Exploring the Capital: An Architectural Guide to the Ottawa-Gatineau Region

Exploring the Capital: An Architectural Guide to the Ottawa-Gatineau Region
By Andrew Waldron
Photographs by Peter Coffman
With contributions by Harold Kalman

273 pages • ISBN 978-1-927958-91-9

Exploring the Capital is for architectural experts and amateurs, and for residents and visitors alike. Waldron has created eleven guided tours covering all corners of the Capital region, taking you behind the doors of more than 390 diverse structures to learn who made them and how they did it.

The many varied threads of Canada´s national life come together in its capital region. Where the Rideau River flows into the Ottawa River, the Algonquin people were the original inhabitants. French explorers and traders began arriving in the 1600s, followed by British colonists in the 1800s. The town grew into a city, spilled by over a provincial border, and now represents Canada to the world.

Follow the eleven tours covering all corners of the region and you´ll encounter landmarks and neighborhoods through stories, maps, and photographs, and learn how great design and engineering turn landscapes into cityscapes.   

Andrew Waldron is an architectural historian who has worked at Parks Canada and is Brookfield Global Integrated Solutions´ heritage conservation manager in Ottawa. His passion for Canadian architecture and historic sites began when he was young. Andrew and his wife, Danielle, live in a historic house in Lowertown.

Peter Coffman who began as an architectural photographer so in love with his subject that he became an architectural historian. He teaches in the History and Theory of Architecture program at Carleton University, and is a past president of the Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada.