Saint John urban renewal demolition, 1968 Leroux p242
Building New Brunswick. An Architectural History . John Leroux, with essays by Robert M Leavitt, Stuart Smith, Gary Hughes. Frederickton: Goose Lane Editions, 2008 Handsome, handsome, handsome — the New Brunswick I never saw as the Trans-Canada hurtled through endless miles of chilly woodlots. This book must have every building in New Brunswick from the earliest Acadian history side by side with Mi’k Maq traditions, to the newest, most invasive proposals by Toronto and Montréal big name firms. In between, a long history of serious building – banks and city halls, post offices and churches, hydro- electric plans and bridges, barns and houses. It is a hidden New Brunswick of late nineteenth century fishing lodges and American tycoons’ estates; of wartime RCAF stations and internment camps, of frugal postwar modernism and frivolous 1990s postmodernism. Writing about this book in the context of the previous two, I can see them all as taking unwieldly and often unpromising mate- rial (much like life) and shaping it into some sort of coherence. Leroux follows a traditional chronology making a rather impres- sive catalogue of New Brunswick architecture. Everything that happened architecturally in the western world – McKim Mead & White, le Corbusier, Venturi, every planning paradign – everything turns up eventually in New Brunswick, somewhere, at some scale. Chronology gives it credibility and context: a precise line is drawn between a lovely M Claire Mott glass-fronted bank and Mies van der Rohe. Leroux makes interesting, sometimes impassioned. always important connections.
The Lure of the Local. Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society . Lucy Lippard. New York: The New Press, 1997
Three books in one here: in a band at the top of each page of this book is an intimate journal about living in Maine – daily life, local events, people, politics – the texture of a sophisticated kind of life in semi-rural America on the eastern seaboard. The middle of the book and I mean this literally — the middle band of each page, is Lippard’s discussion of space, landscape, identity, history and community, informed by her long career as a writer on contem- porary art. The bottom zone of the book, identified by photos, credits and a brief description, has hundreds of contemporary art projects that engage place and identity. This is a multicentred book from a multicentred cultural theorist in a country that by definition (despite its rhetoric of unity) has such a multiplicity of centres that politicians have had to resort to the broadest of strokes to describe it. This is a discussion of America in small strokes, in collective movements of rainbowed coalitions, in the difference between the red dirt of Georgia and the rocks on a Maine beach. We’ve been discussing the impos- sibility of the meta-narrative of modernity for a generation now. What does it look like to take this seriously and to write about place and space, land and identity, art and culture with a multicen- tred coherence? It looks like this book. ~
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archives and museums: On Site review 20
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