Banff Springs Hotel (photography from Wikipedia)
(Banff, Canada)
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Hotel in the Scottish baronial style
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“Everything in Canada is vast, and the string of super-size hotels built by the Canadian Pacific Railways (CPR) to boost tourism along its Rocky Mountain railway (and so fill their Pullman carriages with travelers) fits in with that enormous scale. The railway was completed in 1885, and a mere three years later on June 1, 1888, the grandest of the grandiose faux Scottish baronial castle-style hotels — The Banff Springs — opened its doors. With 250 rooms and a rotunda it was the world’s largest hotel at the time.
Today, the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel and spa has trebled the number of its rooms; it can accommodate up to 1,700 guests, who can often hear the strains of live bagpipe music. If you balk at the C💲900 room fee, you can take a guided tour instead.
The hotel, which is massive, can feel like a giant terminus. It is a touch old-fashioned today, but the edifice still stands proud like an alpha-male stag amid the aspen, beneath the shadows of spectacular massifs at the convergence of the Bow and Spray rivers.
From CPR’s general manager William Cornelius Van Horne’s mission statement, “Since we can’t export the scenery, we’ll have to import the tourist” to the awful realization by the New York architect Bruce Price that the initial building work was 180 degrees off-course — (he allegedly claimed: “You built my hotel backwards!”) — there has always been something mise-en-scène about the hotel. Price’s building was classic late-Victorian architecture — verbose, solid, somber, grand, and so imposing that it became the foundation of Canadian architecture until World War II, and “château style” became the proscribed architectural method for government structures.
Today, the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel continues to stand in all its dour Gothic splendour as a monument to late-Victorian architectural derring-do.”(JH)
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