TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/071089/07108900.071

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 5.7 KB | 110 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.