GALLERY RENEWED
The renovated Ottawa Art Gallery will literally connect to its famous collection and the family who donated it
Director Alex Badzak sees the Ottawa Art Gallery get a new look and a stronger connection to its famous Firestone art collection.
The Firestone house will rise again, in theme if not in fact, as the new Ottawa Art Gallery. When it is completed in late 2016, as part of the $34-million Arts Court redevelopment finally approved by City Council this week, it will echo the home that once held the gallery’s prized collection of Canadian art. The Rockcliffe home of O.J. Firestone and family was demolished years ago, but architects and the gallery salvaged key pieces of the house.
“Before it got knocked down we were able to save the beautiful staircase, and some other things,” says Alexandra Badzak, director of the OAG. The salvaged parts were donated by the Malhotra family, which bought the home and had it demolished.
The recycled parts will be more than a passing fancy for Joint Venture Architects, the partnership of Barry Padolsky Associates and KPMB that is building the gallery. “We’re actually reinstalling the staircase ... in the lobby,” Badzak says.
Indeed, the entire, spacious lobby will be inspired by the architecture and design of the Firestone home, which itself was purpose-built to house the family’s grand collection of works by the Group of Seven, and other important Canadian artists.
Firestone gave the home and collection to the Ontario Heritage Foundation, and the artwork was later moved to the OAG — where it immediately became the core of the gallery’s collection.
The house was modernist in design and, on the exterior at least, had all the coldness one might expect of the style. I’ve only seen photos, but from the outside it looked like a small, bland public school. Inside, apparently, was a different story.
The staircase is all teak and marble and brass, and architects’ drawings show it will be prominent in the new lobby. Also salvaged were teak wall panels, floor panels and ceiling coffers, all of which may be used to “reunite the house with the collection,” as architect Benjamin Gianni says in a video on the gallery’s website.
The gallery will be five levels, says Badzak, whose evident pleasure at seeing the project given the A-OK by council, after years of delays, could be bottled and sold as an all-purpose tonic. Inside the vaguely modular structure will be several exhibition spaces, a black-box theatre, and a large multi-purpose space, much of it visible from the street through walls of glass.
The lobby behind the McKenzie-Waller street entrance will have “a floating glass wall that has the opportunity to slide open, so our whole lobby can open itself up to the street,” Badzak says. Inside will be the gallery shop, and an interior that does indeed bring to mind the Firestone house.
New will be a café, which may be key to the gallery’s success, if it’s done right. The drawings look great; people lunching or enjoying a glass of wine behind glass walls will bring in pedestrian traffic, as will the lower level’s natural function as “a logical throughway from the (ByWard) market to the university (of Ottawa).” But the food has to be good, and not more of the dreadful fare served at Ottawa’s other galleries and museums. (National Gallery motto, “Picasso! Monet! Hot dogs!”)
“There’s a lot of models out there, not all them work ... It’s all placement and location,” Badzak says.
“You can’t just slap a model from another site into your space. You have to pay attention to what’s around.”
The space for temporary exhibitions, a level up, will be 4,400 square feet, at least double what it is today. There’ll be another, permanent gallery for the Firestone collection, and upstairs yet another large, permanent gallery space.
The upper level will also have two project galleries, one a black-box space for media work, and another space with glass frontage.
“We hope to put work in there that is a street draw — that is performance or light-based or whatever — that you can see it at night time.” It’ll have 250 retractable seats, ideal for the city’s animation festival or film festivals. It’ll connect to an outdoor terrace and be a money-maker for the gallery, as it’s rented our for various uses.
There’ll also be triple the restricted space, for curation and collection and conservation and such, the things only seen by gallery staff and favoured newspaper columnists.
Outdoors there’ll be art installations, including “a major commission” as part of a city policy of spending one-per cent of any project on public art.