Why is Canadian architecture always so bland?

Jordan Just the other day, I saw a breathtakingly beautiful proposal. It was for a housing development in Toronto near the waterfront. It is being pitched as the replacement to the Sidewalk Labs initiative that had ultimately been turned down. I have to tell you, it looked gorgeous. Green space everywhere, an urban forest in the centre of it, organized around community gathering places with affordable housing units and buildings that looked unique and futuristic. It was a neighbourhood that would make a real architecture and design statement for this city. Naturally, my reaction was, ‘wow, that’s amazing, it’ll never, ever get built.’ If you want to know why our guest today was moved to explore the reasons that architecture in this country is so bland and mediocre, my reaction to this proposal sums that up. The process for making anything unique and beautiful and expensive in buildings today in Canada, is so impossible that by now, people like me no longer expect anything but the cheapest, most functional option. And that’s what we get. And so after a while, that’s all we have. But does it really have to be this way?

I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings, this is The Big Story. Tracey Lindeman is a freelance writer and author who wrote about Canadian architecture, the good and more often the bad, for the Walrus. Hey, Tracey.

Tracey Hi.

Jordan Why don’t you start, and maybe to lay the groundwork here, what are we talking about when we say Canadian architecture?

Tracey That’s exactly the question that I ask in the Walrus article: what do we consider architecture? Are we talking about Chateau Frontenac in Quebec City? We would probably agree that that’s architecture and that maybe the Calgary and Halifax libraries are also architecture. But is a Home Depot architecture? Is an Iroquois longhouse architecture? What about the glass condo towers all over downtown Toronto? And I think that as the general public, maybe we can’t really agree on what we would consider architecture. But as we know, not all instances of the built form are considered to be architecture. And before I became a journalist, I actually studied creative arts and art history. And through that, I really did come to understand architecture as an intentional act of art. So trying to make something beautiful on top of also being functional. So in my mind, that’s what I define as architecture.

Jordan Well, one of the reasons that I’m so happy to talk to you about this and maybe get to the bottom of what’s behind the current lack of inspiring architecture maybe in Canada today, is that every time a government or municipality or even a business or a hockey team or whatever unveils a new building, there almost always seems to be this collective shrug of disappointment from people who care about this stuff in Canada.

Tracey That sounds about right.

Jordan And I’m trying to figure out why this is, but maybe start us with an example because you start your piece with a discussion of the Ottawa Library, which again, big library, our nation’s capital, this is a chance to pull off something incredible, right?

Tracey Yeah. Well, and even in the city’s press releases, when it announced that it had awarded the contract, they said that they wanted an iconic building to really be like a showpiece for the city of Ottawa. And I don’t think that’s really what was accomplished here. So right now, if you look at where the library is supposed to be, it’s nothing. It’s just an empty field in the middle of nowhere in downtown Ottawa. But if we look at the mock ups, it looks pretty conventional as far as Ottawa aesthetic goes. Like lots of melamine cement, floating floors, like that cheap stuff that you click into place. And when I first saw it, I thought, ‘eh, it’s ok,’ it was nothing special. It wasn’t like the worst building I’ve ever seen, but it wasn’t special and it wasn’t the iconic building that Ottawa said it wanted. So ultimately, I came away with the feeling that it was kind of quintessentially Ottawa in spirit: functional boring and cheap. Except that it wasn’t really cheap because that price when they initially awarded the contract at 192,000,000, as we’ve seen in more recent news reports, the cost has now ballooned over 300 million. And I spoke with Catherine McKenney, a city Councillor who’s now running for Mayor. And they told me that at the time when they were evaluating their bids, they really wondered how it could be possible to build that building for 192,000,000. And then they said, now we know they couldn’t. For that money, they could have awarded the contract to one of the European firms or one of the British Columbia firms that bid, which all have better track records for making more architecturally stunning buildings than the firm that ultimately won.

Jordan I was going to ask this question a little bit later, but maybe I’ll ask it now, since you’ve alluded to it a couple of times already. Can you explain the process for bidding to build one of these buildings and how it usually works in Canada?

Tracey Yeah. So request for proposals are called RFPs, and it’s basically a multi step, very long, drawn out process where you kind of put out a paper saying, like, we’re looking for a building that accomplishes this, that and the other thing, like, for example, it needs to be LEAD certified or it needs to represent some kind of symbolic something or other. And then architecture firms are invited to bid on the project by outlining what their vision is and then by saying how much they’re going to charge for it. And then that kind of goes through this approval process that typically tends to favour the lowest bid. When you favour the lowest bid, a situation like what happened with the Ottawa library may happen where what you end up paying is not really the lowest amount you could have paid. And by consequence, you kind of get something that is a compromise between aesthetics and function. And so that’s the situation that a lot of these publicly or partially publicly funded projects find themselves in. There’s this pressure to respect the public purse by kind of just going with the cheapest thing available, gets the job done, and then you don’t get all those people saying, my tax dollars paid for this.

Jordan They’re going to say that anyway.

Tracey Exactly.

Jordan Is that a process that’s different in other countries? Like, are there other ways to do this aside from RFPs?

Tracey Yeah. I mean, like, the Calgary Library didn’t do an RFP. They did more of a design competition. So their process, they invited firms to bid and then they kind of made a short list, and then they paid for a development process where they really prioritized the aesthetics of the library. It wasn’t just coming down to cost is basically how they approached their tendering process. And when you look at the building that they ended up getting, you see what your money can get. And even if the firm that once was not the cheapest, in the end, their library was something like $250,000,000, and it’s beautiful. Meanwhile, Ottawa is almost $350,000,000 and arguably not that beautiful.

Jordan You talked to a lot of architecture experts and architects themselves for this piece. What did they have to say in general about Canada’s approach to architecture? What kind of buildings do we typically build?

Tracey Well, I mean, you don’t have to look very far to see what kind of buildings currently we’re looking at building. Just in downtown Toronto, it’s a lot of glass towers. You can see the cranes putting them together and that kind of stuff. It’s kind of like a perpetual piece of the Toronto skyline at this point. And so a lot of those buildings are private. Right. They’re put together by private developers. There’s not really like a public consultation process built into it in the way that public buildings are built. But, you know, they kind of opt for these glass towers because they are reasonably inexpensive and quick to put up and they don’t really take that much effort to design. And they’re going to sell those condos and office spaces regardless. So for private construction, cities will be like, yeah, but they’re the ones paying for it. We’ll just let them do whatever they want. When it comes to public design, there’s a little bit more of a different process because some level of government, whether it’s municipal or provincial or sometimes even federal, there’s some level of government involved in that process. But the people making those decisions aren’t always, and often aren’t architects or people with even a design background.

Jordan Right, they’re procurement specialists.

Tracey Yeah, exactly. They may have a checklist that like I said earlier, there might be like, okay, LEAD certification, no more than twelve floors. They’ve checked off all the boxes.

Jordan But there’s no box for inspiring.

Tracey Yeah, exactly.

Jordan One of the reasons I was fascinated by this story is because our approach to it seems so typically Canadian in that nobody wants to go out on a limb anywhere and potentially face blowback and potentially make something good. Where does the lack of risk come from, and what do architects have to say about that? There is risk involved in trying to make an inspiring building right? Because my thought immediately goes to the Crystal at the Royal Ontario Museum here in Toronto, which I think is really interesting and cool, and lots of people hated it as soon as it was made.

Tracey Yeah. I have to admit that I don’t hate the ROM. You know, I read a piece in Azure magazine about it, and someone from the Toronto Architecture firm Partisan said beauty emerges when design misbehaves, and that’s misbehaviour. I think it’s interesting, and sure it doesn’t fit with the buildings around it, but I think that was kind of the point that they were getting at.

Jordan The buildings around it are the typical Toronto buildings we’ve been talking about.

Tracey Yeah, exactly. And that’s not to say they’re not beautiful, too, in their own way. It’s just that this obviously stands out. But that was the intent of the project. In a situation like that, a lot of designers and a lot of municipal government people and a lot of all the various stakeholders may look at something like that and be like, oh, my God, people hate it. I hate it. Like, look at it. It looks so weird compared to the rest of what’s around. Overall, Canadians are risk averse. Canada is always trying to play it safe. And I think that when it comes to aesthetics and design, we would rather play it safe by getting something functional and inexpensive than potentially expensive and ugly.

But all this kind of reminds me of, you remember the Chateau Laurier debacle also in Ottawa from a few years ago, where the Chateau Laurier, which is a hotel in downtown Ottawa right next to Parliament, they wanted to add an addition, like a wing onto the hotel to expand the number of rooms that they had. And so the design that they came out with looked, according to a lot of people in Ottawa, it was like the worst thing ever. It looked like a radiator. It looked like a jail. It looked like the gate that you build to keep bears out of the dumpster. I saw so many different comparisons. But the thing with doing that, number one, Chateau Laurier is only 100 years old. It was built to look old, but it’s not really that old. But regardless, it’s still a heritage building. And one of the key parts of adding on to heritage buildings is that you’re not supposed to replicate heritage design. You’re supposed to add to it in a modern way. But in Ottawa, people were like it should look exactly like that old design. And ultimately the project fell apart. And I just find that all very typical of Canadians in general. Maybe not Quebec. I do think Quebec has a bit of a different culture around design and different standards, but definitely it feels like the rest of Canada.

Jordan I’m glad you mentioned Quebec and the Chateau Laurier, because my next question was about just, when we’re a young country, as you mentioned in the piece, like 100 years old is actually fairly old for a Canadian building. And yet compared to some of the buildings built in that style, it’s incredibly young. And how much of it is just we weren’t building things back when there were amazing things to be built, and building stuff these days is much harder, and there are more costs to take into consideration?

Tracey I don’t know about that. I think buildings weren’t cheap back then either. Quebec City and Montreal are some of the oldest places in Canada that were settled. And for example, Chateau Frontenac in Quebec City or Windsor Station in Montreal, buildings like the St. Josephs Oratory downtown, these are all examples of more like a European style of architecture. And we’re maybe not buildings like that anymore in Montreal and the rest of Quebec. But I think that in Quebec there’s still a push to just not accept the lowest bid possible, and that really shows in our buildings. And we also let younger firms take on public buildings instead of just designing people’s houses. A lot of architects in other parts of Canada, they kind of get stuck building people’s private homes. And there aren’t a lot of rich people in Canada with great taste.

Jordan How much of the function over form, and I might be completely off base about this, but how much of that is due to, these buildings have to be functional, we have a pretty tough climate at times, and you want to build things that are ready to stand up to whatever the weather throws at them?

Tracey I mean, if you look at how we currently build with these glass towers, these glass boxes, that’s not environmental. It does the opposite of what we’re trying to accomplish. It lets in the cold and keeps out the heat. If we Zoom out a little bit and look at the carbon footprint of construction in general, construction represents 30% of all greenhouse gasses. That means the carbon it takes to produce material, that means the carbon it takes to actually build it. And glass and concrete are two of the most carbon intensive products that we can make. So it already starts at a deficit there. I just don’t buy that we have to do it for the cold because I went to Norway a few years ago and I did a tour of a positive energy building. And later on, I ended up writing an article about it for City Lab, which is now owned by Bloomberg, where I was talking about how in this climate that’s as cold or maybe even colder than Canada, how they were able to accomplish a building that not only has less of a carbon footprint than conventional buildings, but it actually produces more energy than it consumes. And that excess energy was used at the time, I don’t know about now, was used at the time to power a hydrogen fuelling station for vehicles. So there’s no excuse why we can’t do that here. And yet typically we accept constructions that check off the LEAD box and nothing more.

Jordan What could governments do? And how much of this is on governments at every level to work together? What could they do to, while respecting tax dollars, do a little more, do something inspiring, do something that’s more than just functional?

Tracey I think one of the key things that we all need to think of and remember is that when you build a building, that’s not the last time you pay for it. There are maintenance costs, and if something is built cheaply, that means maintenance may cost more over time. There’s like an amortized environmental impact that you pay for long after the building has been built. But typically people tend to fixate on the purchase price without really thinking about the long term cost of this thing that we built. So that’s one aspect of it. And then there’s also this idea that we’re so committed to bureaucracy and being cheap that we’re not willing to pay for something even if it’s just a little bit more expensive. And it could be the most beautiful thing we’ve ever seen. And so I think what our society needs is one, we need more city architects. Edmonton has one. I haven’t heard of another Canadian city with a city architect. But what these people do is that they are hired by the city to advocate for beautiful environmental design on the municipal level. And maybe there’s like a counterpart in the provincial government or something like that.

And the other way to improve how Canada looks in terms of its built form is to hold more design competitions and to stop taking the lowest bid. Like some countries, like, I think, Austria, they have this policy where they take the second lowest bid. But there’s some pros and cons to that idea in the sense that maybe the second and third lowest bidders collude with the lowest bid and produce something like corruption that is like rampant in Quebec. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t. But I just think that prioritizing something that has a really sound environmental design that may cost a bit more, but in the long run, cost a lot less is one way of doing it. We don’t have to accept the cheapest thing just because we’re cheap. Think of the bigger picture.

Jordan My last question is the headline of your piece is ‘Why is Canadian architecture so bad?’, I know you don’t write the headlines, but you also put that question to architects. When you were finished reporting this, did you come away with confirmation that our architecture is bad or a different perspective?

Tracey It’s not to say that every single building in Canada that exists is hideous. There are some examples of great architecture, but the overwhelming feeling that I came away with is that we just don’t want to pay for something beautiful if we can just have something functional. And maybe that comes from a little bit of a distrust of government. Like maybe we don’t trust the government to spend our money wisely. Maybe there’s a grain of truth in that. They haven’t always made the best investment decisions with our money. But this is kind of the compromise that governments have arrived at. Is that okay, well, you don’t trust us and we don’t want to abuse the public purse and so we’ll just meet somewhere in the middle and we’ll just choose the most basic thing. Some of the people I spoke with also didn’t want to just write off Canadian architecture totally because actual architects, like the people who design stuff, there’s a lot of really amazing talent in Canada. It’s just that they don’t get the opportunities to do these big impact buildings. Maybe they don’t have the capital up front to kind of like secure materials and that kind of thing, like, you know, whatever. But it just feels as though a lot of those smaller, really interesting firms don’t get the opportunity to do cool projects until they’ve built their case. And maybe we should give a chance to those firms. We’re obviously not doing the best with what we have now, so why don’t we let them show us what they’ve got?

Jordan We don’t have a lot to lose. Thanks so much for this, Tracey. It’s fascinating.

Tracey Thank you so much.

Jordan Tracey Lindeman writing for The Walrus. That was The Big Story. For more from us, you can head to thebigstorypodcast.ca, You can find us on Twitter at @TheBigStoryFPN. You can talk to us anytime via email, thebigstorypodcast@rci.rogers.com [click here!]. You can find this podcast in your favourite podcast player or in your least favourite podcast player if you’re so inclined. Please do rate and review and as always, tell your friends.

Thanks for listening, I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings, we’ll talk tomorrow.

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