Notice Board

Architecture & Design NOW presents Ian MacLachlan
Tallest in the British Empire: Early Skyscrapers of Central Canada
6 pm | January 24, 2022
uLethbridge Online Presentation
Free admission, everyone welcome

In the 4th lecture of his skyscraper series, Ian MacLachlan turns north to discuss Canada’s early skyscrapers from the relatively diminutive New York Life Building (1888) through to The Bank of Commerce Tower (1931) which remained as the tallest in the British Empire and the Commonwealth of Nations until 1962. This lecture focuses on Quebec City, Montreal, and Toronto, leaving scope for a future talk on the skyscrapers of Canada’s Prairie West and coastal peripheries.

Biography

Ian MacLachlan is Professor Emeritus of Geography at the University of Lethbridge in southern Alberta. His academic career included appointments in Sapporo, Mexico City, Edinburgh, and Perth, Western Australia. Ian now divides his time between Alberta and China where he is a Professor at Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School, School of Urban Planning and Design. With research that spans regional development, urban planning, architectural and planning history, and the geography of food animals, he has published in a range of geography, planning and urban history journals.  As a destination speaker for Crystal Cruises, he applies a geographic lens to the fascinating regional features at ports of call from the Baltic to the Med, from the Atlantic to the Pacific and across the Isthmus of Panama. In recent years, he has been developing a lecture series on skyscrapers in America, where they first developed, in their unique Canadian incarnation, and now in Asia which has come to dominate the world’s mega tall structures.

Images: Sun Life Building - Montreal, Canada and Toronto: Royal York Hotel. Photo credit for Toronto: Royal York Hotel Wladyslaw Sojka https://www.sojka.photo.