Building Styles

St Mary's

Romanesque Revival was used extensively in public buildings to instill a sense of permanence and civic pride.

Many buildings, like the Town Hall in St. Marys, have a wonderful mixture of medieval details. Along with the round-headed windows and arches of the Romanesque period, this building displays medieval elements including the brick checkerboard patterning, scalloping, ornamental machicolations, corner towers, and heavy block sills.

Dichromatic accents and the rough finish emphasize the weight of the stone. Darker brick is also used for string courses and sill bands. Corbie steps are also used on the east façade. Even the entrance stairways are enclosed in heavy stone railings.

Woodstock

The Oxford County Courthouse is a late Romanesque example designed in 1892 by Cuthbertson and Fowler. The asymmetrical plan has a large square tower and regularized half-round arched openings.

The architects have made free use of the Romanesque elements distorting them to make a truly unique building. The newel posts by the front and side entrances are embellished to exaggerate the weight of the building. Heavy horizontal bands, cornices, and dentils are equally amplified. The front porches are held up by undersized colonettes.

Woodstock

Extensive use of round arches can be seen throughout the building, but nowhere more than the side entrance. The paneled door is fit into a large round arch. The massive voussoirs of the arch are topped by the gigantic keystone. The imposts are single large blocks that span the full space between the doors and the flanking windows. All of the elements of the door are oversized.

The stone used in the building is************. Both the design and the material give it a distinctly fortress-like feeling.

Woodstock

Also in Woodstock is the City Hall made in 19**.

The stones are large and rusticated with large quoins. The paired round-headed arches on the upper level are very similar to those in Byzantine buildings of the 5th and 6th centuries. These were followed by the Romanesque paired arches found in Pisa and other parts of Europe, even as far north as England as seen in Winchester.

Woodstock

The window on the tower of the City Hall has many Byzantine and Romanesque elements. The Roman or round-headed arch is composed of huge, oversized voussoirs. The arch itself is compound as in many doorways of the period. (See the doorway of Santa Maria dei Soffraggio in Italy, St. Denis in France, and the castle doorway in Spain.)

The arch is supported by large columns with ornate Byzantine capitals. The scotia and torus are also oversized.

The craftsmanship and attention to detail in this building are superb.

Brockville

Another courthouse, this one in Brockville, uses many of the same features, but in a strikingly different way. The two main doorways are like the Woodstock example in that each has a round arch with an emphasized extrados. The windows are rectangular, but they have heavy transom bars dividing them and equally heavy string courses.

The roofline is unusual with two shaped gables and a lunette with a superimposed pediment on the frontispiece. There is carving within the lunette and also on all spandrels.

Sault Ste. Marie

This stone office building is made from Red River stone, a local stone taken from the river. The building is square and solid with large arched openings on the first floor. On the second floor there are tall slender windows with transoms in groups of two, three and four. The top floor dormer has a Romanesque façade with four slender windows topped by a lunette.

The simplicity of the design and the use of straight-forward basic forms suggests that this design was a "Richardson Romanesque" , an American style developed by H.H. Richardson in the late 19th century.

Gananoque

The most outstanding feature of this church is the multi-coloured slate roof. Many features of the church are representative of Romanesque architecture. On the east end the windows in the apse are very high off the ground. This is typical of Romanesque churches that were built as houses of worship as well as the "fortress" to keep them safe from intruding armies and bandits. The church is in a basilica plan with side aisles. The exterior stone is rusticated and the walls are buttressed.

Thunder Bay

While this doesn't have the round-headed arches characteristic of the other examples of the style, the weight and substance of this Red River stone house make it Romanesque Revival. The two-storey front portico has decorative battlementing. The vertical openings on the porch corners are reminiscent of loop holes (openings used in medieval times for shooting arrows). The front entrance and the side dormers have decorated gables, and the bay window is devoid of Classical or Gothic detailing. Examples of Romanesque Revival housing are rare. This is a beautiful example.

Toronto

University College (1856) at the University of Toronto is one of the oldest Romanesque Revival buildings in Canada. The central square tower with its compound arched doorway, scalloping, and rounded windows has the sturdy, solid look that is characteristic of the style. The solid stone walls have intricate Romanesque detailing around the windows and in horizontal bands. The tower has decorative battlementing while the roof of the main building has dichromatic slate tiles and iron cresting. The building is eclectic, but the overall style with its round headed arches is Romanesque Revival.

Saint Catharines

The exterior detailing on Romanesque buildings is not as intricate Gothic. There is minimal carving, minimal parapet detail, and the building face is relatively flat; the overall effect is one of solidity and permanence.

This church in Saint Catharines has small tower turrets on the campanile, round-headed windows, and round headed loopholes, used in medieval times to launch arrows at attackers. An impressive rose window dominates the front façade. The front door is new and nicely integrated, if not completely contextual. The building as a wonderful medieval quality.