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The latest plans for an addition to the Château Laurier would have been a good starting point. They can’t be the end.
Two years after throwing up a first proposal that practically everyone panned, Larco Investments finally has a proposal that looks as though it was done up by someone who’s at last seen the Château Laurier before.
The latest proposal is smaller, so from Major’s Hill Park it looks less like a determined attempt to hide the original hotel. Larco’s cut the proposed addition from 12 storeys to seven, so no part of it is tall enough to obscure the existing hotel’s distinctive roof. The number of rooms is down from about 200 to 164; a smaller structure will be a bit cheaper to build but it means giving up a whole lot of revenue for as long as the addition stands.
It includes some of the same Indiana limestone that clads the original Château and its various additions. It has some vertical bronze strips that are similar in material to the Château’s copper roof and ornaments, and similar in shape to ornaments on the addition to the Government Conference Centre on the other side of Rideau Street, which is being renovated to hold the Senate while Parliament’s Centre Block is fixed up.
You might not be able to see both at once from anywhere, but architecturally linking two buildings that have a common heritage as a train station and its hotel is a nice idea.
And yet.
“The proposed addition is a relentlessly horizontal rectangular box consisting of flat surfaces and right angles,” says formal commentary given to the city by David Jeanes of Heritage Ottawa, the advocacy group. “No amount of refinement of design details or material selection can overcome this fundamental incompatibility. There is an opportunity here to add to the experience of the Château, but this design simply gets in the way.”
The plan is misbegotten, in Heritage Ottawa’s view, and cannot be fixed.
The city’s heritage planners actually like the plain flat roof in the current proposal because it competes less with the Château’s busy top floors — the steeply pitched copper, windows, towers and turrets. Keep it low and simple, they say. So there are opposite views here from the city’s credentialed experts and from the volunteers who protect Ottawa’s historic buildings out of sheer love for them.
Architect Peter Clewes made his name building modernist condominiums in Toronto, including glass-box additions to a historic church and to the Distillery District. His whole thing, when dealing with a heritage building, is violent contrast — Clewes designs buildings of the 21st century, disavowing connections to previous eras. “Contextualism,” the idea that new buildings should try to fit in, is anathema.
The National Arts Centre’s Kipnes Lantern, as it was being finished.
Total rejection of the existing building is a legitimate (if facile) way of dealing with the architectural principle that when you’re adding to a historic structure you shouldn’t try to copy it outright. There are other approaches. The National Arts Centre’s new Kipnes Lantern facing Elgin Street adds to the NAC’s trademark hexagons but uses glass instead of pebbled concrete for a very different effect — that’s a straightforward application of the principle and it works.
In a sense even adopting the old Château’s stone and metals betrays Clewes’s very different philosophy, which is probably why it took two years and three soundly rejected iterations before we got to one that’s minimally acceptable.
The Château Laurier is the capital’s second-most distinctive building after Centre Block, though, and “minimally acceptable” isn’t enough. The plans have only just made it into territory where we can have a reasonable discussion about how to make them good. Larco is sacrificing to come up with a building the authorities could approve and Ottawans might accept. At last, it seems like they’re actually trying.
Major’s Hill Park to the north is a major venue for Canada Day and the Tulip Festival. People walk through it on their way between Parliament Hill and the Museum of History. The Château Laurier’s north side is part of the view from the museum, from the Ottawa River, from the Alexandra Bridge, from the Bytown Locks. We throw the word “iconic” around too easily, but the Château Laurier is unquestionably an icon.
The city’s heritage experts are recommending City Hall sign off on the latest proposal but city councillors don’t have to agree. When visitors ask, “How did that get built next to it?” we don’t want to have to say, “Yes, but you should have seen the first draft.”
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
Two years after throwing up a first proposal that practically everyone panned, Larco Investments finally has a proposal that looks as though it was done up by someone who’s at last seen the Château Laurier before.
The latest proposal is smaller, so from Major’s Hill Park it looks less like a determined attempt to hide the original hotel. Larco’s cut the proposed addition from 12 storeys to seven, so no part of it is tall enough to obscure the existing hotel’s distinctive roof. The number of rooms is down from about 200 to 164; a smaller structure will be a bit cheaper to build but it means giving up a whole lot of revenue for as long as the addition stands.
It includes some of the same Indiana limestone that clads the original Château and its various additions. It has some vertical bronze strips that are similar in material to the Château’s copper roof and ornaments, and similar in shape to ornaments on the addition to the Government Conference Centre on the other side of Rideau Street, which is being renovated to hold the Senate while Parliament’s Centre Block is fixed up.
You might not be able to see both at once from anywhere, but architecturally linking two buildings that have a common heritage as a train station and its hotel is a nice idea.
And yet.
“The proposed addition is a relentlessly horizontal rectangular box consisting of flat surfaces and right angles,” says formal commentary given to the city by David Jeanes of Heritage Ottawa, the advocacy group. “No amount of refinement of design details or material selection can overcome this fundamental incompatibility. There is an opportunity here to add to the experience of the Château, but this design simply gets in the way.”
The plan is misbegotten, in Heritage Ottawa’s view, and cannot be fixed.
The city’s heritage planners actually like the plain flat roof in the current proposal because it competes less with the Château’s busy top floors — the steeply pitched copper, windows, towers and turrets. Keep it low and simple, they say. So there are opposite views here from the city’s credentialed experts and from the volunteers who protect Ottawa’s historic buildings out of sheer love for them.
Architect Peter Clewes made his name building modernist condominiums in Toronto, including glass-box additions to a historic church and to the Distillery District. His whole thing, when dealing with a heritage building, is violent contrast — Clewes designs buildings of the 21st century, disavowing connections to previous eras. “Contextualism,” the idea that new buildings should try to fit in, is anathema.
The National Arts Centre’s Kipnes Lantern, as it was being finished.
Total rejection of the existing building is a legitimate (if facile) way of dealing with the architectural principle that when you’re adding to a historic structure you shouldn’t try to copy it outright. There are other approaches. The National Arts Centre’s new Kipnes Lantern facing Elgin Street adds to the NAC’s trademark hexagons but uses glass instead of pebbled concrete for a very different effect — that’s a straightforward application of the principle and it works.
In a sense even adopting the old Château’s stone and metals betrays Clewes’s very different philosophy, which is probably why it took two years and three soundly rejected iterations before we got to one that’s minimally acceptable.
The Château Laurier is the capital’s second-most distinctive building after Centre Block, though, and “minimally acceptable” isn’t enough. The plans have only just made it into territory where we can have a reasonable discussion about how to make them good. Larco is sacrificing to come up with a building the authorities could approve and Ottawans might accept. At last, it seems like they’re actually trying.
Major’s Hill Park to the north is a major venue for Canada Day and the Tulip Festival. People walk through it on their way between Parliament Hill and the Museum of History. The Château Laurier’s north side is part of the view from the museum, from the Ottawa River, from the Alexandra Bridge, from the Bytown Locks. We throw the word “iconic” around too easily, but the Château Laurier is unquestionably an icon.
The city’s heritage experts are recommending City Hall sign off on the latest proposal but city councillors don’t have to agree. When visitors ask, “How did that get built next to it?” we don’t want to have to say, “Yes, but you should have seen the first draft.”
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
