Up North, Where Canada’s Architecture Meets the Land

The legacy of Canadian architecture grows out of the landscape, a landscape that is mythic in its scale and power. Up north, architecture rarely competes with the awe-inspiring forces of nature. It digs into the side of a hill or a mountain, or it rises up to match the temper of the land. In Canada, there is an unabashed intimacy between architecture and landscape.How do award-winning Canadian architects continue to distinguish themselves in the worlds hyper-market of design? By doing what they've been doing since the 1940s: making meaningful, authentic sense of modernism.

The award-winning architecture that Canadians are producing today is not a concoction brewed up to suit the globalized aesthetic of design. It belongs to a legacy of intelligence in architecture that began on the West Coast: human-scaled, finely crafted architecture that heightened the sense of place. Over the past several decades, the best Canadian architects have developed a modern design language that never abandoned a strong sense of place.

Original analysis and insights are drawn from the author's extensive experience as the national architecture critic and her in-depth interviews with the gurus of Canadian architecture: Frank Gehry, Eberhard Zeidler, Raymond Moriyama, as well as the younger superstars such as Bruce Kuwabara, the Patkaus and Shim-Sutcliffe Architects.

Up North was shortlisted for the 2006 Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction, announced October 19, 2006.

Administered by Wilfred Laurier University, the award supports and encourages a beginning Canadian writer publishing a work with national significance.

“Lisa Rochon has written the definitive guide to Canada's contemporary architecture.”

  • Read a PDF of Joe Berridge's review of Up North in the Literary Review of Canada, April 2006 (Click here)

“This engagingly written, beautifully produced book deserves to be a fixture on the coffee tables of the nation.”

  • Read Alex Bozikovic's online review of Up North in Quill & Quire, December 2005 (Click here)

Read the following excerpts from Up North in PDF format:

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