The story begins with a treehouse. In 1941, Raymond Moriyama was interned along with his mother and two sisters in Slocan, British Columbia; his father was in a prisoner-of-war camp in Ontario, half a continent away. The 12-year-old Moriyama, injured in a kitchen accident, was further marginalized by his fellow internees, who mocked his scarred body. As Moriyama has said throughout his career, the experience was formative—not least because of the way the budding architect chose to take refuge, building his own hidden treehouse in the forest.
Sixty-five years on, in his new book In Search of a Soul: Designing and Realizing the New Canadian War Museum, Moriyama returns to that first work. It was on Little Mountain, a hill by the Slocan River, “in the shadow of the Rockies,” he writes. “Remarkably, this spot shares many similarities with the war museum site in Ottawa. However, my tree house was not a museum—it became my sanctuary during...
Alex Bozikovic is an editor at The Globe and Mail and writes for the paper about architecture. He also writes the blog No Mean City and has contributed to magazines such as Azure, Dwell and Metropolis.
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