Facelift should be easier on the eye
Donald Schmitt’s task wasn’t easy: Take another architect’s signature building, loved and loathed in equal measure, and give it a softer, modern face that welcomes people in a way its furrowed, brutalist brow never has before.
And finish the job in time for a splashy grand opening on Canada Day 2017, the pinnacle of celebrations marking the 150th anniversary of Confederation.
“It’s an extraordinary opportunity,” the architect said this week after an hour-long tour of the National Arts Centre, where he is presiding over its bold, $110.5-million architectural rejuvenation.
As machines beeped and screeched in the background, Schmitt and project architect Jennifer Mallard pulled back the curtain on the bustling construction site where dozens of workers buzzed with the certainty of a ticking clock.
Schmitt’s Toronto-based firm, Diamond Schmitt Architects, has added new layers on three sides of the building, all linked by a glass tower across from the National War Memorial that acts as a new public entrance. The tower’s hexagonal shape is one of several nods to the geometric order that defined the arts centre’s original design. (The pattern of repeating equilateral triangles in the Douglas fir ceiling panels throughout is another.)
Referred to as the lantern, four sides of the tower are clad in glass that’s enabled with LED technology so it can transform into a giant digital screen and livestream events from inside the building or across the country.
There’s also a new lobby off Elgin Street, a rebuilt Fourth Stage (with a much higher ceiling) and Panorama Room (with double the capacity), an education room for school groups, and several new spaces for casual concerts, pre- or post-show talks, community events and corporate meetings.
Mallard pointed out the quarried stone from Owen Sound, Ont., that’s being used for the lobby floor, while high above are the laminated timber coffers, which were prefabricated at a shop in Chesterville to save time. (Production of the coffers occurred concurrently with demolition activities at the site.)
The addition basically grows out of foundations that have existed since the building, designed by Polish architect Fred Lebensold, opened in 1969. The team used cues from the original building to guide the addition, but emphasized light and transparency instead of opacity and heaviness, Mallard explained.
Modern touches include a new coffee shop in the lobby, free WiFi throughout the building, and natural light at every turn.
What Schmitt has created is antithetical to Lebensold’s brutalist, fortress-like building that, since the day it opened, has turned its back to the city. Yet he’s done it out of reverence for the original, he says. It’s important to understand a building’s strengths and weaknesses, but not be afraid to make changes.
“I love this building, I think it’s a stunning building,” he said. “But it’s a building that architects love more than the general public or the people who work in (it).
“Should performing arts be in a fortress? I don’t think so. It should reach out.”
The NAC will reopen in three phases. Visitors on Canada Day can use the new, fully accessible Elgin Street entrance, visit the relocated box office and new washrooms, and catch their breath in the sunny lower atrium.
This fall, the atrium’s second floor, including several new performance and event spaces with tremendous views of iconic capital buildings, will open, as well as the transformed Fourth Stage.
The expanded Panorama Room, overlooking the Rideau Canal, reopens next February.
Meanwhile, the $114.9-million upgrade of production equipment, from sound and lights to projection, acoustics and those plushy new seats in Southam Hall, is to be completed in 2019, just in time for the NAC’s 50th anniversary.
Future plans could include new landscaping and an outdoor amphitheatre to the north of the building and expanded rehearsal and production space on the south side along Mackenzie King Bridge.
Schmitt’s interventions are controlled and proportional, “but the impact is huge,” he said.
The original building is 1.1 million square feet; the new and renovated spaces measure about 78,000 square feet.
Architecture is a public art: Everyone sees it and has an opinion about it. Given the NAC’s prominence — both in location and mandate as the national stage for performing arts — failure is not an option.
“Everybody who comes to Ottawa will see this building, so there’s a certain pressure to get it right,” Schmitt said.
The architect was to fly to Oman later that day to visit another project, but will be back in Ottawa for the NAC’s official opening on July 1, when 150 people, including architects, construction workers and NAC staff members, will cut the ribbon. mpearson@postmedia.com twitter.com/mpearson78