The Architects of our City

Eden Smith
Photo courtesy of Doug Brown
Contribution: St. George's Memorial Church

Eden Smith was born in Birmingham, England in 1859.  He studied drawing and architecture throughout Europe as a young man.  He was thought to have worked for a architectural firm in London for a short while.  He and his wife Annie Charlton along with their young son Harry immigrated to Canada in 1876 where they homesteading in Manitoba for two years before moving to Toronto in 1888 and he began his architectural practice working for the firm Strickland and Symons.  By August 1892, Eden Smith was on is own with an office at 14 King St.

Much of his early work in Toronto was ecclesiastical and sponsored by the Anglican Church.  He designed several churches, among them the church of St. Cyprian in Seaton village, St. John the Evangelist on Portland Street and the church of St. Thomas on Huron Street.  During this time he also designed Upper Canada College and St. Hilda's College.

After 1888, domestic architecture monopolized his prolific output.  In 1890 they lived at 34 Salisbury Avenue.  In 1907 he moved from 267 Indian Rd.  which he had designed and built for his family to 5 Wychwood Park.  As with another 11 houses in Wychwood Park, an artist enclave in the Bathurst and Davenport area of Toronto this house was one of his own designs.  Smith also designed other houses in the surrounding neighbourhoods of Rosedale, The Annex and Forest Hill.  Many of these embodied the contemporary design principles found in the Arts and Crafts Movement, of which Smith was a leading exponent.

His style was called English Cottage, which was developed from late-Medieval and vernacular English forms by such English architects as Sir Edwin Lutyens and M.H. Baillie-Scott.  His English Cottage had rooflines with exaggerated sheltering sweeps, tall chimne

ys, simple walls of plain brick, stucco, exposed timbers, and bands of small-paned casement windows.  Insides were spacious rooms simply finished with paneling, paint and wallpaper and they were made cozy by a large fireplace.  Eden Smith also developed the use of standardized details for windows, doors, staircases and decorative moldings, and encouraged his suppliers to mass-produced them.  Their availability as stock items made for quality finishes and interesting designs at an economical cost.  He liked to use fireplaces, ingle nooks, doglegged stairs and fanciful newel posts in many of his designs.

St. George's Memorial Church
39 Athol St. W, Oshawa
Photos: www.stgeorgesoshawa.org

He was also on-site and supervised the construction.  He believed a house should be designed from the inside out, and if the plan is molded to the activities of the owner, the exterior will reflect his personality said A.S. Mather Sr. of his former employer.  He influenced domestic architecture more then any other architect of his time, his building designs were the forerunner of the modern home.

After the roof of the Wilson Music Hall collapsed at 5 a.m. on February 21st 1898 due to a heavy snow load, Eden Smith was given the task of rebuilding the hall.

In 1915, Eden Smith was commissioned to build three libraries for the Toronto Library System with a grant from the Carnegie Corporation.  The Beaches, High Park and Wychwood Branches are again designed in Smiths Arts and Crafts inspired design,

an adaption of the Tudor Gothic style and after the fashion of the Colliegiate Grammar School of Seventeenth Century England.

Another outstanding achievement was the design of the Riverdale and Spruce Courts, a co-op housing complex at the corner of Spruce and Sumach Streets in Cabbagetown.  It was begun in 1913 and flourishes to this day as a model of successful co-operative housing.  Smith designed the complex around large quadrangles.  The courts were the focus of the sense of community that Smith fostered in his design.  Each entrance has a large stoop and each apartment has it own balcony or veranda.

When the congregation of St. Georges Memorial Church needed to build a larger church, Eden Smith was chosen as the successful design over two other designs.  Built in 1922, St. Georges was considered by Eden Smith to be his finest church.  Read more about the history of St. George's Memorial Church.

Eden Smith died on October 10, 1949, and is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in Guelph, Ontario.