Edmonton and the Bauhaus

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Designed for Alberta Government Telephones in 1953 by Rule Wynn and Rule Architects

now Henderson Inglis Partridge Architects, this building is currently known as the Legislature Annex Building. (photo by Jacek Malec)

The stiffly linear and utilitarian Bauhaus-inspired architecture that still stands today in Edmonton practically glows with simplicity, its confidence placed in concrete, glass and brick. 

Without classical flourishes or ornamentation, these are buildings we perhaps too rarely appreciate aloud because, from their philosophical core outward, we were simply meant to use them – not leer at them like garage-wall pin-ups. 

Four of these miraculous architectural survivors – the former Alberta Government Telephones Building, the Ellis Building, the Northwest Utilities Building and the Harcourt Building – are lovingly embraced in Edmonton and the Bauhaus.

The show, at the Harcourt House artist-run centre from Sept. 20 to Sept. 28, uses text, photographs and illustrations to place these elderly buildings on an evolutionary line that leads back to one of the most influential manifesto houses of the 20th century, the functionalist Bauhaus School. 

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The Harcourt House building designed in 1963-64 by Dennis and Freda O’Connor Architects

now Maltby and Prins Architects. (photo by Jacek Malec)

Founded in Weimar, Germany, by avant-garde architect Walter Gropius in 1919 amid the nightmare wreckage and unresolved identity crises following the First World War, it offered workshops for crafts, architecture and the graphic arts until 1933.

The exhibition, curated by Harcourt’s executive director Jacek Malec, demonstrates the reach of the Bauhaus philosophy and is, Malec says, the only Canadian show to celebrate 100 years of Bauhaus – odd, considering the school’s influence on Western urbanity since the Second World War.  

It includes various objects, including a contemporary replica of a chess set made by Bauhaus sculptor Joseph Hartwig and globally recognizable metal-tube chairs and other furniture by designers such as Gerrit Rietveld, Marcel Breuer, Eileen Grey, Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who were associated with the Bauhaus School or the International Style, another architectural movement of the era.

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This contemporary replica of Josef Hartwig's "The Bauhaus Chess Set" of 1924 was manufactured by Naef under the official licence. (collection of Maltby and Prins Architects, Edmonton; photo by Fish Griwkowsky)

The Harcourt Building itself was built in 1965 by Edmonton's Dennis and Freda O’Connor Architects, disciples of Bauhaus’ luminaries-in-exile after the Nazis closed the school, just as it was starting to achieve its wider architectural ambitions.

The exhibition, beyond its inside-out look at the buildings, also focuses on two women, putting an elephant in the room when it comes to the names typically summoned when talking Bauhaus. Hint: it’s the boys.

Freda O’Connor was the first woman elected to the Alberta Association of Architects, one year after Harcourt House opened, and became president of the organization in 1974 –  the first woman so honoured in Canada. 

Her work was inarguably influenced by the Bauhaus, which in its first school year had 150 registrants, almost half of them women in a postwar population drained of young men.

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Dennis and Freda O’Connor and Maltby Architects and Planning Consultants designed the building that now houses Harcourt House as an office building for Decury Supply Ltd. (image courtesy of Maltby and Prins Architects)

Also celebrated with a number of her photos is Lucia Moholy, who, Malec notes, was the principal photographer for the Bauhaus, and documented the creation of Bauhaus-inspired buildings. She also experimented with photography and photograms.

Moholy fled to Prague in 1933. "She left her glass negatives with Walter Gropius, and he used them extensively without crediting her,” says Malec, noting their inclusion in a 1938 show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 

She was, for a time, married to Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy, a professor at the Bauhaus school, who was often solely credited for their experimental collaborations.

While her documentary images, in particular, were instrumental in spreading the imagery of Bauhaus to the wider world, it was not until the 1970s that authorship questions were sorted out, says Malec.

“So we’re giving her credit where it’s due, here as well.” ■

Edmonton and the Bauhaus is on view at Harcourt House from Sept. 20 to Sept. 28, 2019. A free architectural walking tour starts at Harcourt at 1 p.m. on Sept. 28.

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