A
AlvinofDiaspar
Guest
Basically a rehash of all her articles from last year:
THE YEAR IN REVIEW: ARCHITECTURE
By, of and for Canadians
Amid banal urban design, LISA ROCHON found three gems worth celebrating -- not least because they show off the country's talents
By LISA ROCHON
Thursday, December 29, 2005 Page R1
While ugly buildings and soulless suburbs continue to pummel Canadians with their stupidity, the year 2005 gave the country a taste of architecture defined by its daring, clarity and spectacle. Canada's National Ballet School, the Canadian War Museum and the Grande Bibliothèque du Québec rank as exceptional works of architecture. All three buildings opened this year. All three are transforming. And, all three happen to be designed by Canadians.
Architecture can allow any one of us to lose ourselves in space. Such is the achievement of the Canadian War Museum, a masterful building designed by Raymond Moriyama with his son, Jason, in a joint venture with Griffiths Rankin Cook Architects. Whereas much of Ottawa is a triumph of neo-Gothic boosterism of the federal government, the museum kneels its heavy concrete shape down by the edge of the Ottawa River. A visit requires time -- you'll find the doubt and terror of war in the slanted walls and floors. The memorial hall, cast in light on Remembrance Day, is otherwise awash in sorrow.
If most buildings make us feel like androids rather than sentient beings, there is richly deserved succour to be gained from a visit to the National Ballet School (NBS) in Toronto or the Grande Bibliothèque du Québec (GBQ) in Montreal. It's okay to feel alive in such places. In fact, it can't be helped. At the GBQ, designed by Patkau Architects of Vancouver, the public library is interpreted as a dramatic stage, with patrons exposed to the grand stairs, promenades and elevators and thrust through space to the greatest props of all: books. A similar kind of strategy has been used by the Patkaus to reinvent the Winnipeg Centennial Library, once considered to be a bit of a concrete bunker from the brutalism era of architecture. After three years of design and construction, the library reopened in November.
The NBS is all energy and grace, a heroic exemplar of a society that takes care of its young. The expanded, enlivened school is the result of a complex deal between Toronto, the CBC and Context condominium developers that allowed the school to receive half of a coveted site on Jarvis Street for a dollar. From complexity grew clarity -- the master plan by Goldsmith Borgal & Company allowed for the school to capture two historic jewels on the site while providing room for a contemporary intervention.
Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg Architects designed glass pavilions that wrap around the existing buildings to create a poetic town square and sublime ballet studios held behind a thin veil of glass. Now, the Toronto skyline is imprinted with a generation of gifted athletes.
Chucking functional, if forgettable architecture has its risks: Untested ideas almost always go over budget and past deadline.
Such is the case for the $233-million Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto designed by Daniel Libeskind, featuring a massively disturbed structure -- there are 3,000 pieces of steel engaged in the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal building and every single one of them is erected at acute angles without any perpendicular surfaces.
The Leslie L. Dan Pharmacy Building at the University of Toronto, about a year behind schedule, has two steel pods suspended within its 16-storey atrium. They are intended as cozy lecture rooms even if they look concocted for Woody Allen's Sleeper.
And, although it can do wonders to groove-ify a lifeless Main Street, spectacular architecture means more space is devoted to public amenities and less to education facilities or galleries. For $48-million, the newly commissioned Art Gallery of Alberta will grab 20,000 more square feet for public space, retail and restaurants, but less than half that for new gallery space.
This year, there were occasional glimpses of daring new ways to house Canadians in search of life in tall towers. The twisted tower might have been an innovation designed to give new sparkle to dense urban centres, such as Shanghai and Chicago, but it's also being tested in Canada's less harried zones.
In Halifax's business district, Hariri Pontarini Architects of Toronto has designed a "twisting" multiuse proposal on the site of the old TexPark. In Vancouver, Arthur Erickson -- Canada's own design superstar -- has produced schemes for two twisted towers. The 'Erickson' is to be constructed on the north shore of False Creek for the Concord Pacific Place development. His other gift to the city is a slim building on West Georgia Street that rotates 45 degrees between its base and its roof. Simon Lim, a young developer from China, has commissioned the tower in a gesture, Erickson says, "to prove to his family that he can do it." In a city in search of iconic architecture, the tower is worth watching not only for its unleashed form but for the company it'll be keeping -- the Shangri-La tower, planned to be 60 storeys, is designed by the master of contemporary point towers, the city's James Cheng, for a site across the street.
It was a year when the culture of architecture engaged with atypical ferocity and citizens managed with some success to beat back the ruination of their cities. Sweet was the triumph enjoyed by untold numbers in Toronto when citizens smashed a proposal for a 46-storey luxury tower just south of the Royal Ontario Museum. At a public consultation meeting in early November, University of Toronto students and residence associations decried the museum's desperate money grab. Late into the night, they demanded that the human scale and civic spirit of the site along Queen's Park Road be honoured. The ROM's director and chief executive officer, William Thorsell, who received his share of abuse that night, withdrew the development proposal the following week.
AoD
THE YEAR IN REVIEW: ARCHITECTURE
By, of and for Canadians
Amid banal urban design, LISA ROCHON found three gems worth celebrating -- not least because they show off the country's talents
By LISA ROCHON
Thursday, December 29, 2005 Page R1
While ugly buildings and soulless suburbs continue to pummel Canadians with their stupidity, the year 2005 gave the country a taste of architecture defined by its daring, clarity and spectacle. Canada's National Ballet School, the Canadian War Museum and the Grande Bibliothèque du Québec rank as exceptional works of architecture. All three buildings opened this year. All three are transforming. And, all three happen to be designed by Canadians.
Architecture can allow any one of us to lose ourselves in space. Such is the achievement of the Canadian War Museum, a masterful building designed by Raymond Moriyama with his son, Jason, in a joint venture with Griffiths Rankin Cook Architects. Whereas much of Ottawa is a triumph of neo-Gothic boosterism of the federal government, the museum kneels its heavy concrete shape down by the edge of the Ottawa River. A visit requires time -- you'll find the doubt and terror of war in the slanted walls and floors. The memorial hall, cast in light on Remembrance Day, is otherwise awash in sorrow.
If most buildings make us feel like androids rather than sentient beings, there is richly deserved succour to be gained from a visit to the National Ballet School (NBS) in Toronto or the Grande Bibliothèque du Québec (GBQ) in Montreal. It's okay to feel alive in such places. In fact, it can't be helped. At the GBQ, designed by Patkau Architects of Vancouver, the public library is interpreted as a dramatic stage, with patrons exposed to the grand stairs, promenades and elevators and thrust through space to the greatest props of all: books. A similar kind of strategy has been used by the Patkaus to reinvent the Winnipeg Centennial Library, once considered to be a bit of a concrete bunker from the brutalism era of architecture. After three years of design and construction, the library reopened in November.
The NBS is all energy and grace, a heroic exemplar of a society that takes care of its young. The expanded, enlivened school is the result of a complex deal between Toronto, the CBC and Context condominium developers that allowed the school to receive half of a coveted site on Jarvis Street for a dollar. From complexity grew clarity -- the master plan by Goldsmith Borgal & Company allowed for the school to capture two historic jewels on the site while providing room for a contemporary intervention.
Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg Architects designed glass pavilions that wrap around the existing buildings to create a poetic town square and sublime ballet studios held behind a thin veil of glass. Now, the Toronto skyline is imprinted with a generation of gifted athletes.
Chucking functional, if forgettable architecture has its risks: Untested ideas almost always go over budget and past deadline.
Such is the case for the $233-million Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto designed by Daniel Libeskind, featuring a massively disturbed structure -- there are 3,000 pieces of steel engaged in the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal building and every single one of them is erected at acute angles without any perpendicular surfaces.
The Leslie L. Dan Pharmacy Building at the University of Toronto, about a year behind schedule, has two steel pods suspended within its 16-storey atrium. They are intended as cozy lecture rooms even if they look concocted for Woody Allen's Sleeper.
And, although it can do wonders to groove-ify a lifeless Main Street, spectacular architecture means more space is devoted to public amenities and less to education facilities or galleries. For $48-million, the newly commissioned Art Gallery of Alberta will grab 20,000 more square feet for public space, retail and restaurants, but less than half that for new gallery space.
This year, there were occasional glimpses of daring new ways to house Canadians in search of life in tall towers. The twisted tower might have been an innovation designed to give new sparkle to dense urban centres, such as Shanghai and Chicago, but it's also being tested in Canada's less harried zones.
In Halifax's business district, Hariri Pontarini Architects of Toronto has designed a "twisting" multiuse proposal on the site of the old TexPark. In Vancouver, Arthur Erickson -- Canada's own design superstar -- has produced schemes for two twisted towers. The 'Erickson' is to be constructed on the north shore of False Creek for the Concord Pacific Place development. His other gift to the city is a slim building on West Georgia Street that rotates 45 degrees between its base and its roof. Simon Lim, a young developer from China, has commissioned the tower in a gesture, Erickson says, "to prove to his family that he can do it." In a city in search of iconic architecture, the tower is worth watching not only for its unleashed form but for the company it'll be keeping -- the Shangri-La tower, planned to be 60 storeys, is designed by the master of contemporary point towers, the city's James Cheng, for a site across the street.
It was a year when the culture of architecture engaged with atypical ferocity and citizens managed with some success to beat back the ruination of their cities. Sweet was the triumph enjoyed by untold numbers in Toronto when citizens smashed a proposal for a 46-storey luxury tower just south of the Royal Ontario Museum. At a public consultation meeting in early November, University of Toronto students and residence associations decried the museum's desperate money grab. Late into the night, they demanded that the human scale and civic spirit of the site along Queen's Park Road be honoured. The ROM's director and chief executive officer, William Thorsell, who received his share of abuse that night, withdrew the development proposal the following week.
AoD