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McCarter Nairne.
Canadian architectural partnership formed in 1921 in Vancouver by John Young McCarter (b Victoria, British Columbia, 12 Aug 1886; d Vancouver, 21 May 1981) and George Colvill Nairne (b Inverness, Scotland, 14 Nov 1884; d Vancouver, 18 April 1953). McCarter trained in Victoria and then with Thomas Hooper (1859–1931) in Vancouver (1907–12). Nairne practised in Cardiff, Wales, Seattle and Nanaimo, British Columbia, before joining Hooper (1911–13). With the completion in 1925 of the modern Gothic David Spencer Store (now part of the Sears Tower complex) they became the most celebrated exponents in Vancouver of contemporary architectural trends, remaining so until the 1950s. The Medical–Dental Building (1928–9; destr. 1989) was their first essay in Art Deco, which they perfected with the Marine Building (1928–30), 335 Burrard Street, Vancouver, an Art-Deco masterpiece upon which their reputation chiefly rests; it is ornamented with terracotta panels and was then the tallest building in Vancouver. McCarter Nairne’s sophisticated eclecticism is particularly evident in the Federal Office Building (1935–8), and elements remain in the formalism of their later interpretations of the International Style in Vancouver, typified by the dignified functionalism of the General Post Office (1953–8; with the Federal Department of Public Works). The franker Modernism of the Stock Exchange (1953) and Wosk’s Warehouse Store (1956) was replaced in the firm’s later phase by an inventive New Brutalism, at its most adept in the Shaughnessy Place housing development (1976), all in Vancouver. The firm, renamed McCarter, Nairne and Partners in 1953, remained in practice until 1983.
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