Canadian Architectural Archives, the University of Calgary
Project 56 – Arthur Erickson A hypothetical project in the form of a sketch, Erickson’s Project 56 envisages a skyline for Vancouver that mirrors the silhouette of the mountains in the background. Although unrealised, the sketch was highly influential in shaping high-rise development policies at the end of the century.
City of Toronto Archives
Harbour City – Eb Zeidler Commissioned by the Ontario provincial government, Harbour City was to build on the success of Ontario Place, by creating an adjacent waterfront neighbourhood in place of the Toronto Island Airport. With 60,000 projected residents and an elaborate sys- tem of canals and bays, the plan if realised would have created one of the country’s most unique neighbourhoods.
Digital Collections: Housing Archive. Blackader- Lauterman Library of Architecture, McGill University
Fermont Plan – Desnoyers Schoenauer The plan for Fermont, a new iron ore town in Quebec,
pioneered many tenets of new town planning duplicated elsewhere, including compact housing to minimise infrastructure costs and a singular monumental building that acted as a windscreen for the rest of the town against the cold climate winds. urban design identity
introducting the Canadian Archive for Urban Speculation and Enquiry archives | rediscovering the immediate past by department of unusual certainties
Recently a group was formed out of the World Urban Forum to try and tackle this issue of Canadian urban design identity. The Canadian Council of Urbanism as they are called, rightly state that the Canadian urban situation is varied and unique and that we need to start tackling the question of what Canadian urbanism constitutes. Unfortunately, as a group of high-powered professionals including the chief planner of the City of Vancouver, the head of urban design at the City of Toronto, and principals from several large urban planning and design firms, their efforts have been exclusive and serve more to celebrate their own professional achievements rather than fleshing out a broad concept of urban design.A review of their work so far would have us believe that the entire concept of Canadian urbanism has been one of a heroic struggle against suburbanism and modernism.
Peeling back the layers, Canada has a much richer history of urbanism that we can draw from – from town settlement plans in the prairies by the Canadian Pacific Railway, to big-scaled modernist visions of Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto in the 1960s; from the social housing projects of CMHC to the garden suburbs of Mount Royal and Leaside. Many of these works have been edited out of our discourse on Canadian cities and original source material is difficult to find.
As a young urban design office in Canada, we face an identity crisis inherent in our passport. What does urban design mean in a nation that has practiced so little of it? Who are our national heroes? What are the great projects that we can seek inspiration from? It would seem that other nations would have it easier – with big characters pushing through big projects that have significantly impacted city landscapes, designers have a lot of contextual layers to draw from for their own designs. The Cerda block has served countless design projects in Barcelona.The Hausmannisation of Paris has inspired a thousand counter-manifestos.The Berlage Plan Zuid has inspired generations of Dutch urbanists.
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