Recently the builders of the Central — a block of condos going in at the corner of Bank and Gladstone –re-installed the preserved facade of the the old Metropolitan Bible Church that they had torn down to make room for their development.
Passers-by gave some feedback to the Citizen reporter covering the re-installation, and reading what they had to say got me thinking about what I’d have told the journalist if asked.
I’ve been going by the site at lunch hour for months now, starting about the time the engineers were overseeing Images of the “defacading” and preservation of the old church’s front wall. I’ve talked to the sales people, taken home brochures, and tried to visualize what life in a smart new building on Bank Street would feel like. It’s a fantastic location, to be sure.
And almost everything about it just looks far, far better than the gloomy old mud-coloured brick church it is replacing. It was a building so dreary that if you didn’t know it was put up in the 1930s you could have easily guessed; the drab and unwelcoming structure seemed the perfect marriage between the grim financial reality of the times and certain kind of religiosity then in favour — the kind that looked down on pleasing design as a dangerously worldly concept for the faithful to concern themselves with.
It’s not that I’m opposed to “facadism” as such — there are many attractive examples of it, in cities all over the world. At its best it gives character and a pleasing sense of continuity to urban space. But this truly does seem like facadism for its own sake; on this block of Bank Street, in 2011, I think we would have welcomed a fresh start.
photo courtesy of Images of Centretown
9 comments
Agreed. The old facade of the Metropolitan Church is unremarkable in every way. I’d have much rather, like this writer, seen a totally fresh start. I mean look at it: the facade speaks of no particular era, it has no architectural features that speak to us of beauty, and if we needed to be reminded a church once stood here, a plaque would have done.
I “experienced” the facade last Saturday and I might need a few more weeks to get over it.
Dreary, gloomy and religious – exactly the opposite of what Bank needs.
What irks me is that 1930′ s architecture can sometimes be glorious;to keep this wall is pure perversion.
Ottawa could be the Copenhagen of North America, but noooo; it’s stuck on trying to out-suburbanise Poughkeepsie.
Keep in mind that the top of the facade needs to be reconstructed, the windows and doors replaced, and the marquee reattached.
Unbelievable. That building was so ugly. Why preserve that look?
How can this blight on our renewed Bank Street be resurrected?
Grafitti!
Frankly, even that bland and unremarkable brick wall is better than similar brick walls built on modern condo buildings. It has design details and some subtle variations that modern builders ignore for pure uniformity.
That said, I have another problem with facadism – that it’s exactly as the name suggests, a heritage facade with the guttering of the interior heritage building. Maybe this building wasn’t a great example of heritage, but I’ve seen too many buildings that were truly gorgeous inside and out torn down, with only a wall or two remaining that’s poorly integrated with the glass and concrete building that sticks out the top.
It drives me crazy when people criticize houses still in house wrap…Save judgment….I have hope it surprises us all.
Actually, it use to be a theatre and movie house before it was a church.
Fraser – The way I understood the cinema angle was this: times were so hard that the financing behind the building project stipulated that cinema seating be installed so that, if the church failed, the back-up plan was that it could be readily converted to a movie house. The congregation did meet for a time in the Imperial Theatre also, further north on Bank.
Yes the facade is only ok. Sadly that is what constitutes architectural history in Ottawa. The glass and steel condos that that are being built in the core now also have very little to recommend them. Cheap, banal and unrelated to the street or this city: ubiquitous and charmless. By glueing the old brick facade onto new glass box the building at least captures two eras of workmanlike building and provides some visual texture that, all evidence suggests would not be there if bulldoze and build approach ran free.