TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/071089/07108900.071

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 6KB | 99 lines

DESIGN, Page 64

A Grand Folly in Ottawa

Canada's newest museum is costly, controversial and curious

By Kurt Andersen


    As the grayest, quietest, most culturally introverted major
city in a gray, quiet, culturally introverted country, Ottawa is
not a place where one expects to find architecture on the fringe.
But when the Canadian Museum of Civilization officially opened last
week just across the river in the city of Hull, it took its place
as one of the largest museums in the world and certainly one of the
more curious -- a wildly eccentric, million-square-foot limestone
pile of curves and ellipses, Antoni Gaudi crossed with late Frank
Lloyd Wright, baroque quirkiness run amuck. Architect Douglas
Cardinal's museum is more a fascinating curiosity than a
masterwork. But its flamboyance and seductive, Disneyesque
natural-history exhibits -- life-size Indian homes downstairs,
replica townscapes from the past 500 years upstairs -- will surely
make it the capital's biggest tourist attraction, if not Canada's.

    Until this project, which is a year behind schedule and some
200% over budget, Cardinal had designed mostly schools and small
civic buildings in his native Alberta and other western provinces.
"It is," says Cardinal of the $213 million museum, "like composing
and conducting a symphony at the same time, with an orchestra
that's never played your music before -- and it's the most
important performance of your life." Days before the opening, with
scores of workers still laying granite floors and bending Sheetrock
to Cardinal's hypertrophic specifications, the architect was wan
and tired. "It takes a tremendous amount of warriorship," he says,
"to believe in your vision." Warriorship? Cardinal, who is
one-eighth Blackfoot, uses the phrase constantly; it is New Age
Native American for hubris.

    Cardinal, 55, is a lifelong maverick not well known outside
Canadian architectural circles. He left architecture school in
British Columbia at 19 and immigrated to Texas, where he earned
his degree a decade later. After returning to Alberta in the '60s,
he won his first notable commission, a characteristically
undulating brick church in the town of Red Deer. Because of the
unorthodox engineering, he was obliged to demonstrate on a computer
that the church would be structurally sound, and thus became an
early pioneer of computer-aided design. A few years later, he
acquired buckskins, beads and a ponytail and became a born-again
Native American, lobbying for Indian rights. To this day he takes
a weekly sweat-lodge steam bath, where he smokes the traditional
stone pipe and chants. "You really see yourself," Cardinal says of
the ritual, "and confront your own weaknesses. It strengthens
warriorship."

    In the view of some who have seen him in action, Cardinal has
shamelessly Mau-Maued the bureaucrats in Alberta and Ottawa who
have been his chief patrons. "He's the doyen of the government
establishment," says Edmonton architect Peter Hemingway, "because
with them he can always use emotional means to inflate the budget.
He does his thing about the white man killing the native soul, and
they cough up whatever he wants."

    The Museum of Civilization's schedule and budget problems,
however, are not all Cardinal's fault. When he got the job in the
spring of 1983, the price tag had been set somewhat arbitrarily at
around $78 million, and, at the insistence of then Prime Minister
Pierre Trudeau, construction began later that year, before the
design was finished. Necessary changes cost time and money. But
Cardinal did his part to complicate things too. He fought for weeks
over the pattern on the cafeteria china, and he was upset over the
fact that the TV wall outlets were square, not round. When
officials tried to substitute aluminum for copper on the museum's
vaulted roofs, Cardinal fought and won again -- when the copper
acquires a mellow green patina, the roofs will echo those of the
government buildings just across the Ottawa River.

    In addition, preservationists had to battle Cardinal to save
an early-20th century stone factory tower on the museum site. "I
don't want it there," Cardinal says of the ruin. "I wanna blow it
away." Despite his museum's exhibits celebrating centuries of
Anglo-French building in Canada, the architect rejects Western
architectural tradition altogether. He insisted that the museum
should not be "a piece of colonial architecture." Greco-Roman
forms, he says, "have no relevance to the New World. Why don't we
relate forms to our own dramatic, natural land forms?"

    Cardinal fancies that his museum has been sculpted by a
glacier. Each level is like its own irregular topographical cross
section, with outcroppings cantilevered over the sidewalk below.
The museum is really two eskers linked underground. In one are
offices and the bulk of the 3.5 million-artifact collection; in the
other, the swirling, hyperactive exhibit spaces. Between the two
are terraced, serpentine public walks from which visitors have a
picture-postcard view of Parliament. A man-made stream and
waterfall cascade beside a grand staircase and over part of the
central plaza.

    For better or worse, Cardinal has built the singular building
he wanted. The Museum of Civilization is an earnest folly on a
grand scale. Cardinal may be the perfect architect for a country
that has a chip on its shoulder about American influence. His
museum is like nothing in the U.S. -- or anywhere else. The
international architectural establishment will surely prefer Moshe
Safdie's handsome, lucid National Gallery of Canada nearby, but the
masses will flock to Cardinal's odd, one-of-a-kind fun house.