We're a government town — of course we hate edgy architecture
Kelly Egan, Ottawa Citizen
Published on: September 16, 2016 | Last Updated: September 16, 2016 6:00 PM EDT
Maybe it’s as simple as this: Ottawa gags on modern architecture.
Maybe not, but the five-alarm freakout over the Château Laurier addition suggests some deep-seated resistance to modern design, especially when it comes to touchstone buildings in the Parliamentary precinct, our very own Gothic-Victorian dollhouse.
From most angles, the proposed addition to the Château looks pretty inoffensive — in fact, it echoes the aged copper and pale stone of the original hotel. The one image from the rear did seem to overpower, but this may have been an aspect bungle or Photoshop fart. Hard to know.
It’s worth keeping in mind, by the way, that the architectural taste of the average bloke can’t be trusted. Is this not why we have acres of beige suburbs, and more Merivale roads than we really should, because this is the median of what, collectively, we find “attractive”?
If you’re like me, you live in a mature neighbourhood where there’s lots of infill, probably of the boxy variety. “Doesn’t fit in” is a criticism often repeated, as though “fitting in” is the over-riding design imperative and “sticking out” is a mortal sin. Or we just hate modern architecture.
The Memorial to the Victims of Communism? I suspect most people disliked it because it was not literal enough, jarred with the Supreme Court design, and just seemed jumbly and incoherent, compared to the language of visual expression in, say, the National War Memorial. Had it been a statue and a plaque, there’d be no controversy.
Some of y’all are old enough to remember the controversy over the massive expansion of Ottawa City Hall when it lived on Green Island in the late 1980s.
Moshe Safdie, an architect with sparkling international reputation (National Gallery), won the competition and was proposing a pair of twin towers — about 55 metres high — in his original design, though they had no real utility. People went cuckoo. “A lot of show-off nonsense,” huffed a neighbour.
“My third objection is the extravagance of the building,” wrote a young whippersnapper named Jim Watson, of Capital ward, no doubt typing in his chinos and plaid shirt. “Mr. Safdie should have been reminded he was building a municipal building, not a palace.”
So, what did council do? They cut the towers out to save $1.5 million, putting Safdie in a suing mood for demonstrably changing his design. Here lies mediocrity by committee: honestly, will that not be chiselled on Ottawa’s tombstone?
Architecture, too, is one of those fields where the thing we hate today is the thing we love tomorrow. They wanted to tear the Eiffel Tower down straight away. The glass pyramid addition at the Louvre had some Parisians in a tizzy. The striking Guggenheim museum in New York was once mocked. Our beloved Cattle Castle nearly met the wrecker’s ball.
Allan Teramura is an Ottawa architect and the president of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada. He was travelling this week but managed to see some of the images of the Château proposal.
“I would actually say the design for the addition to the Château Laurier is actually quite respectful of the original building, from what I can tell.”
But he understands the criticism.
“It’s not surprising when you start altering an iconic building that means a lot to many people,” he said. “That’s kind of the curse of being an architect.”
But there’s no way around it, he said. Older buildings can only be preserved or enhanced if modern building techniques are brought to bear— and that can affect the appearance in a jarring way.
He agreed that, architecturally, Ottawa is a conservative city.
“Absolutely. I’m not sure exactly why that is. I think part of it is Ottawa’s never had the kind of aspiration to be a great city the way some other cities have.”
We lack big corporate headquarters, for one, have very few captains of industry willing to leave their built marks and live with rows of forgettable office buildings constructed on the public purse for maximum function and minimum price — thus, a lack of extravagance.
“There is a lot of really terrible, unforgivably bad stuff that gets built in Ottawa that barely gets mentioned, right?”
So the presence of so much mediocre design has a “levelling” effect on our expectations of the city’s built environment, he added.
“Anything that’s a little edgy I think tends to make people uncomfortable.”
There’s a move afoot — of course there is! — to have the Château owners smooth “the edgy” right out.
My God, we’re boring.
To contact Kelly Egan, please call 613-726-5896 or email
kegan@postmedia.com
Twitter.com/kellyegancolumn
http://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/col...y-architecture
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"It’s not appropriate to simply take a national historic site and then add on to it exactly in the architectural ground it was originally conceived in because that just confuses history,” Clewes told the Citizen on Thursday."
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