Remember ice palaces? Probably not.

Stationarity is dead and the world has changed, so they can't build them like they used to.

William Notman, 1883 Ice Palace

Writing on Bluesky, Climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe uses a word I have never heard before:

"Stationarity" is the belief that past climate is an accurate predictor of future conditions. Sounds silly, right? But we've baked this false sense of stability into all our human systems. From building codes to water systems to infrastructure, it's all designed for a planet that no longer exists.

Discussion ensues about how the climate was relatively stable for centuries, but in the last hundred years or so, has been changing so fast that none of our usual rules apply. there are no more “hundred year storms,” they happen all the time now. Where I live in Canada, our building codes were designed to keep our buildings warm, not cool. As Jonathan Tonkin writes, stationarity is dead.

This opened up an opportunity to discuss a favourite theme. One way to see how much our climate has changed in the last 150 years or so is to look at old photographs. I have always been intrigued by the work of the photographer William Notman, who set up his studio in Montreal in 1856, a business that continued until 1915. His photographs of winter scenes show a different world of toboggans, snowshoes, and my favourite, the ice palaces that were built every winter in Montreal. These photographs demonstrate how much climate has changed. Imagine doing this today!

In a 2009 post, artist Meg Walker described how the ice palaces were designed by architect and mason A.C. Hutchinson, an expert in cut-stone work who had supervised work on the Christ Church Cathedral at age 19 before working on the Canadian Parliament buildings earlier in his career. According to the book Ice Palaces, by Fred Anderes and Ann Agranoff,

“At the frozen St. Lawrence River they cut blocks of ice, which measured 42 inches by 24 inches by 15 inches and weighed 500 pounds each. The castle, like all other nineteenth-century ice castles in Montreal, was assembled in the lower half of Dominion Square, in the area now known as Place du Canada.”

The 1884 ice palace got reviewed in Harpers Bazaar:

“[The Ice Castle] is castellated in design, 160 feet long (larger they tell us than the historical palaces of Russia), and contains 15,000 blocks of ice…. Viewed in the daytime, every block emitting its prismatic ray, dazzling and sparkling with crystal brilliancy as the sun lights on it, it presents an appearance which is completely fascinating, and has been visited, admired, and wondered at by hundreds every hour.”

Sandra Stock writes for the Quebec Anglophone Heritage Network (these ice palaces were very anglophone)

From the prints and photos, we can see that these Ice Palaces were huge – most over 100 feet high – and had all the complex turrets and battlements of a real palace. They were, of course, in the popular Neo-Gothic style so loved by the Victorians. This pseudo-medieval architecture was reflective of the imperial mentality of the age and flourished most strongly in British, and British-influenced, countries. Montreal also had the added cultural inheritance of the French château – although somewhat a severe Norman version, more suited to our climate (winter again!) like the Château Ramezay.

William Notman

.Notman was famous for his studio photos, where he would set subjects up on fake snow with winter outfits and snowshoes or have them sliding down fake hills on toboggans. He celebrated winter in a way we don’t do anymore, because we don’t have winters like that anymore. Because stationarity is dead, and the world has changed.

New Deal Ice Palace, Lake Bemidji, Minnesota, 1934

The Montreal Ice Palaces have been imitated in St. Paul, Minnesota (evidently because a smallpox outbreak cancelled Montreal’s in 1885) and continue to this day, but none have been as grand as Montreal. However I do love the New Deal Ice Palace.