In the second volume of A History of Canadian Architecture, Harold Kalman says the following of architect Hart Massey and of the house he designed on the western shore of McKay Lake in the Heritage Village of Rockcliffe Park, Ottawa. Ottawa architect Hart Massey (b. 1918) – the son of Vincent Massey – had a short but important career, from 1953 until his early retirement in 1970. His own striking Hart Massey house built in 1959 on Lansdowne Road in the Ottawa suburb of Rockcliffe Park, is a minimalist structure consisting of a delicate steel frame that contains a series of modular ‘boxes’, some glazed, others with opaque walls. It recalls the two famous ‘glass houses’ built a decade earlier by the masters of modernism: Mies van der Rohe’s Farnworth House in Plano, Illinois (1946-50), and Philip Johnson’s house for himself in New Canaan, Connecticut (1947-9). Whereas the two American … Continue reading The House and Gardens of Thomas and Susan d’Aquino