Renowned Canadian Architect Eb Zeidler Spent His Formative Years In Peterborough & Made Huge Mark Here
/Before Eberhard Zeidler had his first huge architectural project, he spent more than a decade, 1951-1962, in Peterborough. While none of the projects would match the scale of the Eaton Centre or the McMaster Health Sciences Centre he did, several helped hone his skills, and to contextualize his ideas.
The Modernist trained in Bauhaus became more sensitive to the people who lived and worked in the buildings created by architects. Peterborough remained a part of his world long after he left.
When Eb Zeidler started working at the Blackwell and Craig architectural firm at the corner of Hunter and George, he already had impressive credentials, and had expectations of being a chief designer or architect in Canada.
However, he quickly learned that unlike in Germany, architects did not have to sign off on every building project. Architects rarely designed houses or factories, and there were not enough new churches, hospitals and office buildings to support very many architects. Zeidler began as a draftsman and the wages were low.
St. John the Baptist Anglican Church in Lakefield
For the first week, he stayed in a boarding house at Water and Parkhill, and then moved to the YMCA, which was closer to work. Blackwell and Craig had a major client in the Bank of Toronto, and had an office in Toronto designing new branches of the bank. The amalgamation of the Bank of Toronto and of the Dominion Bank of Canada occurred in early 1955, and there would be more architectural work for the firm.
But in early 1952, Zeidler was transferred to the Toronto office to work on designing new banks. There he worked with Ron Dalziel and William Ralston, the “chief designer of our firm”, and their office was in the Bank of Toronto’s “lovely classic temple” on Yonge across from Eaton’s. Zeidler drew the working drawings for Ralston’s design of the new branch at the corner of Dundas and University—a magnificent Art Deco building.
Architect Frank Franner had left Blackwell and Craig to start an engineering and construction firm known as Timber Structures, which was on the west side of High Street north of Lansdowne. He invited Zeidler, who had architectural and engineering experience, to join the new firm.
Early projects in Peterborough were a hockey rink and two churches, in which Zeidler said they worked with glulam, a new engineered product consisting of two-inch wooden planks laminated together and which could be bent into pleasing arches. Franner became an architect in Scarborough, and Timber Structures continued with David E. Ness as president; the Roy Studio had Timber Structures as a major client, and so an impressive collection of photos of their projects are in the Peterborough Museum and Archives.
When Jim Craig invited Zeidler to return to Blackwell and Craig, Zeidler took the two churches, Grace United and St. Giles Presbyterian, with him. Both projects were on hold as the congregations raised the necessary money. Zeidler’s first project as chief designer was to add, 1952-1953, a Sunday School hall to St. John the Baptist Anglican Church in Lakefield.
This was a two-storey box with glulam arches, and laid out parallel to Regent Street. To match the existing church, the roof angles matched, and stone facing joined the hall to the church. There was a narthex of glass between and exits to both Regent and Queen. “I thought the composition looked charming and fit well into the little village,” Zeidler said. He spent more time supervising this project because it was his first Canadian building.
Grace United Church
He was soon working on Grace United Church, on Monaghan across from Kenner Collegiate. The Sunday School on Barnardo Avenue connected with George Street United Church from the 1880s to the 1930s was also known as Grace. Because the congregation had only raised $100,000, the Sunday School was put in the “gloomy” basement “in Peterborough fashion.” The main entrance was at grade level, and the stairs went up for the church and down for the Sunday School.
That said, the church is quite amazing. Jim Craig and Bill Williams helped prepare the construction documentation, and the project was put to tender. Huffman Brothers came in below the architect’s budget and the building of the church was underway. The building used glulam arches, but the arches increased in height as they came closer to Monaghan Road, so the church reached its greatest height over the chancel and sanctuary and the roof extended over the front wall.
That wall facing Monaghan Road was manufactured by Norm Armstrong, a local precaster, and each square was coloured a different hue. Zeidler wanted the wall to be grey like a fieldstone wall but to have pink and green tones, “like natural fieldstone”. He also considered the ways the light would enter the church. Mainly, the light was concentrated on the communion table.
St. Giles Church
There were some critics of the church, but Zeidler was impressed by Robertson Davies’ “glowing editorial” in the Peterborough Examiner about the church which he felt captured our times, and met the needs of its people.
Zeidler worked on St. Giles Church, 1953-54. A few blocks north of Grace Church, St. Giles was a smaller church designed for a congregation of 200. The glass wall facing the street was screened with “a vertical grille of laminated wood slabs perpendicular to the glass.” At some angles, the wall looked solid; at others, the light streamed in.
The firm of Blackwell and Craig did a major addition at St. John’s Anglican Church in Peterborough, 1956-1958, that presented several difficulties. As in Lakefield, the stones removed from one wall were used in building the joining walls between the 1835 church and the 1878 parish hall (which had been expanded by William Blackwell in 1900 and 1926).
St. John’s Anglican Church
