For a guy who was invited to the Mississauga Civic Centre last night to discuss the design of the iconic building that is the darling of so many architecture critics around the world, Michael Kirkland spent an awful lot of time talking about streets.
That’s something that architects and planners and urban designers spend a lot of time talking about, but the general public hardly seems to notice.
“What is a street?” the Miami-born, Harvard-educated architect asked rhetorically towards the end of his presentation as part of the 20th anniversary celebration of the opening of City Hall. (Doctors bury their mistakes but architects are invited to come back two decades later to explain them, joked Kirkland who expressed a droll, offbeat sense of humour throughout his 45-minute address.)
“A street is not a public service; a street is a public space,” said Kirkland, who played the down-to-earth, practical American in the architectural partnership that also featured his emotional, English-born partner Edward Jones. Jones enjoyed lecturing local politicians on their ignorance of architectural history and suggesting that only Philistines such as they would possibly suggest altering the design produced by a nation-wide architectural contest.
City council lopped one floor from the main facade building of the design, much to Jone’s chagrin. He also strenuously objected to some of the reductions in quality of the finishes and furniture that were imposed to meet the budget.
“We need to have a tremendous discussion about the kind of streets we want to have and how buildings are to relate to streets,” Kirkland said last night. “We have to defend the street as a public place.”
The tall buildings that are now starting to pop up along Burnhamthorpe Rd., and which will be augmented notably when Marilyn Monroe sashays into town and plunks herself down and crosses her condo legs on what used to be Harold Shipp’s horse farm on the north-east corner of Hurontario St. next year, are a step in its unfolding evolution. “In the fullness of time, Burnhamthorpe should be a promenade street,” said Kirkland.
It was interesting that the architect, like the rest of us I suspect, had trouble placing City Hall in any real context, even twenty years after its opening. The name of the speech was “City Hall as the Cornerstone of new City of Mississauga” but the architect, understandably so, was reluctant to draw any conclusions based on what he’s seen so far.
The Harvard-trained winner of the Fullbright Prize urged long-term urban design thinking, with municipalities and planners setting the tone by setting out a strong backbone of streets and parks and a few signature buildings such as the Civic Centre to force surrounding developments to respond to quality with quality.
It was always the City’s intent, in commissioning the contest that resulted in construction of the $60 million edifice, which honours the history of architecture and the history of agriculture, to kick-start interest in the city centre and stimulate debate among its own citizens about what the fledgling City was, and what it hoped to be.
“It wasn’t intended to be a tidy end but rather an open-ended beginning,” Kirkland said last night.
He also spoke of how the circular council chamber is symbolic of the central role that dialogue between the citizens and their elected representatives plays in the City’s life. The central escalator was a controversial architectural move.
Part of the motivation of it was to indicate that the council chamber is, “a place of gentle and boisterous contemplation,” he said. “The rough justice of the ground is not the thing of the council meeting.” When you ride up the escalator you are “going to a place that is somehow sanctified in democratic terms.”
As you may have guessed, Kirkland was not at the council meeting earlier in the day when McCallion and Mayor-in-Not-So-Patient-Waiting Carolyn Parrish exchanged rough justice for 30 minutes about whether politicians should question staff in public, or get their questions answered before meetings begin.
The architect himself recalled how he was once hauled before City council to answer why the yellow brick rows of Mississauga’s Oz were being paved with American bricks. Kirkland said he finally got to speak at 10 p.m. after council spent an interminable period of time, first discussing the issue of illegal tattoo parlours and secondly, talking about how a major acquisition of pencils had somehow gone awry.
Maybe we’d better not get too hung up on the “democratic sanctification” of the council chambers until our collective post-council headache goes away.