Between 1913 and 1926, the aged British commercial institution, the
Hudson's Bay Company (HBC), built four monumental department stores across
Western Canada in Calgary, Vancouver, Victoria, and Winnipeg. In this thesis
extensive archival research on the buildings and the HBC's architectural policies is
analyzed within the contexts of Canadian social history, and of Company business
history. The HBC was making new advances into the department store field, and
the stores were clad in a standardized style intended to create a particular image of
the Company in contrast to its competitors. Popular in Britain at the time, this
Edwardian Classicism emphasized the HBC's history as the official representative
of the British Empire across the hinterlands, a history largely defunct by the turn of
the century. The opulent style also helped to establish the stores as key cultural
institutions and as palaces of consumption. After World War One the HBC also
began to stress its specific historical role in the Canadian fur trade and the
settlemehtof the nation, through the use of various other architectural features
such as the display windows, art galleries and museums set up inside the new
stores, and by the historical sites of Company buildings.
The competition between historical themes -British Imperial and Canadian
frontierist- evidenced in the HBC department stores were tied to social factors.
Demographic changes and nationalist sentiment after WWI forced the HBC to
recognize Canada's particular pluralist society, and to mediate its image as a purely
British organization. Many staff members and customers had no ties to the
Company or the Empire, so the HBC invented a tradition that the public could
relate to and participate in. The codification of a representational strategy was
complicated by the differing agendas of the Company's London Board and its
Canadian management. The study of architectural issues such as urban context,
style, and building use establishes how the modern HBC employed history through modes of representation in the built environment, to justify its claims to the loyalty
of a diverse population of workers and customers.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/4102 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Monteyne, David P. |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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