[URBAN NOTE] "A Building of Her Own": Torontoist on Alexandra Biriukova

[rfmcdonald]

At Torontoist this weekend, Kaitlin Wainwright described the career in Toronto of Russian exile and architect Alexandra Biriukova.

Between 1920 and 1968, only 28 women went through the architecture program at the University of Toronto. The first women architects in Canada, among them Toronto’s Esther Marjorie Hill, were more likely to take up careers in historic preservation, public service, or home renovation, and less likely to receive large, private commissions. Prior to the Second World War, only five women had registered as architects in the province of Ontario. One of them was Alexandra Biriukova.

Biriukova was born in Russia in 1895. She came by her talents honestly: Her father, Dimitri Birukoff, was the chief civil engineer on the first trans-Siberian railway for the pre-revolutionary czarist government. As a child, she travelled east on the railway with her family as it inched closer to Vladivostok. Before they were exiled, as anti-Bolsheviks, Alexandra received a degree from the School of Architecture in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) in 1914. Her family fled to Italy, where she completed graduate work at the Royal Superior School of Architecture in Rome. Alexandra arrived at Montreal with her sister, Yulia, in 1929. They had located another sister in Dalton (now Kawartha Lakes), and were soon living there.

Yulia, an internationally known painter, moved to Toronto the following year; her arrival was acclaimed by the Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail, which were so proud to have a European artist call a city like Toronto her home. She quickly found work and her portraits were exhibited at local social clubs, where she was heralded as the guest of honour at tea parties.

When Alexandra Biriukova first arrived in Canada, she held no notion other than to practice architecture, as a professional. She wasted little time establishing her own business and building a network of the city’s leading artists and architects, in part because of her sister’s connections. Both women became close with members of the Group of Seven; Yulia’s first address in Toronto was 25 Severn, the Studio Building commissioned by Lawren Harris in 1913. The Biriukova sisters no doubt appealed to Harris’s interest in European modernism and transcendentalist philosophy.