Modest and courageous

by LISA ROCHON

April 30, 2005

'I can't think of another space in North America that pushes us as hard to contemplate war, and what we have done,' writes LISA ROCHON of Canada's new war museum

OTTAWA - There is no glory in war, no goodness, no triumph. But there are lessons and they have been rendered with audacity and excruciating honesty by Moriyama & Teshima Architects for the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa. The museum, which crawls out of the ground at LeBreton Flats, heralds a brave new expressionism in Canadian architecture.

What do you say to all the Canadian mothers and fathers who lost their sons in war? How do you talk to the men who watched their best buddies die on the beaches and fields of some faraway place? You could lie to them with architecture, delivering the conventions of chest-beating war museums in which everybody emerges through white neo-classical columns feeling a little taller, a little more heroic. Or you could deliver the hard goods, which is what chief design consultant Raymond Moriyama, a survivor of the Japanese internment camps in Canada, has declared to the nation aided by his architect son, Jason.

Walk in from the cocoon of your life and feel a sudden compression in the museum's front lobby. The slate floors slope slightly toward the north from two different planes, and the ceiling presses down hard. At 70 metres wide, the lobby takes its time drawing a visitor slowly, deeply into this disorienting place. There's an uncomfortable pinch here, to do with the body and the mind.

Raymond Moriyama knows the abuses and humiliation of war, having been rounded up with thousands of other Japanese-Canadians and kept in horse stalls at the Pacific National Exhibition in Vancouver before being sent to an internment camp at Slocan, B.C. He was 12 years old when that personal horror began.

How fitting and darkly ironic that Moriyama should become the design force behind the war museum. When his firm was commissioned with the project in 2002, he was determined to create an architecture that grows out of the land on the Ontario side of the Ottawa river. Some of the landscape around the museum has been purposefully disturbed to suggest the craters and swells of battlefields. But, regeneration of nature and our psyches also figures importantly in his scheme, so visitors can walk up onto a gently sloping roof eventually to be covered in grasses and wildflowers.

With the museum, the skyline of Ottawa has been dramatically altered. The building's massive fin containing Regeneration Hall points east to Parliament Hill -- it's possible to see and be charged up by the silhouette blocks away from the river site.

As the designer of the major public spaces at the war museum, Jason Moriyama, a generation once removed from war and a partner with Moriyama & Teshima Architects, shows himself to be a huge talent. While completing his master's of architecture at Sci-Arc in Los Angeles, Moriyama worked for Coop Himmelblau Architects, who tend to make careening constructions, and Frank Gehry, the world's master of distorted volumes. Before that, he completed a degree in industrial design at Carleton University, Ottawa. That academic and professional experience has been unleashed with remarkable force with the museum.

Architects of depth practise their profession through the lenses of artists, psychologists and interpreters. Jason Moriyama absorbed all three roles to render the public spaces with intelligence without giving in to overheated jingoism or kitschy nostalgia. At a cost of $115-million -- about $230 a square foot for site remediation, design and construction costs, the museum is said to be among the cheapest of the country's national museums. And it is surely the richest.

One of the most staggering volumes at the museum is Regeneration Hall, a deeply troubling interpretation of the emotional scars that war inflicts. The hall, found at the end of the temporary and permanent galleries, is meant to communicate hope for the future. From the mezzanine level, it's possible to catch a glimpse through a window sliver of the Peace Tower on Parliament Hill that rises up to the east.

But, hope, to this critic, is one of the fleeting messages of the hall. Narrow and tall with angled walls, the space contains a kind of steel scaffold of magnificent, ruined dimensions. It is a truss bridge about to fall -- a collapsing mind. The teetering is nearly unbearable in the presence of the Seven Virtues sculpted as draped human forms by Walter Allward. These are the maquettes for Allward's Vimy Ridge monument in northern France, and they stand at the bottom of the black steel structure, vestiges of light positioned against the dark.

I can't think of another space in North America that pushes us as hard to contemplate war, and what we have done.

"We wanted the space to be spiritual, but not religious," says Jason Moriyama, summing up much that distinguishes the Canadian way of mediating disaster from other foreign responses. George W. Bush may think of the American soldiers in Iraq as his warriors and the British have known a history of conquest, neatly summed up by Thomas Hardy who declared, probably while snorting down some cognac, that: "War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading." However, it seems that Canadians share a national dislike of bravura.

For one thing, even if we go about it in a quiet, unassuming way, we prefer to live. "Death and sacrifice are not uplifting notions for Canadians," says Jason. "This is not about the American appreciation of what is war. This is much more modest and quiet, but strong and courageous."

Regeneration Hall is intended as the counterpoint to Memorial Hall, a meditative space set within the main lobby as a cube of concrete and surrounded by a discreet reflecting pool. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier hangs within the box, and a high, small window allows for light to fall fully upon the Tomb on the 11th hour every Remembrance Day. Deep privacy is afforded in the space but the purity of the volume -- and the potential for contemplation -- is undermined by dropping part of a pavilion from the upper roof garden down into the space. Similarly, substituting a darker colour and material for the grey acoustical tiles would have heightened the effect of using compressed ceiling planes in the main lobby.

On the other hand, the design architects, strongly supported by the joint venture Ottawa firm Griffiths Rankin Cook Architects, use a mordant sense of humour for displaying the large artifacts at the museum behind a sweeping glass curtain wall. Military vehicles and artillery, including, for instance, a Canadian-made Iltis jeep from Bosnia that is riddled with bullets, are parked in a vast ground level. Stationed there in perfect and crippled condition, they look as ordinary as vehicles in a car dealership.

There is much sorrow within the exterior and interior museum walls. The concrete, beautifully produced in a variety of textures from rough sawn to polished, was carefully supervised by joint venture principal Alex Rankin and executed by the Gatineau contractor Tony Bellai, who used his silver-haired concrete warriors to manage the concrete poetics because of his belief in the building.

In two long, darkened passages, the angled ceilings and concrete sloped walls are hung with massive canvases by some of the artists who recorded the reality of war at home and overseas. There are, for instance, 400 paintings by Alex Colville in the collection.

Besides the architects, there are others who need to be congratulated for the exceptional design of the museum. Adjeleian Allen Rubeli Ltd. are the structural engineers responsible for making the complex structure a reality. Joe Guerts, director of the Canadian War Museum and his museum board supported the scheme in all of its subtlety, as did Victor Rabinovitch of the Canadian Museum of Civilization Corp., who engaged directly in design details and signed off on the concrete. The design review committee of the National Capital Commission insisted on clear connections to the rest of the city, including the pivotal visual axis from the museum looking east to the Peace Tower.

It is said that Canadians found their true identity and national strength at Vimy Ridge. With the Canadian War Museum, our identity through architecture has matured into something complex and whole.

The Canadian War Museum celebrates its grand opening on May 7 and 8. For information call 1-800-555-5621.