In the life of every city, there are architects whose work disproportionately shapes its contours, layers, and sensibility for generations and even centuries after their time. In capitals like London, Paris, and New York, these are often household names, well chronicled and evaluated.
Not so in Toronto, where ERA senior associate and architectural historian David Winterton recently completed the first-ever monograph on arguably the city’s most important architect: Frank Darling. Set for publication by McGill-Queen’s University Press in late fall of 2025, Toronto Edwardian: Frank Darling, Architect of Canada’s Imperial Age explores Darling as the enterprising and inventive designer of Toronto’s institutional core and bank architecture across Canada.
Responsible for Toronto landmarks like the late Victorian Bank of Montreal headquarters (currently the Hockey Hall of Fame), the University of Toronto’s Convocation Hall, and Toronto General Hospital, Darling is situated by Winterton as both a global Edwardian practising at the height of the British Empire and a uniquely Torontonian figure deserving of cultural recognition.
ERA’s Alessandro Tersigni sat down with Winterton and researcher Sean Blank to discuss Toronto Edwardian’s origin, the importance of architectural writing, and the varied dimensions of reading and interpreting the architecture of the past through the eyes of the present.
Alessandro Tersigni: This book has been years in the making. How did Toronto Edwardian come to be?
David Winterton: I joke that I’ve been working on this book my whole life. When I started at ERA in the 1990s, Darling & Pearson had their name on so many buildings we worked on. They were obviously a really important architectural firm, but there was no writing or information on them out there. When I moved to New York to work in Robert Stern’s office, I was encouraged to understand the important architects who shaped that city. Over the years, as Canada increasingly called me home, I thought about who their Canadian or Torontonian analogues were. At the apex was Frank Darling. Later I moved back to Toronto and it felt like the right time to write about him.
AT: Why write a book about an architect who practised over a century ago?
DW: Architectural writing is important for all kinds of reasons. Certain books cause paradigm shifts, change conversations, and make people think about the architecture and broader culture of their city in different ways. In most Canadian cities, the Edwardian layer is a foundational layer of architecture. That’s really important to write about if you believe that a vital part of living in a city is about reading its context, layers, and evolution. That’s all critical for architectural practitioners but especially heritage architects.
AT: What are some examples of those paradigm shifts?
DW: Edwardian educators and architects published amazing books on English Renaissance architecture that in turn fueled the Edwardian Baroque movement. In the 1960s there were books on Queen Anne architecture that helped trigger a Victorian revival and made buildings like San Francisco’s painted ladies desirable again. The MoMA did an exhibition on Beaux-Arts architecture in the 1980s and all of a sudden everyone had beautiful Beaux-Arts watercolour posters in their dorm rooms. In the 1990s, again the MoMA held an exhibition on Deconstructivism and almost overnight university architecture departments pivoted 180 degrees from postmodern designs to Deconstructivist ones. It’s hard to predict how, but zeitgeists certainly inflect the exhibitions and books that arise from them. What does it mean to publish a book on Frank Darling in 2025 and how will it be received? We’ll see.
AT: Commonwealth cities often have a particular aesthetic and Toronto is one of the largest. Did Darling share influences with Edwardian architects worldwide?
DW: The Edwardian Baroque and the Grand Manner styles were absolutely disseminated across the empire. Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, and Newfoundland were separate dominions, but they were culturally connected. But they weren’t independent. Great Britain still had the military and dealt with foreign affairs. It was an astonishing super-state and economic powerhouse. You can imagine white settler architects in the dominions thinking it’s their duty to represent this larger cultural story. That aesthetic cohesion across territories first dawned on me when I saw Edwardian buildings in Hong Kong and went, “This looks really familiar.” The same with Singapore, Wellington, Melbourne, even Calcutta — all these places have very similar architecture and my eyes had been trained to see it.
AT: Is there anything you can identify about the way that Darling realized this global Edwardian style that’s specifically Torontonian?
DW: Edwardian architecture in the City of London (its birthplace) is very florid, sumptuous, and encrusted with ornamentation in a way that it’s not in Toronto. There’s a kind of innate pragmatism to Canadian Edwardian Classicism. It feels stripped down and elemental. There’s the hard climate and a certain parsimony about architectural budgets. Our Edwardian buildings seem to absorb the idea of incomprehensibly vast geographical space and the notion of a gigantic Dominion of Canada into an architecture that’s simple and strong with a very clear spatial concept.
AT: What about Darling’s personal life?
DW: Darling was a very socially active gentleman who ran in elite circles. He was invited to every important wedding in the city, polo outings, you name it. Interestingly, we land on the curiosity of Darling’s bachelorhood in the book. I always understood that one got married in this period, even just to keep up appearances and maintain dynasties. And so, since he didn’t, I’ve been prompted to suggest he was a homosexual. He was certainly an aesthete who was widely called upon to pick furniture and china and paintings and decorations. But we don’t know — we don’t have any receipts or anything. Hopefully one day someone will find a diary that will shed more light.
AT: What was your process for researching the book? Any big finds?
SB: Darling’s offices suffered several fires over the years, so there isn’t as much as one would hope. Therefore the digital revolution of archival materials was crucial. We relied heavily on Robert Hill’s Biographical Dictionary of Architects in Canada, which has fundamentally changed architectural research. Basically, Robert went across the country in the 1980s with a team of researchers and flipped through old building records in every municipality looking for architects’ names and compiled a list of works, and now that’s all online. Resources like bank annuals and architectural periodicals are also available digitally now. Doing this 30 years ago would have been a whole other proposition. We did find a couple dozen new Darling buildings through primary research too.
AT: What would you say the takeaway of the book is?
DW: On a very high level, it’s about re-exposing this architecture and freshening it for 21st-century eyes. For me, architecture is about conveying meaning. Buildings can be read — it’s not text, but it’s form, and, if you can understand how these forms came into being, then you can better appreciate the resonance they had culturally. People see the type of architecture that Darling designed all the time, but they may not know how to read it. That’s always been the driver for me — proposing the meaning behind the architecture.
AT: Have there been complexities to closely examining imperial architecture in the present moment?
DW: Given the intentionally provocative title, we expected some might conflate an examination of imperial architecture with a celebration of imperial ambitions or ethos. So I unpack the many conflicting layers of imperialism across the era — it was both a conservative force and a liberalizing ethos. While researching the period I sensed there are political and cultural remnants of Canada’s imperial age that aren’t as present today but whose undercurrents still exist. For some, that’s an inconvenient part of our history, that Canada in some ways came to be what it is because of its imperial origins. I’m not trying to glorify that but neither is it helpful to simply denigrate it. I’m trying to shine a light on it and say there’s more depth and nuance to who we are and how our national identity was formed. Architecture is inseparable from that journey.
AT: ERA has supported this book from the get-go. What does Toronto Edwardian mean for the firm and for the city?
DW: Michael McClelland wrote a thoughtful forward to the book about the loss of cross-generational and collaborative architectural discourse in Toronto. ERA is a leader in thinking about the city, its layers and history, its suppressed histories, its inconvenient histories. It’s published books re-examining Toronto’s concrete buildings and the loss of The Ward neighbourhood. The firm feels a responsibility to take all the intelligence we gather on a daily basis, working with all the smart people in this office, and share it more broadly. It’s not proprietary — we want it to be public and we also want to be in front of those conversations.
