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Art Gallery of Hamilton - Unbuilt Hamilton

Exhibitions The Jean & Ross Fischer Gallery

Unbuilt Hamilton

September 24, 2016 - February 12, 2017

Unbuilt Hamilton is an exhibition and book that presents the Ambitious City at its most ambitious, exploring unrealized building, planning, and transportation proposals from the early 19th century to the early 21st.

Drawing on archival illustrations, plans, and photographs from Mark Osbaldeston’s forthcoming book, the projects showcased include a magnetically propelled, elevated transit system, a vast mountain war memorial, and a plan from 1917 that would have transformed Ferguson Avenue into the Champs-Élysées. Alternate designs for Jackson Square, Christ’s Church Cathedral, and the Thomas McQuesten High Level Bridge cast new light on familiar landmarks. Unbuilt Hamilton presents the Hamilton that might have been.

A Hamilton native, Mark Osbaldeston’s first book, Unbuilt Toronto, was the basis for an exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum and was a finalist for the Toronto Book Awards and the Speaker’s Book Award. It also received a Heritage Toronto Award of Merit, as did its sequel, Unbuilt Toronto 2.

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Curated by Mark Osbaldeston

Header image: John Lyle (Canadian 1872-1945), The bridge design in the third-place submission of the architect in the 1927-28 Northwest Entrance competition (detail), Royal Botanical Gardens Archives

Exhibition Related Book

Catalogue - Unbuilt Hamilton: The City That Might Have Been cover

Unbuilt Hamilton: The City That Might Have Been

by Mark Osbladeston
Exhibition Catalogue available at the Shop at AGH.

9.5 x 11 Softcover
240 pages
ISBN 978-1-45973-299-5

Price: $26.99

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From the Contemporary Art Collection


Resting with Warriors 2001

Shelley Niro (Mohawk b. 1954)

series of 4 woodcuts on wove paper, Purchase, Permanent Collection Fund, 2016
© Courtesy Shelley Niro

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Art Gallery of Hamilton

123 King Street West
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(905) 527-6610

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