Lessons from architect Ron Thom: Beauty matters

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In a recent biography of Ron Thom, the architect – born 100 years ago this spring – seems like a character from a legend. He rises from middle-class obscurity, attends art school in lumbertown Vancouver, and walks into a local architecture office to deliver a stunning watercolour of a house they’re working on. It is 1949.

Within a decade, Mr. Thom is designing the city’s tallest new building. By the 1960s, he’ll lock up his place as one of the greatest architects Canada has ever produced.

In short, Mr. Thom was a genius, and one who found the right conditions to express himself. This is the story that emerges in the very fine biography, Adele Weder’s Ron Thom, Architect: The Life of a Creative Modernist.

The book gives Mr. Thom his due as a designer, and it also raises tough questions about the state of architecture: Where are the great artists today? And does our society care enough about architecture to give them a shot?

Mr. Thom, who died a quarter-century ago, is ripe for a revival. Ms. Weder’s book skillfully explains his “instinctive” approach to composition. But she also reveals the man, who was brilliant, charismatic, driven and, in the end, brought low by addiction. “What we’ve been missing in Canadian architecture is the stories of the people who made this work,” Ms. Weder said in a recent interview.

A B.C.-based journalist who specializes in architecture, Ms. Weder (who is a friend of mine) also curated the travelling exhibition Ron Thom and the Allied Arts in 2014-2015. Long conversations with many of Mr. Thom’s surviving friends and family allowed her to get a sense of the man and his relationships: two wives, six children (including the architect Adam Thom), a long string of cronies and collaborators.

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She also sets the scene in the ambitious, open-minded and fast-growing Canada of the mid-20th century. This setting is as important as any of the characters.

Young Mr. Thom entered the Vancouver School of Art in 1941, encouraged by his mother, herself a frustrated artist. While the school was small, Mr. Thom studied with two hugely influential painters: B.C. Binning and Jack Shadbolt. These men brought European modernism into isolated Vancouver, and shared their idealism with their student.

“Thom was trained as an artist rather than as an architect,” Ms. Weder said. “He was always concerned with the thing that moves us when we walk into a space. Entering it, and living in it, should be full of joy and beauty.”

Mr. Thom brought that idea into his work. He also remained committed to craft and to the sensory experience of buildings. Glass, textiles, ceramics and elaborate woodwork were key ingredients.

Mr. Thom started his career with the Vancouver studio Thompson Berwick Pratt. There he led young architects – including Arthur Erickson and Geoff Massey – in designing dozens of modernist single-family houses, largely on the North Shore. They honed their skills and tested new ideas for willing clients. Mr. Thom’s star rose quickly. In 1957, the firm completed the B.C. Electric headquarters on Burrard Street, and he served as the lead designer. The British journal Architectural Review hailed it as “the most gracefully handsome office building erected anywhere.”

Mr. Thom moved to Toronto in the 1960s, and gradually split with TBP to found his own firm. Within a five-year period he designed two of the best buildings in the country: Massey College at the University of Toronto and Champlain College at Trent University in Peterborough. Ont., for which he also did the campus masterplan.

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Each was unique. Massey, a small residential college organized around a quadrangle, brings the Japanese work of Frank Lloyd Wright into a Canadian university context. At Trent, Champlain mixes medieval English influences with ideas from Eero Saarinen’s concrete colleges at Yale University. Ms. Weder writes of Trent: “It was as though the architect had appreciated all that is logical and loved about turrets, buttresses, arcades and bell towers – and interpreted those elements with a thoroughly modern sensibility.”

This intellectual brew was unusual and, at the time, unfashionable. And Mr. Thom did not care to explain himself with manifestos. But words are beside the point when you visit these buildings. The main sequence of spaces at Massey, from a cozy courtyard to a monolithic concrete stair up to a high, sunlit dining room lined with brick and shimmering stone, is as good as architecture gets.

For Mr. Thom personally, things generally went downhill from the mid-1960s. He had long been an alcoholic, and in the 1970s, his addiction destroyed his second marriage and undermined his work. Ms. Weder tells that story compassionately and truthfully.

But ultimately, the bigger story is what happened to architecture.

In the 1950s and 1960s, economic growth and the expansion of the welfare state provided unprecedented opportunities for young designers. Erickson, Raymond Moriyama, Eberhard Zeidler, even the corporate machine of John B. Parkin Associates delivered a wave of ambitious buildings. Like Mr. Thom, they also benefited from a freewheeling approach to planning and governance. When Mr. Thom got the job to design Trent, he had one real client to deal with: Tom Symons, the university’s founder, who was in his early 30s.

Then, in the 1970s, things changed. As Ms. Weder writes, “Public and corporate patronage of architecture across the country ... transitioned to a more businesslike model, with every design decision now subject to scrutiny by a board of directors.”

And things have only gotten worse since then. A handful of architecture firms dominate public buildings in this country, working with little freedom and often for little money. Usually, the results are uninspiring; at worst, they’re miserable. Even Mr. Thom’s alma mater, which evolved into the Emily Carr University of Art and Design, recently got itself a grim and unartful building.

So, what happened to the idea of beauty? “We’re skeptical of that now, especially in public buildings,” Ms. Weder told me. “Now we put an emphasis on accessibility and functionality, and rightly so. But it doesn’t have to be either/or. We exclude anything that makes the experience of being in a building beautiful.”

Ms. Weder thinks that’s ridiculous; so, would Mr. Thom.

And they are right. It’s past time for us to learn from the victories of the past, and once again to see architecture as a field of creativity, possibility and beauty.