Growing up in Grimsby, the heart of Ontario’s Carolinian region, young Donald Pettit took pride in studying the region’s plants, and in learning to draw. Drawing, he told historian Linda LeGeyt, taught him not only to look, but also to see. It was no surprise that in 1945, he headed to Ontario Agricultural College in Guelph.
While still a student, Pettit spent his summers teaching horticultural at MacDonald College (McGill University). And it was there, he said, that he met his first “living landscape architect,” Maurice Howitt.
Howitt had studied at Harvard, and Pettit would follow suit. After earning his agricultural degree (1949), he became a lecturer at McGill, and just two years later (1951-53), McGill granted him leave of absence to attend Harvard on full salary.
In 1954, he left the school to join Macklin Hancock, then director of planning for Don Mills Development Ltd. Don Mill became a ground-breaking prototype for Canada’s suburbs, and just two years later, Pettit joined Hancock and five others to found Project Planning Associates Ltd. of Toronto.
With PPA, Pettit travelled extensively and became, in his words, “enthralled with the Canadian landscape,” whether he took on open space planning for a small town like Atikokan, or enormous, high-profile projects like the development of Toronto Islands. For the St. Lawrence Seaway project, PPA prepared master plans for parks integrated into the massive works, including Crysler Memorial Park and Upper Canada Village -- certainly the biggest LA undertakings in the country.
The firm expanded its reach, and PPA became a training ground for young LAs. The profession was maturing in Canada and new schools forming. Pettit, ever the advocate, served as CSLA president (1960-62), then chairman of the examining board.
Pettit particularly relished national park projects (Banff, and Elk Island), and he credited Parks Canada’s Otis Bishopric with involving LAs in park development. But it was another Ottawa-based Fellow, Ned Wood, who drew Pettit to the capital in 1964, to work as Wood’s assistant at the National Capital Commission.
Only a year later, Pettit briefly moved to Parks Canada to become Chief of Planning and Development, but in 1966, and “by popular request,” wrote Fellow Ed Holubowich, “Don was lured back to the NCC, this time as Director of the Design Division,” where he remained as director until 1980.
The NCC was very much a part of Ottawa’s Urban Renaissance, and Pettit worked with Holubowich and Roman Fodchuk to push for further recognition of the profession within the public service. In those years, the NCC brought many major projects to completion: Gatineau Park, the Ottawa River Parkway, Confederation Square, and the transformation of the Rideau Canal into a landscape for pedestrians and skaters.
The OALA made Don Pettit an Emeritus member in 1991.
“Knowing this took place during my career as a landscape architect is a very wonderful feeling.”
…. Don Pettit, speaking to Linda LeGeyt
Images
(Portrait shot)
D.W. Pettit, OAC Yearbook, 1949. University of Guelph Archives.
- Project Planning Associates Limited booklet. University of Guelph. University of Guelph Archives. Frances Blue Collection. Macklin Hancock Collection.
- Plan of Crysler Park recreation area, Ontario, one of the new parks integrated into the enormous engineering works of the St. Lawrence Seaway. Designed by Project Planning Associates, 1959. From Landscape Architecture in Canada, by Ron Williams. Originally featured in “Canadian Architect” 4, no. 8 (August 1959).
- Crysler Memorial Park. University of Guelph Archives.
- Ottawa’s Urban Renaissance (1960s and 1970s), when Don Pettit was Director of Design for the NCC. Map by Dan Williams. From Landscape Architecture in Canada, by Ron Williams.
- From left: Edouard Fiset (Chief Architect of Expo 67), Macklin Hancock and Don Pettit, 1984. From Fifty Years of Landscape Architecture in Canada, 1934-1984, by Cecelia Paine. Page 72.
Sources
Information from Ed Holubowich appears in Fifty Years of Landscape Architecture in Canada, 1934-1984, by Cecelia Paine.
Linda LeGeyt, Changing the Face of Canada. Volume 1. Ottawa: CSLA, 199xxx
Ron Williams. Landscape Architecture in Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014
University of Guelph. Centre for Canadian Landscape Architecture Archives. Frances Blue Collection. Macklin Hancock Collection.
