Why pinning all our civic hopes on LeBreton Flats is dangerous
David Reevely, Ottawa Citizen
Published on: January 30, 2016 | Last Updated: January 30, 2016 8:42 AM EST
Both groups asking to redevelop LeBreton Flats are promising to do something almost impossible: Build a successful new neighbourhood all at once.
The world’s great places have emerged over decades and centuries, one decision at a time, a layer after layer of history, economic cycles and evolving tastes, failures and repurposings. It accretes. Replicating all the complex relationships underneath a working neighbourhood all in one go might not be impossible but it’s very close.
Lord knows people try, with projects big and small. My colleague Andrew Cohen sometimes laments that at Lansdowne, we didn’t try to build something that would do for Ottawa what a spectacular Guggenheim Museum did for Bilbao. Well, here’s another chance, right? The LeBreton Re-Imagined plan for LeBreton in particular, the one from the consortium led by Devcore, is full of museums and cultural buildings, each of which would be its own opportunity for greatness.
Bilbao, on the north coast of Spain not far from the French border, was a fading industrial port in 1990 — think of it sort of like Hamilton, but with fewer people. In an effort to turn it into a centre for cultural tourism, the Basque government made a Hail-Mary pass, spending a ton of money on this new art museum. They struck a unique deal with the Guggenheim Foundation to open a branch museum in Bilbao as long as the government paid for pretty much everything. They hired star architect Frank Gehry and spared no expense to build one of the world’s great galleries.
It worked. Bilbao has been revitalized, its character changed. Most people, if they’ve heard of Bilbao at all, have heard of it because of its Guggenheim museum. One megaproject did it.
The thing is, Bilbao’s Guggenheim is practically a wonder of the world. As a piece of modern civic architecture so phenomenal that people visit just to look at it from the outside, it’s in a class with the Sydney Opera House and … er, the Sydney Opera House. Museum directors and politicians the world over have tried to copy it, blowing billions of dollars and once-in-a-lifetime redevelopment opportunities and not coming close to duplicating the Bilbao Effect.
The landscape is littered with failed clones. Seattle’s rock-and-roll museum (they even hired Frank Gehry to design it). A new pavilion for the Denver art museum. A pop-music centre in Sheffield, England. An art gallery in Helsinki. In Toronto, there’s the crystal addition to the Royal Ontario Museum, which cost $135 million, is a lousy exhibition space and has not produced the attendance bump the museum was counting on. Architecture critic Witold Rybczynski calls it the Bilbao Anomaly, such a fluke it was.
If you build it, they will not necessarily come. They usually don’t.
This is just for single buildings, let alone whole districts. For a failure on a large scale, go to Montreal and look at its old Olympics venues east of downtown, all built at once. A (now little-used) stadium, Biodome and planetarium, Insectarium, botanical gardens, a small arena and a soccer stadium. Lots of attractions, many of which work individually but together make a weird jumble, big buildings with few accesses and nothing much going on between them. In decades, they’ve done little for the neighbourhoods that surround them.
The attractions area of the Montreal group’s proposal for LeBreton Flats looks worryingly like this part of their city. The group led by the Ottawa Senators doesn’t have this problem – but then it doesn’t show very much imagination at all.
The National Capital Commission’s first attempt to rebuild the Flats was a well-intended effort to deal with the all-at-once problem. The commission thought small: it set out to sell its land one piece at a time, hoping it could simulate the organic growth of a neighbourhood by being patient and letting the early sales inform later ones years later. But, desperate not to screw it up, the NCC put so many restrictions on what could happen on the first piece of land that it ended up with just one bidder and some pretty ordinary condos.
Now the commission’s going the other way. Here’s pretty much all the land left at LeBreton Flats, the commission says. Rock our socks.
It’ll either be a grand success or a grand failure. For a project like this, there isn’t much in between.
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