The renovation of the Bank of Canada headquarters in Ottawa was bound to be controversial, altering, as it did, a building by one of Canada's darlings of architecture (and for good reason), Arthur Erickson. Adding to or updating an iconic structure is always a daunting task, as it requires landing deftly between mimicry and offensiveness. Be too insensitive to the original and the clash between new and old creates a visual ugliness that cheapens value of the preexisting building; the alteration becomes an act of iconoclasm. Architectural imitation, on the other hand, is disingenuous on multiple levels: it is essentially plagiarism and necessitates hiding current building practices behind pseudo-historical facades comprised of modern materials that themselves try to conceal their nature by sort of appearing to be something else. Nonetheless, it remains a factor to contend with whenever touching on a master's work: a kind of sentimental protectionism that tints the reactions of some to any planned addition that won't appear as though it had been there on the original building's opening day.

Entrance to the Bank of Canada currency museum and Confederation Building[image: Gavin Guthrie] — Entrance to the Bank of Canada currency museum and Confederation Building
[image: Gavin Guthrie]

One part of Perkins+Will's work on the Bank of Canada's campus in downtown Ottawa (full disclosure: I was part of the team) was the re-imagination of the public square to the tower's east, which involved regrading the plaza and adding two light beacons and three angular protrusions. The latter are formed by bending triangular segments of the plaza surface upward, covering the tipped planes with planting, and glazing the gaps beneath. These are meant functionally to allow access into and provide ventilation for the currency museum below. Their shape is intended to evoke forms from Canadian nature--mountain peaks or icebergs, the headlands of the east coast--as well as both echo the pointed spires of the neighbouring Gothic Revival buildings and converse with the angled projections and recesses in the facade of Erickson's edifice.

The design invited its share of praise and criticism. Among those offering the latter were people who asserted it changed Erickson's building too much. Phyllis Lambert claimed the renovation would "desecrate" the building (though she was remarking more on designs for the atrium that never came to fruition). Another who offered an opinion was Alex Bozikovic, who wrote in The Globe and Mail "The new pyramids look awfully finite. They are clad mostly in black granite. Their forms don't echo the 1970s so much as the 2000s: The notion of peeling up the ground to form a building has appeared several times in the work of New York's Diller Scofidio + Renfro and is something of a contemporary cliché... The existing public space was not so remarkable or distinctive that it demanded total preservation. But these new additions are expressions of their own period."

The public plaza and Bank of Canada currency museum entrance with Arthur Erickson's building behind[image: Bank of Canada] — The public plaza and Bank of Canada currency museum entrance with Arthur Erickson's building behind
[image: Bank of Canada]

Now, it's fair enough to argue the crystalline hummocks aren't as "infinite" as they could have been, or that they are cliché. Those are matters of opinion and arguments either way may have merit. However, it is very odd indeed for someone as familiar with architecture and urban planning as Bozikovic to hold that a contemporary project suffers simply because its design is contemporary.

But, does he really? In the same article, he recognizes the other two elements of the Bank of Canada complex--Erickson's tower and Sumner Godfrey Davenport's original stripped Neo-Classical, Art Deco block--as being of their eras and makes no complaint about it. He noted: "[the bank's] architecture was already a conversation between eras: the conservative Canada of the 1930s and the ambitious, globally minded state of the 1970s... In the thirties, government built a temple you could visit. In the seventies, a green atrium open to all. Today it constructs fortifications and builds Pringles to push public space underground."

Bozikovic's passive condemnation of the security-driven cessation of public access to the atrium is spot on (even if he is wrong about the original bank building being open to visitors). His complaint about pushing public space underground is less convincing, especially as it's a public square that would've been lost had the museum been built above ground, rather than below. But, more to the point here, Bozikovic is also at once lamenting Perkins+Will's additions for being "expressions of their own period" while praising the earlier architects for doing just that in their own times; or at least allowing it. If the conversation between two parties was fine, why not a discourse among three? How to explain the internal contradiction in Bozikovic's critique?

One can only guess Bozikovic feels Erickson needs to be so venerated that the conversation stops with him. Everyone who joins in from then on should only parrot what Erickson says. Yet, that's precisely what we were trained not to do as architects; stylistic mimicry is eschewed by Modernism (a school to which Erickson very much belonged; as did Davenport, evidently). While we no longer hold that contemporary culture must be moulded by modern forms and spaces constructed on the rubble of historic buildings, we still understand that architecture should be of its time, so it--one of the most permanent of artforms--can carry into the future messages about our culture as it is now. We can respect great designs from the past while enriching the built fabric by weaving in a new pattern. Just as Erickson wrapped his tower around Davenport's earlier edifice, so did Perkins+Will materialistically and formally tie its public plaza and pyramidal pavilions to Erickson's tower.

Perkins+Will performed a very similar task with its renovation of Toronto's Nathan Phillips Square, the forecourt to the iconic Modernist city hall by Villio Revell. While the Bank of Canada renovation may not also win a Governor General's Medal in Architecture, the principle of adding respectful interventions without imitating is the same and, in my opinion, just as successful.