Atchison

John Danley Atchison was one of Winnipeg’s most prolific and arguably accomplished early twentieth century architects. In just 18 years (1905-23), he designed or reworked some 136 buildings in greater Winnipeg, 4 elsewhere in Manitoba and 10 in Alberta, Saskatchewan and northwestern Ontario. Across Canada, 65 of his works remain, 55 in Winnipeg.

Atchison was also a founder of several enduring cultural and educative institutions in Manitoba: the Winnipeg Fine Arts Museum (Winnipeg Art Gallery); Winnipeg School of Art (School of Art, University of Manitoba) and University of Manitoba School of Architecture (Faculty of Architecture). He provided leadership, mentorship and funding to these organisations from the time of their founding in 1912-13 until his departure from Winnipeg in 1923.

Atchison was born an American, became a naturalized Canadian during his Winnipeg years and became an American yet again over a three-part career: his formative influences, training and early practice in Chicago and area (1894-1905); his most productive and heralded period in Winnipeg and Western Canada (1905-23); and his final design direction in Pasadena and area (1925-40).

There is no hallmark that identifies an Atchison structure. He built a broad range of building types having an air of elegance in diverse architectural styles. What his buildings have in common are their pleasing appearance—their disciplined composition (their “just right” look) and satisfying proportions. They are typically distinguished by the use of refined building materials like marble, Tyndall stone and terra cotta; sparingly embellished with such flourishes as stone carving, decorative brickwork and metal ornamentation.

Atchison witnessed and participated in the building innovation of Chicago’s “Golden Age” of architecture after the Great 1871 Fire until the turn of the twentieth century. In 1881, when he was 11 years old, his family moved from his birthplace, Monmouth, Illinois, an agricultural centre of about 4,600 people, to Chicago with a population of half a million. After completing high school, he attended the Chicago Manual Training School and Art Institute of Chicago, two highly regarded institutions directed, respectively, to manual/craft skills and classical art training.

Having this education, he undertook a three-year apprenticeship (1889-92) with William G Barfield, an English-born architect with a background in carpentry and joinery. Barfield was well respected for his craft buildings and as a founder of the Chicago Architects’ Business Association (Illinois Society of Architects), America’s first independent state organisation for the professionalisation, licencing and regulating of architects. Barfield likely influenced Atchison’s later professional leadership—he would be a founder of the Manitoba Association of Architects in 1906 and its President in 1910-11—and his rich interiors, particularly evident in his apartments and residences, still evident in Winnipeg.

Atchison next worked for the renowned Chicago firm, Jenney & Mundie (1893-94). William Le Baron Jenney, an engineer-trained architect and landscape architect, had an international reputation for designing the “first” steel frame tall building (not quite fully that, but close) and is considered “the father of the skyscraper.” Jenney hired only the best “students” as he called his younger associates, and so Atchison must have been impressive by the young age of 22. With Jenney’s firm, he was exposed to an attentive teacher and cutting-edge projects that pioneered: steel-frame construction; the use of fire-retarding terra cotta, a high-grade clay product that was also used for cladding and exterior ornamentation; the new architectural styles originating in the city, the Chicago and Prairie Schools of architecture; and a renewed interest in Beaux Arts design, popularized at the 1893 Columbian World Exposition (Chicago World’s Fair) on which Atchison worked as a Jenney employee. These were concepts that Atchison brought to Winnipeg in the early twentieth century.

Atchison practiced architecture in Chicago and the US Midwest for 11 years under his own name and at times in partnership, most notably with Harry WJ Edbrooke (1902-04). While working in the Chicago area, he designed a range of building types, including apartment flats, houses, churches, office buildings and factories. At least 15 of his works remain in the American Midwest.

His most notable works were suburban courtyard apartments, a new typology of usually U-shaped, multifamily buildings situated in residential neighbourhoods and featuring landscaped front lawns. These structures were not “blockish” apartments but sprawling edifices with picturesque facades (Tudor, Dutch gable style etc) compatible with the single-family houses around them. They had multiple, unique entries, hidden back doors for each suite, and bright, airy, spacious interiors. Atchison is considered a pioneer of this style. There were only three other suburban courtyard apartments, all by the same firm in the Boston, designed just months of Atchison’s first example. He brought the suburban courtyard apartment style to Winnipeg with Lee Court, Devon Court and, in a more subdued version, the Alexandria Apartments. These were among his first Winnipeg works.

Atchison, his wife Grace and their two young daughters emigrated to Winnipeg in 1905; two sons would soon complete the family. Atchison was attracted by the opportunity thriving Winnipeg had to offer. The city at the time was growing quickly and “upbuilding” with better and larger structures replacing the streetscape, much like Chicago of his youth. As an established Scottish-Irish Presbyterian professional, Atchison fit seamlessly with the Anglo-Saxon, British-Eastern Canadian business elite then directing the development of Winnipeg.

Atchison designed a range of building types in Winnipeg, including: houses in tony Fort Rouge and the gracious new development of Crescentwood, commercial buildings, skyscrapers, schools, churches, banks, warehouses and factories. Many of these are still prominent landmarks, such as: the Great West Life Assurance, Union Tower, Bank of Hamilton and Boyd Buildings, all monolithic early skyscrapers; the Curry Building, ornamented in Gothic-styled terra cotta masquerading as granite; the gabled, towered and spired Manitoba School for the Deaf (now flagship building of the Canadian Mennonite University), in the Collegiate Gothic style; and the Tudor-styled Grosvenor Court commercial/residential building.

Lost Atchison buildings of significance include: his three courtyard apartments (above); his Prairie School styled Assiniboine Park Pavilion; the Winnipeg Tribune Building (whose ornamental Gothic terra cotta grotesques and characterful heads were salvaged, some on display at the Manitoba Museum); and Allen, Killam & McKay Building, a tallish commercial structure that featured highly articulated and vividly coloured terra cotta.

Starting in 1911, Atchison was a leader in Winnipeg’s earliest aspirations in city planning and urban design, another of his volunteer undertakings. This included his participation on the City of Winnipeg Planning Commission (1911-13) whose report to City council was called “significant” by historian Catherine Macdonald because “its recommendations were based on the explicit premise that the city must be planned in order to be a livable place for all its citizens regardless of socio-economic status and…must be the creation of an environment that is not only functional but aesthetically pleasing.” Historian Alan Artibise called the report “one of the most concise, objective and far-reaching documents to come out of Winnipeg in the first forty years of its history.”

As a member of the successor Housing and Town Planning Association, Atchison supported public education on planning, the implementation of planning legislation and improvements to housing through the building of government housing and having more progressive building by-laws. There are today only tepid renditions of planning projects for which Atchison advocated: the north-south linking Pembina, Osborne, Colony, Balmoral, Isabel and Salter Streets and a broad thoroughfare, lined with monumental buildings, leading from Portage Avenue to the Legislative Building; it was ultimately realised as Memorial Boulevard.

The city’s early entrepreneurs and social set, Atchison among them, were the beneficiaries of Winnipeg’s vast colonial fortune between 1905-12. This was wealth not broadly shared in a city divided by race, nationality, religion and social class. When Winnipeg’s good times turned in 1913, with recession, followed by war, pandemic and labour strife, even members of the privileged settler class were affected. By 1923, a brighter, warmer future beckoned Atchison and his family.

They moved to Pasadena, California, just 18 km northeast of Los Angeles then America’s fifth largest city, booming with the oil and film industries and a burgeoning population. By the summer of 1924, Atchison had obtained his California licence to practice architecture and hung out his shingle. His work there, spanning 15 years, was exclusively directed to residences, compatible with his one-man operation. By the 1930s, the Great Depression dashed the building industry. There are 18 known California projects from his California period, 13 extant. They are mostly in and around Pasadena but also in Los Angeles (Hancock Park) and Beverly Hills.

As in Winnipeg, his California houses were for an upper middle class and wealthy clientele. What was new in his cannon was design in the Mediterranean Revival style, then popular in the region. Atchison continued with other historic styles like Tudor and English country cottage design. He left the styles of the plains—the Chicago and Prairie Schools—to his work in the US Midwest and Canadian Prairies. Although his designs always incorporated state-of-the-art function and amenities, Atchison was, in style, a traditionalist.

His final known construction was a 1940 “French” style house in Pasadena for his daughter and her family. John D Atchison died on 20 June 1959. His cremated remains rest in the Great Mausoleum at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, in Glendale, California.