The Great Architects of Canada: Frank Darling and John A. Pearson

Photo Credit: TOBuilt

This edition of The Great Canadian Architects series looks at two Toronto based architects who contributed greatly to the development of commercial and banking architecture in the early twentieth century in not just Toronto, but across western Canada. Frank Darling and John A. Pearson would create a solid association that lasted from the early 1890s until 1923. They are best known for their banks of which many were built in the Beaux-Arts and Classical Revival styles. Darling and Pearson observed what was happening in the architectural spaces of Chicago, New York and London and created their own architectural interpretations to reflect the unique Canadian experience of commercial development in the early twentieth century. 

At the height of his career between 1895 and 1920, Frank Darling was considered one of the greatest architects of the British Empire winning several awards including a Commonwealth Gold Medal for his architectural designs. Born in Scarborough, Ontario on February 17, 1850, his father William Stewart Darling was a well liked rector in the region. Darling grew up trying out a few different things, such as bank telling and general studies at Upper Canada College and Trinity College School before he decided to pursue architecture. He went to work in the office of Thomas Gundry and Henry Langley in Toronto as an apprentice and decided he had found his passion. Darling then went to London, England to study architecture from 1870 to 1873 under renowned British architect George Edmund Street. Working with Street was a profound experience in Darling’s life and would impact how he would view architecture for the rest of his career. The one key thing he took away from working with Street was the idea that the Gothic Revival style could legitimately be the basis upon which all other styles could be adapted and he applied this belief throughout his career.

Darling returned to Canada and formed a few partnerships with various Toronto architects until 1881, when he entered a partnership with Samuel Curry. This partnership with Curry would be Darling’s most successful of his early career. Curry was a native of Port Hope, Ontario and was trained in Toronto. He preferred the role of junior partner throughout his career and this seemed to work well in his partnership with Darling. One of Darling and Curry’s first large scale projects together was on creating the plans for the Ontario Legislature Building competition in 1882. Although their design won, delays and back room politicking, completely out of their control, meant the project ended up going to American architect Richard A. Waite instead. But Darling and Curry were not deterred by politics and in 1885 created probably their best known work together.

The Bank of Montreal building, on the corner of Front and Yonge in downtown Toronto, is one of the city’s earliest and best examples of the Beaux-Arts style. Its front entrance sits on the corner of the building, which is a typical feature of this style and its influences draw heavily from the English Baroque style of harmony and balance with some Gothic Revival influences. The same style and proportion of facades face Yonge and Front streets with the corner to separate the two similar sides. The building is very decorative with its garlands, volutes over the windows and heavy, carved Gothic entrance way. This remained a Bank of Montreal branch until the early 1980s when the bank vacated to a new location. The building then stood empty for the next decade. It was renovated in 1993 and is now perhaps one of the most widely recognised Toronto heritage building to those outside the city. Canadian hockey fans know this building as the current home of the Hockey Hall of Fame. Just like the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa, you may never have personally been there, but you know what it is when you see it.

Photo Credit: TOBuilt

In 1892, Pearson and Curry won the contract to design the Victoria Hospital for Sick Children. This new building would replace the first hospital built to aide Elizabeth

Photo Credit: TOBuilt

McMaster’s quest to help the sick children of the Toronto area. This Richardson Romanesque styled building in red terra cotta continued operations until 1951 when the present Toronto Hospital for Sick Children (Sick Kids) was built. At Victoria Hospital, such ground breaking inventions in children’s health such as pablum, children’s x-rays, and the first debates on the need for pasteurised milk, took place. This building is now the home of the Canadian Blood Services who won the Toronto Historical Board’s award in 1993 for adaptive re-use reconstruction. It was during construction of this building in 1892 that Darling and Curry took on John Pearson and Henry Sproatt as partners.

John A. Pearson was born June 22, 1867 in Chesterfield, England where he later apprenticed at age 16 to a local architect. But Pearson was frustrated with the profession of architecture in England. He felt it was largely a profession of “old boys with old ways” with not much room for creativity, inspiration, or challenges. At the age of 21 in 1888, Pearson decided to immigrate to New York City where he felt he would have the freedom to interpret and re-invent certain architectural styles rather than churn out ‘cookie-cutter’ versions of what other British architects were doing in England at the time. Pearson soon made connections in Toronto, particularly with architect Henry Sproatt, and decided to move there permanently. Both Pearson and Sproatt caught Darling’s attention with their creative interpretations of the common architectural styles of the day. Darling and Pearson formed an instant friendship over their shared appreciation of British and American architecture. But they also agreed, wholeheartedly, that a uniquely Canadian version of those British and American styles could set Canadian architecture well ahead of the pack. In 1892, the new firm became Darling, Curry, Sproatt and Pearson. In 1893, Samuel Curry left the firm to form a series of other partnerships, the most notable being with William F. Sparling from 1910 to 1918. Finally in 1897, Sproatt left the firm to collaborate with Ernest Ross Rolph.  The firm was reduced now to Darling and Pearson and it would be a successful partnership that would last for another two decades.

Photo Credit: TOBuilt

Photo Credit: TOBuilt

By all accounts, it was a perfect partnership. Both were brilliant architects in their own right who shared the same design sensibilities, yet they were very different in their outward personalities. Frank Darling was the more quiet of the two men. He was a better listener than he was a public speaker, yet he was regarded as very congenial, polite and extremely skilled at uncovering people’s emotions when speaking to someone one-on-one. John Pearson was the more outgoing of the two and could “work a crowd” better than Darling. His ability to network with strangers at a high society social event was obviously an advantage and garnered him and Darling a number of high profile projects. Pearson could get the contract, Darling could uncover the client’s deepest wishes for their building and, together, they would produce architectural works of art that are considered classics to this day. These combined talents of networking and creative styles helped them to win some of the biggest architectural contracts in Toronto at the time, as well as create the legacy for which they are most known.

In 1898, Darling and Pearson were commissioned by the Canadian Bank of Commerce to design and build a number of bank branches across the country from Toronto to Vancouver. The late nineteenth century saw a boom in western development due to the expansion of the railroads, immigration and commerce. The Canadian Bank of Commerce (later to become CIBC in 1961, when it merged with the Imperial Bank of Canada) was one such bank that wanted to take advantage of the development in the Canadian west. Many of these western bank buildings were considered skyscrapers when they were built and were testaments to the growing might of banking and commercialism across the country. Most of Darling and Pearson’s western bank buildings were in the Beaux-Arts style, but not all. One building in particular is on the corner of Granville and West Hastings in downtown Vancouver.

 Built in 1908 to be the Canadian Bank of Commerce’s headquarters in Vancouver, it is constructed in the Classic Revival style with some characteristics of Greek Revival. The “Temple Bank”, as the locals called it in the 1920s because of its towering Ionic columns on the Granville Street side, remained a bank branch until the 1980s. In 1994, Canadian the jewellery company, Birks, took over the building and it is now known in Vancouver as the Birks Building. It is a municipally designated heritage building.

Another example of a Darling and Pearson Canadian Bank of Commerce building not done in the Beaux-Arts style is the building that now houses the Watson and District Heritage Museum in Watson, Saskatchewan. This Greek Revival influenced Neo-Classical building was constructed in 1906 and was designated as a National Historic Site in 1977.

Another bank that commissioned Darling and Pearson in the west was the Union Bank of Canada. Like the other major banks at the time, the Union Bank of Canada wanted to firmly cement themselves in the west to be the bank of choice. To accomplish this, the Québec City based bank moved its national headquarters to Winnipeg in 1912 and became one of the first banks to grant loans to farmers. Darling and Pearson were commissioned by them to build a multi-storey bank branch and office building along Bankers Row on Winnipeg’s Main Street. The Beaux-Arts building, constructed in 1903, was the tallest building at the time in the British Empire and helped cement the beginning of the skyscraper craze in Canada that was sweeping North American architecture in the latter part of the nineteenth century.

 Another unique feature of this building is its steel frame. It is considered to be the oldest surviving steel framed building in Canada of the pre-1920s era. The building was also constructed with state-of-the-art earthquake proofing for that time. The Union Bank of Canada ceased to exist when it was absorbed by the Royal Bank of Canada in 1925 and the building went on to have several owners until it fell into disuse in the 1980s. In 2009, the City of Winnipeg was awarded $15 million in federal and provincial grants to help redevelop the building to turn it into the new home of the Red River College’s Culinary Arts program plus turn the upper floors into student housing and add a restaurant. The entire cost of the project was $27 million.

A major side project that John Pearson is noted for by many Canadians, perhaps more so than any of his commercial buildings with Darling, is his role as lead architect in the re-construction of the Centre Block on Parliament Hill in 1916. On February 7, 1916, a devastating fire that is believed to have been started by a discarded cigar in a waste paper basket, destroyed the Centre Block and killed seven people. Pearson collaborated with Montréal based architect, Jean-Omer Marchand, who was considered the greatest French-Canadian architect of his time.

The Canadian government highly desired an English-French collaboration of architects to rebuild the Centre Block and chose Pearson and Marchand from hundreds of architects who submitted designs. The finished product includes the massive Peace Tower and is a sympathetic, yet more modern, version of the original building that stood before the fire. Pearson, based partly on this major project and for his long standing career in the development of commercial buildings in Canada, was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Architecture from the University of Toronto in 1932. He was the first architect in Canada to receive such an honour.

The great architectural partnership of Darling and Pearson came to an end on May 19, 1923 when Frank Darling died suddenly at his Toronto home after battling the flu. The firm was renamed Darling, Pearson and Cleveland when Barry Cleveland was named a full partner upon Darling’s death and Darling’s nephew joined the practice.  John Pearson died in 1940 and the firm carried on with many of Pearson and Cleveland’s junior partners well into the 1990s under the name Clark, Darling and Downey.

The building legacy that Frank Darling and John Pearson leave to us is one that demonstrates the progression of Canada’s economic and commercial growth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as well as the progression of the Classical Revival and Beaux-Arts influences in Canadian architecture.  Considered to be two of the first “skyscraper” architects in Toronto, their buildings are now dwarfed by the more modern downtown towers. Yet, their buildings show us the meticulous and intricate attention to detail in each of them. If you would like to see some more examples of Darling and Pearson’s works beyond what is contained in this article, please check out the TOBuilt website. It is an independent website dedicated to the built heritage of the city of Toronto and is searchable by architect or building description.

Architectural history adaptive re-use, Architectural Styles, bank architecture, Canadian Architects, Frank Darling, John A. Pearson, Toronto, Vancouver, Winnipeg