Land Use Plan for Hirshhorn, Ontario
John B. Parkin and Associates fonds. Canadian Architectural Archives, University of Calgary. Accession 1A/75.01 PAR 55300
In 1955, Hirshhorn decided to give something back to the region that had made him so wealthy: he devised a utopian city of culture. Hirshhorn, Ontario would house thousands of new mining personnel and also Hirshhorn’s growing art collection in a museum and sculpture park in the centre of the community along with a theatre, concert hall and library. Other public and commercial facilities were to be similarly clustered in a town centre dominated by a tower for the offices of the mining administration: a symbol of private enterprise behind this impressive display of public spirit. The architect of the scheme, Philip Johnson, came into Hirshhorn’s life through his wife, painter Lilian Harmon. In 1952 Johnson offered his design services gratis to Harmon’s synagogue, but there was suspicion that Johnson’s proposal was an attempt to buy back the confidence of Jews after his very public pro-Nazi
period in the 1930s. Eventually Johnson was granted the synagogue project, which led through Harmon to four commissions (just one completed) given him by Hirshhorn, himself a Jew alert to anti- Semitism. In the 1950s Philip Johnson was still closely mimicking the architecture of his ‘Master’ Mies van der Rohe. I would argue that Johnson’s interest in Mies was largely formal, disconnected from the work’s underlying architectural philosophy. Throughout his career, Johnson designed according to a series of styles, starting with the International Style (his own term), moving on to Historicism and ending with ‘Deconstruction’. In Hirshhorn, Ontario, Johnson references Mies’ IIT campus, then nearing completion in Chicago. The somewhat bland town plan was livened up by the architect and clients’ conception of the ‘Tower in Nature’ – the mining company’s office tower rising out of the wilderness.
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animation: Sticky Pictures, Brooklyn
Video still from Wilderness Utopia (Terence Gower 2008)
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