This fall, an exhibition at Regina’s MacKenzie Art Gallery aims to bring the work of Kiyoshi Izumi—the earliest known Canadian architect of Japanese descent—into the public eye.
Izumi (1921 – 1996) was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, to Japanese immigrant parents. His personal journey from Vancouver to Regina, following the 1942 introduction of Canada’s War Measures Act, was remarkable. He avoided the internment camps of British Columbia and settled in Regina with the aid of its small Japanese Canadian community. He went on to become one of the brightest graduates from the School of Architecture at the University of Manitoba in 1948, a testament to his perseverance.
Taking advantage of postwar economic expansion, Izumi bolstered the development of modernist and civic architecture in Saskatchewan. He excelled as an architect, establishing a reputation based on talent and vision despite lingering racism following the war. In 1954, Kiyoshi partnered with his former classmate Gordon Arnott and structural engineer James Sugiyama to open the design firm Izumi Arnott and Sugiyama. With Izumi’s design sensitivities, Arnott’s business skills, and Sugiyama’s in-house structural expertise, it was a team that flourished.
In Regina, the firm was responsible fora cultural hat trick: the expanded Norman Mackenzie Art Gallery, the Regina Public Library Central Branch, and the Saskatchewan Centre of the Arts (now Conexus Arts Centre.) At the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, the firm created the second master plan that guided the postwar expansion of the campus, including Marquis Hall, the W. P. Thompson Biology Building, and the Western College of Veterinary Medicine.
At the height of his practice, Izumi worked with British psychiatrist and psychedelic researcher Humphry Osmond and Canadian biochemist and psychiatrist Abram Hoffer to develop a new design for psychiatric hospitals in Saskatchewan, the first of which was constructed in Yorkton. In order to create a plan that would be sympathetic to patients, Izumi experimented with psychedelics to fully understand the effects of his design. His unconventional research method has attracted the attention of critics and scholars both then and now.
“Izumi concluded that patients required places to retreat to. They needed privacy. They should be afforded designs that encourage socialization but allow spaces that allow for one to enjoy quiet and privacy, even in the absence of single rooms. Ambiguity should be avoided at all costs, for example, spaces that require one to enter into a sprawling social space where one is immediately confronted about choices about how to navigate such a space,” writes historian of medicine Erika Dyck. “Many of Izumi’s design features were incorporated into psychiatric facilities, first in Saskatchewan, and later these ideas spread throughout North America.”
As Vice magazine’s Brian Anderson writes, “An immersion in [patients’] ‘reality,’ [Izumi] said, was ‘a convincing experience’ that forcefully reaffirmed what he considered the selfless and social responsibility of the architect, a worldview that for him ultimately transcends the clinic to include all people, all space.”
Spring on the Prairie: Kiyoshi Izumi and the work of Izumi Arnott and Sugiyama is on view at the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina until January 19, 2025.
As appeared in the October 2024 issue of Canadian Architect magazine