Taking the Legislative Building Tour

I took off during my lunch the other day to walk over to Wascana Centre and take a tour of the Saskatchewan Legislative Building.  It was fascinating!

My tour guide was Arnold, a very funny man with interesting stories about the building and Saskatchewan's history.  He also knew a lot about the Baha'i Faith, which was cool to chat about (I think it has to do with the scores of Baha'is who come to visit the building, since it was build by W.S. Maxwell and his brother who were architects from Montreal).

Memorial plaque outside the Prince of Wales side entrance. Neat!

Some really cool bits of ephemera found in the upper ceiling during renovations to the building several years ago.

"Before The White Man Came" John Leman, 1933

"Northern Tradition and Transition" Roger Jerome, 2005

Saskatchewan Legislative Assembly chamber - the decorative wood carvings were uh-MAZing.

View through to the falsely-lit central dome from the ground floor gallery.

The building is made with 34 different types of marble!  The most beautiful one, I think, is the green striated marble from Europe that makes up the huge, gorgeous pillars in the rotunda.  Other highlights included: the reference library with the old Speaker of the House's chairs, the Assiniboine Gallery featuring various oil pastel portraits of famous tribal leaders in the early 1900's, and finding out that the dome is actually lit by fluorescent bulbs, not sunlight (the dome extends much higher than it looks on the inside).

A highly recommended tour stop if one is in the Regina area.  So there you go.