Main building of the Université de Montréal, by Ernest Cormier
Ernest Cormier, OC (December 5, 1885-January 1, 1980) was a Canadian engineer and architect who spent much of his career in the Montreal area, erecting notable examples of Art Deco architecture. He first graduated as an engineer from Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal and then studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris where he received the Prix de Rome in 1914.
His major work is the central building of the Université de Montréal on the North slope of Mount Royal. This huge example of the Art Deco style was built between World War I and the middle of World War II and kept in a nearly pristine shape over the decades. The only major destruction of his designs took place within the interior spaces. They occurred in the 1970s when the great multistory hall of the central library was filled up with several smaller, one story rooms for the faculty of medicine and its library.
Another important example of Cormier's work can be found on another Québec university campus, the Casault pavilion of Université Laval, familiarly known by students as the 'Louis-Jacques'. Designed in 1948 but only completed in 1960, it is a massive cathedral-like building, originally designed as Québec City's Grand Séminaire, which is particularly spectacular viewed from a distance along the impressive mall that runs along the East-West axis of the campus grounds. (see photo: [1]) Despite an unfortunate renovation scheme in the 1970s that gutted the chapel, filled in the magnificent enclosed courtyard and transformed the interior into an undecipherable labyrinth, the building has become the most recognized landmark of the second oldest university in North America and home to Laval's faculties of Music and Communications, as well as to Québec's National Archives.
Cormier's own house, on Montreal's avenue des Pins, is one of the finest examples of an Art Deco home in the world. Pierre Trudeau purchased the building and lived there following his retirement until his death in 2000.
Cormier is also responsible for the magnificent Supreme Court of Canada building in Ottawa and was a design consultant for the United Nations building in New York.
In addition to showing a great balance, in most of his buildings, between the disciplines of engineering and architecture, Cormier also had great skills as a painter and illustrator. He has left us many stunning renderings of his works, done in the planning stages.
In 1974, Cormier was inducted into the Order of Canada by Governor General Jules Léger, and received numerous honours and awards. The Édifice Ernest-Cormier, the Quebec Court of Appeal building in Old Montreal, is named in his honour.[1]
References
- Gourney, Isabelle. ed. Ernest Cormier and the Université de Montréal. Translation by Terrance Hughes and Nancy Côté. Montréal : Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1990.
- Tinniswood, Adrian. The Art Deco House: Avant-Garde Houses of the 1920s and 1939s. New York: Watson-Guptil Publications, 2002.
