; he did not possess the artist’s grand ego. Rather, he became the man to execute in stone the work of the well recognized sculptors of the period. The process of stone carving is tedious. It begins with small clay maquettes, then scaled plaster castings and lastly the carving away of stone blocks. It is a time- and labour-intensive pursuit, in which one mistake can destroy the piece.
Image: Bas-relief by Elizabeth Wyn-Wood, 1962, for Ryerson Polytechnical Institute, courtesy Ryerson University.
Photo: Colin Rose, Montreal Licensed Under CCO
My father and his brothers Peter and Mario were most frequently the carvers selected to execute the important commissions. In Elspeth Cameron’s book, And Beauty Answers: The Life of Frances Loring and Florence Wyle, Louis Temporale, by the late 1950s, is described as “Canada’s leading stone carver.” Poignantly, only ten years earlier, during WW2, he had been stripped of all government commissions, due to the fact that he was an Italian Canadian. My father and his brothers were among a handful of sculptors capable of executing major commissions. The few that remain today are largely involved in the restoration field. The marriage of art and architecture as an integral part of the building envelope, particularly for the centuries-old use of stone, has severely declined.
In addition, the nature of the building industry over the past 100 years has changed. Large corporate entities, including multinational corporations and shareholders with a focus on the bottom line are not building to leave a legacy. Rather, the horizon for the investment is relatively short-term. Lyle’s crusade for a Canadian expression in architecture has been largely replaced by the preference for internationalism. Unlike countries such as Italy and Denmark, Canadian design has never been a key part of Canadian identity. The fine arts are more marginal than ever in the discussion of architecture.
However, there is hope on the horizon. Architects and interior designers are starting to employ a large tool kit of materials, colours, textures, photography and the arts to give humanity to spaces. Will sculpture be part of buildings in the near future? – perhaps not, at least in the traditional sense. Will creative sculpture be part of urban spaces? – increasingly, we hope.
But, for the sake of our architectural and cultural tradition, architects should help to ensure that the buildings and sculptures that remain from the modernist movement of the 1920s to the 1960s are preserved, since they represent a precious heritage that can never be replaced.