Commentary
In Ian Fleming’s 007 novel “For Your Eyes Only,” James Bond visits Ottawa where he has a meeting booked with the RCMP commissioner, and so he reports to the Department of Justice alongside the Parliament Buildings. This is how Fleming described the building and, by extension, Ottawa generally: “Like most Canadian public buildings, the Department of Justice is a massive block of grey masonry built to look stodgily important and to withstand the long and hard winters.”
Fleming’s description isn’t exactly wrong, but it’s a bit harsh. Built in the 1930s, the Justice Building is a fine piece of official architecture along Wellington Street. Like the Confederation Building nearby, it was designed in the Château style of our early-20th-century railway hotels and stations and other government buildings. Think of the Château Laurier at the other end of Wellington Street, along with the Banff Springs Hotel and the Château Frontenac in Quebec City. Official Ottawa also long favoured neo-Gothic and Tudor Gothic styles like the Connaught Building, the Royal Canadian Mint, and of course the Parliament Buildings—all “stodgily important” and built to withstand the weather, yet nevertheless beautiful.
The Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Quebec, directly across the Ottawa River from Parliament Hill, on April 19, 2024. 4kclips/Shutterstock
But look east from Parliament Hill or across the Ottawa river to Gatineau and you’ll see some very different structures. Irregular slabs of dark concrete rise up out of the earth like a Lego-built star destroyer: the Pearson Building. Nearby, a strange assortment of triangles, pyramids, and rectangular slabs and cubes, like rubble abandoned by a child, form the Diefenbaker Building. And from Place du Portage across the water, a crushing mass of concrete government office towers glowers back. The strange, undulating curves and domes of the Canadian Museum of History to the east will relieve you, but only a little.
What happened? In short, what happened was modernism and postmodernism.
The catalyst for change was a 1960 speech by Prime Minister John Diefenbaker to the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada. “In a few short years this nation will be celebrating its Centennial,” he stated. “I ask that you, the members of this profession, should … present to the Centennial Committee as soon as possible your views and suggestions for this celebration; something to touch the hearts of Canadians, something to represent the unity of our country.”
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A noble but flawed aim! In total, 860 buildings were constructed across the country to honour the centenary of Confederation in 1967. But architects were given free rein to design whatever they wanted, and so they strove to impress one another—not to continue a tradition or cater to public taste.
A few buildings like the Museum of Vancouver and the Ontario Science Centre were genuinely creative, albeit eccentric. But most, like Winnipeg’s Centennial Concert Hall, the Arts and Culture Centre in St. John’s, Newfoundland, and the Fathers of Confederation Memorial Building in Charlottetown, P.E.I., were extremely unattractive.
That last example—now known as the Confederation Centre of the Arts—resembles a grim, Soviet-style mausoleum. Similarly, the Burnaby campus of Simon Fraser University, opened in 1965, was so bleak and dystopian that it was used as the set for sinister American government buildings in the “X Files.”
Not all 20th-century architecture is necessarily ugly. Far from it. The variety and simplicity of the early modernists was carried forward into the 20th century by Frank Lloyd Wright and Richard Neutra (among others), and their works are still widely admired. But the official style in Canada tended to follow a different example.
The Fathers of Confederation Memorial Building in Charlottetown, now called the Confederation Centre of the Arts, was built in the brutalist style. Alan Kean/Shutterstock
This was the poured-concrete technique known as brutalism—so called from the French expression for raw concrete: béton brut. From the mid-20th century onwards, nothing said “important building” like the monstrosities at Place du Portage and the Pearson Building, along with dozens of other civic structures throughout Canada. Apart from their soul-crushing drabness and gigantism, they are difficult and expensive to heat, and even hard to get in and out of.
But they were cheap and fast to build, which appealed in a war-ravaged Europe. And brutalism seemed to embody the opening of a new world of limitless possibilities. But with few exceptions, this is not how contemporary architecture evolved.
It’s now stereotyped and hackneyed. Brutalism and modernism may be fading, but postmodernism has stepped up. Instead of unimaginative simplicity we now endure absurdity, asymmetry, discomfort, and strangeness which comes across as one huge architectural spoof played on the common man. For a sense of this transformation, consider the newly renovated Stanley A. Milner Library in Edmonton—a 1960s modernist rectangular design re-constructed as a jumble of ungainly shapes and angles.
Happily, there are early signs of change abroad that may point the way to renewal. The famous rebuilding of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris to its original state is one glorious example. The eastern German cities of Potsdam and Dresden, both largely destroyed in World War II, have been cleared of their hideous Soviet-era buildings and reconstructed according to their old Baroque plans. The medieval and baroque refurbishment of the castle above Budapest, Hungary, is nearly finished. And Donald Trump’s second presidency opened with an executive order requiring federal civic architecture to be beautiful once again.
Canada should follow suit. The current rehabilitation of our Parliament Buildings in Ottawa is a good pretext for a new generation of civic architecture. A future Canadian prime minister could invite architects to design new buildings for a new quarter-century emphasizing continuity and harmony with traditional styles, and warn that any designs that don’t meet such criteria will be discarded. It’s worth a try.
Michael Bonner is a political consultant with Atlas Strategic Advisors, contributing editor to the Dorchester Review, and author of “In Defense of Civilization: How Our Past Can Renew Our Present.”
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
