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Posted Dec 15, 2019, 1:52 PM
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Moderator
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Join Date: Mar 2012
Location: Ottawa
Posts: 29,131
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From Urbsite. A little history on the building. It frustrates me how this city treats historic buildings. It's all about bricks and windows, not the structure and interior where the history took place. Considering the shape of this building, there really is no excuse.
Note that the Urbsite article contains even more images and articles not copied on here.
Quote:
TAKING THE BANDAGES OFF THE MEDICAL ARTS BUILDING'S FACADECTOMY
As heirlooom buildings go the Medical Arts Building is an old chestnut still roasting on the fire. It was once deemed unworthy of protection. In 1985 when the local community association submitted 180 Metcalfe Street for heritage designation the City of Ottawa refused. In 2015, thirty years later it finally designated the building for its historic and architectural value as ‘a unique and well detailed example of an Art Deco building in downtown Ottawa’. The Medical Arts Building has now gone under wraps for a façadectomy. When the bandages are removed several years from now its historic south, east and north walls will re-emerge attached to the bottom of a 27-storey condominium apartment tower. The project’s commencement also coincides with the 90th anniversary of the medical building’s opening in the 1929.
For its time this structure was a model of modern efficiency, designed for a real estate consortium of 50 local doctors and dentists who had visited similar developments in Montreal and Toronto for inspiration. Despite its opening of the eve of the Depression their investment was successful.
The doctors’ office suites would include small waiting areas with wicket windows for settling bills, and examination rooms. Tiled and terrazzo surfaces were used for a germ resistant environment. The building provided shared services like the x-ray department and a laboratory for test results. In the basement there was to be an assembly hall for the meetings of medical and dental societies, a boardroom for the Ottawa Medical Arts Building Ltd., and a vault for the storage of documents and private papers.
The building’s promoters boasted that it was equipped with ‘the most modern plumbing equipment to be found anywhere in Canada’. In addition, metal chutes for the disposal of medical waste fed an incinerator, and one of the elevators was sufficiently large to accommodate patients on gurneys who needed to be transported between floors. Piped compressed air from a central plant was available for the dentists.
In launching the building the doctors promised that it was ‘the intention of the administrative committee to have the building open daily except on the Sabbath from eight o’clock in the morning until eleven o’clock at night, and its staff on the elevators, telephone exchange, etc., will be all females who will wear distinctive uniforms of battleship grey with silver facings.’
This ostentation would gradually disappear. With the advent of newer technologies and suburban medical dental centres the Medical Arts Building went into a long slow decline and the doctors sold their building to a property developer many years ago.
To stabilize the exterior walls prior to the removal of the rest of the building a double row of concrete-filled steel pipe pilings has been sunk around the building. Because the area is underlain by a deep seam of marine clay, to deal with the soft soil conditions the Medical Arts’ steel frame rested on floating footings, strong enough for an additional two storeys that were to be added later but never built.
The new development (RLA Inc.) is definitely a trade-off. Will its height, bulk and scale actually crush the insouciant spirit of one of Ottawa's favourite heritage buildings? It will join a thicket of towers that is transforming this section of Centretown.
By the 1920s Metcalfe Street was slowly trending downmarket from mansions for the great and the good into tourist homes, apartment conversions, and professional offices for doctors and dentists. (Photo: NCC Library - Ottawa Streets)
The Medical Arts was a major interruption on the Metcalfe streetscape (seen here looking north from the Lisgar intersection) which had been settled as an exclusive enclave for Ottawa's barons of commerce and senior politicians. (Photo: LACe010934940)
In a special supplement the Ottawa Citizen deployed a palm frond waving allegorical figure proclaiming the new Medical Arts Building as it emerged from a blinding sunrise. She stands on a notification that the architects Noffke, Morin and Sylvester moved their own offices into the new building. (Ottawa Citizen, May 25, 1929)
[IMG]The Ottawa Journal's special insert on this new and imposing building stressed its commercial success. 'Although only completed within the past week the new medical Arts Building is completely filled with tenants. Every office and suite within the large building has been rented and there is already a waiting list of doctors anxious to locate in the building'. (Ottawa Journal, May 23, 1929)[/IMG]
[IMG]Perhaps the chief glory of the Medical Arts Building was the wrought iron parking lot fence supported by very tall orb-bearing posts. During the last ten years they were gradually scrapped one-by-one, the final few being removed a few months ago.[/IMG]
The flamboyant fence was a feature of the original scheme, although it enclosed a much smaller parking lot which was expanded as the houses behind the building were bought up by the doctors and demolished for more and more parking. The post's design was replicated as the lot grew and the fence crept further down Nepean Street.
For greater telephone efficiency every doctor and dentist in the building was connected on one exchange, serviced by a switchboard operator in the main lobby routing all of the incoming calls. In addition to the reception desk the ground floor conveniently offered patients exiting their doctors’ appointments with prescriptions in hand the Medical Arts Dispensary furnished with a custom built Harley-Davidson motorcycle in white livery with a mortar and pestle shaped side-car that guaranteed 15-minute delivery on orders within the city limits. (Ottawa Citizen, May 25, 1929)
In planning the building the doctors had intended to have two retail spaces, 'one devoted to drugs and the other devoted to surgical and dental instruments'. Instead they rented the second space to the Bank of Nova Scotia for a new branch where 'Commercial customers and the public generally will find every banking facility placed at their disposal at the "Medical Arts Building" branch of this bank'. (Ottawa Journal, May 23, 1929)
It was this unrealized behemoth planned for Metcalfe Street between Albert and Slater that brought to light a federal scheme which could have scuttled the Medical Arts Building. Before getting to that story here's a diversion into the realm of the unbuilt. A 335-room hotel to be known as the 'Royal Ottawa' or the 'Ambassador', with an accompanying 500-car garage on Slater Street, was announced by the Hampton, Frost and Co. of New York and Boston. Lockwood, Greene and Co. of Spartanburg, South Carolina were the architects. The Ottawa Hotel Committee (a team of civic minded boosters formed to find a replacement for the loss of the Russell House hotel) had solicited the project. which didn't get off the ground. (Ottawa Citizen, May 25, 1928)
Just as the Medical Arts Building Co. Ltd. (the doctors' holding company) was completing the purchase of lots for their new building and the building permit was about to be issued, news of the hotel scheme uncovered a proposal being considered by the Federal District Commission and the Prime Minister to dramatically widen Metcalfe Street between Wellington Street and the Victoria Memorial Museum. This would open up a grand vista that was eventually moved east to Elgin Street. Both the Medical Arts Building and the new hotel were in its path. Eventually the plan was rejected as impractical and too expensive. (Ottawa Journal, May 25, 1928)
The lot's chain of ownership lists a who's who of Ottawa's bankers, architects, business magnates and fine old families.
The first version of the 180 Metcalfe Street development (Roderick Lahey Architect Inc., 2015) was floated by Toth Holdings Ltd. which had bought the building from the doctors in 1984. It proposed a glassy tower on a buff brick podium for mixed hotel/condo. Those plans got city approval, but were abandoned.
The property was subsequently picked up by Jadco, Montreal developers who have dropped the hotel component but adopted the detailed conservation plan for preserving and restoring the three historic walls (Robertson/Martin Architects, 2014)
The updated conservation plan (Robertson/Martin Architects, 2018) details which elements are to be maintained, or removed, repaired or reproduced and reinstated. The elevator penthouse has been demolished in its entirety and will be reconstructed.
The new plan is distinct in that the tower will now be framed in darker brick, and the podium's cladding will no longer attempt to mimic the Medical Art's buff brick.
This is the schematic drawing for shoring up the Medical Arts Building's old walls in situ, structural steel bracing that will also holds the three-decker construction trailers (Remisz Consulting Engineering Ltd.)
The most significant alteration is to lower the Metcalfe Street entrance to grade and cover it with a hard shell canopy. The awnings are a gratuitous addition.
Unfortunately they will block one of the building's character-defining elements - the arch and column copper spandrel panels.
It's unlikely that those 50 doctors and dentists who delivered their own modern medical centre in 1929 could have imagined urban hipsters lounging on its rooftop 90 years later. If in the world of heritage, façadism is always second best to a full building preservation we have to admit that it does look like fun.
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http://urbsite.blogspot.com/2019/10/taking-bandages-off-medical-arts.html
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