NCC Capital Illumination Plan
 

NCC wants your feedback on its Capital Illumination Plan
Online public consultation on the plan closes Sunday

By: Alex Abdelwahab, Metro
Published on Mon Jul 03 2017

It’s time to have your say on the NCC’S Capital Illumination Plan 2017-2027, which is scheduled to launch this year.

The NCC is asking the public’s input on its newly released plan, through a questionnaire on its website, until Sunday, July 9.

The 121-page plan focuses on the downtown core of both Ottawa and Gatineau, but also extends from Metcalfe to the Canadian Museum of Nature, on the Ottawa side.

The plan aims to improve the “nighttime beauty of the Capital” by doing a better job of lighting iconic buildings and monuments on both sides of the river, including the Parliament buildings and Canadian Museum of History, while also reducing energy use.

It divides the type of lighting into six categories, including permanent functional lighting, illumination lighting, and dark-zone lighting. The plan includes parameters for when the specific lighting should be turned on or off and its intensity.

Among the guidelines are to “turn off indoor lighting of office buildings no later than one hour after they are no longer in use and until regular occupancy begins.”

The final plan will be presented to the NCC board of directors this fall.

http://www.metronews.ca/news/ottawa/...tion-plan.html

Save our skyline!!
 

Please help save Ottawa's skyline!!!

The National Capital Commission (NCC) wants to shut off the lights in our downtown hotels, office towers and condo buildings so that only a select few of the city's landmarks are visible at night.

Ottawa already has an inferiority complex when it comes to our mediocre skyline.We can't allow the NCC to make it worse by erasing the towers from our downtown. We can't allow Ottawa to become nothing more than a sterile "museum" piece with a select few institutional buildings.

Please complete the survey and tell the NCC that you want Ottawa to look like a true and complete urban centre, not just a post card from the 1920s.

We're more than just the capital, we are a real city of a million people. Our skyline must be visible in all its (pedestrian) glory.

I think this post IS the demonstration of aforementioned skyline inferiority complex.
But thanks for bringing this up.
Filled out the survey commending on their initiative to oblige office towers to turn off the lights late at night.

They are just trying to create a hierarchy of what is prominently lit more than others. If you have ever been to Prague, they do it quite well there.

http://s1.1zoom.net/big0/790/335227-svetik.jpg

The difference being that in Prague there are exactly zero "high" rises whose lights are dimmed, both in the old city and across the river at the castle (the view seen in the photo). I believe that's the OP's point: he's concerned about whatever skyline we have falling into darkness due to this proposal.

To better clarify my position, I agree with the idea of adding lighting to the Confederation Boulevard landmarks to add a bit of "hierarchy", as Kitchissippi puts it. I don't agree with shutting off the lights of every other building downtown.

There plan reminds me of this image;

http://cdn.skyrisecities.com/sites/d...7316-57755.png

The NCC dreams of chopping off the tops of our downtown towers, but this is their "next best thing"; just shut off the lights and make them disappear at night. We can't just erase the last 50 years of development to "preserve" the view from before 1967. With this proposal, the skyline will essentially be 2D, removing all the depth.

And that Prague example, waaayyyy to bright.

Don't like this plan at all. The Gatineau side is even more offensive as it makes Gatineau look like a ghost town/abandoned.

I 110% agree that office towers should turn off their lights. It shocks me that this doesn't happen already. It's absolutely absurd to have thousands of lights on all night long for no reason at all.

Having said that the NCC can't force a condo to have its lights off or blackout blinds at night. It's not WWII. A simple PWGSC policy to frigging turn the lights off a night is a good start and would go a loooooong way.

It's good that they're thinking about this, I suppose.

I wonder about safety concerns: aircraft, birds, etc.

If an aircraft is flying that low over downtown Ottawa, there are certainly bigger things to worry about. :stunned:

In regards to shutting the lights out... It's really only 3-4 months a year tourists are running around taking pictures... and while I agree with turning off "unnecessary" lights.. do we really want the city looking totally dead during the deep dark winter??

There's a difference between a dead city, and turning off the lights in an office tower. It's not as though they're requesting street lights be turned off and people not drive of walk on the streets.

For instance, the bank of Canada shuts down all of it's lights after a certain hour in the evening (save for stairwells and entrances), and most of the lights in the building are on motion sensors throughout the day, saving thousands of kWh of power.

Also airplanes don't rely on office lights being on to steer clear of tall buildings. There are blinking red lights to ward off airplanes.

The only thing that keeping every single light on in a tower accomplishes (I'm looking at you, L'Esplanade Laurier) is a waste of energy. Surprisingly, people don't know where the light switches are. Also, the cleaners need light, so some buildings leave ALL the lights on for cleaners. But from 10pm-6am, absolutely no one benefits from the lights being on. Both of these things can EASILY be corrected, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars PER BUILDING per year.

This conversation should have happened decades ago, and not just because the NCC wants new showcase lighting. The fact is, PWGSC is so behind the times and doesn't care about actually saving money for taxpayers. Private buildings: lights out. Public buildings: meh, leave them on, whatever.

Also, there are Transport Canada regulations about aviation hazard lights; any building or other structure tall or prominent enough to warrant it is still going to blink red at the top.

If the NCC wants to do something lighting-related, how about taking leadership against light pollution? Ottawa's night skies are becoming too bright.

The NCC's plan is not about light pollution or conserving energy, clearly as it is adding lights to prominent federal structures. It's about displaying what the buildings they deem worthy.

A city's skyline is its identity. Its face to the world. We wouldn't expect NYC to shut down all lights except for the Chrysler Building and Empire State. Or Toronto's lights on all buildings but the CN Tower and Royal York, or even Montreal, keeping only the Vieux Montréal and the Jacques Cartier Cross on top of Mount Royal a light.

I'm all for better lighting on our prominent buildings. I'm also not for completely shutting off the lights in our office towers for the reason J.OT said.

Yes, but as part of their light plan, they should do something to address light pollution.

There are many cities in this world, even in this country, whose mental image in my head is not of their skyline, and, frankly, given globalism and the international schools of architecture, and architectural penis-envy that leads almost every city without historical protection, height controls, or other rules to limit the construction of tall buildings, every city's skyline is starting to look like every other city's skyline.

There are very few cities with instantly-recognizable skylines, and apart from maybe half a dozen, most of those which are instantly-recognizable by their tall buildings, are ugly as hell. (Hello, Shanghai and Dubai). Even many cities with tall modern buildings are iconized by their non-tall and old ones: quick, is Paris the Eiffel Tower or La Défense? London, is it Westminster, the Tower, St. Paul's, or The Effing Shard?

If the "face" of Ottawa is more prominence for the official, holtplanian string of historical and government buildings along the Ottawa River, I'm quite OK with that: Canadians, and the non-Canadians who even know where or what Ottawa is, recognize Ottawa by the Peace Tower, Centre Block generally, the Parliamentary Precinct generally, or - heavy sigh for using this phrase - the buildings along "Confederation Boulevard" generally.

No one outside Ottawa gives two craps about World Exchange, Tower C, or those vertical bunkers in Hull. Truth be told, I'm half-tempted to edit "outside Ottawa" out of the preceding sentence.

And, in all seriousness, if the NCC wants to throw more light into the sky to highlight the iconic Ottawa buildings, it should bloody well reduce overall light pollution levels by reducing lux flow on other public properties, and doing what it can to encourage the private and non-federal property-owning sectors to do the same.

Direct link to the NCC's Capital Illumination Plan, 2017–2027:
http://s3.amazonaws.com/ncc-ccn/docu...2017-06-14.pdf

NCC Survey:
https://www.questionpro.com/a/TakeSu...nguageSelected

It's a step in the right direction, but it's still kind of boring...

Plain and simple: we need something like Times Square in Ottawa, maybe in the Market, or on Elgin.

boom!

But parking. Can't have that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Simple fact is that as property owners realize they can substantially reduce their $200,000 electricity bill, all the lights are out.

People taking photos at night are not taking photos of Place de Ville. They're taking photos of the peace tower and supreme court.

Leaving office lights buzzing all night simply because it looks nice is not a good argument.

All those landmark buildings you listed have accent lighting for the sole purpose of pointing them out at night in the sea of other office blocks.