The Architects of our City

John McIntosh Lyle was one of the Canada’s foremost architects of his time.  Born in Belfast, in 1872 he was raised in Hamilton, Ontario, where he trained at the Hamilton Art School, and went on to study at the Yale Art School and the Ecole Des Beaux Arts, in Paris.  He practiced architecture in New York for fourteen years, before returning to Canada in 1907.  Shortly thereafter, he became consulting engineer to Toronto’s Civic Improvement Committee and the designer of record for the proposed Federal Avenue scheme that later inspired improvements to University Avenue.

Upon return to Canada he was instrumental in disseminating the beaux-arts ideals to the architectural profession.

His early works reflect the beaux-arts style – Royal Alexandra Theatre (1906) and Union Station (1913-27) in Toronto, Memorial Arch, Royal Military College, in Kingston (1923) and Bank of Nova Scotia in Ottawa (1923-24).  Later in the 1920s, through an examination of Canada's architectural heritage, Lyle went on to develop a distinctively Canadian style.  He integrated Canadian floral and faunal motifs into the design of his buildings.

For example, in 1929 he designed 3 bank branches that codified his nationalistic feelings: Dominion Bank (Yonge and Gerrard, Toronto), Bank of Nova Scotia (8th Avenue SW, Calgary) and Bank of Nova Scotia, In these buildings he integrated elaborate sculptural motifs in stone, metal, plaster, fresco, glass and mosaic to express the Canadian heartland.  In 1930 he built the Runnymede Library, Toronto, which combined colonial Georgian and early Québec styles.  Union Station was designed in the grand manner of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris by a team of architects composed of the Montreal firm of G.A. Ross and R.H. MacDonald, Hugh Jones of the CPR and John M. Lyle of Toronto.  It was built by Canadian Pacific Railway and Grand Trunk Railway at a time when a railway station was viewed as the gateway to a city, Union Station was the largest and most opulent train station erected in Canada during the last great phase in railway station construction.  Construction began in 1913 but was delayed for several years because of the First World War.

The Royal Alexandra incorporated features such as air conditioning which required tons of ice and .9 meter thick concrete floors making it Canada’s first fireproof theatre.  The interior design with it cantilevered balconies and sweeping curves made it the first theatre in Canada with unobstructed views.

In 1926, John Lyle was awarded a gold medal by the Ontario Association of Architects.  He also received a silver medal for his civilian relief work in France during the war, for which the French government awarded him the Reconnaissance Francaise.  Like his father Reverend Dr. Samuel Lyle, a Presbyterian minister, who founded the Hamilton Art Gallery, John Lyle was dedicated to the arts and served as president of the Art Museum of Toronto (now the Art Gallery of Ontario) from 1941 to 1944.  He also spent a good deal of his time mentoring the next generation of architects.

R.S.  McLaughlin engaged John Lyle to design a formal garden (Parkwood Estate), which remains a monumental achievement in Canadian design.  Construction of this garden began on June 17, 1936 and it was completed 13 months later.  Lyle’s design for the Formal Garden won the Bronze Medal of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada in 1939, and it remains his only surviving residential landscape.  This garden blends English and North American traditions in a design unique in Canada, through its use of water, space, vegetation and Art Deco forms and motifs. 
On the 1935 formal garden: Mr. Lyle (In The Builder May 26, 1939)

John Lyle also designed and remodeled interior spaces, the schoolroom was converted into the McLaughlin master suite, the Art Gallery and the ornamental ironwork balustrade on the main staircase.  The carved relief panels in the mastersuite, executed in the Art Moderne style reflect John Lyle’s belief in using Canadian flora and fauna in his designs.

John Lyle retired in 1943, but continued as a consulting architect for his successor firm started by his assistants John J.  Beck & Arthur Eadie until his death on Dec. 19 1945.