Building on social power: Percy Erskine Nobbs, Ramsay Traquair, and the project of constructing a Canadian national culture in the early decades of the twentieth century (Quebec).

摘要

This dissertation examines the contribution of the Scottish-born architects Percy Erskine Nobbs (1875–1964) and Ramsay Traquair (1874–1952), professors in the School of Architecture at McGill University in Montréal, to a nationalist discourse that emerged among the Anglophone intellectual elite in Canada in the early decades of the twentieth century. Beginning with an examination of their backgrounds in the Arts and Crafts Movement and their antimodernist leanings—their conviction that modern society had lost a quality of authenticity found in pre-modern cultures—this thesis examines the ideas underpinning their study of vernacular architecture and their identification of historical architecture in rural Québec as the embodiment of authentic folk culture.; I examine how Nobbs and Traquair used this seemingly traditional culture, which to them existed in the past, to enrich what they saw as their own correspondingly “modern” society. Both were involved with the popularization, institutionalization, and nationalization of Québec traditional culture as the folk history of both English Canada and Québec. A preoccupation of many intellectual elites in the 1920s and 30s, the project had both nationalist and commercial ends. At the same time, both maintained at various times that in the historic architecture of Québec lay the key to developing a distinctly Canadian style. Exploring their ideas about a national architecture in light of their views about race and ethnicity in Canada, I argue that their thoughts about the suitability of particular styles for specific building types served to reassert the cultural authority of the Anglo-Canadian elite in the face of a perceived threat posed by the country's increasingly numerous non-British population.