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The Memoir of a Fortunate Architect
A.J. Diamond
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The Memoir of a Fortunate Architect
A.J. Diamond
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About This Book
A deeply personal memoir from one of Canada's most celebrated architects. In this personal account of A.J. Diamond's life and work, he shares how he came to be the founder of the leading architecture firm Diamond Schmitt, one of Canada's most successful architecture companies. He also explains his principles of design, which at their core are about making a positive impact in the world, considering the needs of the content, client, and context. Diamond gives insight into his design principles in relation to some of his most notable projects, including the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts in Toronto, la Maison symphonique de MontrĆ©al, the Mariinsky II Theatre in Saint Petersburg, and the new city hall in Jerusalem. Diamond also chronicles his family ancestry, his childhood in South Africa, from his birth in his grandfather's study in the small provincial town of Piet Retief on the borders of Eswatini (Swaziland) and Mozambique, to his university days at the University of Cape Town and Oxford ā where he played rugby at the international level, scoring two winning tries for the Oxford Blues against Australia ā and the University of Pennsylvania. His memoir traces his immigration to the U.S. and, eventually, Canada as well as his growing architectural practice in Toronto, where he focused on the issues facing his chosen city.
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Artist BiographiesFour
University Life
There were No Architects in My Family. I was the first to receive a university degree of any kind. I am not sure why I applied to the School of Architecture at the University of Cape Town, rather than the closer Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg. Perhaps it was the attractiveness of the Western Cape and its Mediterranean climate, and my familiarity with Cape Town, having spent holidays there while visiting Uncle Louis and Aunt Annie Diamond.
Louis and Annie could charitably be called parsimonious. When they were both out of the house, they locked the phone to prevent the maid from using it. Calls cost a ātickeyā then ā the South African name for a three-penny coin. They would owe each other money for postage stamps. They drove across town to the wholesale market to buy bags of fruit and vegetables to save a few pennies, and I often wondered if they took into consideration the cost of petrol and the wear and tear on the car. The uneaten fresh fruit was bottled. There was no way all the accumulated food could have been consumed in their lifetimes. Perhaps Annie had an economic way of using rotting fruit.
Louis and a partner had established the Good Hope furniture factory in Salt River, an industrial suburb on the opposite side of the city from Sea Point. Their product was aimed at the lower end of the market. I visited the factory once and saw a workman using a spray gun, the kind used in car body repair shops, to cover a piece of furniture with varnish. This enterprise provided Louis with a substantial income.
Louis travelled each day by public transit to the factory; first by bus into the city, then by a suburban commuter train to Salt River, saving a few more pennies.
Their house on High Level Road in Sea Point, an attractive suburb of Cape Town on the lower slopes of Signal Hill, overlooked the Atlantic Ocean from the promontory that encloses Table Bay. It had a minuscule rear garden. Louis would wear dungarees, rubber boots, and gloves to garden. I never knew either fruit or vegetables, let alone flowers, to come from the garden.
I remember the rhythmic, mournful bleat of the foghorn when the Cape was enveloped in a thick, misty blanket; and the long copper hunting horn blown by the passing Cape Malay fishmongers from their two-wheeled, one-horse carts; and the call āStrawābries! Strawābries! Waaatermelon! Waaatermelon!ā from fruit sellers on similar carts.
The rare combination of Beaux Arts and modernist architecture that shaped the academic and design curriculum of the school suited me perfectly. I had been a mediocre math student in high school, but suddenly calculus made sense, now that it had the practical application of solving structural problems. I revelled in precision drafting, freehand drawing, and watercolour rendering. I had always drawn. I made an imaginative leap to playing house by designing houses, and I drew cityscapes and still lifes. That gave me a head start in the first year.
Louis Diamond had promised his two nephews a car if they matriculated with first-class passes. To my fatherās disgust Uncle Louis failed to keep his promise. My father then promised that if I did well in my first year at university, he would provide a car. He was good as his word, and I was given a gunmetal grey CitroĆ«n with red leather seats. During vacation, I could now drive the 1,500-kilometre trip from Durban to Cape Town, in two days, with a stop in Colesberg to stay with the parents of a fellow UCT student ā āPannieā Garlake.
Colesberg, in the Great Karoo, a semi-desert region of South Africa, was established by the Dutch East India Company. The Garlakesā house was once the VOC (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, United East India Company) agentsā house. I was always given the privilege of the gunroom in which to sleep. Ella Garlake was the perfect chatelaine, an island of civility and taste. The polished mahogany table, furnished with silver Georgian cutlery and candelabra, was the setting for exquisite cuisine, all somehow enhanced by being in this small town in the Karoo.
Colesburg was remote from the large cities, so newspapers took several days to arrive. One was therefore especially welcomed if one brought the morning editions of the Natal Mercury or the Cape Times, depending on the direction one was travelling. Jack Garlake was a lawyer and auctioneer, and while conducting auctions he would drink whisky camouflaged with milk. Alcohol wasnāt something the staunch Dutch Reform farmers approved of. Long after I graduated, Jack was shot by a local sheep farmer. I never learned the motive for his murder.
My second year at UCT was a struggle. I had been coasting, and hadnāt developed beyond my native capabilities. At times it was hard to even get up in the morning. I had trouble mastering the new academic material and the magnificent potential of architecture. It became clear that everyone had caught up to me, and had passed me, and now I had to catch up to them. That was the only year in the five-and-a-half year academic program that I did not receive the class prize. However, it was an important academic and organizational lesson.
After the second year, my energy returned, and I became a member of the university first teams in rugby and athletics. I was elected to the Student Representative Council (SRC), and became involved in South African politics. In 1953 we attempted to integrate the university swimming pool ā excepting only the academic program, apartheid applied to every other aspect of non-white studentsā lives at UCT. Informers at the university reported our activities to the government and police, and we were put on the political policeās list. Subsequently, one of our number, Albi Sachs, was jailed and held in solitary confinement.
Unlike in North America, there was no tradition of summer jobs for the then largely white student body in South Africa. There are two reasons for this: summer and winter vacations are relatively short, with somewhat shorter Easter and Michaelmas breaks. And as there was, and regrettably still is, a large underemployed African population, there was little need to hire students. However, at the end of my first year of architecture school I applied for a position as an apprentice bricklayer with a large construction company during the Christmas summer vacation. I wanted to find out how projects were actually managed and what was required for their successful construction.
I was assigned to a mid-rise apartment tower whose concrete frame was completed. The site faced Esplanade Park, which runs the length of Durban Bay.
At one end of the bay is a bluff on which a large lighthouse was strategically sited. The bluff made a natural windbreak for the port at the entrance end of the bay, but no such protection was afforded the apartment tower at the other end of the bay. Each morning, I would park my new Citroƫn blocks from the construction site. I did not reveal that I was an architecture student, but did make the mistake of admitting I was able to read plans: I was promptly assigned to mark the location of all internal and external brick wall positions, and to lay the first course of bricks on the recently cast concrete floor slabs. There was a union rule that not more than six hundred bricks were to be laid by any bricklayer in a day. I was in no danger of breaking that rule.
At the end of the day Iād be grateful to be back at my parentsā house to soak my aching back. So, at first, I was pleased when I was moved to the plastererās section. They were working on a loosely-planked metal scaffold on the eleventh or twelfth floor. The technique was to hold a hod piled with mortar in one hand, gather some on a rectangular wooden trowel with the other, take a step or two back onto the loose plank platform along the external face of the brick wall, and hurl the plaster from the wood trowel with sufficient force to adhere it to the wall. Standing on loose planking eleven stories up in a strong wind didnāt exactly produce a sense of security. I developed an alternate plastering technique, albeit less efficient, of standing close to the wall and pressing lumps of plaster against the wall with my hands.
The ābrickies,ā as they were called, were crude, but I learned very important lessons that summer. One was to produce construction documents with as much clarity as possible. Not just the details regarding the installation of various systems, materials, and technologies, but also how the worker would be able to effect the installation.
During my second year of architecture school, I worked in the office of Hanson and Tomkin in Durban. They were practitioners of the modern movement, which was based on the work of Le Corbusier and, to a degree, on Mies van der Rohe. It was first introduced in South Africa by Rex Martienssen. His book, The Idea of Space in Greek Architecture, was seminal, and he influenced a generation of progressive architects. Hanson and Tomkinās left-leaning politics was also a draw for me. Their office was an exciting place to work, though I was mostly confined to window details. I was once given the job of designing free-standing lettering for an entrance canopy. I was given a tutorial on typefaces and how to secure them to the cantilevered concrete canopy. It made me aware of how little I knew of design implementation. That and my bricklaying experience introduced me to layers of design consideration previously unthought of.
Once, while driving from Durban to Cape Town, I stopped to pick up a hitchhiker outside Bloemfontein. He spoke Afrikaans as his English was poor. He saw an orange I had in the open glove compartment and asked if he could have it. I said yes, and he ate it, peel and all. It turned out he hadnāt eaten in days. Heād been released from the Bloemfontein prison a few days earlier after serving a sentence for the attempted murder of his wife. He had been given money on his release but spent it all on tobacco, which he then threw over the prison wall for the inmates: half for the Black section of the prison, half for the white. āSwart en wit is deselvde in die tronkā (Black and white are equal in jail), he said. I asked where he was heading. Back to his wife, he said. I hoped it would be a reconciliation.
ā¢ ā¢ ā¢
For my thesis subject, I chose acoustics and the design of a concert hall, a perfect vehicle to indulge my two passions ā architecture and music. By good fortune, the visiting lecturer that year was Philip Hope Bagenal, a prominent English acoustician. He become not only my thesis supervisor, but a wonderful mentor, as well. I learned much from him. There was a reason for the success of traditional concert halls and opera houses ā their empirical development of shape, materials, and details produced wonderful acoustics ā but they didnāt look functional in the modern sense. The irony is that modernist shapes ā particularly the fan-shaped auditorium ā were exactly the opposite of what is required. Sound decays as it moves away from its source, so it needs reinforcing if the sound is to be equal for all locations in the hall. The fan shape, which widens as it moves away from the sound source, reduces the intensity of sound reflection. Those halls look functional, but they are decidedly not.
The Bachelor of Architecture degree at UCT required the fourth year of the degree program to be an internship in an architectural firm. This could be done anywhere in the world, provided it was in an accredited office. I chose London.
Professor Thornton White, the head of the University of Cape Town School of Architecture, provided a letter of introduction to the head of the Architectural Association, of which he was a graduate, and I was referred to the firm of Casson and Condor. Sir Hugh Casson had achieved great success as the architect of the Festival of Britain in 1951. Besides being an exhibition of note, it boosted the morale of a country still battered by the Second World War. Casson was a friend of the British royal family and designed the interior of their yacht, Britannia. My first task was designing a bar with a battleship-linoleum counter for the royal yacht.
In 1954, the journey from Cape Town to Southampton on the Union-Castle Line took two weeks. A classmate, who had arrived in London a month earlier, met me at Waterloo station on a Saturday afternoon in November. Fog shrouded London. We had lunch in a pub and went straight to the Albert Hall to hear a performance of Handelās Messiah. Sir Thomas Beecham was the conductor. The lamps on the stairs were still gas lamps. London was at the end of an era, not much changed from preāSecond World War days. I had never before left southern Africa, but this was all familiar to me. From nursery rhymes and books at school, I knew English and Commonwealth literature and history. Under Africaās sun, I had read of English fog and English glory. I had read Dickens, Conan Doyle, and Lytton Strachey, with his devastating satire of Prince Albert and the Albert Memorial. I was a part of the British Commonwealth. In travelling to its metropolitan heart, I was in some way coming home. Nothing in London was strange to me, and yet nothing was completely real. A magic realism perhaps. A heightened sense of Londonās essence, an atmosphere created by soft light and rain and the soot-blackened buildings.
Casson Condorās office was in what had been a house on the Old Brompton Road. As in most English buildings the heating was far from adequate. It was mostly supplied by a small gas fireplace. As I was a junior, lived nearby and was an early riser, it was my job to be first to arrive at the office and to light the gas fires. The office was conveniently near The Denmark, a pub. Our salary was paid weekly on Fridays, so Friday lunch was a half pint of bitter, and roast beef and two veg at the pub. A welcome change from pasta, or very cheap and not very good Chinese or Indian food.
There were far fewer foreign students in London then than there are now. The Colonial Office made every effort to welcome students from the British Commonwealth and to introduce us to events, personalities, and institutions of personal and professional interest. One such event was an invitation to a home in Chelsea, to a reception for Chagal. There was, however, a purpose more than merely social: our hostess wanted Chagal to assess the work of a young painter. I overheard her ask Chagal, after he was shown the artistās work, whether the young painter should continue to paint. Chagalās answer was that that decision must be entirely up to her. A Solomonic judgment, I thought.
The best part of London was that I had my own flat, in a courtyard in South Kensington. The anonymity of the city, the independence I felt there, sketch book and watercolours in hand, was sublime. After a concert in the Festival Hall I stood on Hungerford footbridge looking out at the Thames with a sense of exhilaration ā I felt I could fly, or conquer the world. Anything was within my powers.
I bought a decommissioned 1938 taxi cab for twenty-five pounds and with friends I toured the south coast of England. Then I sold the taxi and bought a Lambretta motor scooter. Together with a classmate, Owen Dolby, I travelled to Helsinki to visit my relatives ā the Strachevskys. The visit concluded with a stay at their summer house on an island north of the city, an idyllic clapboard house with four-poster beds, feather-filled mattresses, and a sauna on the lakeās edge. One of the family had been Sibeliusās conductor, another an opera singer, and a third was a nurse who had served in a German field hospital when Finland was allied with Nazi Germany: an anomalous situation for a Jew, to say the least.
During the summer of 1954 I returned to South Africa. It was earlier than expected, because of a breakup with a girlfriend. My father asked me what I intended to do. I replied that I was deciding whether to find a place in an architectās office in Durban or in Cape Town. He said that if I left home and went to Cape Town he would not support me. I replied that he had just made up my mind, and that I was going to Cape Town. Within an hour I was on the road driving to the Cape.
It was a critical moment of independence. I felt a surge of exhilaration at the freedom and self-reliance it entailed. I found a place in an architectās office in Cape Town, and never looked back. To do my father justice, he did say that he thought I was wrong, but admired me for doing what I had decided. Perhaps the first compliment he ever paid me.
In 1956, my final year at UCT, a combined University of Cape Town and Stellenbosch University rugby team was selected for a European tour. We played against Italy, France, and Wales. Dr. Wells, the UCT rugby team doctor, and Dr. Atkins, of Guys hospital in London, arranged the British portion of our tour. We visited the Houses of Parliament, and as we entered the building, Dr. Atkins said to me, āNow Diamond, as an architect, Iām sure you will be interested in the Perpendicular style of the Gothic Revival Architecture of the building.ā
I was astonished that he would know that I was an architecture student, and even more astonished that he knew the names and academic courses of every member of the team. I learned a lesson in real politesse that day, something that was not prevalent in South African culture.
We lunched in Mansion House, in which there are plaques with the names of those British soldiers who fell in wars abroad. This included one devoted to those who fell in the Anglo-Boer war. A man from Stellenbosch University who was on the team, looked at the list of names on the plaque, and commented, āNot enough.ā This showed me, as nothing else in South Africa had, the depth and perpetuation of feeling, even two generations after the war.
That night we were given a dinner at which I was seated next to Brendan Bracken, Churchillās parliamentary private secretary during the Second World War. I could not have had a more fascinating and engaging dinner partner. My interest in history in general, and the Second World ...