Archives /// Urban design

This week on Ottawa Morning the CBC's Julie Ireton is taking an in-depth look at Ottawa's dysfunctional Sparks Street mall, the national tourist attraction that doubles as an echo chamber from October through April. In this segment she hears ideas on how to revitalize the street; the concepts include a dedicated vintage trolley system, on-street parking, and dropping in an "anchor store", or maybe even two. With ideas to share  like Kate Wetherow's on how to make vacant buildings come to life -- combined with some pot-shots at the federal bureaucracy -- Spacing's ...

Ottawa-the national capital, often overshadows Ottawa-the place to live. This is particularly true in architecture, where institutions like parliament, the Museum of Civilization and the National Art Gallery of Canada grab all the attention. Today, Apartment613 is featuring a photo essay by photographer Steve McCullough that explores some of the structures that - while not national treasures - help to give the city its unique style. Steve uses his camera to bring out the extraordinary in the everyday, even capturing the infamous City Center in an attractive light. Frequently voted the ...

A couple of weeks back we wrote about some excellent Ottawa blogs that take an urbanist point of view with them as they explore our city's streets and structures. Today we've got three more that are well worth adding to your RSS reader; Spacing Ottawa checks these ones on a daily basis to see what new gems have been brought to light. We'll start with the photoblog Wawtawa Life maintained by photographer Robin Kelsey. Robin tries to post one image every day, and though he's slowed off that pace a bit recently he still manages to be one of the most regular photobloggers around. Based near Somerset West, his eye for the telling detail is superb as he chronicles the fascinating streetscape of Chinatown and adjacent downtown districts. He's a clever man with his photoshop, but for our money he is at his very best when he employs composition or  perspective to tell a story. One mild criticism; it would be great if Wawtawa included a thumbnail gallery to make navigating the site a bit simpler. Still, clicking on a text description instead of a thumbnail image does add to the surprise factor.

In the late-1940s, Ottawa was a vastly different place from the city we know today. In spite of being Canada's capital for 80 years, the city was still relatively small (just over 270,000 people on both sides of the river) and retained much of its industrial roots—especially its position as an important centre for the logging industry—and maintained a haphazard collection of poorly-built “temporary” office buildings to house a civil service that exploded in numbers during the war. Several plans had been prepared throughout the first half of the 20th century to beautify Ottawa, but all wound up falling by the wayside, due to the First World War, Great Depression, and changes in the winds of political favour. It wasn't until 1950, after several years of study, that a plan that would ultimately lead to the transformation of Canada's capital would appear: the Plan for the National Capital General Report, more commonly known as the Gréber plan, after its chief architect, Jacques Gréber.

A previous version of this article appeared in e-architect.co.uk/ They say of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Romantic poet and famous opium addict, that he was prone to digress into his illustrations. He had a far-searching mind that just couldn’t leave well enough alone. Defining sustainable community would have given him hours of fun. Renewable energy. Ten percent of Germany’s roofs now green. Ten-thousand solar rooftops in LA. Stockholm suburban houses that one can heat with a hair dryer. Leed-certified box stores. Most of the press on the subject suggests that sustainable homes mean technologically savvy and energy efficient. But the marketing and attention given to eco-gadgetry overlooks a couple vital human needs. Every day I drive through the vinyl sea that was once a novel garden city en route to our little three-acre plot north of Kanata. I scan the streetscape for attempts at architectural beauty: gothic signifiers in a hotel fit for Batman; the preservation of the hundred-year-old March House (soon to be dwarfed by a box store neighbour); a stylish renovation to a bungalow now a dental clinic (with stonework outside that reminds me of crooked teeth in need of straightening). But, I have to look hard. Most of the time I think I could be on any suburban street in Toronto, Seattle, or Vancouver and not know the difference. I’m not a fan of suburbia. But suburbia is where I grew up. My pastoral playground was the bungalow-ville of the seventies. Its developers, too, had paved over valuable farmland. My neighbourhood was far from the modern density ideal.

A supportive ecology is crucial to any organism, and Spacing Ottawa is no different. But whereas in many cities in North America our recent splash landing in the middle of the local blogosphere could have seen us washed us up on some very barren shores indeed, in Ottawa we were blessed to find ourselves surrounded by a rich variety of like-minded blogs from across the city. The water is warm here; we pan to bob along with the current and share what we see along the way. For this first passage through Ottawa's blogging archipelago, we want to highlight three sites that get right down to street level, and revel in what they find. Charles Akben-Marchand is a Centretown resident, neighbourhood activist, and superb observer of change in downtown Ottawa. His "Images of Centretown" blog is focused on the way memory attaches itself to buildings and other elements of our streetscape, and he carefully documents those moments of transition when a street changes forever, one iteration of a particular address or streetcorner giving way to the next. Here's Charles himself on what he does:

What better topic to kick off Spacing Ottawa than with Lansdowne Park? It has attracted a great deal of controversy and misinformation, but in looking at the future of this important municipal asset, I have sought to steer clear of the rhetoric and asked myself a few basic questions about what the city ought to consider as it ponders Lansdowne’s future. The answers I give here are my own, as a citizen of Ottawa and one who is ambitious about the evolution of this city. What should Ottawa seek to achieve at Lansdowne? Lansdowne was never intended as a park in the strict sense of the word. It has always been, and should continue to be, a magnet for people and a place of intense activity revolving around sports and commerce.