Here is a selection from the Griffin Quarterly.
Articles
Charles Macdonalds' Modernism
- based on a talk given by Wayde Brown of the Nova Scotia Museum at the Charles Macdonald Concrete House Museum in Centreville, NS, on May 27, 2001
Centreville's concrete house and Huntington Point's "gnome cottages" might amuse casual visitors to the Annapolis Valley: more folk art? Yes, but the works of Charles Macdonald (1874-1967) also belong in the canon of modern art and architecture.
Born in Steam Mill, Macdonald left school at 15 and sailed around the world as a ship's carpenter. Returning to Nova Scotia in 1912, he founded Kentville Concrete Products and, using materials at hand, began building his concrete house in 1916. Writing to his future wife, Mabel Misner, Macdonald asked, "Do you think this has the appearance of a house? Most everybody laughs at it."
Macdonald did not plan his projects; Mabel recalled that "he just made it up as he went along." He built his Centreville house, now a museum, with reinforced concrete beams containing 1/4-inch iron rods. The original house only had one storey, and the Macdonalds spent summers on the roof in a pup tent as they built a second floor. To show concrete's versatility, Macdonald built everything in the house using concrete, even the bathtub, and the doghouse.
At Huntington Point on the Fundy shore, Macdonald built five concrete cottages distinguished by plastic, curvy forms, bright colours, and the incorporation of local beachstones. In a 1941 article, the Christian Science Monitor exclaimed, "Snow White and her seven dwarfs might have lived [there]." Macdonald's socialist politics led him to build cottages when his factory had no orders during the Depression just to give his workers jobs. His radicalism helps to explain his devotion to a new, modern material which, he hoped, would allow every family to build its own inexpensive house. Concrete was a revolutionary statement of individualism.
In 1916, concrete was largely used to build boxy, traditional structures. Few explored its 'plasticity' or sculptural potential. In Barcelona, Antonio Gaudì's buildings look plastic and made of concrete, but are stone - a material Gaudì and local workers knew better. As with Macdonald's buildings, colour, wit and detail characterize such Gaudì constructions as Colonia Güell. In Potsdam, Germany, Erich Mendelsohn built the plastic, fluid Einstein Tower in 1920. Mendelsohn wanted to build with reinforced concrete but was unable to master the unfamiliar material. He built his tower with bricks, then parged them with concrete. Self-taught, the unknown Macdonald accomplished what internationally renowned architects could not.
The dean of modernists, Le Corbusier, wanted architecture "free from all constraints, pure invention of the mind" because the world needed "plastic" art. Another modernist tenet was "truth in materials": concrete, then, should be used in ways appropriate to its own properties rather than mimicking other materials. Macdonald built spontaneous, plastic buildings and used concrete on its own terms. Furthermore, modernists like Bofill sometimes incorporated vernacular elements into avant-garde buildings, as Macdonald did. Macdonald's buildings fascinate because they were part of both Maritime folk tradition and nascent international modernism.
The Griffin, Volume 27 #3, September 2002 
