At the October 8, 2025 morning meeting of the Rotary Club of Hamilton AM, the guest speaker was Shannon Kyles..
From Edwardian homes with servants' quarters to the wartime housing of the 1940s, to the single-family home boom of the 1950s and '60s, our speaker, Shannon Kyles, says the style of housing tells a story of the society that built it.
That’s the underlying theme in her new book, The Story of Ontario Architecture: What We Built and Why We Built It, an almost 400-page book detailing the story of buildings in Ontario.
Kyles began her career working with computers and taught the first CAD (Computer-aided Design) course in Canada, followed by work in mechanical engineering and came back to architecture as a professor teaching architecture courses at Mohawk College.
She then bought and restored a farmhouse in Hamilton and began noticing that people in the community were buying beautiful, old houses and tearing them down or ruining them. “After a while, I realized they were doing that because they didn’t know any better,” Kyles relayed. “In 1998, I was teaching the history of architecture, and nobody had any courses on Ontario architecture, so I started one. Mine is still the only course, per se.
“I thought, we need a website". Kyles built a site for her students and in 2002. She created it with the goal that, through education, she could contribute to a better environment for everyone to live in. The result is a stunning presentation of her photos and scholarly descriptions of architectural terms; the site gets over one million hits per month.
Users are able to identify features of their homes, and Kyles receives frequent emails asking for help determining house styles or for sources of building materials (such as windows and porches) to restore heritage buildings. Shannon Kyles has an enduring website, an impressive book – what a remarkable lady!
Posted by Mark Ewer
