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Cormier, Ernest
(b Montreal, 5 Dec 1885; d Montreal, 1 Jan 1980). Canadian architect and engineer. He trained as an engineer in Montreal and worked for the Dominion Bridge Company until 1908. He then entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, one of only a few Canadians to do so, joining the atelier of Jean-Louis Pascal and studying painting and sculpture. After two years in Rome as the Jarvis Rome Scholar of RIBA, he received his diploma in architecture from the Ecole in 1917. In 1918 he returned to Montreal and within two years was invited by L. A. Amos (1869–1948) and C. S. Saxe to design for them one of the most important buildings in Canada, the Criminal Court of Montreal (1923–6). In this building, as in all future work, he showed how profoundly he had absorbed the precepts of Julien Guadet in Pascal’s atelier: simplicity as a rule of composition; the importance of circulation, lighting and ventilation; the reciprocal relationship between the building’s exterior and interior; and, above all, the belief that these basic principles are unchanging in all great architecture, irrespective of stylistic considerations.
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