The installation at the Hirshhorn Museum titled Terence Gower: Public Spirit was made up of a 3-minute animation (projected at 3 x 5m), a two-part aluminium sculpture representing the two principle buildings of Hirshhorn, Ontario, and four showcases full of original documents on the following themes: 1 the 1955 plan for Hirshhorn, Ontario 2 Joseph Hirshhorn’s uranium mining activities, and mining in Canada in general 3 the Hirshhorn Guest House, designed by Philip Johnson and actually built near the site of the town 4 the Hirshhorn collection in 1955 (some works on paper and illustrations) notes on Terence Gower: Public Spirit – the vitrines, the video, the structures One of the things that triggered this whole project for me was that when I was in grade 2, a boy transfered into our elementary school when his family moved to Vernon from Kitimat. I remember other children taunting him about the fact that he didn’t come from a real town, as Kitimat had been built in the 1950s. This really stayed with me, the idea of the new town, and then came back full force in my research on Clarence Stein (one of the planners of Kitimat, incidentally) and the New Town Movement as background to my work on the Hirshhorn, Ontario story. Clarence Stein’s Toward New Towns for America , published in 1951, would have been required reading for anyone embarking on a project like the design for Hirshhorn, Ontario. Though I didn’t find explicit mention of Stein in Johnson’s archive, his project exhibits all the characteristics of a Stein plan. I like to think of Hirshhorn, Ontario as a pristine example of New Town utopian urbanism, though it was planned to serve the first stage of the atomic weapon production chain. The irony is that Clarence Stein’s best-known post-war projects were built at the other end of this production chain: they were the satellite towns built just outside the estimated radioactive fallout radius around Washington, DC. –
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