Block 2 design winner completes 'Parliament Square' with a nod to heritage
A final design should be complete by the fall and work should begin about 18 to 24 months after that. The project will take about two years to complete and is expected to cost about $430 million.
Blair Crawford, Ottawa Citizen
May 16, 2022 • 22 minutes ago • 3 minute read
The winning design for what’s been called the most prestigious property in Canada will have copper-clad windows as a subtle “tip of the hat” to the Parliament buildings it faces across Wellington Street.
A joint submission by Toronto-based Zeidler Architecture Inc. and David Chipperfield Architects of London, England, was announced Monday as the winner of an international competition for the remaking of Ottawa’s “Block 2.” Despite its plain sounding name, the block bounded by Metcalfe, Wellington, O’Connor and Sparks streets forms the fourth and final side of what’s come to be known as Parliament Square.
The winning design features a public square and soaring atrium and integrates with existing heritage buildings on the block, including the Indigenous Peoples Space housed in the former U.S. Embassy, directly across from Centre Block.
The buildings will house office space for the Senate, House of Commons and the Library of Parliament while including renovated retail space along the Sparks Street Mall.
“We can look forward to a block design that projects the image of Canada and its capital on the world stage,” Public Services and Procurement Canada Minister Filomena Tassi said in announcing the winner. “The new and renovated spaces will respect the heritage elements of the buildings, while providing modern, sustainable and accessible accommodations for Parliament.”
John Ralston Saul was the honorary chair of the selection committee.
“For 25 years I’ve been staring at this space out there, talking about it and the need to complete Parliament Square,” Ralston Saul said. “There’s a lot of us who love Ottawa and live in the capital and have been waiting for this to happen.”
With Wellington Street likely to be permanently closed to traffic because of security concerns following this winter’s convoy (“Sometimes negative events have a positive outcome,” Ralston Saul said), the Block 2 development will complete the square centred around the great lawn of Parliament with the 1860s-era East and West Blocks and the Centre Block from the 1920s.
“This new building will have to acknowledge the other three blocks,” Ralston Saul said. “But not through imitation or pastiche. What you will see is an elegant, simple acknowledgment with the copper window casings of the new building — a tip of the hat, if you like — with the copper roofs so identified by all Canadians with the existing Parliament buildings.
The boxy Zeidler/Chipperfield design lacks the funky angles of the losing bid by Diamond Schmitt Architects or the circular glass tower of the Provencher Roy + Associés Architectes submission. It was the design that best integrated with the surrounding buildings, said Anthony Housefather, MP for Mount Royal and one of the jurors on the selection committee.
“It was one of the designs that best kept the heritage nature of the block,” Housefather said. “We looked at a myriad of different factors, including how people will look at these buildings 100, 150 years from now and how they intertwined with the Indigenous spaces (as well as) the usability of the building inside and outside. There were vigorous deliberations but in the end, there was a consensus that this would meet the challenges that we were looking for for Block 2.”
A final design should be complete by the fall and work should begin about 18 to 24 months after that, Tassi said. The project will take about two years to complete and is expected to cost about $430 million.
https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local...od-to-heritage
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