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From the Globe:
A university's Grand idea
Waterloo's relocated School of Architecture has injected new life into a former silk mill and a flagging community
By LISA ROCHON
Thursday, November 24, 2005 Posted at 4:53 AM EST
From Thursday's Globe and Mail
Cambridge, Ont. — Though there is plenty to bemoan about the current state of city building, moments of triumph do exist. Singular, gutsy ideas have the power to anticipate ecstasy in the city. One year after moving about 30 kilometres down the road from its intolerable facilities at the University of Waterloo, the School of Architecture -- one of the strongest think tanks in the country -- has not only settled into its digs on the river's edge in Cambridge, Ont., it has triggered explosive change in the town.
What it takes for an instant shakeup of a flagging downtown: the arrival of 400 architecture students who labour long and hard in their creative incubator, a century-old brick compound that once housed a monumental silk mill. They walk from their apartments and rental houses -- 85 per cent per cent of the students live here without cars -- and fill up the sidewalks as those have not been filled for a long while.
They travel in and out of town, en route to co-op work terms in cities such as Toronto, Vancouver, New York or London. They need to be housed and fed, and they need to participate in their new community.
The School of Architecture's occupation of the former Riverside Silk Mill in the heart of old Galt has prompted the construction of nearly 200 housing units, which are currently being built. Several hundred more condominium and rental units are on the boards. There are 30 restaurants in the downtown.
How this happened: Five years ago, Rick Haldenby, the director of the School of Architecture and leader of a federally funded research centre on core-area intensification (or ways for towns and cities to thrive, rather than die), met with business leaders at a Cambridge chamber of commerce meeting to present his research. Minutes after starting his presentation, Haldenby was abruptly interrupted by John Wright, a prominent local businessman, who asserted loudly: "You'd solve our core-area problems if you'd move here. What would it take to get you here?"
Haldenby, long frustrated by a lack of studio space at the Waterloo campus, shot back: "A lot of money and a great site." At which point, Wright, along with three other business leaders, Tom Watson, Val O'Donovan and Jim Cassel, made it their business to lure the School of Architecture to their section of the Grand River.
Cities morph and change. It's a fact of nature. Even the names of major centres can change over time. Cambridge is an amalgamated composite of the towns of Galt, Hespeler and Preston, a region bursting with jobs at the Toyota plant, Frito-Lay and an aerospace manufacturer. By way of introduction, there's a zone of urbanity entered off Highway 401. A co-mingling of fumes exhausted from cars and greasy restaurants hangs in the air like Eau de putrid.
Beyond the deadening sameness lay the historic centre of Galt, a silver town of medieval proportions and Scottish stoicism. One hundred years ago, Galt was a major manufacturing centre of textiles, with factories pressed up against the banks of the Grand River. It was called the Manchester of Canada. Besides power, the river offered quarries of limestone and, naturally, a singular aesthetic for the town.
Originally, the design for Waterloo's School of Architecture in Cambridge was handed over to the acclaimed San Francisco architect Stanley Saitowitz. When he won the international call for architects in 2002, Saitowitz told me he wanted to celebrate the picturesque setting of the river by opening the dilapidated river face of the building to the water and allowing a public promenade to run by it. He was dreaming big -- of harnessing the energy from the river -- and erecting wind turbines on the roof of the new facility.
At a time when the budget and time frame for the school hadn't been clarified, his was a major vision. What emerged later on was that transforming the 90,000-square-foot building would have to be accomplished in short order with a modest budget. Saitowitz was paid a lump-sum fee, and the joint-venture architects, Levitt Goodman Architects of Toronto, were asked to take over.
Janna Levitt, principal in charge, led an exemplary operation of architectural acupuncture, leaving most of the complex to its historic self. "The existing building had a lot of really gutsy beautiful spaces, so we excavated it and inserted a couple of key contemporary moments -- the atrium space, the theatre and the library."
Though completed fast with many cooks in the kitchen, there's an intelligent balance between a tough, industrial aesthetic and warm, human gestures. The bones of the building were seductive enough: red brick walls of the five-building complex, original wooden floors and light that arrives generously through the studio spaces -- no desk is more than 10 metres away from a source of natural light -- as well as from the roof on the third floor, where double skylights run the length of the building. Black steel stairs hang like a sculpture in the atrium space.
There's hard-core studio furniture -- desks, bookshelves, store units -- designed by Waterloo associate professor Donald McKay and manufactured of galvanized steel sheeting. Throughout, there's a sense of the building opening itself to the creative enterprise. The library is vast, with all the books visible in stacks and views overlooking the river. Wooden "napping" benches with bamboo mats line one of the walls in the library, an idea that came from conversations with students, the librarians and the architects.
Except for student workshops, the ground floor of the complex is a public space, with a restaurant, gallery and theatre that both students and citizens can book for lectures. Cambridge Galleries have opened a design exhibition space called Design at Riverside. Its current exhibition, Regional Responses to Sustainable Architecture in Canada, is a handsome display of culturally and environmentally sensitive projects organized by curators John McMinn and Marco Polo.
The theatre is a simple space, pulled out from the existing building as a void that features concrete flooring and raked seating. And, as is the case throughout the school, the design anticipates the desires of the building's inhabitants. Just inside its entrance doors, there's a long, wooden bar operating both as threshold into the space and place to lean against. When I was delivering a recent lecture there, I looked up to notice students and academics lined up along the bar, using it like a timeworn hitching post.
Every once in a while, architecture frames the movement of ideas. At the School of Architecture, there's the movement of townspeople walking in from the streets to attend an exhibition or a lecture in the auditorium. There's the movement of conversation and drawings in the building. And there's the movement of a town on the rise.
The citizens of Cambridge have long known how to make textiles and cars. Now they understand the business of making minds.
lrochon@globeandmail.ca
GB
A university's Grand idea
Waterloo's relocated School of Architecture has injected new life into a former silk mill and a flagging community
By LISA ROCHON
Thursday, November 24, 2005 Posted at 4:53 AM EST
From Thursday's Globe and Mail
Cambridge, Ont. — Though there is plenty to bemoan about the current state of city building, moments of triumph do exist. Singular, gutsy ideas have the power to anticipate ecstasy in the city. One year after moving about 30 kilometres down the road from its intolerable facilities at the University of Waterloo, the School of Architecture -- one of the strongest think tanks in the country -- has not only settled into its digs on the river's edge in Cambridge, Ont., it has triggered explosive change in the town.
What it takes for an instant shakeup of a flagging downtown: the arrival of 400 architecture students who labour long and hard in their creative incubator, a century-old brick compound that once housed a monumental silk mill. They walk from their apartments and rental houses -- 85 per cent per cent of the students live here without cars -- and fill up the sidewalks as those have not been filled for a long while.
They travel in and out of town, en route to co-op work terms in cities such as Toronto, Vancouver, New York or London. They need to be housed and fed, and they need to participate in their new community.
The School of Architecture's occupation of the former Riverside Silk Mill in the heart of old Galt has prompted the construction of nearly 200 housing units, which are currently being built. Several hundred more condominium and rental units are on the boards. There are 30 restaurants in the downtown.
How this happened: Five years ago, Rick Haldenby, the director of the School of Architecture and leader of a federally funded research centre on core-area intensification (or ways for towns and cities to thrive, rather than die), met with business leaders at a Cambridge chamber of commerce meeting to present his research. Minutes after starting his presentation, Haldenby was abruptly interrupted by John Wright, a prominent local businessman, who asserted loudly: "You'd solve our core-area problems if you'd move here. What would it take to get you here?"
Haldenby, long frustrated by a lack of studio space at the Waterloo campus, shot back: "A lot of money and a great site." At which point, Wright, along with three other business leaders, Tom Watson, Val O'Donovan and Jim Cassel, made it their business to lure the School of Architecture to their section of the Grand River.
Cities morph and change. It's a fact of nature. Even the names of major centres can change over time. Cambridge is an amalgamated composite of the towns of Galt, Hespeler and Preston, a region bursting with jobs at the Toyota plant, Frito-Lay and an aerospace manufacturer. By way of introduction, there's a zone of urbanity entered off Highway 401. A co-mingling of fumes exhausted from cars and greasy restaurants hangs in the air like Eau de putrid.
Beyond the deadening sameness lay the historic centre of Galt, a silver town of medieval proportions and Scottish stoicism. One hundred years ago, Galt was a major manufacturing centre of textiles, with factories pressed up against the banks of the Grand River. It was called the Manchester of Canada. Besides power, the river offered quarries of limestone and, naturally, a singular aesthetic for the town.
Originally, the design for Waterloo's School of Architecture in Cambridge was handed over to the acclaimed San Francisco architect Stanley Saitowitz. When he won the international call for architects in 2002, Saitowitz told me he wanted to celebrate the picturesque setting of the river by opening the dilapidated river face of the building to the water and allowing a public promenade to run by it. He was dreaming big -- of harnessing the energy from the river -- and erecting wind turbines on the roof of the new facility.
At a time when the budget and time frame for the school hadn't been clarified, his was a major vision. What emerged later on was that transforming the 90,000-square-foot building would have to be accomplished in short order with a modest budget. Saitowitz was paid a lump-sum fee, and the joint-venture architects, Levitt Goodman Architects of Toronto, were asked to take over.
Janna Levitt, principal in charge, led an exemplary operation of architectural acupuncture, leaving most of the complex to its historic self. "The existing building had a lot of really gutsy beautiful spaces, so we excavated it and inserted a couple of key contemporary moments -- the atrium space, the theatre and the library."
Though completed fast with many cooks in the kitchen, there's an intelligent balance between a tough, industrial aesthetic and warm, human gestures. The bones of the building were seductive enough: red brick walls of the five-building complex, original wooden floors and light that arrives generously through the studio spaces -- no desk is more than 10 metres away from a source of natural light -- as well as from the roof on the third floor, where double skylights run the length of the building. Black steel stairs hang like a sculpture in the atrium space.
There's hard-core studio furniture -- desks, bookshelves, store units -- designed by Waterloo associate professor Donald McKay and manufactured of galvanized steel sheeting. Throughout, there's a sense of the building opening itself to the creative enterprise. The library is vast, with all the books visible in stacks and views overlooking the river. Wooden "napping" benches with bamboo mats line one of the walls in the library, an idea that came from conversations with students, the librarians and the architects.
Except for student workshops, the ground floor of the complex is a public space, with a restaurant, gallery and theatre that both students and citizens can book for lectures. Cambridge Galleries have opened a design exhibition space called Design at Riverside. Its current exhibition, Regional Responses to Sustainable Architecture in Canada, is a handsome display of culturally and environmentally sensitive projects organized by curators John McMinn and Marco Polo.
The theatre is a simple space, pulled out from the existing building as a void that features concrete flooring and raked seating. And, as is the case throughout the school, the design anticipates the desires of the building's inhabitants. Just inside its entrance doors, there's a long, wooden bar operating both as threshold into the space and place to lean against. When I was delivering a recent lecture there, I looked up to notice students and academics lined up along the bar, using it like a timeworn hitching post.
Every once in a while, architecture frames the movement of ideas. At the School of Architecture, there's the movement of townspeople walking in from the streets to attend an exhibition or a lecture in the auditorium. There's the movement of conversation and drawings in the building. And there's the movement of a town on the rise.
The citizens of Cambridge have long known how to make textiles and cars. Now they understand the business of making minds.
lrochon@globeandmail.ca
GB