The Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture, formerly the McGill School of Architecture, is one of eight academic units constituting the Faculty of Engineering at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Founded in 1896 by Sir William Macdonald, it offers accredited professional and post-professional programs ranging from undergraduate to PhD levels.
The School of Architecture is located inside the Macdonald-Harrington Building, designed by Sir Andrew Taylor, on the McGill University downtown campus. The School of Urban Planning, which became independent from the School of Architecture in 1970, occupies the fourth floor. The School of Architecture also operates many auxiliary facilities, including workshops, laser cutting and 3D-printing facilities, research labs and various libraries and collections both within the Macdonald-Harrington Building and elsewhere on McGill's campus. The school is accredited by the Canadian Architectural Certification Board (CACB) and is recognized in the United States by the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards (NCARB).
The Architecture Students' Association represents undergraduate students at the school and the Graduate Architecture Students' Association represents graduate and post-graduate students. All registered students automatically become members of these associations. The school also maintains a chapter of the American Institute of Architecture Students as well as bilateral exchange agreements with several architecture schools in other countries. As of Fall 2019, there were 163 undergraduate, 90 graduate and 20 PhD students enrolled.
On September 26, 2017, the school was renamed the Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture following a C$12 million gift from architect and McGill graduate Peter Fu.
History McGill's School of Architecture, founded in 1896, is one of the oldest architecture schools in North America and the second to be established in Canada. Initially a Beaux-Arts style school based in the Arts and Crafts movement, it became a Bauhaus-based institution under new directorship after World War II. The school was the first in the country to offer a graduate planning program and a PhD in architecture.
Early history
In 1890, the Province of Quebec Association of Architects adopted a constitution requiring compulsory examination for people in Quebec who wished to become professional architects. This created a need for more systematic architectural education, and the absence of such opportunities caused many aspiring Canadian architects to study in the United States, where ten architecture schools had already been established. Canada did not yet have any formal architectural education, and the only forms of architectural education in Montreal were periodical lectures by local practising architects at McGill's affiliated religious colleges. This new need for architectural education is an important factor that led to the founding of the School of Architecture at McGill University.
In 1896, Sir William C. Macdonald created a chair in architecture at McGill which was led by Stewart Henbest Capper, a former student at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Macdonald also provided funds for the purchase and maintenance of the school's initial equipment. At this time, the school had two architecture studios which occupied two rooms of the top floor of the original Macdonald Engineering Building. The school offered a four-year course to prepare students for professional accreditation, and as it remains today, the first year was preparatory, with all courses taken jointly by architecture and engineering students. The first graduating class was composed of only three students, and Professor Capper gave all lectures in architecture, while Henry F. Armstrong, the only other full-time professor, taught art classes and modelling.
In 1903, Capper returned to England to establish the School of Architecture at Victoria University of Manchester, which was the fourth university architecture school to be established in the British Commonwealth, after University of Toronto (1890), University of Liverpool (1894) and McGill (1896). The second director of the school, Percy Nobbs, arrived at McGill in 1903 to only two students. Nobbs is credited with designing the McGill coat of arms three years into his tenure. As director, he divided the four-year course into two streams, the BArch degree and the BSc degree in Architectural Engineering. By 1906, he was teaching six classes, so he hired three new staff to assist him, including his former colleague Cecil Burgess. Nobbs believed students should be exposed to architecture in practice, and designed the McGill Union (today the McCord Museum) across from McGill's Roddick Gates. After the Macdonald Engineering Building burned down in 1907, Nobbs designed the new building in its place, and the School of Architecture moved to its ground floor. By 1912, the school had grown to eight students, and the next year, Philip J. Turner joined the faculty. In 1913, Ramsay Traquair became the new director. He is credited with designing the McGill flag, which he presented to the university in 1921 and has since flown above the Arts Building.
World War I At the onset of World War I, many faculty and students were called to war. Nobbs attained the military rank of major, while twelve of his students did not return. Four among these students have tributes named in their honour at McGill, including Gordon H. Blackader, for whom the Blackader-Lauterman Library is named, Hugh McLennan, namesake of the Hugh McLennan Memorial Travelling Scholarship, Murdoch Laing, of the Murdoch Laing Prize and John Louis Robertson, of the Louis Robertson Book Prize. In addition to the aforementioned four, eight other McGill architects were added to the Roll of Honour of World War I. Another seven graduates returned from the war as distinguished soldiers, with one receiving the Distinguished Service Order, four the Military Cross and two the French Croix de Guerre.
Post-war After the war, Nobbs continued to teach many classes. In 1920, Ernest Cormier joined the faculty for one year to teach design and the next year, Traquair organized the school's first "sketching school" in Quebec City, a tradition that has been carried on annually to various destinations since as a credited course. Arthur Lismer, a member of the Group of Seven, taught this course at the school for over a decade even after his retirement in 1955.
In 1939, Turner succeeded Traquair, who had completed a 26-year tenure as director. At this time, McGill Principal Lewis Williams Douglas considered discontinuing the architecture program due to low enrollment; however he faced a great deal of backlash from Turner and several famous architects from Montreal, and eventually abandoned the idea. Under Turner's tenure, support for co-education was made, and in 1943 Catherine Mary Wisnicki became the first woman to graduate from the school. Wisnicki was the fourth woman member of the Ontario Association of Architects and the second to join the Architectural Institute of British Columbia.
Mid-century Following the retirement of Turner as director of the School of Architecture, John Bland became director in 1941. In 1945, a new five-year program was adopted for the next two decades. After the Second World War, the School of Architecture increased its staff and doubled its physical accommodation due to the surge in university enrollment. This required the school to briefly use McGill's Dawson College, a satellite campus in St. Jean, Quebec, to accommodate its students. By 1947, the school had become so cramped that a repurposed building on University Street was vacated to make room for the school's students. This new building expanded the school's physical size immensely, and enrollment grew to 133 full-time students by the 1949–1950 academic year. At the same time as the school's relocation, Professor Frederic Lasserre left the school to establish a new architecture school at the University of British Columbia. Lasserre's resignation, coupled with the new influx of students at the school resulted in the hiring of several new faculty members, which included Robert Esdaile and Harold Spence-Sales.
In 1946, Spence-Sales became associate professor of design, and he and Bland established the first post-graduate architecture and planning program in Canada. Beginning in this academic year, the professional program was extended to six years, with first-year students following the engineering curriculum. During the early 1950s, three new teachers were added to the faculty, including Hazen Sise and Guy Desbarats who later founded Arcop with Fred Lebensold, Ray Affleck, and Dimitri Dimakopoulos – all former students or teachers of the school.
In January 1958, the school was temporarily relocated to two townhouses on McTavish Street when the University Street building was demolished for the construction of the McConnell Building. On November 30, 1959, the new building was inaugurated and the School of Architecture moved to its north-eastern wing, where it remained for decades. Enrollment was steady during the 1950s due to the limitations of physical space, but after the McConnell Building underwent a four-story expansion in the 1960s enrollment grew again.
In 1961, McGill Professor Douglas Shadbolt left the school to found the first architecture program at the Nova Scotia Technical College (later known as Technical University of Nova Scotia [TUNS]) in Halifax, and 8 years later founded the School of Architecture (later the Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism) at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario. In 1966, John C. Parkin and Harry Mayerovitch joined the faculty as visiting professors. In the following years, Ray Affleck, Fred Lebensold, Andre Vecsei, Warren Chalk and Moshe Safdie also became visiting professors.
In the late 1960s, the six-year architecture program became a four-year program with the introduction of CEGEPs in Quebec.
1970–present In 1970, Spence-Sales retired from the faculty. Later that year, the graduate planning program was restructured by Professor David Farley, which resulted in the establishment of the independent School of Urban Planning. Over the next decade and a half, the school changed directorship three times, with Professor Norbert Schoenauer heading the school from 1972 until 1975, Professor Derek Drummond from 1975 until 1985 and Professor Bruce Anderson in 1985.
In 1987, the school moved from the Engineering building to the Macdonald-Harrington Building. Macdonald-Harrington was initially named the Macdonald Chemistry Building but was renamed after Bernard Harrington, the building's first chemistry professor. The building is one of the many donations made by Sir William Macdonald and was designed by Sir Andrew Taylor for the Departments of Chemistry and Mining in 1896. The building was renovated for the architecture and urban planning departments by Arcop in 1987.
In 1989, the School of Architecture's PhD program was introduced. In 1990, Derek Drummond returned for another six years as the school's director, replaced by Professor David Covo in 1996. In 1997, the PhD program was officially approved by the Minister of Education as the first in Canada, and the school had its first PhD graduate, Lily Chi. In 1999, the professional BArch degree was replaced by the new MArch I professional degree, leaving the BSc in architecture as the only undergraduate architecture degree. Two years later, the school graduated its first class in the MArch I program.