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ing a taste for the temperate natural
environment in which they were living,
and also seem to have become infatuat-
ed with the fi rst part of their province's
name. Lovely landscaped gardens full of
fl owers that couldn't survive anywhere
else in Canada became all the rage,
particularly in Vancouver and Victoria.
In the midst of these magnifi cent green
spaces, huge Tudor Revival and Arts
& Crafts houses were built. These two
styles originated in the so-called “back
to basics” movement led by British im-
migrants. The Tudor Revival style was
inspired by the manors that were built
in the English countryside under the
reign of Henry VIII, and was charac-
terized by the use of red-brick facing,
bay windows with stone mullions and
surbased gothic arches.
The Arts & Crafts movement, which
could be described as both a craze for
rural British crafts and a rejection of
the industrialization of big cities, pro-
duced an organic architecture featuring
extensions covered with different ma-
terials, ranging from half-timbering to
walls made of stones from the beach.
Everything was skilfully designed
to produce an overall effect of great
charm. Vancouver architects Maclure
and Fox excelled in this domain, and a
good example of this style is the Walter
C. Nichol House (1402 The Crescent,
Shaughnessy Heights, Vancouver).
The end of World War II marked the
beginning of a new era of unpreced-
ented prosperity throughout the region.
Using wood, and then concrete, indi-
viduals like Robert Berwick, C.E. Pratt,
Ron Thom and more recently Arthur
Erickson designed buildings accord-
ing to the elementary post and beam
method, and erected them on the Coast
Mountains. The pure lines of these struc-
tures blend into the luxuriant greenery
that envelops the communal rooms,
while the wall-to-wall picture windows
that fi ll in the voids highlight the pan-
oramas of the Pacifi c Ocean (Robert
Berwick, Berwick House, 1560 Ottawa
Avenue, Vancouver, 1939; Erickson
and Massey, Gordon Smith house, The
Byway, Vancouver, 1965). Until that
The public buildings that were erected
during the same period are more urban
in style, as was required by their func-
tion. Here, too, however, the emphasis
was on British styles and architects.
Sir Francis Rattenbury, who designed
Victoria's Legislature and Vancouver's
former courthouse (now the Vancouver
Art Gallery), was the leading light of
this prosperous era.
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