Festival of Architecture and Design: Jack Diamond, Glenn McArthur, Witold Rybczynski

Jack Diamond (Canada/South Africa) is the founding Principal of Diamond and Schmitt Architects, which has received numerous national and international awards for design and sustainability. He is a Royal Architectural Institute of Canada Gold Medalist, an Honourary Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, a member of the Order of Ontario, and an Officer of the Order of Canada. Diamond’s Sketches, a collection of watercolours and words, offers a captivating view of the world through the memories, eyes and sketchbook of a renowned architect.

Glenn McArthur is a designer, photographer, author and artist whose work has been exhibited in several galleries. He has worked as a graphic designer for advertising agencies and design studios in both New York City and Toronto. His book on the architect William Thomas received glowing reviews and numerous awards. In A Progressive Traditionalist, McArthur chronicles the life and work of one of the early 20th century’s foremost architects, John M. Lyle – from his training at Yale and in Paris, to his early career in New York and his later success in Toronto, including the iconic Union Station.

Marco Polo is an architect and Associate Professor in the Department of Architectural Science at Ryerson University. He has published extensively on architecture and design in the popular press as well as professional and scholarly journals, and was editor of Canadian Architect from 1997 to 2003.

Witold Rybczynski has written about architecture for the New York Times, Time, Atlantic, the New Yorker and Slate.com, and is the author of the critically acclaimed book Home and the award-winning A Clearing in the Distance. He was also the recipient of the National Building Museum’s 2007 Vincent Scully Prize. Rybczynski lived and taught in Montreal for several years and now lives in Philadelphia where he teaches at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design. My Two Polish Grandfathers, a book comprised of autobiographical essays, acts as a testimony to the boundary-less world of art, architecture and music, and how its language needs no translation – a clear affirmation of Rybczynski’s own career choices.

John M. Lyle (1872–1945) was an anomaly among architects: a Beaux-Arts classicist who nevertheless found much inspiration in modernism, allowing his own traditionalist practice to be affected in form and detail by a brave new emphasis on minimalism and indigenous influence. With ornamentation showcasing local flora and fauna and a turn to native landscape for inspiration, his innumerable buildings contributed to a burgeoning nationalism in the field. In A Progressive Traditionalist, Glenn McArthur traces this aesthetic trajectory, documenting Lyle’s training at Yale and in Paris, his early career in New York and his later success in Toronto, including countless legendary banks and residences and the iconic Union Station. Part biography, part architectural history, and extensively illustrated with colour photographs and drawings throughout, this book is the first to examine in depth the important contributions of one of the early 20th century’s foremost architects.

Defiantly urban and socially responsible, the buildings of Diamond and Schmitt Architects – most recently the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts – are celebrated internationally. The firm has won more than 140 awards, including six Governor General’s Awards and an American Institute of Architecture design award. In 2004 and 2007, Business Week and Architectural Record named two of their projects on their list of the world’s ten best buildings.
Today the firm is at the heart of a critical debate: how do we make cities livable and sustainable in the 21st century? Insight and On Site addresses such issues in 12 essays, including one by architecture critic Witold Rybczynski, and interweaves a veritable portfolio of the Diamond and Schmitt oeuvre, including Jerusalem City Hall, the York University Student Centre, the Earth Sciences Center at the University of Toronto and the Life Sciences Centre at the University of British Columbia.

Celebrated architect, historian and critic Witold Rybczynski tells the story of his parents and grandparents in pre-war Warsaw – a thriving, cultured family in a then sophisticated European city. With the onset of war, their world fell apart. His mother and father made separate escapes, later reuniting against many odds. In My Two Polish Grandfathers, Rybczynski not only recounts his fascinating family history, but his experience with émigré and student life in Montreal, working in children’s theatre, designing housing for the Third World, and building his own house by hand. Through these beautifully written autobiographical essays, Rybczynski reveals how he came to his “imaginative life,” and how in many ways a European generation defined post-war American culture.