Peter Douglas Rose

Peter Douglas Rose, architect (b at Montréal 1 Aug 1943). After receiving a BA (1966) and M Arch (1970) from Yale, where he studied under Vincent Scully and Charles Moore, Rose returned to Montréal and began designing a series of Post-Modern vacation houses in the Eastern Townships and Laurentian regions of Québec.

In 1977 he completed, with James Righter and Peter Lanken, Pavilion Soixante-Dix, a ski pavilion in St Saveur, Qué, which was the only Canadian work included in Charles Jencks's The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977) and received a 1978 Progressive Architecture Design Award. These works expressed the duality of the new Post-Modern idiom: modern in the use of geometric forms and flat surfaces, traditional in the revival of historical motifs and contextual concerns.

Urban issues have also been an important focus for Rose. To increase architectural awareness in Montréal, he founded the Alcan Lectures in Architecture (1974-92), which brought distinguished international architects, architectural historians, and planners to the city. For ALCAN ALUMINIUM LIMITED, he did interior planning and design (with Peter Lanken) for the company's new world headquarters, an exemplary project that preserved an important row of historic buildings in downtown Montréal. He has drawn up proposed master plans for several urban developments, including Montréal's Old Port.

Rose's major work to date is the CANADIAN CENTRE FOR ARCHITECTURE, an architectural museum and study centre in Montréal that houses the collections of its founder and first director, Phyllis LAMBERT. Completed in 1989, the CCA won Rose the National Honor Award of the American Institute of Architects and was the recipient of the Governor General's Award for Architecture in 1992.

In 1991 he was appointed adjunct professor of architecture at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard U. Although he continued to carry out projects in Canada, such as the WESTMOUNT Public Library restoration and addition, Rose's more recent commissions are in the US; notably, work at Brookside School, Cranbrook Educational Community in Bloomfield Hills, MI, and at Buckingham, Browne & Nichols School in Cambridge, MA; at J.B. Speed Art Museum in Louisville, KY; and for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.

Residential work continues to engage Rose. His country house for a Montréal couple in Stowe, VT, was selected as one of Architectural Record's Record Houses in 1998, while in September 1999 the New York Times featured his renovation of a town house for Edgar Bronfman, Jr., on Manhattan's East Side.

Author SUSAN WAGG