ENVISIONING THE CHÂTEAU
Students go Outside the Box
When the Fairmont Château Laurier’s parent company, Larco Investments Inc., unveiled its design plans for an addition in 2016, members of the public were largely unimpressed with the proposal that was essentially a box attached to the rear of the building, facing Major’s Hill Park.
Architect Peter Clewes, head of Toronto’s architects-Alliance firm that came up with the design, went back to the drawing board, but subsequent designs for the 160-plus room addition, also boxy in nature, have been greeted with only slightly less tepid enthusiasm than the first.
The process and public reaction gave Mariana Esponda, professor at Carleton University’s Azrieli School of Architecture, the idea to have third-year students come up with their own designs for the addition. Those designs were unveiled this weekend during an exhibition at the Hintonburg Community Centre.
“Because this whole Château Laurier addition has obviously interested a lot of people and attracted a lot of attention, I thought that more people should see these alternatives,” said Peter Coffman, not only an architecture historian and supervisor of Carleton’s history and theory of architecture program, but also a board member of Heritage Ottawa, which sponsored the show.
“The public conversation we’ve had about the whole project has been really constricted by the fact that we’ve been given so few options to consider. We were given a couple of boxes and people said, ‘No, we don’t like that,’ so we’re given a different box and then a different box with fins. But what the public has never been able to do is to look at some different options of what is possible here, what could an addition to the Château Laurier be.
“This building is so important and its setting is so incredibly important in terms of heritage, I think a really vigorous public conversation with an engaged public would be a productive thing,” Coffman added, “but we’re never really given that chance and it’s clear we’re not going to be given that chance, so I thought, ‘Well, let’s just do it without them.’”
Titled Outside the Box, the exhibit offered eight different possibilities created by 14 students. Some incorporated copper, already so familiar on the hotel’s roof. One featured a stepped look spilling from the hotel’s courtyard, invoking a comparison to the Rideau Canal’s locks directly beside the Château. Some offered modern interpretations of the hotel’s existing windows, sort of a present-day mirror, while yet another incorporated a historical, semicircular pattern of windows reflecting the century-old architecture of the former Union train station across Wellington Street.
The show, Coffman said, is also a perfect example of what a university should be doing. “We’re engaging with a really complex problem, we’re questioning assumptions, we’re generating ideas and we’re contributing to the public discourse. And that’s our job.”
If the comments left by visitors this weekend were any indication, there’s an appetite for a design that doesn’t completely ignore the original architecture that’s being complemented. “Larco needs to hire these people,” read one. “At least they looked at the site.”
“Every one of these is more imaginative and pleasing than the current plan!” another said.
Coffman is critical of the public consultation over the past couple of years. “There are two types of consultation,” he said. “There’s the consultation you undertake because you want to get ideas that will help you produce a better result, and then there’s the consultation you do because you want to tick off the box that says ‘consultation.’ I think we’ve had a lot of the latter and not so much of the former.”
The significance of the renovation cannot be overstated, he said. The building, one of Canada’s great railway hotels, is one of the most beloved edifices in Ottawa. Situated across from Parliament Hill and directly beside the Rideau Canal, a UNESCO world heritage site, it has enormous heritage value. “I’m hard-pressed to think of another heritage site across the country that can surpass where the Château Laurier is in the Parliamentary precinct. It’s been on the back of the dollar bill and on postage stamps. So much of our national narrative is encoded there.”
However, Coffman doesn’t expect Larco to greet the students’ new designs with any great interest or enthusiasm, nor does it need to: city hall has already accepted the company’s most recent design on the condition that it revise the plan to better incorporate the historic nature of the hotel, he said, and that amended design won’t go back to council, but rather straight to the city’s planning committee for site plan approval, where it’s unlikely to be rejected.
“Planning committee cannot reject a design based on heritage considerations,” Coffman said. “It’s simply not their mandate. They don’t have the jurisdiction. So, essentially, city council washed their hands of it and Larco only really has to satisfy city staff that they’ve ticked all the boxes. So I don’t have a lot of optimism.”