Happy 130th birthday, Wells Coates, an almost unknown Canadian modernist architect

A look at his plan for the Toronto Islands, which would have been amazing.

The architect and designer Welles Coates was born on this day in 1895. I know this because of a Bluesky post from the Isokon Gallery in the Lawn Road Flats in London, his most famous (and one of his few surviving) buildings. When I toured the building in March, I questioned whether Coates could be described as a Canadian architect, given that he was brought up in Japan and spent most of his career in the UK. But it turns out, Canada was a very big part of his life and death.

According to the thesis paper “Wells Coates: beginning of the modern movement in England (supervisor: Dr. Reyner Banham) by Farouk Hafiz Elgohary in 1966, Coates came to Canada in 1913 and studied at “McGill University College at Vancouver.” ( I think that is supposed to be the University of British Columbia) He moved to England in 1922 but returned to Canada in 1926. It was not a happy return because of the death of his closest friend, Alfred Borgeaud. Elgohary writes:

[Borgeaud] fell to his death from the freight train they had "hopped" down the Coquihall Pass, near Hope, on their journey to Vancouver B.C. in September, 1926. There were newspaper articles, and it was even suggested at first that he was responsible for Borgeaud’ s death. The scandal was soon cleared, but in shock and desolation he abandoned the trip and left Canada.

Back in England, in 1927, Coates worked as a journalist and playwright, and designed the interior of a flat for himself and his wife. His friends all admired it; he wrote:

“The arrangement and decoration of our flat has afforded us great pleasure. It has furthermore demonstrated the fact that I have some talent in this field. All our friends say at once: You ought to go in for this sort of thing.”

And indeed he did, spending the next twenty-five years designing housing, apartments, yachts, furniture, radios and architectural hardware. I discuss a bit of this in post, The Isokon shows us how to design for living in small spaces.

He came back to North America in 1952 to build design the new town of Iroquois to replace one of the “lost villages” in the path of the St. Lawrence Seaway on behalf of British industrialists, but it was never built; politics intervened and the job went to Kent Barker, not one of my favourite professors at U of T school of architecture.

He taught at Harvard, and then went to Vancouver in 1956 where he designed and patented a monorail. He had a heart attack in 1957 and died in 1958 “on a sea picnic at Vancouver Beach. His old friend Professor Serge Chermayeff said about his death: "He died the same way he liked his life to be, surrounded by beautiful young girls, joy and fun."

Coates’ plan

None of his late Canadian projects were built, which is perhaps a good thing; his proposal for the redevelopment of the Toronto Islands is wild, and would have changed the face of Toronto forever. According to Elsbeth Cowell, writing in the Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada Bulletin in June 1995,

“In early 1954, probably while still working on the Iroquois New Town, Coates in association with John C. Parkin initiated a Toronto Island redevelopment project which focused on increasing the housing density and updating the island's housing stock and recreational facilities. This followed on the City’s 1947 plan:”

City plan 1947

“The city's long-term plan of 1947 set the general direction for all their subsequent proposals. The harbour side of the islands would be used for parkland and recreational facilities. The lake side of the islands would be developed with high-density housing and hotels fronted by beaches. In some plans, two of the smaller islands on the harbour side, Algonquin and Ward's islands, continued to be occupied by individual houses. Transportation centred on a wide highway which swept across the islands and connected them to the mainland by a tunnel to be located adjacent to the existing airport. This road would supplement the existing ferries. Several plans also suggested a drawbridge over the Eastern Channel. Extensive parking for visitors (up to 9,000 cars) was also a recurring feature.”

Coates’ plan included widely space apartment blocks in a park-like setting, an arrangement obviously inspired by Le Corbusier's urban projects. Coates thought the islands were an “an ideal location, based on the proximity to downtown Toronto and absence of land ownership problems, to explore the potential of high-rise apartment blocks as a solution to Canada's housing crisis.”

Coates developed a form of prefabricated plug-in “room units” similar to Le Corbusier’s ideas.He lectured about them in Vancouver in 1952 and his ideas about modernism took hold in Canada, as Cowell notes:

“Canadian post-war architects did embrace International Style modernism as the style of choice. High-rise apartments of the form (though not the fabrication) proposed by Coates for Toronto Island soon began to sprout up across the country: the Benvenuto Place Apartment-Hotel, designed by Peter Dickinson (a former employee of Coates) and constructed in 1955, was among the first apartment buildings to adopt the International Style in Toronto.”

Toronto wasn’t ready for Coates; it still isn’t ready to even have a proper public connection to the Islands and still relies on ferries. Cowell concludes:

“He created an idealized living environment where leisure and entertainment were paramount. His objectives in redesigning this community are clear: he intended Toronto Island to showcase his Room Units housing blocks as a model housing form of the future for Canada, and his urban plan of rationalized zoning and public control of urban land as a model modern community for his adopted country. His Toronto Island project, had it been built, would indeed have been Modern architecture of "more than isolated buildings." But such a thing did not prove possible for Coates in Canada.”

Many things are not possible in Canada, especially in Toronto, and in particular, on the Toronto Islands, where it is forever 1947. Wells Coates’ vision may have been a bit much to swallow, but at least he had one.

So happy birthday, Wells Coates, an underrated Canadian visionary architect and designer who should be better known here. It is a very Canadian thing that we don’t.

UPDATE: When I wrote this post I was a bit confused by the “McGill University College at Vancouver” reference, since McGill University is in Montreal. However, I am advised by a graduate of the University of British Columbia that it was the origin of UBC.

A provincial University was first called into being by the British Columbia University Act of 1890, amended in 1891. Under this Act a Senate of twenty-one members was constituted and a McGill medical graduate, Dr. Israel W. Powell of Victoria, was appointed Chancellor. Regional jealousy between the Island and the Mainland killed this Act after several ineffectual attempts had been made to put it into operation. The Universities of Toronto and McGill then took the lead in promoting higher education in the Province. The Columbian Methodist College in affiliation with Toronto was formed in New Westminster in 1892 to give work in Arts and Theology. The College was soon entrusted by Toronto with all four years’ work, though the records show that very few students ever availed themselves of these facilities. Soon after work began in Columbian College, McGill University appeared on the educational scene, in affiliation with high schools, first in Vancouver, in 1899, and then in Victoria. A further stage of development was reached in February, 1906, when two Bills, drawn up in Montreal by McGill’s solicitors, were introduced in the Legislature in Victoria and passed, setting up McGill University College of British Columbia as a private institution under an independent governing body, known as the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning, and giving courses “leading to degrees of McGill University”. McGill College carried on its work for nine years, giving up to three years in Arts and two years in Applied Science in Vancouver and two years in Arts in Victoria. In the last Session of 1914-15, there were 290 students in Vancouver, and 70 in Victoria.