Should architecture be a popularity contest?
Once it’s on the ground, why not?
For the second year in a row, the City of Mississauga is democratizing its Urban Design Awards process by having a parallel public vote to the one that is carried out by a panel of experts, who toured the 15 nominated projects earlier this week.
The “People’s Choice” awards gives everyone a chance to put themselves in the judge’s shoes and compare apples and oranges. Which is always entertaining, if frustrating.
By going to www.mississauga.ca/portal/residents/choiceawards, you can conduct your own run-off elections between Port Credit Memorial Park, St. Joan of Arch (as in (Arch) itecture I guess) Secondary School and the renovation of the Silverthorn Pumping Station.
Guess which one the engineers in the crowd will go for?
There are some telling things in the nominations. For one thing, more than half of the projects were completed by public corporations, not the private sector. That suggests that our public bodies are putting a premium, as they should, on providing quality development that sets a standard for the private sector.
This, of course, was the theory behind the architectural contest that gave us the Mississauga Civic Centre, which — 20 years on — now seems to be acting as the magnet for development that was intended when it opened.
There are three buildings from the UTM campus in the contest, any one of which could place first in most years. The Recreation and Wellness Centre (RAWC, pronounced Rock) which opened today, the Hazel McCallion (Don’t Call Me a Library) Academic Learning Centre and the Communication, Culture and (No Longer Information) Technology building (see photo.)
The CCT building has already been hailed in architectural contests and in print. Awarding-winning architectural critic Lisa Rochon of The Globe and Mail wrote a public love letter to it and architects Saucier +Perrotte last February calling it, “the thriller among the serious buildings that have gone up at the suburban campus” and saying “it marks a new heroism in this country’s architecture.”
Rochon was particularly enamoured of the way the building is integrated into the surrounding green space — the campus’ overarching asset.
Even the inevitable downtown putdown of the locale was relatively gentle: “It might seem unfair that a building of such tremendous import has been set down on a suburban campus rather than on the main street of a major metropolis,” Rochon wrote. “But remarkable architecture turns up fairly regularly in curious places.”
Even Mississauga.
If you’re into handicapping, put the CCT on the top of the list — at least on the expert panel’s sheet.
By the way, was somebody providing a little subliminal support for a certain provincial campaign candidate via the nomination photos on the city website? If you look carefully at the Marina Cove project in Port Credit, you’ll notice a lot of red signs for the Mississauga South Liberal candidate, who had his office on the main floor. Voting for the People’s Choice awards began the same day as the provincial election.
One of the private projects nominated is the straw bale house on Meadow Wood Rd. just north of Lakeshore Rd. W., a project you can’t even see from the street.
The irony is that the City was not exactly thrilled about the green project when it was proposed.
The owners spent a lot of time, and money, appealing to the Ontario Building Code Commission in order to get approval of the construction method, which City building officials said left too many unanswered questions.
In a decision released almost exactly eight years ago, the Commission allowed the construction, subject to several conditions.
Perhaps the beauty of the Building Code, like the beauty of a building, lies in the eye of the beholder.