Context
In 1873, the City Registry office was built to contain both Ottawa and former Bytown’s official records of property history, land ownership, and names of land proprietors. The building was used for this purpose until 1909, later to be sold to the Federal Government in 1935. In the 90’s, the building was bought by the Viking-Rideau Corporation (developer and owner of the Rideau Centre). This purchase was part of a land-exchange deal between the Department of Public Works and Government Services. In this deal, there was no commitment to preserve the structure (Fleming). The Registry Office is only one of four remaining in Ontario, and unique in many architectural aspects, including its twelve-foot deep foundations designed to prevent theft of the official records by tunneling.
Key Issues + Solutions
The future of the Registry Office is dependent on development of the Viking-Rideau Corporation which is in the process of a major expansion of the downtown shopping centre. The new mall hopes to include about 110,000 square feet of retail space, including two floors, a third mezzanine, and two-storey underground parking. There is also much discussion of expanding convention space. The construction of this project will be taking place east of the shopping centre, on a surface parking lot at the corner of Rideau and Nicholas street. The vacant Ogilvy building overlooks the site, and is also bordered by a traffic loop on Besserer street.
[Figure 1: Proposed sketch of new Rideau Centre at Nicholas and Rideau. The current site from this perspective is a surface parking lot. Image from SkyScraperLife forum (http://www.skyscraperlife.com/canada/3429-rideau-centre-expansion.html#post70187).]The Registry Office lies to the south of this proposed area of development, but Viking-Rideau wishes to move the existing structure from its current site to an alternative location at 60 Waller Street, the corner of Waller and Daly, to clear a path for future growth of the Rideau / Congress Centre. Viking Rideau has confronted the major issue of structural concerns in such a move, and have confirmed in an engineering study that the structure can be safely displaced to its designated alternate location (Fleming).
[Figure 2: Site map of proposed alterations to the Rideau Centre and the Registry Office. Image from Google Maps with modifications by the author.]The Heritage Ottawa organization believes that the ideal solution is to leave the building in its place and that all future development does not encompass the building, but reveal it in its entirety (Fleming). Failing this, Heritage Ottawa claims they would reluctantly support moving the entire building to its alternate site.
Critique
Relocating a heritage building should not be considered a last resort in conserving the character of a heritage building. Relocating and reusing buildings and their fragments has been used since antiquity in both Western and Eastern cultures. Essential to heritage conservation is the notion of conservation versus preservation. The former is the sustainable continuation of a building’s use and meaning, while preservation is a lock-setting, freezing a building in time so that it can be looked at, but not inhabited as a contemporary. If a building or culture is to survive in a naturally functioning way, buildings have to adapt: to be moved around, expanded, disassembled, relocated, or turned upside down. The moment they are preserved as sacred objects, they lose functionality and cultural relevance. If we consider Rome as an example, Michelangelo removed stone directly from the Coliseum to lay the courtyard for the Farnese Palace (Crowther, 2). This is an example of using fragments from other buildings as an energy and material availability concern but also authorship of relating the meaning of the Coliseum to the Farnese Palace. In Japan, builders of traditional timber used a construction technique that allowed their buildings to be taken apart and rebuilt elsewhere, sustaining the cultural knowledge of how to build in their traditional techniques. In this way, “remodelling, removal and reconstruction of buildings is possible according to life styles’ (Kikutake, 26-27) – a completely different regard to heritage and sustainability as we perceive it today.
[Figure 3: Sketch by Wilna Clark of the Registry Office relocated to 60 Waller Street, next to the Arts Court. Image from the summer 2004 Heritage Ottawa Newsletter, Volume 31, No. 2.]The main underlying issue of the Registry Office is location. Moving the Registry Office to its new location as one whole piece does strip the building of its original context, but it’s only moving to the next block. It still maintains its connection to the community. As an option, the excessive stone in the building’s twelve foot deep foundation could be re-used as benches or garden walls on the same location in the future Rideau expansion as a marker of its past presence.
Leaving the building as it is on the other hand will challenge the future design of the Rideau Centre to frame the Registry Office (having to expose all four sides of the existing building), but in doing so, turns the building into a museum artifact. Could we not allow the Rideau Centre to incorporate the Registry Office into its design and in doing so, truly recognize it as “an important source and reminder of local civic history?” It’s a tragic waste of embodied energy constructing such a building to keep it locked until Doors Open Ottawa.
Bibliography
- Crowther, P. 1999, ‘Historic Trends in Building Disassembly’, ACSA/CIB 1999
International Science and Technology Conference. Technology in Transition: Masting the Impacts. - Fleming, D. "Future of Historic Registry Office a Concern." 2001. http://www.heritageottawa.org/english/frontpage/registry.htm (accessed 21/09/2008).
- Kikutake, K. 1995, ‘On the Notion of Replaceability’, World Architecture, vol. 33,
p26-27.
1 comment:
This is great info to know.
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