Ottawa's old conference centre is slowly becoming the Senate
Tom Spears, Ottawa Citizen
Published on: October 21, 2016 | Last Updated: October 21, 2016 6:21 PM EDT
You have to use your imagination, but already a visitor can see the new home of the Senate taking shape in the bare concrete, exposed ducts and water drips that were once the Government Conference Centre.
In not quite two years — September of 2018 — it will begin 10 years of service as the Red Chamber, with a lot of Senate offices, committee rooms and a public gallery.
But to get there, a renovation team has to strip everything down to its 1912 origins — when it was the city’s train station — and build it back up.
“We started to discover things that we hadn’t quite expected,” said Thierry Montpetit, senior director of the Parliament Precinct Branch at Public Services and Procurement Canada. “We had planned to be surprised, but there were even more surprises.”
The original plans, it turns out, are a blend of truth and fiction.
The train station was built in only two and a half years — a real achievement, Montpetit says, “but they took shortcuts. There was a difference between what was on paper and what was actually done.”
The original station had no heating system, no insulation and no ventilation.
“If it was cold you lit the fire and put on a fur coat.”
In the 1960s the trains stopped coming downtown and went instead to Tremblay Road. The downtown station was slated for demolition.
But a funny thing happened. Our train station was modelled on Pennsylvania Station in New York City, and when that was demolished in 1963 the people of New York were outraged. Suddenly there was a movement to save Ottawa’s train station, a Beaux-Arts structure in contrast to all the Gothicness of Parliament Hill.
Presto, a conference centre was born. With heating.
But it wouldn’t do for the Senate, Montpetit said. It was “a rat’s maze” — inefficient, hard to get around, and converted to its new use “very haphazardly and ad hoc.”
Drywall covered wainscotting and mouldings, and stipple “like you would put in your basement” covered the ornate ceilings.
This turned out to be good news for the renovation team. When they removed the 1960s reno work they found much of the original material still in place. There hadn’t been enough time or money to remove it.
“We found a lot of this in good shape,” said Martin Davidson of Diamond Schmitt Architects and KWC Architects.
That means you’ll soon see a more wide-open interior with wood-framed (restored) windows, stone floors that were covered 30 to 40 centimetres deep by 1960s flooring, and vaulted plaster ceilings.
The northeast corner will be new, made of stone and containing an elevator. And a new facade along the east side will be stone also, with glass windows above.
Stone appeared to be too expensive until the team found it was possible to cut the stone offsite and mount it on precast concrete slabs, which could then be mounted much faster than stone alone. Time on this job is crucial. Everything has to be ready for the first Speech from the Throne after September of 2018.
The budget is $269 million and Montpetit thinks it will finish under budget.
“We’re in the middle of a resurgence in the capital,” Montpetit said. He called the old train station “part of a cultural landscape, a national landscape” that once saw soldiers leave for war and return years later, and that welcomed Winston Churchill, the Emperor of Japan, and Elvis Presley.
“At the same time, common people also arrived here,” he said. “This was their gateway… There’s a tremendous emotional attachment to this building.”
“What’s great about this building is the monumentality and the scale,” he said.
“This is a high-drama space.”
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