What's Latest in Ornamentum
A Toronto Gem: Gustav Hahn and the Spadina Billiard Room Frieze
hen albert and Mary austin returned to toronto after living in Winnipeg for
fourteen years, they decided to commission a local artist to design and execute the interior for the billiard room at Spadina, their home, located at the Davenport Road hill. The...
Decorative City Arches and Gates in Canada
Architecture and the Decorative
Editorial by John Fleming
Until the mid-19th century, architecture in the formal European tradition, as opposed to the vernacular, generally followed classical concepts of structure and style. Where structure was function realized, style was made manifest through the non-functional, usually aesthetic and decorative characteristics that distinguished period, culture, and taste....
The Art of Thomas Nisbet, Master Cabinetmaker
ne does not ordinarily associate early 19th-century Canada with elegance and wealth, yet that is what was presented recently at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre in “The Art of Thomas Nisbet, Master Cabinetmaker.” As curator of the exhibition in Guelph, Ontario, furniture maker David Nasby has...
Decorating The Ranch: Legacy of an Immigrant Family in Southern Alberta
n the decorative arts collection of the Royal Alberta Museum the gilded frames of the Reed family collection stand out. More valuable than the paintings they were meant to enhance
at the time of purchase, in the late 1860s, the hand-carved Italian frames reproduce the delicately...
The School of Restoration Arts at Willowbank
The idea for a School of restoration Arts at Willowbank came to Laura Dodson,
a Heritage Canada Board Member, during the time she was president of the Niagara-on-the-Lake Conservancy. She happened to visit a church in Toronto and saw young people learning to gild under the...
The Art and Architecture of Canadian Cemeteries
n the little Dutch Church Burial Ground in Halifax are the paired tombstones of Philip J. Holland (d.1837) and Sarah Ann Holland (d.1842). Though damaged, the tops of the stone slabs
preserve elements of their original ornament in the form of scrolls with paterae and...
The sense of an ending: The shape of canoes from bow to stern
here’s nothing like being in a room with more than 400 canoes to start you thinking. To walk through the storage facility and galleries of the Canadian Canoe Museum in Peterborough, Ontario, is to listen in on a host of simultaneous conversations amongst the members...
Industrial Design: Form, Function, and the Concept Car
rnamentum: Could you talk a bit about the relationship between form and function in designing a car today?
BRUCE THOMSON: In the design process the car is treated as what it is,...