The Government in Ottawa gives permission to build a wall

To protect the citizens from beauty. 

Above: The existing Château Laurier seen from Major's Hill Park. Below: The proposed and approved design by architectsAlliance.

One sees an obvious typology to the various border wall projects proposed for America's southern border.

Border Wall Prototypes (from cms.qz.com)

This raises the obvious question of why the architects chose a barrier wall type as their civic expression?  What are they enclosing or defending or protecting or excluding or demarcating? Is this some slavish obedience to the zeitgeist? 

Contrast this to the design sensibilities of the original architects and developers a mere century ago: 

 

The existing Château Laurier in Ottawa, designed in a stately early 20th century French Chateau Revival style, was intentionally designed to complement the neighboring Parliament Buildings on Parliament Hill, a promontory overlooking the city.

Image from Google Earth: The Chateau Laurier in the foreground with the Parliament buildings behind

The developer of the original hotel, Charles Melville Hays of the Grand Trunk Railway, had commissioned the original architect, Bradford Lee Gilbert of New York, to harmonize with the civic scale and architectural referents of the adjacent governmental complex.

Château Chenonceau, Loire Valley, France (image from Wiki Commons, GNU free)

The original Château Laurier was a poor man's Chenonceau, a traveler's hotel where private rooms could be had for $2 a night, or a traveling salesman could sleep dormitory style with common baths. But the architecture on the personal and civic scale spoke of a dignity to which we all aspire and which was once expressive of a view of the person in relationship with history, tradition, society, and beauty.

While Gilbert was removed from the project, and was succeeded by Ross and Macfarlane  of Montreal, the intentions and the talents of the architects and developer were clear. Even in an age of architectural pluralism and historical stylism, when one could design convincing civic and institutional buildings in Greco-Roman Classicism, Neo-Gothic of either the French or English Tudor variants, Italianate, Mission Revival, Egyptian, or Renaissance Palladianism, the civic sensibility was to design with respect to and regard for the neighbors.

The limits of Modern Architecture

This was an age before the hegemony and totalitarianism of the Modern movement which  effectively mandated that all buildings should be built in modern materials (steel, concrete, plate glass), without regard for context or civic engagement, and certainly without reference to the human person or the architectural patrimony of the past. So for the past 100 years we have been building buildings indistinguishable from any other typological building built anywhere else or at any time since.

The modern architect is today limited to the programmatic and functionally driven dictates of the project, massing to maximize the code permitted envelope, and to articulate the box with a limited vocabulary of materials, with window shapes and building massing which don't need to correspond to the internal organization of the building.

The architecture of modernism is reducible to the functional and economical, manipulated by the idiosyncratic mind of the architect as form giver. It is no longer a truly public art which respects the civitas. A planning consultant for the design team, one Dennis Jacobs, is on record as stating in defense of the design and in rejection of the public outcry against the design:

This is not a court of public opinion — this is a municipal government decision.

And the gatekeepers of the civitas -- in this case the Ottawa Council -- have been as negligent in oversight as Epstein's jailers.

Polite Buildings for the Polis 

Architecture is the most durable of the arts, and the most informative and impactful of how we organize our lives in the public realm and shape our common life. This is precisely why architecture has an ethical aspect to it: architects, developers, municipal planning staff and elected officials have obligations to the community far beyond the mere financial benefits of the industry. One is permitted to pursue one's private goods -- in this case the financial gain from being a hotelier or a developer or an architectural firm -- but not at the expense of the common good.

And in this case, we can consider the common aesthetic experience of the entire community to be a part of the common good: those things which we share in common without competition or exclusion (the principles of non-rivalry and non-excludability). This principle of the common good is all the more important as the scale and prominence of the "good" is considered:  no one really ought care what your garden shed looks like, whereas we all have a vested interested in how our civic scaled architecture and public spaces affect us. And the fact that architecture has not only an aspect of non-excludability, but forced and coerced inclusion, heightens the ethical demand on the owner, the design team, and those entrusted with the common weal of the community.

With this in mind, we can better appreciate the efforts of those who over the past several decades have renewed an interest in the communal aspects of architecture and urban planning, notably groups such as INTBAU, the Congress for New Urbanism, the Form-Based Codes Institute, numerous professionals in private practice, and select programs at some schools of architecture such as the School of Architecture at University of Notre Dame. 

I mention the last one in particular given that one of the graduate students, Michael Pfaff, has drawn up an alternate proposal to solve the same design problem given to the architects of record.

Such an approach respects its neighbors.  It does not think to pile up overseas shipping cargo containers (as Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson likened the approved design) next to your lovely home simply because that's what the architect fancied. It is a truly civic and civilized architectural approach for the civitas, a polite architecture for the polis, and rejects the radical, isolated individualism of Ayn Rand's Howard Roark which is the manifested expression of the Enlightenment rejection of tradition, relationship, and natural community.

It is certainly interesting that only 20 years ago, the previous owner of the hotel, the Fairmont Group, received planning permission for a similar expansion to the Château Laurier, which was respectful of the original design intent. This was very much the same approach when in 1929, the hotel added a whole 240-room wing keeping with the existing Val de Loire Château style.

The 2000 proposed addition to Château Laurier, by Le Group Arcop. Thanks to Scott Moffatt, on Twitter, for this reference.

It is noteworthy that past ages once saw the virtue in treating people in the fullness of their dignity.  In service of persons made in imagines Dei, truly noble beings worth of beauty and a civilized life,  the architecture supported and manifested a vision of civic virtue. The aristocratic style of the Loire Châteaux seemed to be a fitting architectural expression. Once the style of the grand nobility, the democratization of the new world saw these historic styles as apt for the dignity of the citizen in the new modern nations. 

What will be built speaks rather of the individual as an economic unit, to be warehoused in a container, embedded in a great wall.  And rather than providing a grand facade which extends the presence of the historic Château Laurier, the approved project will literally deface the hotel from the Ottawa skyline. It will hide the humanizing and historic architecture behind a steel wall more fit for border control.