The ironies of proximities in Ottawa: the memorial to Canadian Peacekeepers, the US Embassy behind.
short years later, President John F. Kennedy was killed and Lee Harvey Oswald declared that he was a patsy just before he too was silenced. The notion that two fundamentally opposed belief systems exist within one body is hardly new; Noam Chomsky and other cultural commentators have been bringing to light examples of this dichotomy for several decades. What is unsettling is that the architects of this project must have wrestled with this dichotomy before deciding on the comparatively benign expression of opposites expressed as differ- ing physical influences. Pity that. Given the embassy’s physical proxim - ity to the National Gallery’s engaging transparency, the Parliamentary Library’s deliberate vulnerability and the Byward Market’s intimate charms, the architects of this project chose not to present even a veneer of engagement, representative of democratic dialogue. Instead, we got a sulking, introverted hulk that is only nominally a response to its immediate neighbours. To borrow a phrase from Ron Keenberg, describing Mies Van Der Rohe’s application of steel to a concrete structure, it may be more appropriate to conclude that the architects of the American Embassy lied to tell a deeper truth.
A troubling aspect of this dichotomy is its portability. By this I mean the ability, beyond American borders, of the embassy’s proponents to weather sustained criticism by Canadian architects, local citizens and the media as the proposed design proceeded through the various permit-granting stages. Despite the opposition to this embassy on a number of highly articulated counts, the project proceeded into construction largely unscathed. This suggests that the values of the granting agencies and by extension, the Canadian government were closely aligned to their American cousins. Even before the embassy was completed, opposition, however annoying it may have been at the time was inconsequential in affecting any meaningful dialogue or adjustments to the project. An observer of the American political system in the late 1950s com- mented, in William Burroughs fashion, that the United States’ singular most important achievement was its ‘complete and utter sense of cor- ruption’ (this at a moment in time when Leave It To Beaver was being beamed into every American and most Canadian households). A few
Myron Nebozuk is an architect who turned down a job offer at Morphosis to work with the curious people at Manasc Isaac Architects in Edmonton. Likes his martinis with a lime twist. Greatest accomplishments: his two daughters,Veronika and Aniko.
ON SITE review 6: BEAUTY
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