Protect Sears building, Kitchener heritage committee says
Owner willing to ‘commemorate the pre-cast cladding’
KITCHENER — Kitchener’s heritage committee rejected the advice of the city’s heritage planners and moved to prevent the demolition of the Sears building at Fairview Park mall.
The heritage committee passed a motion calling for the iconic 1965 building to be protected with a heritage designation, after a number of people came to the committee’s Tuesday meeting urging that the building be saved. Council will have the final say on whether to protect the building when it meets Nov. 19.
Designation would give the building extra protection, since council would have to approve any alterations to the heritage elements, or demolition.
The Sears building, with its distinctive facade of ribbed, precast concrete, was built in 1965 as the anchor store for the new mall. It was built in the Kennedy-era International style and is unique in the area. The building is one of the first in this part of Ontario to be built entirely of precast concrete.
The building’s owner Cadillac Fairview has applied to the city for a demolition permit as part of a major redevelopment of the mall. Cadillac Fairview is one of the largest real estate organizations in North America.
Cadillac Fairview says it will urge council not to designate the building.
“If the property designation were increased, then the project as envisaged would stop,” Finley McEwen, Cadillac Fairview’s senior vice-president of development, said in an email.
“The building’s exterior is clad with solid pre-cast panels that block visibility and access to the interior. In our design proposal, we are trying to create more animated buildings with operable entrances and windows to let light into the building interior using warmer-feeling materials on a more pedestrian scale,” McEwen said.
But several people urged the heritage committee to save the building.
“Kitchener has thousands and thousands of buildings,” yet only 230 are on the city’s register of heritage buildings, said Sandra Parks, a retired heritage planner with the city who spoke on behalf of the Architectural Conservancy of Ontario. “It’s a limited resource that is gradually being chipped away . ... This building is part of that authentic Kitchener.”
The redevelopment gives a nod to the area’s industrial past with a tall brick chimney and a replica of an old-fashioned water tower, she said. “Why build a fake brickand-beam building when we already have an authentic midcentury modern one?”
The plan would demolish almost the entire facade of the Sears building, saving a section of it along a walkway on the north side of the building. The original six-metre, white vertically lined panels each weigh 7,250 kilograms, topping 2.5metre-high walls of dark green glazed brick.
City heritage staff acknowledged the building’s heritage significance, but recommended that the city allow the demolition, since Cadillac Fairview has made it clear it’s not interested in designation. The city could likely save more of the building’s heritage by working with the owner rather than forcing designation on an unwilling owner, staff said.
The committee voted 6-4 to ask council to move to designate the building. Cadillac Fairview’s plan to save a portion of the facade in the least visible location on the building “is a very weak thing,” said committee member Peter Ciuciura.
Cadillac Fairview said it’s willing to “commemorate the pre-cast cladding in an appropriate, mutually acceptable way by preserving several hundred linear feet of it in a location where it can be viewed and explained to the public with interpretive panels.”