Ron Thom and The Allied Arts

Ron Thom was one of Canada’s greatest architects, whose landmark projects helped define the nation’s twentieth century architectural identity. But instead of adopting the stark modernism of the International Style, Thom drew on his love of nature and art to create organic, warm and intimate places. Like Frank Lloyd Wright, Thom believed in creating not just a building for a client, but a gesamkunstwerk, or a total work of art, from the landscaping to the interiors and the furniture to the ceramics. It was an ethos that inspired Thom to shape his architecture with poetic drama.

Ron Thom and the Allied Arts explores Ron Thom's architecture in the context of his underpinnings as a west-coast artist. Thom was educated at the Vancouver School of Art, where he met Molly Lamb, Bruno Bobak, and other like-minded spirits who would grow into important colleagues and lifelong friends. He and his peers perceived architecture as an art form, and part of a continuum of all the arts. He had a high respect for the Mingei folk craft movement, wherein potters and other artisans opting out of the industrial age found a higher beauty in the hand-made. Of this architect’s long and diverse career, Ron Thom and the Allied Arts celebrates the most creatively fertile period, 1947-1972, with a focus on his key masterpieces—the west coast houses, Massey College, and Trent University—and the allied arts that informed their design. On display is a selection of Thom’s original paintings, prototypes for furniture and fittings, correspondence, architectural drawings and sketches, archival and architectural photography, the original hand-rendered 1960 Massey College presentation boards, and selections of the artisanal work he commissioned as an integral component of it all.