Gothic Dreamer
William Harris's work is to be understood within this context, for most of the stylistic influences operative during this period are reflected in his designs. However, he handled the many forms available to him with flair. His buildings are not mere imitations of work done elsewhere. His style unfolds from a dynamic within itself as well under the impact of outside influences, so that nearly all his buildings are recognisable as having come from the same hand. In these respects of development, continuity and identity of style William Harris the architect was an artist just as truly as any painter or composer of music.
The Harris Churches
Harris's specialty was the design of churches. In 1880 he drew plans for a new Methodist Church at Tryon. Five years later its steeple was replicated at Bedeque, perhaps by locals, because by that time Harris's steeples had evolved, as we see in his churches at Clifton Royal in New Brunswick, Long Creek and Kensington in Prince Edward Island, and Mahone Bay in Nova Scotia - all designed and built in the mid 1880s. At this time his churches follow English Gothic precedents, with chancels narrower and lower roofed than the naves, and with square end elevations with an east window. However, in the next decade he began to use the architectural vocabulary of French Gothic Style, perhaps because the spatial unity of nave and choir and the angling of surfaces in the interior enhanced the acoustic qualities of the building.
Harris's adaptation of elements of French Gothic architecture did not mature all at once; in the decade between the mid 1880s and the mid 1890s his church designs have an exploratory or transitional character. St. Paul's Church at Sturgeon, Prince Edward Island, in 1887 is the first of his churches to have an apse, and its proportions are high and narrow - characteristic of French Gothic. In All Saints' Church, Springhill, Nova Scotia, (1892) and two years later at St. Joseph's, Kelly's Cross, on Prince Edward Island (destroyed by fire in 1914), Harris placed an apsidal partition behind the altar within a squared exterior wall, and ceiled the sanctuary (but not the nave and transepts) with rib vaults. In two of his other commissions in this period, in 1890, at Grand River and Springfield (both in Prince Edward Island) he remodelled churches erected a generation or two earlier, and there is less evidence of Gallic innovation. Harris is responsible for the exterior only at Grand River (including the steeple); but at Springfield only the sanctuary and the proportions of the nave survive from the earlier building.
All Souls' Chapel* at St. Peter's Cathedral in Charlottetown (1888), and St. John's Church at Arichat in Nova Scotia (1894) also belong to this period. Some features of French Gothic church architecture - like high and narrow nave proportions - Harris tried and discarded, and some - like massive entrance portals and large rose windows in transepts - he never used at all. His approach was essentially pragmatic: he was attracted to the French architectural vocabulary because it favoured open and well integrated interior spaces and curved or angled surfaces, features which helped him create Gothic churches with good acoustic qualities and sight lines. High roofs and ceilings and large expanses of glass, on the other hand, made buildings in a colder climate than that of France more difficult and expensive to heat. Unlike the first and last generations of Gothic Revival architects, who designed archaeologically correct recreations of medieval Gothic buildings, High Victorian Gothic Revival architects like Harris were less ideological and more eclectic in their use of the Gothic architectural vocabulary.
*To see pictures of All Souls' Chapel go to www.isn.net/friartuck/rharris on this website.
Harris's use of the French architectural vocabulary matured in his design of St. Paul's Church, Charlottetown, in 1895 (above). It had an apsidal east end, a rib-vaulted ceiling, and a chancel almost the same height and width as the nave. He designed the entire building as a musical instrument, with a sounding post of juniper wood under the chancel floor, and resonant panels of spruce and maple in the choir. Its acoustics and sight-lines were superb. Over the next 18 years 19 churches with similar design principles were drawn by Harris and built for mostly Anglican and Roman Catholic patrons in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island.
Junior siblings of St. Paul's include churches at Milton, Fort Augustus, Kinkora, Indian River, and Crapaud in Prince Edward Island, and Sydney Mines, North Sydney, Mulgrave, Falmouth, Windsor, Whitney Pier, Newport and Bedford in Nova Scotia. Most have fared well in respect to the preservation of their interior fittings and furniture, but some have suffered exterior maintenance that can only be described as mutilation. The Anglican Church in Nova Scotia is particularly at fault in this regard: and All Saints' Church in Springhill, St. John's Church in Arichat, and Trinity Church in Sydney Mines await exterior restorations that will reveal them to be the architectural gems they were in the beginning and might be yet again. The Prince Edward Island Anglican churches have fared better, although one (St. Thomas's at Long Creek) has been turned into a summer cottage. Three French Gothic Style Harris churches - all Roman Catholic - in Prince Edward Island have been destroyed by fire (those at Souris, Emyvale and St. Teresa) and two in Nova Scotia (St. John's Anglican in North Sydney, and Immaculate Conception Roman Catholic in Truro) have also burned.
THE CATHEDRAL IN HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA
While an apprentice in the architectural office of Messrs Stirling and Dewar in Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1870 - 75,William Harris described in an essay his dream of a great Anglican cathedral being built in the city. When the pro-Cathedral, St. Luke's, burned in 1904 Harris submitted a design (above) for the new All Saints' Cathedral; but it was rejected on the advice of Percy Nobbs, professor of design at McGill University in Montreal, in favour of plans the new Bishop of Nova Scotia, Clarendon Lamb Worrell, had obtained from a prestigious New York City architect, Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue. The Bishop ordered changes in Goodhue's specifications that cheapened the construction; when within a few years the building began to disintegrate Harris's partner, William Horton - who had been the supervising architect - was blamed. Harris's dream had become a nightmare; he suffered a heart attack shortly after the cathedral was opened in 1910 and died in 1913.
All Saints' was Harris's second cathedral disappointment: ten years earlier he had lost the commission to build St. Dunstan's Cathedral in Charlottetown to Francois-Xavier Berlinguet, a Quebec architect, who had been unfairly blamed by ecclessiastical critics in Quebec for the collapse of a church built over old mining excavations.
This site is under construction: a survey of William Harris's houses, civic and business buildings, will be added in the near future.