GCC, 2020
These three photographs can be understood as family portraits of three leading figures spanning three generations. The buildings portrayed are adjacent to each other in the heart of Ottawa, Canada’s young capital city. They share location, innate confidence, and a conservative material palate in their DNA. However they differ in the social and technological platform that nurtured their formation.
The first to be built originated as a neoclassical central railway station - Union Station (Ross and McFarlane, 1912) - and now serves as a Government Conference Centre. It addresses the street with a clear hierarchy and the unquestioned assumption of right and power embedded in ideals of colonial and mercantile progress. It harks back to its antecedents an ocean away, proclaiming its dominion over the new frontier as evidenced by the tracks that once flowed from every direction into its caverns.
The second to be constructed continued the postwar midcentury effort to reimagine buildings on rationalist foundations, refuting the prewar social order. Its mass dominating the city centre, the National Defence Headquarters (Pearkes Building, John C. Parkin, Searle, Wilby, and Rowland, 1974) has a balanced asymmetry and a repetitive vertical composition eschewing decoration or for that matter an obvious means of entry.
The third and most recent addition is a product of global interconnectivity and trade where architecture as spectacle plays a role in attracting international engagement. The Shaw Centre facade (Brisbane, Brook, Beynon, 2011), applying parametric design only possible with substantive computing power, rejects homogenous utilitarianism and reaches for complexity and wonder befitting a destination aspiring to celebrity on social media.
Each of these buildings was a landmark architectural project in their respective eras. All three are easily seen from a single vantage point from which they present a compelling generational delineation of changing technology and collective intention. Together they form both Ottawa’s parlour and the gallery of family portraits within it.
SCC, 2020
NDH, 2020
