RICHARSON, Prof. Albert E. (1880-1964) and GILL, Charles Lovett (1880-1960), a prominent firm in London, England prepared an elaborate scheme for the interiors of the display by the Empire Marketing Board, and exhibited in the Dominion Government Building, Canadian National Exhibition, TORONTO, ONT. 1928 (The Globe [Toronto], 18 April 1928, 13, descrip.; Const., xxi, Oct. 1928, 326-33, illus. & descrip.; Builder [London], cxxxv, 2 Nov. 1928, 706-09, 714, 718-20, illus. & descrip.; Architects' Journal [London], lxix, 10 April 1929, 560-65, illus. & descrip.; Canadian Hotel Review, vii, June 1929, 18-20, illus.). For their only Canadian commission Richardson & Gill created a lofty fifty-foot high central rotunda lined with eight symbolic murals, and three corridors leading to the exhibit stalls fitted out by Commonwealth countries. The pavilion surely ranks as one of most elaborate and expensive exhibition spaces ever built in Canada during the first half of the 20th C., yet the entire work was dismantled within months of its construction, and nothing remains of the project which was funded solely by the British Government.
As an architect, Richardson was an influential designer who promoted a restrained neoclassical style in his work based on Georgian precedent. He was a successful writer and respected lecturer at the Bartlett School at the University of London. He had a wide-ranging knowledge of 18th and 19th C. English architecture, and wrote about it extensively in his best known book, Monumental Classic Architecture in Great Britain & Ireland (1914). Richardson also possessed an open mind about new directions in 20th C. design, and was one of the first to draw attention to the Modern Movement (Journal of the Royal Inst. of British Architects, xxxi, 1924, 267-74, illus.). A monograph of the career and work of Richardson, written by Simon Houfe, was published in 1980 (obit. for A.E. Richardson in Architect & Building News [London], ccxxv, 12 Feb. 1964, 255-6; biog. and list of works by Richardson in MacMillan Encyclopedia of Architects, 1982, iii, 556-7; obit. for C. Lovett Gill in The Builder [London], cxcviii, 1 April 1960, 642). A detailed exhibition catalogue entitled Sir Albert Richardson 1880-1964 was published by the R.I.B.A. Heinz Gallery in London in 1999, and contains a detailed list of built works and published articles written by Richardson from 1910 to 1965.