Monumental challenges: Frank Gehry’s Eisenhower memorial

By Scaachi Koul - Tuesday, July 10, 2012 at 10:27 AM - 0 Comments

A proposed memorial for former U.S. president and five-star general Dwight “Ike” D. Eisenhower has stalled after months of controversy, and a Canadian architect is at the centre of it.

Architect Frank Gehry's model of the Eisenhower Memorial is viewed on Capitol Hill in Washington. (Susan Walsh/AP Photo)

Frank Gehry, 83, was initially asked to design Ike’s Washington memorial. Few, however, appear pleased with his designs. The Toronto-born architect wanted to focus on Eisenhower’s humble roots, which bothered conservatives who said that would diminish the legacy he built up during his later years. His family agreed.

Gehry then wanted to erect metal mesh screens around the four-acre plot to hide the drab neighbouring office buildings. Eisenhower’s granddaughter Susan said the screens brought to mind the Iron Curtain, comparing the memorial to those created for Marx, Engels and Lenin. “That was the point at which I could have left the stage,” said Gehry. Perhaps he should have.

Last week, a congressional committee nixed nearly $60 million in funding for the memorial, reflecting growing concern over the controversies. Gehry, however, is pushing ahead. Hope is not lost, says Chris Kelley Cimko, spokesperson for the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial Commission. After all, she says, “It took some 40 years to build the Roosevelt memorial.”

Winnipeg’s warming huts keep skaters warm

By Amy Rosen - Thursday, February 9, 2012 at 10:40 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Marianne Helm

It was a gong show, in Paul Jordan’s words. More than two dozen architects landed in Winnipeg last week to build some zany huts for skaters. There was one made of rope and another carved from a single giant block of foam. Then there was Frank Gehry’s deconstructed igloo. The sun was beating down on the blocks of ice, made from distilled water and shipped from Montreal, and they were starting to melt.

“I’ve got 11 Czechs, two Norwegians, three Americans, two Israelis, two Germans, and more coming, so it’s like the United Nations here and they’re all building their crazy huts,” said Jordan, 56, the lead organizer of Warming Huts v.2012: An Arts + Architecture Competition on Ice. “It’s about as much fun as you can have.”

Five teams have been working on their creations at the Forks, where the Assiniboine and Red rivers meet, a famous Winnipeg waterfront development that gets four million visitors a year. The warming huts are really unheated shelters, a place for skaters to get out of the cold, rest or to tighten the laces on their skates. They are also pieces of art. This week the teams began moving the huts onto the frozen river, where they will join winners from previous years with names such as Carcass, Apparition and Under the Covers.

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Changing the face of Washington

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Thursday, October 14, 2010 at 1:00 PM - 0 Comments

Bing Thom Architects/ Diamond Schmitt

Washington likes its buildings imposing, their walls stone-solid—and the activities inside concealed and guarded 24-7. The city’s century-old height limit preserves the iconic views of the Capitol at the cost of imposing a bulky and boxy shape on most large buildings, from concrete government complexes to cookie-cutter condo developments. But lately, a stream of Canadian architects have been bringing a different touch.

On Oct. 25 the American capital will see the gala opening of the biggest new cultural complex since the Kennedy Center opened in 1971: the Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theatre, built on the Washington waterfront by Vancouver-based Bing Thom Architects. President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle are the honorary chairs of the event.

The 200,000-sq.-foot complex is in many ways a very un-Washington building. Instead of imposing, it is playful. Instead of opaque, it is wrapped in a curving wall of 35,000 sq. feet of transparent glass. In the place of neoclassical columns that adorn so much of the city’s official architecture, there is a decidedly West Coast feature: five-metre wood columns—made by B.C.-based StructureCraft Builders out of Parallam, a material engineered from strands of the province’s Douglas firs—that rise around the building like streamlined totem poles supporting an expansive cantilevered roof. To build the unique structure, the architects said they had to prove the material’s strength and fire resistance, and get a local building code amendment. The elliptical beams, a metre in diameter, taper as they near the floor—making the columns seem lighter, as if giant trees had put on ballet shoes and risen up en pointe. “I’m very proud of it because we need to look at using wood in new ways,” said Bing Thom in an interview, adding, “We have this memory of the timber war with the U.S.—this is the Canadian revenge.”

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Will the art world trust the AGA?

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, February 25, 2010 at 3:00 PM - 16 Comments

Photograph by John Ulan

The cultural building boom of the oughts has been tied off in Edmonton with a ribbon of stainless steel. The new Art Gallery of Alberta was controversial from the moment of the 2005 design competition, which saw Frank Gehry acolyte Randall Stout outflank much bigger names (Zaha Hadid, Will Alsop, Arthur Erickson) by presenting his deconstructivist design in person and making sure to incorporate some contrived local symbolism. The curved steel strip that circulates through the glass envelope of the new building is supposed to echo the decidedly un-mirrorlike North Saskatchewan River that winds through the city, but its official name is the “Borealis.”

It is surely inauspicious for a structure to start life as a mixed metaphor, but Stout does seem to have studied the city sincerely. He noticed that, as an American Institute of Architects bulletin put it, Edmonton consists of “a hyper-rational grid system” with a belt of water and wilderness undulating through it. Cynics may think his steel-and-glass simulacrum over-literal, but they cannot challenge its technical brilliance.

Indeed, brilliance was needed. The project’s structural specialists, DeSimone Consulting Engineers of San Francisco, noticed immediately that—as they explained in the June 2009 issue of Modern Steel magazine—having “multiple locations where the curving Borealis elements penetrated the building envelope of the atrium” was a big problem in a cold-weather city. DeSimone and local partners were forced to invent and test an all-new type of load-transfer element containing some material that would hold up under large compressive loads without conducting heat as efficiently as metal. The mechanical engineers among you may have already guessed the humble, almost homespun secret: they used oak.

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Are admission prices too expensive?

By Anne Kingston - Wednesday, February 3, 2010 at 10:10 AM - 7 Comments

When Edmonton’s Art Gallery of Alberta, or the AGA, opens its glass doors this weekend, lineups are expected to mimic the steel ribbons furling around the building’s exterior. Ten thousand free-entry tickets for the first two days have been snapped up by locals keen to check out the $88-million reno. The response echoes the excitement surrounding Frank Gehry’s revamped Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), which drew 68,000 on its free first weekend in November 2008, and continues to attract 1,500 to 2,000 to its no-charge Wednesday evenings.

The spectre of crowds clamouring for gratis access to gawk at Goya and Degas reflects a modern Catch-22 with more twists and turns than the AGA’s bold new facade: on one hand, there’s a decided hunger for the public gallery experience, reflected in strong emerging 2009 attendance numbers. As Kelvin Browne, the vice-president of marketing and major exhibitions at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), puts it: “In a virtual age, the power of real things increases.” Yet there’s also resistance (and inability) to pay the admission these institutions must charge to cover budget cutbacks and still create the “Wow!” spaces and quality exhibits required to attract audiences fed a diet of virtual spectacle. Adult admissions to the country’s major institutions vary widely: the AGA is raising its to $12 from $10, due to higher costs of running its expanded space and an ambitious new programming push, says executive director Gilles Hébert. “It’s a thing of value,” he says. Post Gehry redo, adult entry to the AGO rose to $18 from $15, an increase that prompted the architect’s quip, “highway robbery.” Ottawa’s National Gallery charges $9. The Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG) charges $19.50 (winter), $20.50 (summer). And at the ROM, it’s $22.

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