Resignations a wake-up call
When it comes to designing quality space, there is something broken at city hall, according to Rick MacEwen, one of seven architects who resigned from the city’s Downtown Ottawa Urban Design Review Panel yesterday.
Imagine Ottawa without any of the property built and maintained by the federal government — Parliament Hill, the Rideau Canal, Vincent Massey and Gatineau Parks, the Experimental Farm, Rideau Hall and the River Parkways.
Now, remove any building older than 30 years old, the churches and the buildings in the ByWard Market. “The stuff you are left with is purely unremarkable. As an architect, that’s a damning confession, but other cities do better than we do,” said MacEwen, a partner with Watson MacEwen Teramura Architects.
To illustrate his point, MacEwen pointed out that in the last 25 years, Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver have won dozens of Governor General’s Medals of Architecture. Ottawa’s solitary medal during that time was for the federally owned and built Canadian War Museum.
The last straw was the Lansdowne Partnership plan, he said.
Councillors have consistently ignored the city’s official plan by accepting cheap and easy designs for new buildings, he said.
The resignation is intended to be wake-up call to take design more seriously.
“We could send letters and have meetings and exchange emails and it would not be effective. It becomes lost on these guys,” he said. “The folks on city council are oblivious to anything unless you wave it in their faces and make a big deal about it.”
