Of Architecture and Hope: The Citadel Theatre of Edmonton and the Cruel Optimism of a Bygone Petroleum Age

Edmonton is a relatively new settler colonial city. It initially grew up around the Indigenous settlement known as Beaver Hills House (amiskwaciwâskahikan) was first declared a city in 1904, with a population of 8,350. The next year, after much political arbitration, Edmonton became the capital of the newly formed Canadian province of Alberta.¹ Edmonton is also, significantly, an oil city. In its early years, fur trade centers, coal mines, meatpacking plants, tanneries, and brewing companies drove its flourishing economy, but in 1948 Imperial Oil Ltd. established the city’s first oil refinery in the district of Clover Bar. That development, followed by the 1953 discovery of Canada’s largest oil field, Pembina, to the west, put Edmonton on the global map. Much like Beaumont, Texas, which experienced a similar trajectory from the early years of the twentieth century through World War I, Edmonton became known as a city of perpetual financial booms and endless possibilities.² After World War II, the discovery of multiple oil fields, the proliferation of oil refineries, and the expansion of gas pipelines imbued Edmonton with an aura of hopefulness and “cruel optimism.”

The term cruel optimism, introduced by literary scholar Lauren Berlant, refers to a type of neoliberal subjectivity or scenario marked by a state of perpetual faith in modes of being even when these modes fail to keep their existential promises. Cruel optimism is “about the dissolution of optimistic objects/scenarios that had once held the space open for the good-life fantasy, and tracks dramas of adjustment to the transformation of what had seemed foundational into those binding kinds of optimistic relation we call ‘cruel.’ ”³ In the context of Edmonton, cruel optimism arose from the seeming inexhaustibility of fossil fuels and natural resources, which promised continuously rising quality of life and endless growth.⁴ Instances of this optimism could be seen in the 1953 plans for the construction of Canada’s largest shopping center, with a lavish budget of Can$5 million; the 1957 construction of a civic center in the downtown core, with a city hall building and park; and the 1964 construction of a new airport, accompanied by newfound enthusiasm for internationalism and multiculturalism, as evidenced by cultural experiments such as the Miss United Nations Pageants in the 1960s.⁵ Edmonton, tellingly described as being at the “centre of the last West” in a 1909 New York Times article, remained a space conducive to cruel optimism well into the 1990s.⁶ Indeed, because of its immense resources, the province of Alberta not only survived but even profited from the energy crises of the 1970s, despite rising concerns over dwindling oil supplies.⁷ The 1980s witnessed a global surplus of oil production. While the global recession of that period caused Alberta’s oil production to decrease to almost half the levels reached in the 1960s, as well as increased unemployment by 12 percent, two promising new oil discoveries—one northeast of Peace River in 1984 and another near Taber in 1985—restored a sense of optimism. However, by the 1990s, the depletion of resources, the aging of pipeline infrastructures, and the rise of global environmentalism led to a gradual decline in that optimism. Even the rise of oil prices after the turn of the millennium did not bring back the once seemingly eternal cruel optimism that had presided over Edmonton during much of the twentieth century. The global economic crash of 2008 and the global environmental movement’s growing influence dealt the last blow to the city’s optimism. Both Edmonton and Alberta as a whole, founded and dependent on the petroleum industry, had to reimagine themselves completely.

In this article, I argue that the petroleum-driven zeitgeist of hope and optimism that prevailed in Edmonton from World War II to the 1990s found its most cogent architectural crystallization in the project for the Citadel Theatre (1973–76).⁸ With three theaters—seating 650, 240, and 220 people, respectively—and a lobby accommodating 1,000 people, an art gallery, a lounge, and a public mall, the Citadel Theatre represented an ambitious cultural project for a city of just under 500,000 residents. The extravagant use of glass panels to cover 60 percent of the 90,000 square feet of the building’s exterior surface, described by contemporaries as “a waterfall of glass,” installed in a cold-climate city with an average annual temperature of only 2 degrees Celsius (35.6 degrees Fahrenheit), warned of the designers’ blind faith in the possibility of perpetual fossil fuel extraction and energy production.⁹ The same ideology guided the choice of materials. The designers specified California redwood for the wall panels in the 650-seat Shoctor Theatre, exploiting what is today an endangered tree species. The use of Medicine Hat red brick, too, links the building’s construction to a history intertwined with resource extraction and human exploitation. Following Arjun Appadurai, I investigate these materials as having a social life that reveals much about their politically and socially complex historical context, once the gloss of a homogeneous cultural unit is removed.¹⁰

The Citadel Theatre, in other words, not only stands as a symbol of Edmonton’s bygone petroleum age but also represents an optimistic desire to achieve the normative good-life fantasy in a new city full of opportunities. But optimism turns cruel when, as Berlant writes, good-life scenarios, despite their encouraging confidence, offer existentially empty promises. In the case of the Citadel Theatre, this cruelty rested on the threat that the project posed to the existence of Indigenous peoples. If, as Rhodri Windsor Liscombe writes, “architecture is the most readily appreciated articulation of socio-economic interests and their legitimating ideologies, particularly during the temporally and geographically extensive spheres of the modern era,” then the Citadel Theatre can be understood as an excellent instance of petromodern aesthetics, as a project that indulged good-life fantasies supported by abundant and cheap energy systems while devastating land and exploiting human populations.¹¹ And yet my aim in this article is not to pass judgment on the Citadel Theatre by evaluating it according to present-day standards. Nor do I wish to restate the truism that the extraction of materials is inherent to any construction project. After all, architecture has long led to the conspicuous consumption of relatively scarce materials as well as to the exploitation of labor. Instead, in this architectural study, with a nod to Thomas J. Schlereth’s understanding of material culture as “careful questioning of meaning in historical evidence,” I wish to account for oil’s historical importance in the shaping of sensibilities, perceptions, and social imaginaries.¹² In other words, I take petroleum as the fulcrum of studying architecture as material culture.

This investigation serves a double function: it introduces the Citadel Theatre of Edmonton as one of the largest theaters to be built in North America in the twentieth century, and it explores how the history of this ambitious building represents the petroleum-driven cruel optimism of the period. I begin by analyzing the Citadel Theatre, drawing upon primary sources held at the City of Edmonton Archives, the Provincial Archives of Alberta, and the University of Alberta Archives, as well as in the private Shoctor family archives.¹³ While at first glance the Citadel Theater might seem ordinary, I argue that it is precisely in its ordinariness that one finds what Berlant characterizes as “a story about the dissolution of optimistic objects/scenarios that had once held the space open for the good-life fantasy.”¹⁴ After introducing the building, I focus on the materials used in its construction, in particular the California redwood and Medicine Hat red brick. I discuss these in ecomaterial terms, as by-products of the times, to account for the ways in which architectural materials provide vital indicators of the ideologies embedded within buildings. I complete my discussion by examining how the story of the Citadel Theatre is not only a story of cruel optimism but also a story of petroleum-based aesthetics.

Located in the Canadian Prairies, in the westernmost of the three Prairie Provinces (Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba), Edmonton is a geographically flat city. It is also the northernmost metropolis in North America, the formation of which, as Dwayne Trevor Donald writes, has “painted over”—that is, displaced or replaced—Indigenous histories and memories.¹⁵ Winters in Edmonton are cold and long. The often gray-and-white flat landscape has a double face. If the tedious flatness and relentless pale color palette of the city can become dispiriting over time, the miles of surrounding grasslands may evoke openness, freedom, and endless possibilities. The bounding power of place may be interpreted also as the liberating force of nonplace.

Edmonton’s cityscape suggests what Karsten Harries calls “the perfect illustration of what is meant by ‘loss of place.’”¹⁶ Buildings are low-rise and few and far between; the wide streets and vast parking lots defy any notion of distance. Moreover, most buildings in the city do not establish grounded relationships to their environments; rather, they are merely plain boxes with added visual or textual signs. In other words, as Robert Venturi might have stated, in Edmonton communication and signs have triumphed over spaces. In reference to such spatial arrangements in Canada, Rhodri Windsor Liscombe and Michelangelo Sabatino observe that “the monumentally scaled architecture … vaunt[s] the immensity of the surrounding geography.”¹⁷

As Liscombe and Sabatino note, the massive scale and diverse geography of Canada have left powerful imprints on Canadian architecture.¹⁸ Harold Kalman further emphasizes the importance of geography in creating what he names “prairie regionalism,” or specifically architectural responses to the flat landscapes and challenging climate of the Canadian Prairies.¹⁹ Architectural responses to the prairie language of space in Edmonton have also been diverse. Graham Livesey points toward the bifurcation of architectural heritage in the Prairies. While the traditional architecture of the region undoubtedly belongs to Indigenous peoples, it is mostly the colonial architecture of settlers that has shaped the large cities. The violent displacement of Indigenous peoples onto reservations paved the way for Edmonton’s settlers to form the urban landscape, importing styles from elsewhere, including Eastern Canada, the United States, and Europe.²⁰ As Ethel S. Goodstein has noted, much of Canada’s architecture can be characterized as a “manifestation of western values, evidencing the influences of England, France, and the United States.”²¹ According to Liscombe, such conditions may be described as “the cultural epistemology of architectural iconography act[ing] to emphasize the cultural ontology embedded in the architectural fabric.”²²

Modern architecture started to appear in the Canadian Prairies in the 1940s, Livesey writes, and it continued to develop there through the 1960s. He argues that such architecture mostly prospered in Edmonton through “institutional structures and office buildings for the emerging oil and gas industry,” noting that in the Prairies modern architecture took a regional turn after the 1960s.²³ Goodstein, however, criticizes the urban development of “the oil-rich economies of Edmonton and Calgary” for generating “bland, monochromatic cityscapes whose glass and steel tower-lined streets portray the most negative connotations of International Style modernism lingering through the 1970s.”²⁴ Nevertheless, Calgary rather than Edmonton remained the petroleum industry’s headquarters, with oil companies dominating the major office districts of that city.²⁵

Today many of the major institutional buildings of downtown Edmonton feature metallic façades and pyramidal shapes that fade into the gray color palette of this northern city. This curious architectural trend can be traced back to Peter Hemingway’s design for the Muttart Conservatory in 1976. Gene Dub introduced another pyramidal form in his design of Edmonton City Hall in 1992, and a number of later Edmonton buildings also represent variations on this theme.²⁶

The Citadel Theatre building, designed by Jack Diamond, Barton Myers, and R. L. Wilkin, stands in sharp contrast to this bleak landscape of monumental gray buildings (Figure 1). With its sleek structure, meticulous detailing, and warm color palette, the theater is unlike not only the kitschy West Edmonton Mall (opened in 1981 and completed in 1998), as Liscombe and Sabatino write, but also the majority of buildings in downtown Edmonton.²⁷ Goodstein views the “unembellished and unrestrained honesty of the curtain wall enveloping function-derived form” at the Citadel Theatre as significant in its “strong civic presence.”²⁸ She also lauds the theater’s “finely detailed interior spaces,” which stand out against the building’s “stripped envelope.”²⁹ Kalman also writes positively of the Citadel Theatre’s sophisticated design and scrupulous construction standards.³⁰ C. Ray Smith uses the term “monochromatic contextualism” in reference to the building’s predominant rust color and use of materials sourced from Alberta—namely, Medicine Hat red brick.³¹

The Citadel Theatre was first incorporated as a local nonprofit organization in 1965, with the goal of presenting live theater to Edmonton audiences. The first play mounted by the theater, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, premiered on 10 November 1965, in a space housed in the old Salvation Army Building on 102nd Street, acquired that same year for Can$100,000 by the founders of the theater, Joe Shoctor, Sandy Mactaggart, Ralph MacMillan, and J. L. Martin (Figure 2). The investors converted the preexisting building into a theater at an approximate cost of Can$250,000.³² The retrofitted Salvation Army Building included a 277-seat theater, a 125-seat restaurant, and a multipurpose auditorium (Figures 3 and 4).

In 1976, eleven years after its initial establishment, the Citadel Theatre moved to its current location at the juncture of 102nd Avenue and 99th Street (Figure 5). This relocation had been in preparation for several years: Diamond, Myers and Wilkin presented the first design drawings for the new theater space to the Planning Department of the city of Edmonton in September 1973.³³ In fact, the chronological account of the new Citadel Theatre’s development in the City of Edmonton Archives reveals that Joe Shoctor met with the Planning Department to discuss a new venue for the theater as early as February 1969.³⁴ When Shoctor met with Jim Wensley of the Planning Department on 19 February 1969, their discussion was already focused on the site at 102nd Avenue and 99th Street as a potential location. Given the proximity of this site to both Churchill Square, downtown Edmonton’s main public space, and the Edmonton Public Library, the parties deemed this option to be mutually satisfactory.³⁵ The plot was approved as the new development site for the Citadel Theatre on 8 January 1973, and on 22 April 1974, workers surveyed the proposed site; at that time, the project was designated to receive Can$1 million in funding from the province of Alberta.³⁶ In September 1974 the architects submitted preliminary plans to the city, and construction began in December. On 1 October 1976, an agreement went into effect giving the theater the right to rent the site for fifty years, for a yearly fee of Can$1.00.³⁷ Construction lasted just under two years, and the new Citadel Theatre complex officially opened on 12 November 1976.

On 8 August 1973, Joe Shoctor invited local architectural firms to submit proposals for the new Citadel Theatre building.³⁸ The budget for the project, exclusive of land, was set at Can$3 million. The firms received a brief describing the space requirements for the theater, which, according to a letter dated 3 May 1971, drew upon the guidelines in a number of sources, including the Ford Foundation’s The Ideal Theatre, Jo Mielziner’s The Shapes of Our Theatres, the ANTA Checklist for Proscenium and Thrust Stages, and Stephen Joseph’s Actor and Architect. Five firms entered the competition: Diamond, Myers and Wilkin; Peter Hemingway; Donald G. Bittorf; Abugov & Sunderland; and Wynn, Forbes, Lord, Feldberg & Schmidt. The firms met with the management committee on 4 and 5 September 1973 to submit dossiers documenting work performed under each of the proposed project principals and to make verbal presentations of their key considerations regarding the theater design. Visual components were not required as part of their submissions, and no records of any such documents exist. On 8 September 1973, the management committee, consisting of the Citadel board members headed by Shoctor, discussed the proposals and came to a final decision. On 24 September 1973, Diamond, Myers and Wilkin sent a letter to Joe Shoctor acknowledging that the firm had secured the design commission.

In early 1970s Edmonton, Diamond, Myers and Wilkin enjoyed the reputation of an established architectural firm. Two years prior to being selected for the Citadel Theatre project, Diamond and Myers, in collaboration with local architect R. L. Wilkin, had designed the Housing Union Building (HUB) for the University of Alberta’s North Campus. Beginning in the late 1960s, Diamond and Myers had prepared a long-range plan for the University of Alberta, which led to the design concept for HUB. They again collaborated with Wilkin on the design for the Citadel Theatre. However, Myers, who had been a student of Louis Kahn at the University of Pennsylvania, assumed the lead on the project when the partnership between Diamond and Myers ended in 1975. For the design of the Citadel, Myers (in dialogue with Shoctor) proposed to create a crystalline form that would invite the public into the world of the theater. The building would serve as a metaphor for theater itself, with transparent surfaces that would function to integrate the theatrical scene into the fabric of the city. The original design drawings proposed a building with two primary façades, one facing south and one west. The other two façades, facing east and north, would be left as blank surfaces to abut the party walls of future neighboring structures.³⁹ During coordination meetings with the Planning Department in the spring and summer of 1974, however, a number of new design requirements emerged. Through these negotiations, the Citadel became a four-sided building (Figure 6).⁴⁰

Plans for the Citadel Theatre dated December 1974 show a rectangular ground-level plan with rounded corners on the eastern edge and a ramp piercing through the same side. The main entrance to the theater, situated on the south side of the building, opens onto a broad lobby hall that spans the entire width of the building to another entrance on the opposite side. The hall divides the open lounge areas on the western side of the building from enclosed spaces such as the studio theater and cinema on the eastern half (Figure 7). Kalman emphasizes the heightened sense of transparency and visibility created by these circulation spaces: “The lobby is enclosed in walls and skylights of glass, allowing theatre-goers to see out, as they are seen by outsiders during intermissions.”⁴¹ Myers’s design for the coatroom, adjacent to the box office, on the east side of the lobby hall, suggests Kahn’s influence: the stepped reinforced concrete underside of the Citadel’s main auditorium, the Shoctor Theatre, forms a roof for these service spaces (Figure 8). With the slanting concrete beams supporting the theater seating, radiating upward above the box office—and below the orchestra pit—the structure of the building speaks eloquently to its function.

The eastern half of the building, including the three theaters and backstage areas, is constructed of reinforced concrete elements, including columns, beams, and slabs. Steel framing and glass enclose the lobby, its floor slab resting on concrete columns. Steel stairs and walkways are suspended from hollow steel beams that also function as ducts. Structural steel decking serves as the ceiling. All exposed structural steel elements, including the ducts, soffits, and furnishings, as well as the steel framing of the lobby and the sidewalk canopy, feature a rust-colored finish that echoes the brickwork of the eastern half. Smith identifies the Citadel Theatre as a civic monument and notes that its monochromatic palette simultaneously highlights and undermines its monumentality.⁴² If the exposed structure of the Citadel Theatre emphasizes the building’s monumentality, this very gesture is also thwarted by the painting of all these structural elements in a single hue—the color now identified as “Citadel red.”

The design of the Citadel Theatre was admittedly ambitious. Each level of the 90,000-square-foot building makes full use of the available space. It features three performance spaces: the Shoctor Theatre (a proscenium stage with 650 seats), the Rice Theatre (a 200-seat auditorium designed for experimental theater, with flexible seating and stage configurations), and Zeidler Hall (a 220-seat theater originally designed for films and lectures). The lobby areas accommodate more than 1,500 people. The initial plans for the Citadel Theatre included two classrooms on the ground floor, with a combined capacity of 50 people. With storage space and studios belowground, and workshops and boardrooms on the third floor, the building’s total capacity when it opened in 1976 surpassed 3,000 people. At that time, Edmonton’s population numbered only 461,559; even taking into account the Citadel Theatre’s 132,710 annual subscribers, the building’s occupancy exceeded the theater’s stated local constituency.⁴³ But no cost was spared in its construction; total expenditures included Can$6.5 million from the federal, provincial, and local governments as well as Can$2.9 million from private supporters (Figure 9).

The extravagant design of the Citadel Theatre is also reflected in the choices of materials for the building, perhaps most tellingly in the extensive use of exterior glass surfaces, which provide minimal insulation against Edmonton’s very cold climate (Figures 10, 11, and 12). In addition, the decision to panel the interior surfaces of the Shoctor Theatre with now-endangered California redwood represented overt environmental exploitation, and, as we will see, the use of Medicine Hat red brick recalled colonial exploitation practices (Figures 13 and 14). Such materials are not merely mute objects; rather, they function as economic objects. As Arjun Appadurai argues (following Georg Simmel), economic objects are valuable not because they have some inherent value but because they “resist our desire to possess them.”⁴⁴ The value of California redwood and Medicine Hat red brick, in other words, emerged historically and functioned as much in physical space as in the space of collective desire. These materials attested to the desire of the building’s designers to abolish distance (to eliminate the distance that separated the faraway “last West” from the abundance of natural resources in its vicinity) as well as their desire to employ culturally “appropriate” building materials (using the gleaming warmth of California redwood instead of the conventional pine timber employed by Alberta homesteaders, and the coarse, kiln-colored red of the Medicine Hat brick instead of shiny gray aluminum).

A 1975 article published in the journal Environmental Conservation reported on the accelerating century-old battle between conservationists and loggers over the diminishing resource of the California coast redwood.⁴⁵ Redwoods, technically known as Sequoia sempervirens (evergreen in Latin), number among the longest-living organisms on Earth, as remnants of a pre–Ice Age forest that once extended across North America.⁴⁶ Builders have long praised California coast redwood as one of the most valuable timber species, owing to its longevity, durability, and resistance to water, flame, and decay. Among other uses, redwood was for many years a preferred material for railroad ties, bridges, barns, sidewalks, gutters, paving blocks, roads, decks, and furniture. As the 1975 article noted, the California coast redwood can be found only in “a narrow zone about 40 kilometers wide which parallels the coasts of California and southern Oregon.”⁴⁷

The discovery of gold in Northern California in 1848 brought a rapid increase in population, which in turn accelerated the exploitation of redwood forests. When the first sawmills were established in Humboldt and Mendocino Counties in 1851, redwood forests occupied some 2 million acres. By the 1890s, “redwood accounted for half of California’s lumber production,” and sawmills exported redwood planks around the globe, to Asia and Australia as well as Canada and Europe.⁴⁸ With the advent of railroads and improved logging technologies, as well as the “passage into private hands of much Redwood land under the provisions of the federal Timber and Stone Act of 1879,” a few logging companies in Humboldt, Mendocino, and Del Norte established and secured monopolies over California coast redwood timber production.⁴⁹ By 1900, lumber companies owned almost all of the redwood forests on California’s northern coast. By 1910, one-quarter of the state’s redwoods had been logged. By the time of the postwar housing boom of the 1950s, the number of trees harvested each year had tripled. By 1975, redwood timber production had risen so dramatically that scientists predicted that “old-growth redwood will be exhausted from commercial forest-lands by the year 2000.”⁵⁰ Although conservationists established small national parks in an effort to protect the species, these interventions failed to halt the decline of the redwood forests, since forest cutting and road construction adjacent to these sites caused destructive soil erosion, flooding, and wind damage.⁵¹

The conflict over the California coast redwood was neither brief nor inconsequential. Indeed, the 1975 battles were only part of what Darren F. Speece calls the “Redwood Wars,” which “transformed California’s and the nation’s forestry regulations on private land, and demonstrated the power granted to citizen activists by the environmental protection regime erected during the 1970s.”⁵² As David Vogel has observed, “The roots of California’s tradition of civic mobilization lie in nature protection.”⁵³ And yet, as Joy A. Fritschle found in a 2009 study, the twentieth-century logging activities of timber companies profoundly changed the ratio of redwood trees to land.⁵⁴ Today, approximately 350,000 acres of California redwood forest—that is, 45 percent of the remaining coastal redwoods—fall into the protected category. Only about 5 percent of the state’s original coastal redwoods remain intact. In 2013, the California redwood acquired endangered status and was added to the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List.

It is not surprising that some remnants of the endangered California coast redwood survive in Edmonton’s Citadel Theatre. As noted, redwood paneling was used to line the interior walls of the Citadel’s Shoctor Theatre, a design decision that was made during the peak years of the so-called Redwood Wars. The use of this precious material is a testament to the cruel optimism that gave birth to the Citadel Theatre in the first place. The opulent redwood paneling reverberated with the other “Citadel red” materials employed, critically reinforcing the good-life fantasy and other social imaginaries upheld by the theater. The importance of the California redwood was amplified by the rare material’s exchange value and the sacrifices that made it possible to showcase such wood in Edmonton. More than a material, California redwood represented an object of desire that crystallized the good-life fantasies of generations of Edmonton émigrés thirsting for a world-class theater. Likewise, the Medicine Hat red brick materialized the forced sacrifice of Indigenous peoples and their lands that enabled the fantasy to come to life. Just as the decision to create a largely glass exterior for this theater in the northernmost North American city speaks of the time’s blind faith in the infinitude of cheap energy and fossil fuels, the extravagant use of California redwood signaled contemporary attitudes that assumed endless access to such resources. When we consider redwood in terms of its use as an architectural material, we can better understand the connections between our deepest hopes and desires and the sites of energy extraction and environmental exploitation.

Medicine Hat, a city in the southeastern part of Alberta, close to the border of Montana, is home to the Blackfoot and Métis peoples.⁵⁵ With a population of 33,220 in 1976, Medicine Hat was the eighth-largest city in Canada; Edmonton was the fourth. With the discovery of natural gas in Medicine Hat in 1905, the city became an industrial and military hub. Abundant cheap natural resources, access to the Canadian Pacific Railway, and low tax rates made it a haven for industrialists. The chief local industry was the manufacture of stoneware.⁵⁶ The Medicine Hat Brick and Tile Company, Medalta Potteries, and the Hycroft China Ltd. factory all extracted clay for their products from a region known as the Cypress Hills, which extended “twenty-two miles northwest of Manyberries, Alberta, eastward sixteen miles to the Saskatchewan border and thence forty-two miles into Saskatchewan.”⁵⁷ Medicine Hat’s clay industry, which began as early as the 1910s, lasted through the late 1960s. By the late 1980s, a combination of global competition and disastrous floods led to the closure of most of Medicine Hat’s clay manufacturers.⁵⁸

The histories of clay and fossil fuels intertwine at Medicine Hat. In 1965, the fossil fuel resources of the Cypress Hills accounted for two-thirds of all such resources in Alberta and Saskatchewan.⁵⁹ Oil and gas reserves also played a pivotal role in supporting the flourishing clay industry. For instance, the Medicine Hat Brick and Tile Company’s factory—operated today by I-XL Building Products—used its own gas wells to generate energy for the plant. Alberta Clay Products, too, used its own gas well, drilled as early as 1901.⁶⁰ Fossil fuel extraction was also linked to land exploitation and devastation; as Eric Onoferychuk writes, “The clay products industry was the logical outgrowth of the clay deposits and natural gas supplies in south-eastern Alberta. … Many of the local quarry sites that are used by Medicine Hat’s ceramics industry have a practically limitless supply of clay.”⁶¹ The same cruel optimism about the inexhaustibility of natural resources and the endlessness of growth that cleared away the California coast redwood forests drove fossil fuel and clay extraction in Medicine Hat. As Anishinaabe scholar Leanne Simpson observes:

The extraction of resources such as clay and fossil fuels denies Indigenous peoples and their lands meaning and transforms them into passive observers. As Patrick Wolfe reminds us, land is life, as it is necessary for life.⁶³ Extraction thus engenders a double violence, to the people and to the land. This violence can be seen today in the remnants of the clay factories and miles of devastated land around Medicine Hat. As Jen Preston writes, resource extraction is an ongoing “process of environmental racism” that normalizes Indigenous oppression and violence.⁶⁴ The violence is readily manifest in the processes used to extract clay, gas, and bitumen from oil sands, all of which create blasted landscapes (Figures 15 and 16). This violence persists in the extracted materials: its residue is still present in Medicine Hat red brick, and, by extension, in the fabric of the Citadel Theatre.

From the beginning, the designers of the new Citadel Theatre proposed a crystalline structure intended to invite the audience into the world of theater. Indeed, as I learned in my discussions with the design team, the original project incorporated even more glass than was eventually used.⁶⁵ Smooth glass surfaces also created a striking contrast with the warm color and texture of the brick. The minutes of the site meetings held during the construction phase testify to numerous discussions regarding the color of the brick and its surface qualities.⁶⁶ While the crystalline form rejected the old Salvation Army Building’s fortresslike inaccessibility, the red brick paid homage to that building, which housed the Citadel for a decade prior to the construction of the new theater. The use of brick also recalled other significant local buildings, such as Rutherford House on the University of Alberta’s North Campus. Myers had played a role in major preservation projects at the university, and with Diamond he had restored high-density Victorian streetscapes in the Dundas-Sherbourne housing project in Toronto; it is not surprising that he took particular care to determine the exact tone of red brick to use at the Citadel Theatre. Little can be said about the decision by Myers and Shoctor to use California redwood, other than the fact that redwood satisfied civic fire code requirements, but certainly the material’s lush color and texture not only complemented the burgundy color palette of the whole building but also imbued the interior with luxurious ambiance.⁶⁷ Notably, in Zeidler Hall, oak veneer panels were used instead of redwood because of budget limitations.⁶⁸ In other words, what mattered was the illusion of luxury evoked by these materials, which was further heightened by the use of brass railings and light fixtures. The overarching concept weaving together the building’s interior and exterior remained that of a gleaming crystalline theater exuding light and warmth—both literally and metaphorically—in a cold city. The project further testified to contemporary optimism through its mission of bringing theater to the inhabitants of a working-class oil city.⁶⁹ The building’s scale and materials, the theater’s array of creative directors, and the acclaimed plays produced all spoke to an indefatigable pursuit of good-life fantasies in the guise of cultural elevation and colonial pageantry.⁷⁰

The theatrical function of this project further reinforced the many ways in which it rested on the creation of illusions. According to Friedrich Nietzsche, the theater replaced the place of worship as the one building that brought together all people, but they gathered there only to watch a play—an illusion.⁷¹ The Citadel Theatre, in this sense, represented a paradigmatic illusion in and of itself: the South in the North, the transparent in the closed off, the warm in the cold, the wealthy in the working-class, and the infinite in the finite. The Citadel Theatre represented the cruel optimism of a bygone petroleum age.

The use of California redwood and Medicine Hat red brick at the Citadel Theatre inscribed existentially empty good-life fantasies into the fabric of the building and the city. These materials converted the abstract “notion” of oil into palpable representations that could be perceived through the senses and through lived experience. Where petroleum was the fulcrum, these materials became indices of environmental violence at a time of energy intensity and petroleum-based booming economies.

Ecomaterialism can be defined as a process whereby we distance ourselves from our normative emphasis on representation and instead explore the environmental impacts of cultural production.⁷² This offers a critical lens through which to explore the ecological ramifications of cultural artifacts as these are manifested in their production, distribution, and consumption. Architecture, too, is a cultural artifact. In this study, I am more interested in this approach to architecture than I am in examining it “as an expression of tastes and values, as the embodiment of local and regional distinctiveness, and as part of larger intellectual currents.”⁷³ Instead, I am curious about how the materials used in these cultural artifacts enable us to discover the ecological exploitation and violence that shaped the making of those artifacts in the first place. As Jeff Diamanti notes, exposing the hidden-from-view parts of energy-intensive infrastructures is central to environmentalist politics.⁷⁴

The use of both California redwood and Medicine Hat red brick in the construction of the Citadel Theatre merged resource extraction and aesthetics into one material entity. The very materiality of the building, in other words, functioned and continues to function as a spatiotemporal matrix of extraction practices and petroleum-based aesthetics. The Citadel Theatre stands as an aesthetic configuration of the petroleum-driven cruel optimism that defined Edmonton’s mid-twentieth-century historical landscape. Faith in the illusory promise of the good life that drew settlers from across the world to the “last West” coalesced in an architectural formation that may appear overwhelmingly ordinary to us today. But when we investigate this very ordinariness, we can begin to recover the material fabric of resource extraction that is itself intertwined with the ongoing violence inflicted on the Indigenous lands where such buildings were constructed.⁷⁵