Author Talk
David Monteyne discusses For the Temporary Accommodation of Settlers: Architecture and Immigrant Reception in Canada, 1870-1930
Please join us on August 10th at 7 pm for a talk by Dr. David Monteyne, PhD, award-winning author, and associate professor in the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape at the University of Calgary.
For the Temporary Accommodation of Settlers reconstructs the experiences of people in these spaces - both immigrants and government agents - to pose a question at the heart of architectural thinking: how is meaning produced in the built environments that we encounter? Monteyne interprets official governmental intentions and policy goals embodied by the architecture of immigration but foregrounds the unofficial, informal practices of people who negotiated these spaces to satisfy basic needs, ensure the safety of their families, learn about land and job opportunities, and ultimately arrive at their destinations. The extent of this Canadian network, which peaked in the early twentieth century at over sixty different sites, and the range of building types that comprised it are unique among immigrant-receiving nations in this period.
In our era of pandemic quarantine and migrant detention facilities, For the Temporary Accommodation of Settlers offers new ways of seeing and thinking about the historical processes of immigration, challenging readers to consider government architecture and the experience of migrants across global networks.
Monteyne’s decision to focus on immigration buildings from the perspective of cultural landscapes rather than purely architectural history has made the book relevant and interesting to a broader audience than just architects and architectural historians. A significant number of people living in Canada are immigrants or have claim to a parent or grandparent who emigrated to Canada. This book helps to paint a picture of what it would have been like for our grandparents and great-grandparents to be newly arrived in Canada.
Thursday, August 10th
Doors: 6:45 PM
Talk begins: 7:15 PM
FREE with registration. Let us know you’re joining!
About the Author
David Monteyne
Associate Professor, University of Calgary
My training is in architectural history and cultural studies, and I use interdisciplinary approaches to study buildings, urban sites, monuments, public spaces, and landscapes in relation to a broadly-defined social context.
In 1995, I completed a Master’s degree in the School of Architecture at the University of British Columbia, then worked five years as a lecturer, heritage researcher, and architecture librarian. In 2005, I completed my PhD in American Studies at the University of Minnesota, and my dissertation came out as a book in 2011 with the University of Minnesota Press.
Through an engagement with cultural and political history, I seek to specify the different techniques and processes by which space is produced through social relations. Critical architectural history seeks to research the built environment as a creative cultural phenomenon not limited to singular structures or famous architects. In contrast, understanding the role of the everyday spatial practice of subjects in producing the built environment is one of the most under-studied questions facing architectural and urban design history. A new research project on Canadian cultural landscapes seeks to address this question through research on spaces of immigration. This scholarship incorporates analytic categories such as race and gender, thereby adding relations of identity and power to its examination of the meanings and uses of spaces and places.
In my work, a specific focus has been the relationship between built environments, bureaucracies, and national identity. I have studied this in different ways, through the architectural programs of the Hudson’s Bay Company in the 1910s-20s, the United States civil defence establishment during the Cold War, and the Canadian government departments responsible for immigration in the century after Confederation.
