To: Ontario Heritage Trust, Ontario Heritage Ministry, National Capital Commission cc: Hon. Steven Guilbeault, Federal Minister of Heritage cc: Hon. Jonathan Wilkinson, Federal Minister of the Environment/NCC cc: Hon. Anita Anand, Federal Minister of Public Services and Procurement cc: Lieutenant Governor of Ontario, Hon. Elizabeth Dowdeswell
Dear Hon. Lisa MacLeod, Mr. Marc Seaman, Mr. John Ecker :
On April 19 the Ontario LPAT hearing approved a new neomodern design for the Château Laurier, as proposed by the hotel management company and owner Larco Investments, and designed by condominium architect Peter Clewes. Heritage Ottawa supported the design in a strategy to block the previous, arguably worse, “radiator” offering.
Despite variances with City bylaws, the LPAT approval process sailed ahead, agreed to by everyone in the room. The lawyer for Heritage Ottawa went so far as to claim the neo-modernist design will “enhance the hotel for decades to come.” It is unlikely that is a view widely held by most heritage advocates.
The Château Laurier is a one-of-a-kind hotel in Ottawa, dearly loved by citizens across the country for its classic railway hotel features that are considered a national architectural style. Those elements are now at permanent risk.
Our primary concern remains with the height of the new design and its overall incompatibility with the Châteauesque features. We are in agreement with Gordon Bennett, former Director of Policy for National Historic Sites, who wrote: By “obscuring character defining forms and employing pointed contrast on whole façades [the Clewes design] is not compatible” with national heritage Standards and Guidelines, and should not be approved. The proposal, he underlined, violates the principles of subordination to the historic place. This is exacerbated by the added scale of design, which would now rise to eleven storeys in height.
We believe there remain at least three avenues for authorities to step in to prevent Larco from proceeding.
Ontario Heritage Minister Lisa MacLeod can designate the Chateau Laurier an Ontario Heritage site (it is currently designated only by the City of Ottawa and by the Federal government) and can then protect the historic property through a stop work order. These options are available through the Ontario Heritage Act. Provincial governments may have “devolved” responsibility for private heritage properties to municipal government, but the City of Ottawa has abnegated that duty, although – to their lasting credit — nearly half of Council stood their ground and voted against the most recent design. The Ontario Heritage Minister can work alongside the Ontario Heritage Trust in this effort. While rarely done, there are well known cases of similar intervention efforts by Ontario for projects in Toronto and Hamilton.
Given the National Capital Commission is responsible for Major’s Hill Park, there is continuing Commission responsibility here regarding allowance of pedestrian traffic entering the proposed hotel annex via the park. This trespass from public property arises given the absence of setbacks, because of variances approved by LPAT.
Another option is for federal intervention and expropriation of the property. This is a viable alternative when all else fails. It should not be shied away from if it needs to be deployed to protect this historic hotel.
It’s Time to Consider Federal Expropriation of the Chateau
When Larco Investments purchased the Chateau Laurier in 2013 they assured the public that no major changes would be made, only refurbishments, and the structure would be preserved.[i] This was, after all, an historic Canadian treasure, part of the national Parliamentary precinct. Politicians, celebrities, wedding parties and citizens from across the globe come to the “castle hotel” because of the way it looks, as much as for its central location beside Parliament Hill and above the historic Rideau canal.
The Chateau, Parliament and a family of buildings along Wellington Street share greening copper roofs, turrets and much history. They represent a range of architectural styles, from Beaux-Arts (Union Station, Wellington Building) to Gothic Revival (Parliament, Justice and Confederation Buildings), Second Empire (Office of the Prime Minister and Privy Council) Modern Classicism with Chateau features (Supreme Court) to French Gothic Revival Chateauesque (in the case of the Chateau Laurier).
Despite its placement within this rich architectural heritage, the owners of The Chateau have proposed to attach a series of contemporary designs – the most recent one being very close in appearance to the rejected first proposal.
A range of people has been involved in trying to block Larco’s apparent obsession with a boxy addition to the hotel. We have included prominent architects, heritage organizations, academics, celebrities, politicians, half of Ottawa City Council, columnists – and many thousands of Ottawans and other citizens across Canada.
Heritage Ottawa engaged in a legal process out of which came an agreement between that organization and the owners. While this agreement has no legal basis beyond Heritage Ottawa and Larco, unfortunately it has effectively muzzled many heritage advocates in Ottawa. For that reason, a group of supporters of the Chateau Laurier has stepped forward with a refreshed campaign — to build support to place ownership of the hotel in federal government hands until heritage legislation is established to protect the iconic building.
Heritage Guidelines are not Regulations
A core argument has been that any Chateau Laurier addition must be “compatible” with, but also “distinguishable” from, the original structure — two words with ambiguous meanings. These terms are excerpted from the “Standards and Guidelines for the Conservation of Historic Places in Canada” which is a guidance document, and not a set of mandatory regulations.
The purpose of this document is to help “create a culture of conservation to preserve Canada’s unique and irreplaceable heritage for successive generations.” The language was not designed to offer arguments for building new structures onto historic buildings, but to preserve our heritage. In fact, the guidance document also states unambiguously that: “The construction of an exterior addition in an historic place may seem essential for a proposed new use, but the Guidelines emphasize that suchnew additions should be avoided, if possible, and considered only after it is determined that those needs cannot be met on another site …”
But further: “Any addition should be designed so that the heritage value of the historic place is not impaired, and its character-defining elements are not obscured, damaged or destroyed.”
Unfortunately, this effort by Parks Canada to preserve and protect is being mis-used to disqualify two clear options that are consistent with preservation and conservation, and that are also the most popular ones: Either a replica addition (something in the Chateauesque style), or no addition at all (leave the hotel alone, as is.)
The guidelines state that a new addition to an historic place should “conserve the heritage value and character-defining elements” and be “physically and visually compatible with, subordinate to and distinguishable from the historic place.”
Advocates of a new boxy “contemporary” addition have focused on the word “distinguishable” because (they argue) this implies that any new addition must not look like the existing building.
The purpose of conservation (as the guidelines make clear) is to preserve, rehabilitate or restore. In the case of the Chateau Laurier, through “rehabilitation” the owner is seeking to increase revenue through expansion, even if that harms the “character-defining elements”. The guidelines define rehabilitation as “the action or process of making possible a continuing or compatible contemporary use of an historic place, or an individual component, while protecting its heritage value”
But here are the contexts provided by the guidelines: “Rehabilitation can revitalize historical relationships and settings and is therefore more appropriate when heritage values related to the context of the historic place dominate.”
Additional Standard #11 addresses a new addition to the Chateau Laurier, which clarifies that any addition must
not obscure, radically change or have a negative impact on character-defining materials, forms, uses or spatial configurations.
[show] physical compatibility with the historic place.
be visually compatible with, yet distinguishable from, the historic place. To accomplish this, an appropriate balance must be struck between mere imitation of the existing form and pointed contrast, thus complementing the historic place in a manner that respects its heritage value.
be subordinate to the historic place. This is best understood to mean that the addition must not detract from the historic place or impair its heritage value.
The guidelines, in other words, recommend (they do not legislate) that an addition should neither “merely imitate” nor strongly “contrast”, but it should be somewhere in-between. By any normal reading, that means we should be able to tell the new from the old but the new should not significantly differ from the old, (as would a contemporary structure against a heritage structure), and cannot have a negative impact nor diminish heritage values.
Two options that would best fit that guidance would be:
A close replica addition in the “chateau” style; or
No addition at all.
What Do Most People Want?
While no scientific poll has been done, we do have credible evidence from online responses within heritage webpages, from the names assigned to a petition, and by radio talk-show messaging. Comments on Facebook sites such as Lost Ottawa and Ottawa Pics – Past and Present (with a combined membership of 65,000 people, mostly from the National Capital Region) significantly skew in the direction of dismissing Larco’s proposed additions. The online petition to protect the Chateau Laurier has more than 13,500 signatures. Radio talk show host Dahlia Kurtz informed us that never had their radio station received more calls on any subject in its history than for the Chateau controversy, with all call-ins save one being opposed to the Larco proposal.
On the other hand, aside from a minority band of opinion tied to support for a “contemporary” addition, there is no evidence of broad support for any proposals Larco’s architects have put forward. Even marginal support for the last proposal was based primarily on minor improvements over the preceding proposal — the “prison wall” structure which blocked off the inner court, and that was universally condemned.
Based on hundreds of comments online and attached to the petition, a compatible, replica-like addition would be popular (as would no addition to the current building at all.) There are many examples of Canadian railway and other iconic hotels where extensions were added that replicated or mimicked the original architectural style. Five examples appear in the appendix: The Royal York (Toronto), The Lord Elgin (Ottawa), The Fairmont Lake Louise, The Fairmont Empress (Victoria) and The Hotel Frontenac (Quebec City).
The position that only something entirely different, modernist and brash, could be a suitable gesture to the original Chateau Laurier architecture, is a narrow interpretation and not a widely held point of view. Indeed, the guidelines (which are not regulations) do not prohibit replica-like additions to the Chateau Laurier as some are suggesting. Unfortunately, Heritage Ottawa’s President stated in support of the last Larco proposal in August 2020: “From the beginning we have called for an appropriate contemporary architecture that respects the heritage characteristics of the hotel, and we are pleased with this result.”
Perhaps worse, the heritage organization further clarified: “The proposed new addition is not a historical replica, which Heritage Ottawa never advocated, but it is more compatible [than previous proposals] with the hotel’s composition and irregular silhouette.” It is not clear by what decision process the historical replica option was discarded outright, for that resolute statement seems in conflict with a heritage mandate.
While successful in achieving the goal of stopping the penultimate design Larco put forward (i.e. “the wall”), Heritage Ottawa also appears to have excluded the two options most (not all, but most) citizens prefer: a near replica in the French Chateau-style; or no addition at all.
There have been admirable contemporary additions to other Ottawa heritage buildings that many believe have been successful, including to Union Station, to the Bank of Canada building, and to the National Arts Centre. But these are not the Chateau Laurier, nor do they share the unique French Gothic Revival Chateauesque features of the iconic Canadian railway hotels that Ottawans want protected.
Beyond a particular ideological fascination that favours only contemporary (e.g. modernist) additions to iconic buildings, there is no compelling logic nor obligation to ignore what most people want while protecting their heritage buildings. Quite the opposite.
So, Now What?
It’s taken several years so far to shuffle through a series of undesirable proposals from Larco Investments, the current owners of the Chateau Laurier.
Therefore, let’s take another pause to allow time for the federal government and its heritage authorities to consider other options.
One option that we strongly favour, is that the federal government purchase the Chateau Laurier property (through expropriation at going rates). This is not a new proposal. It was suggested earlier by our colleague Ken Grafton who wrote in 2019: “Few could argue that saving the Chateau Laurier is not in the public interest.”[ii] What is needed now, however, is political will. “Sometimes political will is created by public pressure,” Grafton pointed out.[iii]
Several prominent individuals have been supportive of expropriation, including former Liberal cabinet member David Collenette, Senator Jim Munson, Thomas Axworthy (in a letter he signed along with twenty others) and Carleton University professor and historian Randy Boswell.
Most see expropriation as a “last resort” option and this is appropriate. But we appear to have entered the phase of last resort, given Larco’s recoil from their original purchase promise not to significantly alter the building, and after efforts through other avenues to block their unloved proposals. (It should be mentioned that the last proposal was eerily similar to the first rejected proposal, making clear that Larco’s architects do not intend to change course.)
Part of our dilemma, however, rests in the absence of real regulations that protect Canadian heritage properties (whether private or public.) This underlying problem needs quick and effective resolution through legislation.
The “Political Problem” of Expropriation
We should acknowledge at the outset that expropriation of private property, while not unusual in Canada, nor in Ottawa, is not a popular government action in some circles. This is particularly true at a time of deep deficits due to COVID19. Therefore, any federally-mandated purchase should be undertaken only after other measures to protect the structure fail, as is the current situation.
To further assuage concerns, the federal government could guarantee up front that the process would sequence as follows: Purchase, Protect, Sell/Co-Manage. Expropriation would be followed by the swift establishment of clear regulations that would protect the Chateau Laurier so that no “contemporary” addition can ever in future be stapled onto the building. Then, if desired, the Chateau could be re-sold, or the running of the hotel would be contracted out to a management company (in fact, Fairmont currently manages the Chateau Laurier on behalf of Larco.) There are other options as well. [iv]
We believe that this is a reasonable and coherent way to protect the Chateau Laurier far into the future, so her iconic architecture, history and vistas can be treasured and shared for many more generations.
Block changes to the Château Laurier’s classic look/ Protegez le Château Laurier
Plans are in motion to alter the classic look of the grande dame of Ottawa hotels, the Château Laurier, with an addition that is not consistent with her existing style. The Château is a heritage property that for many Canadians is representative of our capital city and its history, second only to the Parliament Buildings themselves. The Château Laurier is a national historic site, one of Canada’s famed railway hotels, completed in 1912. Its opening was postponed when the Titanic sank. It once housed the most famous portrait photographer in the world, Yousef Karsh. We want no changes to the classic Château style, we want her features retained.
PROTEGEZ LE CHâTEAU LAURIER
Des projets sont en cours pour modifier l’aspect classique de la grande dame d’Ottawa, le Château Laurier, avec un ajout qui ne correspond pas à son style actuel. Le château est un bien patrimonial qui, pour de nombreux Canadiens, est représentatif de notre capitale et de son histoire, à un jet de pierre des édifices du Parlement eux-mêmes. Le Château Laurier est un lieu historique national, l’un des « hôtels de chemin de fer » réputés du Canada, achevé en 1912. Son ouverture a été reportée au moment du naufrage du Titanic. Il abritait autrefois le photographe de portrait le plus célèbre du monde, Yousef Karsh. Nous ne voulons aucun changement dans le style classique des châteaux français, nous voulons que ses caractéristiques soient conservées.
I know that you have been contacted by others about the Chateau Laurier expansion issue. I’d like to encourage you to take up the call for federal expropriation/purchase of the hotel, establishment of strong heritage protection legislation, and then continued management or re-selling and contracting management into the future (possibly with Fairmont continuing to manage). The hotel is too iconic for this city to give in to pressure to ruin its look and to damage the character of the parliamentary precinct.
I initiated the early petition* to protect the “castle style” of the Chateau. We succeeded in getting more than 13,400 supporters to support protecting the hotel. More than a thousand people added their heartfelt appeals in comments while signing. Support came from all across Canada and from the US too, as customers and admirers of the classic building are widely spread.
As you know, the City did not decide to protect against an addition that most people do not want, but deferred to owner Larco’s wishes. Disappointing to many of us, Heritage Ottawa came to a legal “agreement” with Larco wherein a final design was given a thumb’s up. (It is unclear on whose behalf HO agreed, as I was a member of Heritage Ottawa, but that is another issue.) We know the final design is remarkably similar to the original rejected design. One can only assume that HO believed an unacceptable, bad design was better than an unacceptable worse design. That low bar should not be allowed to stand.
My intuition tells me that the citizens of Ottawa remain very opposed to what is now proposed and most want no changes to the Chateau. Some may be happy with replica-style changes, but I think most want no changes. They “like her the way she is”.
Given these circumstances, it seems the only way forward is is by way of the good offices of a council member such as yourself who is committed to saving the hotel in its present form, and through negotiation with the federal authorities and political leaders (NCC, Heritage Canada, Ontario government) take a bold political initiative to issue a notice of intent to purchase and protect the Chateau Laurier permanently. Others such as Tom Axworthy and Serge Joyal have shown interest in the purchase option. I think many Ottawa council members would be on board if someone leads. I see no other route at this juncture.
I appeal to you to consider taking on this project as I think you have the respect and recognition of many Ottawa citizens, and you are someone who can re-energize the campaign.
I’d be interested in further discussion if you are keen. Sincerely, Robin Collins
By Richard Rhodes. New York: Vintage Books, 2000. 371 pp.
Reviewed by Robin Collins | 2020-10-01 12:00:00 (in Peace Magazine)
In Why They Kill, Richard Rhodes takes us through the life’s work of Lonnie Athens, an American criminologist who discovered a four-stage psychological process leading to what he called “violentization”. In 1989, with little academic support, Athens published an analysis of his fifty-eight comprehensive personal interviews with perpetrators of violent crimes, mostly homicides. Those stages he defined as: brutalization, belligerency, violent performance and virulency. Each reinforcing stage led into, and enabled the next, and (most significantly) all stages are necessary to create dangerous violent criminals.
Rhodes—known to many peace activists for his earlier book The Making of the Atomic Bomb —went on to look at several additional famous cases (including Lee Harvey Oswald; boxer Mike Tyson; and Perry Smith, the key murderer in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood) to see if they confirmed Athens’ predictions. They did.
Most know that males commit 95% of the homicides worldwide, and the bulk of the male perpetrators and victims are in the 15-29 age group.1,2 Testosterone is a superficial explanation, although most males in modern society don’t kill. Guns exacerbate the problem many-fold (even if acquired as protection they also imply a willingness to use) but they are not the primary cause. Violence in films and on television does not correlate as a significant determinant.
A better explanation, according to Rhodes, is that “the patriarchal preference for subjecting males to ‘violentization’, and their physical advantage in achieving early successful violent performances, explains why men are much more likely than women to be seriously violent.”
TRAINING TO KILL
While Athens primarily studied violent civilian homicide, there is significant overlap with data on violence related to war. Returning American veterans are about five times more likely than the civilian population to commit more than one violent act a month. This is due to traumatic experiences on the battlefield, but also is a consequence of soldiers violating their personal ethics. They had to be trained to kill, and even then it was common not to fire one’s weapons and to intentionally aim to miss.
Without the minimum justification of self-defence, killing was for most an unnatural act. When this was discovered, military training methods changed in order to trigger different learned mental responses.
That meant, in Vietnam for instance, the U.S. military implemented violence coaching to improve enemy body count numbers. North Vietnamese civilians were then killed as “payback” for fallen American comrades. This was the same process Athens understood as the transition between the “virulency stage of violentization and the final development of malevolency.” The entire process could be completed in a period as short as a few months, Athens found, as with the infamous 1968 incidents at My Lai and Co Luy in Vietnam when US soldiers began by torturing, mutilating, and executing captured prisoners; and then they raped, scalped, and beheaded—eventually massacring six hundred Vietnamese civilians, including babies and the elderly.
When they came back to the USA, Rhodes writes, many soldiers “descended from physically defensive violence into full malefic virulency, with violent self-images, unmitigated violent phantom communities and excruciating, conflicted memories of the taste of ecstatic slaughter.” Welcome home, soldier.
Short of preventing war itself, at minimum restricting violent conflict to combatants may limit the malevolence of the quagmire that comes post-war, Rhodes suggests. But what can be done within society more generally to stop dangerous violent criminality?
Athens believed that starting with good schools is the best approach. “A good school can go a long way in making up for a bad family.” Family violence, gang violence, single parenthood, problems of foster care and group homes also need attention. But an effective broad-based community education program would include instruction about rules of conduct and law “to counteract the ideas circulating in the community [justifying a right] to act violently toward one another.” The spare the rod-spoil-the-child and break-the-child’s-will, kind of “fundamentalist Protestant childrearing” with its authoritarian and traditional punishment strategy is wholly unhelpful and destructive.
When rehabilitation is still possible, “belligerent students” should be directed towards rehabilitation programs, rather than expelling them. This means a focus on anti-violence, negotiation, anger management and conflict resolution training. Catching them early is critical to preventing full passage through violentization. This principle applies regardless of social class, race, sex, age or intelligence, and the project needs to include community support for gun control and attention to dissolution of street gangs.
If early intervention fails, then violentization will occur, and neither prevention nor rehabilitation will be effective. Then society has little choice but to respond with law enforcement measures. “Community members will have little faith,” wrote Athens, “when they and their neighbours are daily subjected to the threat of murder, rape, robbery and assault.” Rehabilitation program support also means selective removal of “ultraviolent criminals from the community.”
Rhodes suggests that the statistically high level of violence among minorities segregated by racial prejudice having some of its origin in community dependence on “conservative Christian values that encourage physical punishment.” Now isolated within these “impoverished turbulent and malignant minor communities where policing has been both sporadic and more punitive,” violentization proceeds, and guns, drugs, crime and violence flourish.
Rhodes concludes that protecting society from violence means spending more money on informed programming, protecting children from brutalization, and making schools the community “social and moral centers”. Emphasize therefore: broader social supports, including (a shock to ‘defunding’ activists) police protection in minority communities, “rather than building more prisons”. The trend has been to blame poverty, mental illness, racial difference, diversity, masculinity, guns, cities, and other factors for violent crime.
But as Rhodes shows, referring to Athens’s ground-breaking work, because “violentization subsumes all those categories” that’s where our attention should be directed.
Reviewed by Robin Collins, an Ottawa-based peace activist.
It is true that modern additions can enhance or destroy a treasured architectural structure, and this is relevant to the Chateau Laurier expansion saga.
There is no reason to think an addition to an existing structure mustbe a modernist upgrade or mostly different in architectural style. There are other prominent additions that are not. (To name three examples: The Lord Elgin Hotel in Ottawa, the Hotel Frontenac in Quebec City, and the Hotel Fairmont Empress in Victoria, B.C.) If we were to poll the citizens of Ottawa, now that we have their attention, we could see where public preferences skew. I suspect most want to retain the traditional Chateauesque style. Of the more than 13,000 petitioners who signed on to protect the Chateau Laurier in 2019 (“Block Changes to the Chateau Laurier’s Classic Look”), a very large number added comments (about 1000) and many of these drew attention to the “castle look” as their reason for admiring the Chateau Laurier and why they signed the petition. “Don’t change it!” “Leave it alone!” “Protect our castle!” was the common theme.
However, architectural choice isn’t always about what the people want.
There is also snobbishness and modernist dogma at play. Some believe replication or wholly similar additions are the preference of the unsophisticated, unwashed masses. This is the view, for example, of the Globe and Mail architecture columnist Alex Bozikovic, who thinks Ottawa is a backwater where “low brows” hold a “simplistic idea that new is bad, and old is good.” Thus, he believes, minimalism, functionalism, and modernism must be the only good, and protecting the old is bad. That’s as presumptuous an ideological bias as the view that all modern styles are inherently hideous.
Bozikovic liked the previous (fifth) Chateau Laurier proposal – “the wall” — that almost everyone else detested: “I think the architects have done a really nice job of putting together a building that, in its details, in its proportions, is quite beautiful,” he wrote. In 2019, he described the Chateau Laurier as a “Gilded Age commercial confection.” He doesn’t like the Chateau Laurier. And that’s okay too, but disparagers are unlikely heritage saviours. Bozikovic believes that replication is not only undesirable but it is also impossible to do: “That kind of stonework, the craftsmanship that went into that building 100 years ago is literally impossible to reproduce today.” I’d argue that’s largely untrue, given the evidence, not to mention the skills and technology now available to builders.
When the hotel, which opened in 1912, was significantly enlarged in 1929, the expansion stayed close to the original. Those castle-hotel features enabled the building to acquire its later national heritage validation. It wasn’t because of the clumsy garage addition that was added in 1969, and since removed, nor the glass conservatory window that was added at front in the 1980s.
The stamina for “saving the Chateau” may be waning given the City of Ottawa, Heritage Ottawa and others have left the field of battle — to the obvious delight of the current owners, Larco Investments. We’re told that because version six is better than version five, it’s a marvel, or at least good enough, even though (as architectural historian Peter Coffman points out), the newest proposal looks remarkably like the initial rejected offering.
We’ve been had.
Will a federal institution now need to step forward to take bold measures? A large core of citizens — in our city and beyond — hope that sanity will prevail, and Ottawa’s Grande Dame of hotels will still be worthy of protection as a national treasure. But it will require some political courage.
Commentary 