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Take a walk around downtown Toronto’s Financial District and there is a good chance you will see several landmark buildings that were designed by Frank Darling more than a century ago.

While few of us may know the name, Darling was one of Canada’s most prolific pre-First World War architects. A book illuminating his life and career is set for publication early next year.  

Toronto Edwardian: Frank Darling, Architect of Canada’s Imperial Age was written by David Winterton, a principal at ERA Architects.

Winterton and his research team discovered roughly 360 projects by Darling working for the firm he co-founded as Darling & Pearson (D&P). About half of those projects were in Toronto.

“He was a prolific architect. He defined the institutional (and financial) core of Toronto,” Winterton says, pointing to the Royal Ontario Museum and about a half a dozen buildings on the University of Toronto campus as examples of his work.

On Bankers Row, King Street, he designed about six buildings, some of which are still standing.

Winterton suggests in Darling’s day the patrons of Toronto, Canada’s “second city,” had ambitious plans to put Toronto on an Imperial stage.

“They wanted it to be credible with other cities in the Empire. Darling was their go-to architect; he did their houses, their banks, their office buildings.”

Winterton was motivated to document Darling in part through his work at ERA. The firm has been involved in restorations and other projects on the Edwardian designer’s buildings.

“I started to notice that Darling & Pearson have their name on a whole lot of stuff concentrated in this one period. I thought, ‘Why don’t I buy the book on them.’”

Like other noteworthy early architects in Toronto, however, D&P had received little published attention.  

Further impetus for the book came from Winterton’s time working in the New York office of renowned architect Robert A.M. Stern. 

Stern “had the most magnificent architecture library” and whenever a new shipment of books, many from other countries, were evaluated as potential acquisitions, Winterton would scramble to see if there were any on Canadian architects. 

“It was very rare that happened, if ever.”

To produce the book, Winterton and a small research team at ERA scoured archives across the country where they found “an embarrassment of riches of the photographs and drawings.”

Divided into two parts, the book starts by covering Darling’s upbringing and early career which included “trial by fire” training under two seminal gothic revival architects in London, England.

“It developed an architectural rigor in his practice.”

Darling’s partner was John Pearson, knowledgeable about building construction but Winterton’s research suggests Darling was the firm’s creative leader.

D&P was at the forefront of skyscraper design in Canada, with their first tower being a 10-storey building for the Union Bank in Winnipeg in 1904. The main contractor was George A. Fuller Company, a Chicago-based builder and a pioneer in steel-frame tall building construction.

Drawing on Fuller’s expertise, D&P returned to Toronto where the firm put its signature on the 12-storey steel frame Dominion Bank Building, the 15-storey Canadian Pacific Building and a host of others over 10 storeys high – the height at the time that defined a skyscraper.  

Bank buildings were a big part of the firm’s portfolio.

“It’s an amazing story because it is about Toronto, but Canada too, because they had a project for the bank branches in every province of confederation and Newfoundland.”

Winterton says D&P relied on modern technology of the day, telephones and telegraphs, and they travelled by train and steamship if necessary to get to projects, “living there with the contractors to make sure everything was done well.

“The level of the quality of the banks didn’t drop because they were far away. Even small prairie towns were getting beautiful stone carving or cast stone.”

Winterton says the extensive research to put the book together, followed by several rounds of anonymous academic edits of the manuscript at publisher McGill-Queen’s University Press, was worth it.

“It was heartbreaking choosing which images didn’t get to go in the book considering the treasures we found, but you have to be very judicious and choose wisely. I’m very pleased with the book.”

Publication is slated for February 2026.