Paris

Many buildings from this era suffer from an excess of ornament, but the more beautiful buildings done in this style are truly magnificent. The Opera House in Paris by Garnier is a good example. It is a huge building with an extravagant and avant guard floor plan. Each wing of the building is calculated to give maximum visual impact and to create a sense of occasion both inside and out.

This is the kind of architecture that inspired the Beaux Arts style in Canada.

Perth

A square building with the entrance on a cutoff corner and a multiplicity of Classical detailing is an obvious Beaux Arts building. This bank in Perth, built in 1903 by Darling and Pearson, is typical of this pattern of Beaux Arts banks. On the street façades are temple fronts with pediments, architraves, dentils, and engaged pilasters.

Unlike the Classical Revival style, the Beaux Arts style makes no pretensions to accuracy of detailing. Instead, it is an eclectic mixture of Classical and Renaissance details. Along with the temple front are half-round windows with keystones, and above the pediments are corner buttresses. The windows on the upper floor have pediments, and within the tympanum of the large pediments are roundels. The building is created in a mixture of red and yellow brick with rough cut stone on the base for rustication.

Toronto

This is a less colourful, but much better known, building than the Perth example above. Like it, the entrance is on a cutoff corner and there are two temple fronts facing the street. There is much more ornament and decorative flourishing such as the volutes over the second storey window, the extravagant doorway, and the carved architrave. The pilasters supporting the pediments have ornate capitals as well as crests and garlands.

This Bank of Montreal building was built in 1885 by Darling and Curry. It is now the Hockey Hall of Fame.

Toronto

The Canada Life Assurance Company was one of the first Beaux Arts buildings on University Avenue. Finished in 1931 it was a precursor to the Graet Depression, so did not have much company on the street for a few years.

There are huge scroll consoles with triglyphs and guttae on either side of the main door. The Florentine pediment has an oversized keystone.

The Doric style columns start on the second floor. The facade is achromatic and elegant.

Toronto

The side door has a cast iron lintel with a central acroterion. The walls are banded ashlar. The keystone is oversized and ornate.

Toronto

Next door is another Beaux Arts building that has the classical bucrane as a decoration on the architrave.

The capitals are a mixture of palm leaves (on the top) and acanthus on the bottom. Typical of the beaux Arts style is the mixing of various unrelated classical motifs on the same facade.

Union Station Toronto

Tuscan Order columns line the front of the Union Staion in Toronto. the station is fashioned after the Baths of Caracalla in Rome.

Toronto

One door in Union station has a huge coffered barrel vault with a cartouched keystone. The windows above the door and the mouldings around the galss doors are all polished brass.

Ottawa

There is a fabulous Beaux Arts building downtown Ottawa that was meant for the central train station. It functioned in that capacity for many years, then in the 1970s some rediculous beaurocrat decided that there was no more need for trains downtown. The Ottawa train station is now far outside the downtown core. Silly really.

Brantford

Here is another corner bank in Brantford that is of the oversized Classical mixture style but without the side temple-fronts. Here we have giant order, fluted, Ionic pilasters along the sides with giant order engaged columns on the corner front. Above these are a continuous architrave and frieze with a large cornice and dentil blocks.

On the attic level is a series of windows with alternating triangular and Florentine pediments in the Renaissance style. The parapet on the corner door has a small ziggurat pattern. This mixture of Renaissance and Classical elements is standard for Beaux Arts style buildings.

Brantford

Here is a somewhat different adaptation of Beaux Arts Classicism on a public building; this time it is the Brantford Public Library.

Atop the impressive flight of stairs is a temple-front with four Ionic columns, an entablature announcing the purpose of the building, a pediment with dentiled cornices, a brick tympanum, and an anthemion - a Greek palmette ornament used at the peak of pediments. This temple-front lies in front of a Renaissance styled façade with a heavy cornice and pedimented windows. The center of the plan has a large dome with clerestory lighting. Altogether an impressive place for books.

Carnegie Gallery - Dundas

The corner building with the doorway perpendicular to the corner is the signature footprint of the beaux Arts style. here the doorway is flanked by two Doric columns. The architrave, directly above the columns, has been update from Carnegie Library, the original use of the building, to Carnegie Gallery, the current use.

An army of dedicated volunteers and fund raisers keeps this building in good shape. Good work guys.

Sault Ste. Marie

Sault Ste. Marie's Courthouse is another example of a civic building that is created in the Beaux Arts Classicism style. Instead of stone block the material is brick with stone detailing. Again we see an eclectic mixture of Classical and Renaissance details. From the Classical are four engaged Ionic columns under a pediment . The columns are only half the height of the façade and are part of a frontispiece . Like the Renaissance palazzi, the first floor is rusticated and the windows create a regularized pattern.

Thunder Bay

This bank building designed in 1913 is constructed of local lime stone. In contrast to the extravagant Beaux Arts buildings above, this represents a movement towards "Modern Classicism". Instead of the frantic mixture of Classical and Renaissance detailing, the elements have been reduced to bare essentials.

An exaggerated Renaissance style cornice separates the attic floor from the monumental arcaded façades of the first floor. The windows are divided by unadorned paired pilasters. The half-round windows have simple keystones.

Spandrel panels between the upper and lower halves of the windows show restrained detailing that suggests Art Deco influence. This is repeated on the front door where the broken pediment and keystoned crest containing the date have a decidedly stylized look. All the Classical elements are here but they are used in a more subdued and understatedly elegant manner.

Thunder Bay

If Gothic was the vocabulary for educational institutes, Classical was the vocabulary for banks. This CIBC in Thunder Bay has four massive Doric columns with large abacuses and prominent fluting. There are an unusually high frieze with windows, a large cornice, and an attic floor with stylized triglyphs and guttae. The inspiration shows the relatively unadorned surfaces of Greek architecture as opposed to the more ornate Roman.

The pedimented doorway between the central two columns has discrete engaged pilasters and a very simple architrave. The Classical elements are monumental and imposing giving the impression of solidity and mass that is most appropriate in a bank.

Thunder Bay

At first glance this looks like a Neo-Gothic school because of the street level which is composed of a four-centered arch opening, spandrels and buttresses. But this base supports a monumental Classical Composite order frontispiece with an exaggerated cornice and elliptical lunette. The cornice is ornamented with egg-and-dart molding.

The side piers have Baroque brackets and above the cornice band is a pediment design completely split into two parts. The building has permanence and presence, but the detailing is wonderfully wild.

Brantford

Here is a somewhat different adaptation of Beaux Arts Classicism on a public building; this time it is the Brantford Public Library.

Atop the impressive flight of stairs is a temple-front with four Ionic columns, an entablature announcing the purpose of the building, a pediment with dentiled cornices, a brick tympanum, and an anthemion - a Greek palmette ornament used at the peak of pediments. This temple-front lies in front of a Renaissance styled façade with a heavy cornice and pedimented windows. The center of the plan has a large dome with clerestory lighting. Altogether an impressive place for books.

Hamilton

At first this bank in Hamilton looks almost as if it could be a Classical Revival. the temple front is convincing until you see that there are four columns and two pillars making up the front. All have Corinthian capitals, but the columns are fluted while the pillars are not.