COVER STORY - Architect of Peace

by CHRISTOPHER HUME

May 1, 2005

From the dripping water in Memorial Hall to the sunlight that falls on the tomb of the unknown soldier each Nov. 11, Raymond Moriyama's War Museum is a monument to war — and to the human capacity for renewal.

Raymond Moriyama didn't know it at the time, but his design for the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa began more than 60 years ago.

Moriyama, then a child of 12, had been shipped off to an internment camp for Japanese-Canadians deep in the B.C. interior. With the rest of his family and community, he had been declared an enemy alien. Their property confiscated — stolen might be a better word — the Moriyamas were imprisoned by a country whose soldiers were off in Europe fighting for freedom and democracy.

Seeking a refuge from the nightmare of the camp, the young Moriyama secretly built a tree house on the banks of the Slocan River, just beyond the edge of the complex. There he spent countless hours trying to understand a world gone mad and forming a bond with nature that has lasted to this day. When he was asked to design the Canadian War Museum, he began with a single sketch, a drawing of that tree house.

Moriyama says Vancouver still makes him uncomfortable. It was the city of his birth, but Toronto has been his adopted home since the 1950s. His presence in this city has been profoundly felt; not only has he designed dozens of buildings around town — everything from the Central Reference Library and the Bata Shoe Museum to the Scarborough Civic Centre and University of Toronto's School of Continuing Studies — he has been a civilizing influence on the place in person as well as in practice, as have few other architects. Little wonder he has been awarded more than ten honorary degrees and serves as the Chancellor of Brock University in St. Catharines.

Now, aged 75 and at a stage of his life at which most architects would have cashed in their drafting tables and headed off to retirement, Moriyama has just completed the finest work of his career. Though the Opening Ceremony does not take place until May 8, the 60th anniversary of VE Day, the Canadian War Museum is already turning heads. That's not surprising; the $132-million structure ranks among the most remarkable examples of contemporary architecture in this or any country.

The museum was an opportunity any architect would have welcomed. It offered a chance to go beyond the normal constraints of use, budget and location and do something that could be meaningful to every individual visitor as well as the nation, and, indeed, the world.

Moriyama also went beyond the conventional idea of a war museum as a place where weapons are displayed and battles celebrated, to examine the human side of conflict. Indeed, he and his partner, Alex Rankin of Ottawa-based Griffiths Rankin Cook, reinvented the institution. This museum is as much a memorial as a building, a statement as well as a structure.

Officially, its mandate is summed up in three words, "Remember. Preserve. Educate." Its job is to tell the story of Canada's military history.

But this hardly begins to explain the powerful impact the museum has on anyone who enters it. To walk its corridors is to experience physically the sense of dislocation and disruption that that are the inevitable results of war. The darkness of certain spaces and the feelings of separation and isolation it leads to are impossible to ignore.

The brilliance of this extraordinary building lies in its most basic structural elements — the angles of the walls, the handling of light and materials, the use of emptiness and absence as architectural devices. These are some of the techniques that enabled Moriyama and his team to create a building that itself communicates a narrative, conveys emotion and speaks so eloquently.

That's why the Canadian War Museum could have been opened to the public before any exhibits were installed. That may sound strange, but it's not. In 2000, when Berlin officials decided to open Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum while it was still empty, the response was overwhelming. Several hundred thousand visitors showed up to see the building as a building, architecture as architecture. Like Libeskind's museum, Moriyama's would have been powerful enough to hold its own. Just wandering through its passageways, galleries and halls leaves an indelible impression.

Here, the architect becomes storyteller, and architecture the story. War brings out the worst in people and nations but also the best. And so the museum tells of heroic sacrifice as well as monumental stupidity. This is a war museum designed to attract women and men, pacifists and militarists, young and old, veterans and non-combatants. The museum's previous quarters, the former Public Archives Building on Sussex Dr., was never adequate to the task. It was a location, but not quite a home.

Finally, the architecture of the new building relates the story of a young boy trying to save himself from being destroyed by a world consumed with violence and fear.

"I don't want you to dwell on my years in an internment camp," Moriyama insists. "But the museum started with a sketch of what I experienced as a child during the war." Hiding out in the tree house was, he says, "kind of creepy, but for me it was also very comforting. It was a place of refuge. I didn't even tell my mother about it; I didn't want her to get in trouble if I was discovered."

In fact, the young Moriyama was as desperate to get away from his fellow inmates as his captors. As a four-year-old, he had had an accident at home that left him close to death, with burns to 40 percent of his body. He spent eight months in bed recovering. After his family was imprisoned, his scarred body made him an object of derision among other prisoners; the tree house was his escape.

But, in Moriyama's life, great adversity often led to great hope. It was while confined to his bed, watching an addition being built on a nearby house, that he encountered his future calling. The project's architect, a tall, imposing, pipe-smoking figure who oozed authority, captured the boy's imagination. Moriyama announced to his family that he, too, would become an architect when he grew up.

The tree house would be his first project: "I had to find a site, gather the materials and put them together," he remembers. "It was a real struggle." But, he adds, smiling broadly, "the result was magic. It was a place of contemplation. It was where I discovered nature and began to think about the world."

That first project would recur in various ways throughout his career. Not in physical resemblance, but rather in the way Moriyama approached each job. Moriyama has always avoided the temptation of personal architectural style. The public may respond to signature architecture — think of Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind and even Mies van der Rohe, whose works are instantly recognizable — but Moriyama insists that every project must be informed by its own unique circumstances.

He is an architect who begins each commission by looking for the single, simple idea behind it. At the Bata Shoe Museum, for example, it was the notion of the shoebox and its contents. The building reads like a container in which the walls and top have been opened up and reassembled to reveal the artefacts inside.

For the Bank of Montreal's Institute for Learning, which Moriyama designed in the early 1980s, the idea was that of the bow and arrow. For him, it served as a metaphor for knowledge and how it can lead to progress. The flight of the arrow resembles the trajectory of education.

At the war museum, the idea might be summed up in one word, "Regeneration." That applies to human and physical effects of violence as much as it does to the capital, a city in transition.

Sitting in LeBreton Flats, on the banks of the Ottawa River, this large, bunker-like structure fits into its site as if it were some enormous geological feature. The roof, covered in grass, slopes upwards from the back where it starts at ground level. The front, which faces east to the downtown core, presents an enormous glass faηade to the city.

The most striking exterior element is a huge copper-clad "fin" that extends beyond the glass out on to the sidewalk on Booth St. The copper, a requirement for all official buildings in the capital, visually connects the museum to other Ottawa landmarks, most importantly, the House of Parliament and the Peace Tower.

On its south side, and throughout much of the interior, the walls are made of raw concrete, heavily textured from the wooden forms used to hold it in place. This, and the fact the walls lean at various angles, brings a deliberate sense of urgency and disorientation to the building. It seems, in the words of poet Wilfred Owen, that we have entered "some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped/ Through granites which titanic wars had groined."

Nothing here is quite what you might expect. Even the lobby, a large space with entrances on both north and south sides, has concrete walls and a ceiling low enough to create a feeling of compression. It's not quite uncomfortable but enough to make you stop and pay attention.

This is, don't forget, a war museum. The issue isn't beauty in the ordinary meaning of the word, but conflict, pain, memory and death, as well as redemption and regeneration. In Moriyama's words, "It's about ordinary people doing extraordinary things."

It also addresses the paradoxical fact that the worst of circumstances bring out the best in people. That is eloquently summed up in the contrast between the museum's collection of Canadian war paintings and the rough concrete walls on which they hang. However beautiful they may be, these works, by artists as diverse as A.Y. Jackson, Alex Colville, David Milne and Allan Harding McKay, document the ugliness of human violence.

In one section of Commissioners' Hall, curators have also mounted a selection of World War II aircraft "nose art." These hand-painted insignias, which typically come from bombers, include the plane's name and logo, anything from a Vargas-style pin-up to a pink elephant. Each crew devised its own symbol — bombs or girls or beer mugs — for marking operations.

The biggest interior space, the front glass-walled gallery, houses a collection of heavy equipment, i.e. tanks (Chieftain, Sherman), personnel carriers, canons and even a jetfighter, an old Voodoo, with its impossibly stubby wings. Perhaps the most memorable item on display is, however, an Iltis, a small Jeep-like vehicle used by Canadian peacekeeping troops in Bosnia. At first glimpse, it seems an unremarkable addition, dwarfed by the rest of the weaponry on exhibit. But then you notice the bullet holes in the front windshield, any one of which could have been fatal.

It's a spectacular room, but also the most conventional. At the other end of the spectrum is Regeneration Hall. This gallery, long, tall, narrow and eerily empty, is the area contained by the copper fin. The only contents are the steel structure that holds up the walls and a series of plaster figures sculpted by Walter Allward in preparation for his Canadian Memorial at Vimy Ridge, unveiled in 1936. The studies, which depict Peace, Justice and Hope, stand in stark contrast to this mostly unfinished space.

Past that, on one side of the lobby, we encounter the sombre Hall of Remembrance. This darkened box of a room contains nothing but a shallow pool, a bench and a headstone of an unknown Canadian soldier buried in France. A small window on the east wall has been carefully placed so that the sunlight it admits shines directly onto the headstone in the morning of November 11, Remembrance Day.

The only sound is the steady dripping of water, one drop every 20 seconds. The timing is intended to slow people down and induce a more meditative state of mind.

"This is a moment of silence," says Rankin. "The museum is a story told in a building. It tells the story of Canada's military history. It starts with a 5,000-year-old Indian skull with a spear through it and continues up to the DART team in Sri Lanka."

Like Moriyama, Rankin believes the site they were given is the best in LeBreton Flats, the former industrial district of Ottawa that was expropriated by the National Capital Commission in 1962. The NCC always had big plans for the area, but didn't decide what to do until the late 1990s. One of the expectations of the war museum is that it will serve as a catalyst for development in the rest of LeBreton Flats.

This complex but thoroughly urban building sits in a large park, the Common, that will function as the outdoor counterpart to the institution. Though unfinished, the Common will be able to accommodate 20,000 people. That means the museum precinct will be the natural location for many ceremonial occasions. The opening will be the first of many.

Despite the cost, parking was put beneath the museum. As it stands, LeBreton Flats has the potential to become a genuine extension of the city. Certainly future residents of the neighbourhood will have in the war museum a facility they can use around the clock. For instance, there's a concrete path that leads up the south side of the building to the green roof and from there to the other side. The roof itself resembles a small park, complete with an architectural element in the centre whose purpose is to frame the views of the Parliament Buildings beyond.

Such porosity has become a cardinal virtue of contemporary architecture, which makes sense. After all, this is a public institution and should be accessible beyond its hours of operation. In this case, it forms part of a larger park that will be the centrepiece of the new neighbourhood.

"I wanted to make human connections as well as connections to nature," Moriyama explains. "At the west end of the building, you can't tell where it begins and the grounds end. I also wanted it to be contemporary. We used lots of concrete and simple materials. You don't want a stage set, but you do want something more than just a room, a corridor or a stairwell."

Above all, you want to move people, stir their emotions and make them think.

"Raymond is a singularly brilliant conceptual designer," Rankin observes. "He has the ability to distil symbol and meaning, and to touch the soul of a nation.

"It was very exciting. I had never worked with Raymond before, but I knew him. I taught his sons at Carleton (University). We were the two principles. Our firms were equal. Raymond was the director of design, but we were involved in every detail all the way through. We developed a clear and open way of working."

As Rankin also says, Moriyama isn't just a great architect; he's a great guy. In a profession where the leading practitioners tend to garner admiration more than affection, Moriyama is an exception. He's a gentle man with a quick smile. He has watched this country grow and change, but doesn't always like what he sees.

"I've realized that I'm more Canadian than I like to admit," Moriyama confesses. "When I'm out of the country I'm really nationalistic. But I find it sad that we're sliding down and down. We're not disciplined and there's no leadership. We have all this opportunity but we don't look ahead. It's gotten worse and it's going to get worse. I don't feel depressed, but I find it unfortunate."

When Moriyama does retire, sons Jason, 44, and Ajon, 42, are poised to pick up where he leaves off. They both work at Moriyama Teshima Architects, and Jason helped out his father at the war museum. The firm's offices in midtown Toronto are lined with the more than 200 medals and awards it has won over the years. After the war museum, inevitably, there will be more.

But what the visitor notices aren't the plaques and prizes so much as the fish swimming in a small pond in the lobby. It is the perfect Moriyama touch, a little bit of nature, brought indoors. Or has the room been moved outdoors?

In the end it hardly matters. Both spaces belong equally in the world and Moriyama's architecture.

Both places of refuge.