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Art and Politics. Sarah Jennings
Читать онлайн.Название Art and Politics
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isbn 9781770706002
Автор произведения Sarah Jennings
Жанр История
Издательство Ingram
From the start, the change of site from Nepean Point to Confederation Square presented huge additional costs and problems. The designers were determined to avoid the mistakes of Montreal’s Place des Arts, where a single exit kept visitors sitting in their cars among exhaust fumes waiting to leave. The garage in Ottawa was to open in several directions; an exit on Slater Street, a block away from the centre, required a concrete tunnel for several hundred yards. Its excavation brought furious complaints about dust from the British High Commission, located directly overhead on Elgin Street. As the plans worked their way through various government departments in the traditional approval process, Dr. R.F. Legget, the National Research Council’s building research director and a soils expert, warned that if the design team wanted an underground garage alongside the Rideau Canal, they were sure to have water problems. He was right, and the design for the 900-car garage required special shoring, which was prohibitively expensive. Lebensold also determined that having the building’s main entrance open to the world, facing Confederation Square, would create massive traffic jams. Despite objections, he made the controversial decision to turn the back of his building to the city and to lead people down a long curving ramp to the front door facing the canal. The basic hexagonal shape of the building was taken, Lebensold claimed, from the shape of the site—and he made it the dominant motif throughout the rambling structure.
Southam was “so convinced we were doing the right thing”9 that cost remained a secondary issue in his thinking. His relationship with Langford could be “abrasive” at times, as the two of them struggled to keep the project under control. Despite these efforts, costs began to jump upward in leaps and bounds.
To kick-start the project, James Langford broke the job down into three separate contracts. The first was for the enormous excavation of the site. Photo © Ottawa Citizen/ UPI. Reprinted by permission.
The building was to be “an architectural and engineering marvel,” well beyond anything that had been built in the city since before the war. The change in location from the more distant Nepean Point to the site along Confederation Square opened up possibilities for a cultural hub to the city which had been partially foreseen. On the land immediately adjacent to the south of the hexagonal NAC site on Elgin Street, the previous Diefenbaker government had already proposed a large museum. The working drawings by Vancouver architect Ned Pratt had been prepared for tender, and the old Roxborough Apartments on the corner of Laurier and Elgin streets, where former Prime Minister Mackenzie King had made his Ottawa home, had already been torn down in preparation for future construction. When Langford arrived in town as the new chief architect, he saw immediately that the two cultural buildings could be complementary to each other, and he set about trying to have Pratt and Lebensold talk to each other. Before he could make much headway, however, the museum project was cancelled by the new Liberal government. The land where it was to be built sits empty to this day.
As more construction problems cropped up, the price tag of the Arts Centre accelerated, moving rapidly from $16 million to $21 million and then to over $26 million. Each time Southam called on the prime minister to break the bad news, Pearson would say, usually after a reflective moment, “We shall do it all the same”10—and so inform his finance minister, Mitchell Sharp. As the price went up, there were cries of outrage in the House of Commons, and Pearson was called upon on several occasions to issue reassuring statements and progress reports to the parliamentarians. Later, Sharp would explain that, in Cabinet, “the Prime Minister was so for it that we did not feel it appropriate to oppose it.”11 Southam concurred: “We felt unassailable really. It was the right thing to do and the right time to do it.”
For the independently wealthy Southam, the times were exciting: his parents had had a similar dream, and “now here we were given the opportunity.” He was in his element. But for others involved in the job, it was not so easy. Langford’s bosses railed at him for not controlling the development better, and at one point after the site had been excavated and the foundations put in, serious consideration was given to filling the hole in again or filling it up with water, to make it into a lagoon in the summer and a skating rink in winter. Langford worried constantly, but Southam remained calm. He had his personal pipeline to the prime minister and, through his own shrewd organization, he also had the best artistic people in the country behind the development. “We had enormous impetus,” he recalled. “There were a lot of talented people behind it. This gave me the energy to meet with the prime minister.”12 In Canada, in the early 1960s, these connections were enough to get the job done.
Besides car fumes, dust, and water problems, the project presented a fascinating array of structural issues. Engineer John Adjeleian, one of Canada’s leading structural engineers with Toronto’s SkyDome later to his credit, became architect Lebensold’s alter ego, taking the architect’s concepts and translating them into structural reality. The lively and intelligent American-trained Adjeleian was of Armenian origin, and he meshed well with the headstrong Lebensold. The two wrestled constantly with the rising costs, as Lebensold called on the resourceful Adjeleian to come up with economical solutions to his artistic vision.
Good acoustics were a priority, and the mechanical-electrical systems would have to run silently to accommodate both music and the spoken word. Although not a theatre person, Adjeleian became fascinated with the paraphernalia involved in theatres and concerts halls: screens, pulleys, and backstage equipment, the sound baffles and special music shells that had to be planned for and incorporated into the building. The requirements for the elaborate curtain being created for the opera hall by artist Micheline Beauchemin—how it would be hung, where it would rise and fall—opened a new world to him. His most important engineering achievement was to create the column-free spaces that Lebensold wanted throughout the building. The three tiers of balconies in the opera hall cantilevered out seventy feet over the auditorium, and Adjeleian marvelled years later that “you could look up and not see a column anywhere. You could see three balconies of people without a supporting column! How,” he asked, “did we do that?”13
He also saved money. One initiative, after much heated discussion among the consultants, called for the use of moulded fibreglass in the ceiling tiles, then an architectural precedent. Another of his more interesting challenges was the creation of the box seats, and especially the Royal (State) Box, a nicety that the protocol-conscious Southam had insisted upon. That particular conundrum was how to cantilever the box without having another box hanging over it in the tier above, as happened in the classic European opera houses. This thorny question occupied Adjeleian for weeks.
The hexagonal grid that dominated the building design deviated entirely from traditional right-angled solutions. Some critics would later say the building suffered from “hexagonitis,” but this shape was a popular innovation in modern architecture. The most repeated form in nature, used by bees in constructing honeycombs, it had recently been applied in Canada by Buckminster Fuller in his design for the U.S. Pavilion at Expo 67. Everything was triangular, “more mathematical than material,” Adjeleian recalled, and this shaping required “thousands upon thousands of calculations.”14 Computer-aided design was not yet in common use in architecture, and all the work was done the old-fashioned way with a slide rule.
Similarly, the use of concrete for the building, which “enabled the marriage of architecture and structure,” was at the cutting edge during the sixties. The style would later become known as “brutalist,” but it was considered then as “an expression of the time.” Outside the building, an entire city street was rerouted to accommodate the construction.
Adjeleian, despite his later triumphs, always maintained