Biography

Joseph Kiely English was born in Calgary in 1923 and grew up in the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood of the city. English – known to his family and good friends as Kiely – loved to draw, and he and his brother Jack enjoyed drawing horses and cowboys on the kitchen chalkboard with chalk their mother had salvaged from the pockets of their father, a schoolteacher.

English did not become a cowboy, but his artistic leanings would shape his future career. After completing high school and serving in the RCAF as a bomber pilot from 1942 to 1945, English found himself looking for a profession. The post-war era brought a massive building boom in Alberta, and for a young man who had loved to draw, architecture seemed a logical choice. English married Claire Mireault in 1946 and the couple moved to Winnipeg where English attended the University of Manitoba from 1946 to 1950.

As a veteran, English, now better known as Joe, received financial aid from the Canadian government to attend school and lived in a small house on campus. He described his university residence as a “tar-paper shack” with space for a bed, toilet and not much else. The three oldest of the young couple’s children were born during these early university days and Joe was forced to juggle his studies with the challenges of parenthood. 

The architecture school at the University of Manitoba, under dean John Russell, was a hotbed for Modernist ideas. U of M favoured the so-called International Style, the highly rationalist school of Modernism that emerged primarily from the Bauhaus. English was a lifetime fan of Marcel Breuer, but he claimed Frank Lloyd Wright as his favourite architect.        

After graduating as part of the largest class in the School of Architecture’s history, Joe spent two years apprenticing at the Winnipeg firm of Green Blankstein Russell – arguably the most important Prairies firm of the period – that was responsible for the design of many important Winnipeg buildings.

From there, moving back to Edmonton seemed a good career choice as well as a personal one, as his wife Claire had grown up in the city and still had extensive family there. The city was also going through an extraordinary boom even by the standards of the time; fuelled by oil, Edmonton’s population doubled between 1945 and 1948 alone. There was large-scale construction of housing and public projects, including hundreds of schools. The climate was open. Premier Ernest Manning, writing in a Royal Architectural Institute of Canada publication in 1953, said: “Alberta is young and vigorous and receptive to new ideas provided they are progressive and wholesome. This province has demonstrated to the rest of Canada and to the world that her people are not afraid of experiment.”

The city signalled its commitment to Modernism by commissioning a new city hall in the International Style (1957), designed by Dewar Stevenson Stanley, as well as the Queen Elizabeth Planetarium (1959) by city architect Robert Falconer Duke.

And Edmonton was relatively short on architects; the University of Alberta’s architecture program, headed by the conservative Cecil Burgess, folded in 1940. Joe joined other U of M grads in bringing their Modernist training to bear on the city’s rapid expansion. The scene was animated by young graduates from the University of Manitoba, including Roy Meiklejohn and Leonard Klingbell. At the same time, the firm Rule Wynn and Rule, founded in the 1930s, moved boldly to embrace Modernism.

(Click and hover on photos to see descriptions)

Against this backdrop English practiced first with the firm of W.R. Brownlee and then as a principal at Diamond Dupuis Desautels. With partner Charlie Blais, he formed Blais & English in 1954, soon joined by third partner Ken Shedden, but by 1956 English established a solo practice that would continue until 1981.

The newly minted J.K. English & Associates was run out of a home office situated at the back of Joe’s house in Calgary which he had designed himself in the ranch house style inspired by the Usonian houses of English’s hero, Frank Lloyd Wright. The family had four children by this time with three more arriving over the next four years, the youngest being born in 1960.

Through his connections to the Catholic community, Joe had found consistent work designing churches and schools for the Alberta Dioceses since his early days in Edmonton.  Although he usually worked by himself, he hired Louis Kerenyi, a set designer by trade, as a draftsman for a short period and architect Bill Boucock as an intern when he was just a young graduate.  As an experienced pilot, Joe owned various light aircraft over his career and used them to fly to his projects in more remote locations, occasionally bringing one of his seven children along for the ride.

As Joe’s practice evolved his style as an architect came firmly into view. English’s work pushed away from the corporate modernism of the International Style, which was favoured by the top Canadian firms of the time. Instead, English moved toward an Expressionism that was formally and technically bold.

The St. Pius X Catholic Church (1954) in Edmonton is a strong early example of this bold new style. Cross-shaped in plan, like many traditional Catholic churches, it is clad in friendly red brick, its windows an irregular rectangular grid of stained and clear glass. And yet within, the building firmly breaks away from tradition. Its two gables are supported by arches of glue-laminated beams that start, tree-like, at the floor, and soar upward to heights at each point of the cross. This exuberance recalls the Ingalls Rink that Eero Saarinen was designing for Yale University at about the same time. Joe again used glulam for St. Bernadette’s (Lynnwood) School in Calgary, his first solo commission.

In 1958, Joe submitted a design proposal to The Toronto City Hall And Square Competition, an architecture contest juried by five well-known international architects including Eero Saarinen.  Ultimately losing to Viljo Revell, Joe’s ambition would lead him to push boundaries on his later projects.

The high point of his art would come a few years later with the St. Joseph Parish Centre (now known as the Scandinavian Centre, 1960) and Ross Ford Elementary School (1962) in the Alberta town of Didsbury. Each of these buildings, for relatively cautious clients, is exhilarating in its geometric ambition. The St. Joseph Parish Centre is a four-sided structure with a cantilevered concrete roof, a more daring version of the St. Pius X. Ross Ford is fronted by a gymnasium that is a hyperbolic paraboloid, its prestressed concrete roof curving up to and over the lines that reach to the points of the building.

In 1968, looking to escape the financial and contractual problems of the Snowridge Ski Lodge project, Joe, Claire and their six youngest kids travelled to Florence, Italy where their oldest daughter Pat was a university student. Joe sold his Bonanza aircraft to finance the trip and the family of nine travelled to London, continuing south through the continent in their Ford Caravan over a six-week period. Eventually settling in a villa just outside Florence in Fiesole, the family went on regular weekend excursions throughout Italy during their five-month stay and the youngest children enrolled in the local elementary school.

This long European jaunt was followed by another dramatic move to Yellowknife where Joe found a job with the Department of Public Works.  He worked as an inspector flying out to oversee various architectural projects in the Northern settlements. His time in the Northwest Territories ignited his love of Inuit art, and he and Claire amassed a substantial collection of soapstone sculptures, textiles and art prints during their four years there.

Joe returned to Alberta in 1975 to help his two oldest sons set up their nascent construction business and worked to design two residences, including his own, and a duplex on land his sons had bought in the town of Nanton.

Joe retired as an architect in 1981, having designed over sixty projects including thirty churches and church halls. He and Claire bought a framing business in Nanton that year and created a gallery space featuring the work of local artists that ran until 2003. Claire passed away less than a year later in June of 2004.

Joe continued his own artistic practice painting detailed pastel portraits and watercolour still lifes well into his 80s. He also taught art lessons to children and adults throughout his retirement years and was involved in establishing the Bomber Command Museum in Nanton as its founding director.

Joe died in 2010 at the age of 86, leaving seven children, ten grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.

Text by Alex Bozikovic and Kiely Ramos