Carved in stone

October 5, 2007

This Centennial series of feature stories and photographs is designed to inspire readers to look around, beyond Collegiate Gothic, to the wide range of architectural styles on campus. With the help of Associate Vice-President of Facilities Colin Tennent, planner Colin Hartl, and architectural design co-ordinator Andrew Wallace, former
On Campus News writer Silas Polkinghorne examines the history, design and
construction of the buildings on this remarkable campus.

Somebody knew a lot about stone.

When local stone carver Robert Assie looks at the Thorvaldson Building, he sees hundreds of thousands of person-hours of carving.

The University’s Collegiate Gothic structures get no shortage of attention, but rarely do we take a close look at what went into one of their most attractive features – the stone work adorning their front facades.

The hanging tracings, the curved moldings and geometric designs on Thorvaldson – with no repetition in their design – are the product of a team of carvers, all with the same exceptional skill level, working for months upon months. A single carver working on a single gothic arched window would have taken seven or eight months, Assie explained.

“It’s just over the top, really. It’s amazing,” he said. “This is a building where no expense was spared.”

Thorvaldson was constructed in the roaring 1920s, and there are details on the building that are only seen by maintenance workers – never from those on the ground.

“I haven’t seen another building in Canada like it – everything’s done to a really high level,” said Assie. “This building will never be replicated again.”

“It’s kind of a testimony to what humans have achieved,” added Assie.

Take a look at the University’s first residence buildings, however, and it’s plain to see that sometimes, stone carving was an expense that had to be spared.

Saskatchewan Hall, completed in 1912, has a variety of playful stone figures, as well as carvings of keys and shields around its doorways and north-west corner. But across the courtyard at Qu’Appelle Hall, completed in 1916 during the First World War, the stone carvings were never finished. Stone “blanks” surround the north-east door of the building where carvings were originally meant to appear.

“It would have been hard to justify spending money on stone carving [during the war],” said Andrew Wallace. A few early chisel marks can be seen on a couple of the stones, but they were never finished.

While construction was underway on the College Building, between 1910 and 1912, there would likely have been no stone carvers in the province, so the work was completed by a carver elsewhere and the stone then shipped to Saskatoon. University President Walter Murray wanted local plants and animals represented, but the carvers, perhaps in Montreal or Baltimore, had no knowledge of native Saskatchewan species.

The results are amusing, with wonky gophers and odd-looking prairie chickens. The “chickens” can be seen wrestling with human figures above the doorway, “which I assume to be their little joke on how difficult it was to carve these creatures they had never seen,” Wallace said.