Elgin Street courthouse: a bunker by design, or a viewer’s blinkered vision?

The Citizen published another installment of a wonderful feature yesterday. It’s a historical walking tour of Elgin Street by Ottawa writer Phil Jenkins, and it’s a very engaging piece, by equal parts informative, opinionated, funny — just what we’ve come to expect of Jenkins over the years. It picks up at Sparks Street, where he left off last week. Working his way south to Lisgar, near the end of the piece he addresses himself to the provincial courthouse at Elgin and Laurier:

Crossing over to the east side of Elgin, it is probably best to run past Fort Court, as it is known, unless your presence is required within. A ghastly building, from which one expects a puff of smoke to emerge every now and then when a traffic offender is incinerated.

Surely this not what justice should look like.

Reading that, I realized that I usually do walk past the the courthouse as quickly as possible, not giving it a second look – which actually takes some doing, as it takes up most of a city block.

But in viewing the photo above, taken from the City Hall side, I think I see why I agree with Jenkins, and avoid looking at the actual building in my perambulations. It’s just not very attractive. How so? Well, to my layperson’s eyes, its failings start with its use of one of the most overused 1980s post-modernist clichés; the non-functional campanile, in this case two of them, grey and squat, their square peaks perhaps trying — and to my eyes failing — to suggest a jaunty Second Empire flourish. Next, these unlovely towers bracket a layered massing of stone and glass that puts me in mind not so much of a fort but rather some kind of heavily fortified bunker, with horizontal slits for a maximum angle of defensive fire. Finally, on a site that should enhance a the visual experience of a major street corner, it instead turns a blank wall to it, excusing itself with some scrubby bush and a lamp post. The view from further south on Elgin is even less inspiring.

I’m told that the firm of Murray and Murray designed the courthouse; over the course of a long career the team of Tim and Patrick Murray designed scores if not hundreds of buildings in the Ottawa area and mentored dozens of architects along the way; they were a very well-respected firm, now part of the IBI group. Patrick Murray passed away earlier this year; last year Maria Cook wrote this piece on the Murray brothers who had recently been asked to lecture at an Urban Forum event at City Hall.

The point being that the appreciation of design is subjective, and to a good part often depends on how familiar the viewer is with the visual vocabulary being articulated. With a reputation like theirs and decades of good work behind them, it seems unlikely Murray and Murray were lacking taste in design. I would happily accept that there is something I’ve missed in the symmetry of the structure or the balance of its parts that would be the key to appreciating it for what it truly is. After all, it took 20 years or more for the NAC’s brutalism to grow on me; I love that building now, so I know from my own experience how long-held opinions can change.

So I’m wondering – do you think I’m off-base? Do you yourself have strong opinions, one way or the other, about “Fort Court”? If so, I’d love it if you shared them with us in the comment section below.

photo by Simon P.