Mining communities have traditionally had an ephemeral, transient quality due to the finite nature of natural resources. Miners typically prefer to live with their families in trailers so they can quickly pull up stakes and move on to the next claim. Hirshhorn and his associates believed the volume of uranium ore in Northern Ontario was extensive enough to merit a true settlement with proper infrastructure. The first practical response to this need was the creation of Elliot Lake, Ontario, a modest planned town which has gradually broadened its industry to forestry and tourism as the mining boom slowed. The town of Hirshhorn was to be different. It was a town devoted to beauty, culture and education. It was one man’s idea of an infrastructure for social progress, imposed upon the landscape and inhabited by real townspeople. The project found close relatives in the experiments of company-funded collective living such as the Godin Familistères in nineteenth century France. But Hirshhorn’s emphasis on culture made it unique. He compulsively collected the art of living artists. His style was nicely described by Lilian Harmon: ‘Hirshhorn bought art like he was at the roulette wheel’. Yet Hirshhorn never purchased art for profit. According to the collector, he bought for love and he bought for posterity, with the notion that the works would be left for the enjoyment of the public. The same sense of public spirit lay at the heart of the Hirshhorn town project. It was a vision of public life fortified by art and culture, masterminded by a private individual. But at Hirshhorn, Ontario the expansive public spirit of the mining millionaire was overwhelmed by the protectionist fears of neighbouring communities and the town was never built. The project may not have had huge architectural merit, but it had value as a socio- cultural experiment, and for the peculiarity of its anchoring concept: the Hirshhorn Museum in the wilderness of Canada. Post-script Joseph Hirshhorn left three traces: two at the site of Hirshhorn, Ontario and one on the National Mall in Washington, DC. First, the Hirshhorn Guesthouse, designed by Philip Johnson as a glass-walled flat-roofed Miesian rectangle, surrounded by forest and overlooking Lake Huron. The house was based on a speculative model designed for another Johnson client in 1954. The architect sold a copy to Hirshhorn, which was hastily built near the future townsite in the spring of 1955. The house expresses the same deliberate friction of technological Modernism inserted into an unspoiled natural setting found in Johnson’s town plan. Second, we have the environmental stain left by uranium mining. The mining and processing of uranium ore has left towering deposits of radioactive tailings throughout the former wilderness surrounding Hirshhorn’s townsite. These moonscapes are the legacy of Cold War industry, the dystopian flipside of Hirshhorn’s utopian public schemes. Finally, we have the Hirshorn Museum designed by Gordon Bunshaft in Washington, DC. The museum’s hovering cylinder is a testament to the architect’s investigation of the limits of form generated by new building technologies. –
Panda Collection, Canadian Architectural Archives, University of Calgary
Robert del Tredici
41
Smithsonian Archives 95-264
from the top: Hirshhorn Guest House, Lake Huron, Ontario. Philip Johnson, architect, 1955 Tailing area for Stanrock Mine at Elliot Lake. A wall of radioactive sand 10m high holds back the tailing, 1987 The Hirshhorn Museum under construction, 1970
First published in roulotte.03, Barcelona, July 2007
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