Our Architecture section covers residential, commercial, and civic design, along with the history of particular styles and movements. It draws both casual readers who enjoy well-photographed monographs and design professionals looking for reference material that is no longer in print.

Given our setting, we keep a steady supply of titles on mountain and rustic architecture, National Park lodge design, and the building history of Western Canadian towns, alongside broader international coverage of modern and historic architecture from the classical period to the present.

Large-format, heavily illustrated architecture books are some of the more delicate items we carry, and we take particular care in describing their condition, since covers and dust jackets on this style of book show wear more visibly than a typical paperback.

We also carry books on historic preservation and restoration technique, popular with owners of older homes in the Bow Valley, along with surveys of Canadian civic architecture that trace how small mountain towns like Canmore grew from mining camps into the communities they are today.

A smaller shelf covers landscape architecture and site planning, which tends to interest the same readers drawn to our National Park and mountain-town history titles.

So much of what makes a mountain town distinctive comes from how buildings sit against the landscape around them rather than from any single structure alone, and this corner of the section speaks directly to that.

• Residential and civic design
• Historic preservation and restoration technique
• Mountain, rustic, and park lodge architecture
• Design movements and architect monographs
• Urban planning and building history
• Western Canadian civic architecture
• Landscape architecture and site planning
• Large-format illustrated surveys

Because so many of our architecture titles are large and heavily illustrated, this is a section best browsed in person, where the scale and detail of the photography can actually be appreciated rather than guessed at from a listing.

Customers restoring or renovating an older Canmore home in particular often find this shelf useful for understanding what materials, proportions, and details were original to a building from a specific period, which is difficult to establish from photographs alone.

Oversized architecture and design books are heavier than the 1 kg default our checkout assumes, so shipping on a single large volume is usually higher than the standard estimate. We will confirm the real figure before your order ships.

These books are also packed with additional board and corner protection, since spine and corner damage in transit is the most common problem with large-format titles.