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Birds and plant life in red sandstone decorate the pillars of this annex.
The house with the stone birds (above) is the K Annex at 2150 Bishop St., which is home to a variety of University offices.
Art historian Virginia Nixon described its architectural influences. "Though it's combined with the ubiquitous slanting false Mansard roof, this turn-of-the-century house uses a 19th-century reworking of the round-arched Romanesque style of the 1100s developed by the American architect Henry Hobson Richardson.
"Popularized in the 1880s, Richardsonian Romanesque buildings typically have the cave-like porches, squat pillars ornamented with fanciful carvings and checkerboard-pattern stonework that we find here. The red sandstone is also typical.
"A building style widely found in Montreal's anglophone residential areas, Richardsonian Romanesque was also popular for commercial and public buildings."
