[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="267" caption="Voice of Fire: the template for curatorial controversy since 1989"][/caption] You might remember the ink spilled several months ago over Maria Cook's Ottawa Citizen article revealing plans for a 10-storey Roxy Paine sculpture, a kind of giant stalagmite atop Nepean Point. Online commentators quickly lashed the New York artist's Hundred Foot Line, and in the tradition of taxpayer critiques, ridiculed the commission as yet another foreign and aloof New York abstraction pushed onto the "suckers" at the National Art Gallery. Not to be outdone, the curatorial establishment rallied to defend the installation, apparently eager to assume the role of a cultural bastion desperately resisting the philistine masses. (A Mount Carmel complex which says a lot about the gallery's PR doctrine and its evolution since the early 90s, but let me concentrate for a moment on what seems vital.) These art controversies may strike us as naive, foolish, or ridiculous, but I believe they present some otherwise unavailable clues or code outlining larger processes in Ottawa's historical development. More specifically, these public art installations are likely the latest phase in Ottawa's well-known spatial mutation, beginning in the 1950s, when the horizontal city — the "Edinburgh of the West" whose only towers were the spires on churches and on Parliament — burgeoned into the familiar vertical experience of glass and concrete, the stunted mockery of Toronto or New York. (With all that came packaged: wild architectures; kaleidoscopic visual stimulation, etc.)