Architectural: modernist buildings
It’s not always easy to see the value of the things around you.
As a kid in this city in the 1960s, I was surrounded by modern architecture.
I grew up in Valleyview, surrounded by avant-garde homes, one-of-a-kind works of modernism designed by some of the city’s leading architects.
I went to Ross Sheppard High School, star-gazed at the planetarium, took swimming lessons at Coronation Pool, shopped at the Bay downtown, saw movies at the Paramount and the Garneau, went to bar mitzvahs at the Beth Shalom synagogue.
I didn’t know it at the time, but my Edmonton was actually a laboratory for modern design. Our postwar oil boom made this city a perfect laboratory for architectural experimentation. We were building a new city, with money and brashness to burn. Architects gathered here, some immigrants from postwar Europe, others new graduates for architecture schools in Winnipeg and Vancouver. Edmonton was their canvas and Edmontonians were willing to pay for unique design and fresh brave ideas.
And as a kid, did I appreciate the bold, sleek architecture all around me?
I did not. I thought it was weird and barren and cold. I longed to live in a city with real history, like London or Zurich, a city with historic buildings, with cathedrals and flying buttresses and Tudor timbering.
But a funny thing happened to my esthetic sensibilities sometime in the last decade. Suddenly all that weird architecture started to look cool. And beautiful. Those clean, bare lines, those crazy ’60s colours, that light-filled urban minimalism: All the things I used to think were kitschy somehow began to look hip and sophisticated.
It’s not just me. Perhaps it’s nostalgia. Perhaps it’s a reaction against the cutesy excesses of knock-off post-modernism. But suddenly, “retro-modernism” is all the rage, be it in fashion, or interior design, or architecture.
So there couldn’t be a better time for the Art Gallery of Alberta’s newest show, Capital Modern, a celebration of some of Edmonton’s best modernist architecture, from 1940 to 1969. The exhibit, which opens today, features blueprints, archival photos, and handsome building portraits by renowned Edmonton architectural photographer James Dow, compels you to look at Edmonton’s modern structures in a whole new way, to discover beauty you never saw before.
“Style is a revolving thing,” says AGA chief curator, Catherine Crowston. “In your moment, you don’t always notice or appreciate what your moment is.”
Capital Modern, which was co-curated by local architects Shafraaz Kaba, Troy Smith, and David Murray, features many of the prominent public buildings you might expect — the Jubilee Auditorium, HUB Mall, the Royal Alberta Museum. But the show also highlights buildings you might not expect — like the General Veterinary Hospital on 115th Avenue, the Epcor power station on Stony Plain Road and that little building in the Edmonton Municipal Cemetery on 107th Street. It showcases expensive “designer” homes in Windsor Park and Capital Hill, and “ordinary” patio homes in North Glenora.
Walk around the gallery and you get a whole new perspective on Edmonton — it’s a trip back to a more innocent time, when the young, muscular city was filled with hope and potential, when public bodies and private owners were more willing to take risks, to invest money in cutting-edge design and in building materials like marble, limestone and cedar. A time when public bodies still believed in commissioning landmark infrastructure.
As you gaze at the images of these brave, hopeful buildings, you have to ask — with the boom-times back, where is our vision? Where is our esthetic courage? When did our ambition to build a great city evaporate?
“There’s a story here that keeps coming back and back. And I don’t know if we’re hearing it or learning our lessons,” says David Murray.
The irony is that our current boom is actually putting our modernist legacy at risk. Instead of treasuring these remarkable buildings, we’re all too often tearing them down or renovating them beyond recognition or simply neglecting them until they become too run-down to save, too battered to appreciate.
The beautiful old planetarium, for example, sits lonely and unloved in Coronation Park, used for little more than storage. Peter Hemingway’s Central Pentecostal Tabernacle is halfway demolished already. A developer has just announced plans to tear down the Paramount Theatre. The Legislature Annex, the very first office tower in Canada built with a glass curtain wall, has been so poorly maintained that its neck is also on the block.
Murray has spent years labouring to create a public inventory of Edmonton’s best modernist architecture, so that city council can move to designate and protect some of these buildings as heritage assets. But it hasn’t happened yet — and time is running out for many of the city’s signature modern buildings.
Perhaps it’s naive to think one show at the AGA can galvanize our community’s political and business leaders to act to protect our unique buildings. But maybe it’s not too much to hope that Capital Modern inspires in a new generation of Edmontonians a passion for the architectural riches we’ve inherited.
source: http://www.canada.com
