Journal of the Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada 31, no. 2 (2006)

The Victorian Gothic Revival appealed to the public in terms of its “true principles.” It was an ethically honest architecture with nothing to hide. However, not everyone who commissioned a Gothic Revival church was interested in being equally overt. Not that they would lie about the building and why they commissioned it. Rather, they presented one obvious reason to distract from another secret reason that they didn’t want to disclose to the public, just to their Christian god. This was the case with Edward Chandler Walker in eponymous Walkerville, Ontario, Canada. Walker used filial deference (commissioning the community’s Anglican church in the name of his parents) to obscure his socio-political claims in the Edwardian era and the sickness in his body, using the church as an appeal for divine intervention to save his life.

with Martin Bressani

True Principles: Journal of the Pugin Society 4, no. 2 (2010–11)

Augustus Welby Pugin died at the relatively young age of forty years. His death was attributed to overwork. A more recent hypothesis is that Pugin acquired syphilis at the London theatre scene, where he briefly worked in his early adulthood, a few decades before dying of that infection. We pursue that hypothesis in this essay, exploring the metaphorical power of health and sickness in Pugin’s architectural writings, suggesting that part of the dramatic change in career choice (from the loose morals of the theatre to the utter piety of Gothic Revival church architecture as a Roman Catholic convert) was his effort to grapple with his own illness, physiologically and sociologically, because of the social stigmas attached to venereal disease.

“We don’t often associate Pugin with concerns of the body [… but] a critical exception is Martin Bressani and Cameron Macdonell, “Remedies External and Visible: Pugin’s Health and Pugin’s Gothic.”

—Corrina Wagner

University of Exeter

Journal of the Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada 37, no. 2 (2012)

A common criticism of the Gothic Revival is its ability to revive the forms of medieval architecture but not the spirit. In this essay, I propose that American Gothic Revivalists Ralph Adams Cram and Bertram Goodhue managed to revive the spirit of medieval humour along with their medievalist forms. Specifically, Cram’s extensive writing on medieval architecture and its modern revival includes many plays on the pre-modern language of humour and the bodily humours. Thus, this essay is structured to create categories of humour in Cram and Goodhue’s Canadian and American architecture, based on the four bodily humours of ancient and medieval European medicine: the sanguineous humour of light-hearted comedy, the phlegmatic humour of intellectual wit, the choleric humour of bitter satire, and the melancholic humour of black comedy. Moreover, Cram and Goodhue would mix the complexions of these humours, starting with a light-hearted jape, for example, that suddenly turned incredibly dark. Altogether, their use of humour was part of their effort to revive what Cram especially considered the healthier culture of medieval Europe, believing that medieval types of humour were essential to that social sense of wellbeing.

with Annmarie Adams

Winterthur Portfolio 50, no. 2/3 (2016)

Montreal architect Ernest Cormier designed and occupied the art deco house at 1418 Pine Avenue starting in 1930–31 to accommodate his unusual living arrangement with Clorinthe Perron. Pierre Elliott Trudeau, fifteenth prime minister of Canada, purchased the house in 1979 to suit his different and yet equally atypical masculinity as retired head of state and single father. The house’s unique spatial program and its artifacts comprise an architecture of domestic masculinity reflecting Cormier’s autobiographical narrative as well as Trudeau’s reanimation of that narrative by restoring, maintaining, supplementing, showing, and/or rearranging those spaces and signifiers to accommodate his self-image.

Edited by Timothy Brittain-Catlin, Jan De Maeyer, and Martin Bressani 

(Leuven University Press, 2016)

When Ralph Adams Cram and Bertram Goodhue hailed Pugin in their numerous books, it is assumed that they were referring to Augustus Welby Pugin. Granted, Augustus Welby Pugin was the most famous in three generations of an architectural family, but careful analysis of Cram’s and Goodhue’s numerous visual and textual citations from Pugin family works indicates that they actually celebrated Pugin’s father, Auguste Charles Pugin, more than they celebrated his famous son. They did so because their American architectural firm thrived on the vogue for the Perpendicular Gothic in the later decades of the Gothic Revival, and Augustus Welby Pugin notoriously hated Perpendicular Gothic. It was his father, and his father’s several books of drawings for British Gothic monuments, that appealed to Cram and Goodhue because the elder Pugin had no qualms with the Perpendicular phase of the British Middle Ages. In this chapter, the analysis of Cram’s and Goodhue’s textual and architectural production calls into question how the late Gothic Revival imagined the alignment of predecessors differently than histories of the style tend to claim. For them, the distinctions between flimsy Georgian Gothick and astute Victorian Gothic were not so clear.

“This useful and well-illustrated book covers a huge amount of ground [… including] perceptive essays on William Hay; the meanings of Gothic in Atlantic Canada; Joseph Connolly and his connections with the ‘Irish Pugin’, James Joseph McCarthy; [and] the ‘American Pugins’, Ralph Adams Cram and Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue.”

—James Stevens Curl

Independent

“Cameron Macdonell’s chapter on the ‘American Pugins’—Ralph Adams Cram and Bertram Goodhue—provides a particularly interesting case to reconsider the historiographic boundaries of the Gothic Revival across the Georgian and Victorian eras.”

—Stuart King

University of Melbourne

Edited by Martin Bressani and Christina Contandriopoulos (Wiley, 2017)

Scholars of Gothic Revival architecture and gothic literature commonly assume that they have nothing in common after the Georgian era in Britain. There are three major reasons for this disciplinarily schism: (1) Victorian gothic fiction had little to do with the Middle Ages, often moving the sites of terror into the modern city, whereas Victorian Gothic architects became rigorously attentive to medieval precedents; (2) the sites of haunting in gothic fiction tend to be domestic spaces, whereas the Victorian Gothic Revival tended to create public institutions, especially churches; and (3) if religion informed gothic fiction, it was typically a Protestant perspective, whereas the Victorian Gothic Revival had many Catholics as architects. British designer Augustus Welby Pugin is thus most often presented as the pivotal figure in this disciplinary divide: a Roman Catholic convert who primarily designed churches, following the “true principles” of medieval architecture, unlike the “sham” constructs of Georgian architects. However, in this chapter, I present Pugin’s sense of holy dread as a form of the pre-Freudian uncanny to open an interdisciplinary discourse on haunting in nineteenth-century revivalist architecture.

(McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017)

Most studies of modern Gothic media assume that, beyond the 1830s, modern Gothic architecture and literature had very little in common. The work of Ralph Adams Cram (1863–1942), America’s most prolific Gothic Revival architect and author of ghost stories, challenges that assumption.

The first interdisciplinary study of Cram’s aesthetics, Cameron Macdonell’s Ghost Storeys deconstructs the boundaries of Gothic architecture and literature through a microhistory of St Mary’s Anglican Church in Walkerville, Ontario. Focusing on Cram and the church’s main patron, Edward Walker (1851–1915), Macdonell explores the intricate intersections of Gothic aesthetics, architectural ethics, literature, theology, cultural values, and community construction in an Edwardian-era company town. When Walker commissioned the church, he believed that its economy of salvation could save him from the syphilis that afflicted his body and stained his soul. However, while implementing that economy, Cram, whose architectural theory, social commentary, and ghost stories were pessimistic about reviving the Gothic in the modern world, also created an architecture haunted by the sickness of humanity.

Painstakingly researched and generously illustrated, Ghost Storeys redefines the allegorical relationship between a marginalized church and the Gothic Revival movement as a global interdisciplinary phenomenon.

“Ghost Storeys is refreshing, critically engaging, well-written, and creatively conceived. It demonstrates that there are viable cases – like Walkerville and Cram’s work more broadly – where Gothic literary and architectural forms can and should be considered as two sides of a cultural coin.”

—Ayla Lepine

University of Essex

“Ghost Storeys makes effective use of both deconstruction and microhistory, blending the former’s insistence on the elusiveness of truth with the latter’s empirical rigour. The result is an illuminating, fine-grained study.”

—Denis McKim

Douglas College

“[Ghost Storeys] is a model for interdisciplinary studies of church life where culture and personality collide with the opportunity to create monuments in time and space.”

—Richard J. Mammana Jr.

Ecumenical & Interreligious Relations

The Episcopal Church

“What a winning title for a scholarly work on gothic architecture […]. This unusual book ranges beyond stone and mortar into literature, theology, culture, ethics and more.”

—Sarah Murdoch

Toronto Star

Edited by Momoyo Kaijima, Laurent Stalder, and Yu Iseki 

(TOTO, 2018)

Life obviously exceeds architecture, yet at the same time it is the basis and essence of architecture. Understanding its different forms, as ethnography shows, is the precondition of engaging with it. But, what does it mean for architecture? How can the myriad situations that both feed into and result from the design of a building be effectively mapped? How does one address architectural drawings, not just as notational systems but as instruments to document, discuss, and evaluate architecture? How can they work to explore people’s actual usages, needs, and aspirations, and moreover to give shape to individualized life forms in today’s globalized society?

The catalog of the exhibition in the Japan Pavilion showcases a collection of forty-two projects from all over the world from the last twenty years, ranging from design specifications and spatial-activity charts, to maps of urban hybrids and large studies of rural farming and fishing villages following natural disasters, originating from university design studios, architectural offices, or artistic practices. They all reflect the search for a new approach in drawing—of, for, among, around—society, which we term “Architectural Ethnography.”

“Capturing the realness of cities with [a] keen and humorous point of view, the project questioned the nature of architecture from the perspective of its users and received a strong response in and outside of the country [Japan].”

—Mennat Allah El-Husseiny

University of Cairo

Architectural Theory Review 25, no. 1/2 (2021)

Gothic Revival architecture projected a sense of unity through the British Empire, even though the materials used to construct such architecture varied by available resources, geographic location and climatic conditions. In Canada, this led to the proliferation of wooden churches during the mid-nineteenth century, including William Hay’s Anglican “Garrison Church” for Toronto. The resulting forms allowed Anglo-Canadians to participate in a global discourse of Britishness while laying claim to local materials. However, the contested legality of local lands disrupts timber’s ability to ingrain Anglo-Canadian identity. Instead, I speculate that the transformation of local forest growth into timber-constructed designs is haunted by an uncanny act of appropriation, and I use the “garrison mentality” of a Canadian gothic novel to discuss the unstable boundaries between the demonised Indigenous peoples of Canada’s mostly coniferous forests and the would-be civility of Anglo-Canadians sheltered behind the wooden walls of Hay’s Garrison Church.

with John Sicat

idea journal 19, no. 1 (2022)

In this visual essay, we present a feminist counter-fiction to the likely fictional narratives the media has used to describe Sarah Winchester’s reclusive life in the labyrinthine mansion she designed for herself in the Santa Clara Valley, California (1886–1922). Given Winchester’s continual construction of uninhabited rooms in that house and given her decision to offer no public explanation for her designs, the media has projected narratives of haunting and madness onto Winchester and her house. Without dismissing the possibility of those readings, our feminist counter-fiction does not presume to assign a specific meaning to Winchester’s designs. Instead, we ghost-write two soundtracks along the edges of filmstrips that trans-mediate the narratives of so-called yellow journalism and of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story of haunting and madness, ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’ (1892), into the sepia tones of early cinematic imagery. Specifically, we visualise Winchester as a media construct and the media’s fabulation about the columns in Winchester’s house and about her would-be seance room, where the public apparently saw nothing more than a woman’s silhouette projected onto a curtained window. While we offer nothing to penetrate that curtain, which we have trans-mediated to a cinematic screen that divides us from her interiority, we see traces of objects and a shadow ostensibly tracing a pattern from the other side of the curtain. Thus, we draw inspiration from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s uncanny ability to ghost-write the hymenal curtain/screen between Jacques Derrida’s labyrinthine columns of text. Tolling the bell of Derrida’s Glas, this visual essay positions Winchester’s pendular body in a space where the interiority of her designing pleasure eludes representation because that pleasure is not dependent on the reproduction of meaning. We pastiche certain forms from the Winchester House, but these forms, akin to the impossibility of Gilman’s yellow wallpaper, do not amount to the meaning of a total design.