The problem with public architecture in Canada

Alex Bozikovic is The Globe and Mail’s architecture critic. His most recent book is 305 Lost Buildings of Canada.

Once, the Arthur Meighen Building displayed Canada’s coat of arms and friezes of Canadian life. Now the federal building in midtown Toronto shows a different face: a hundred-metre-long blank stare of greige tiles and mirrored glass. After a $396.5-million renovation designed by DIALOG, this massive public building is both unwelcoming and anodyne. It is a building you could walk past anywhere in the world and immediately forget.

Yet this bland brand of badness is deeply Canadian. In the past 40 years, public design in this country has reached new lows. Even as Canada grew richer, denser and more diverse, its public buildings and places got steadily worse.

The problem is not just austerity – although that is a factor. It is not simply that design has been marginalized in our culture – though it has. The central answer is hidden in the weeds of public policy: design procurement. Our governments do not care about design, and their practices make that clear. They hire the wrong people. They hire them in the wrong way. They spend too much on the big expenses of construction and maintenance, but too little on the smaller costs of design. They have eroded the country’s ability to make distinctive architecture and landscape architecture – and in the process, they’ve undermined the idea that Canadians can make anything great at all.

Canada once had such ambition. In 1960, John Diefenbaker had a grand agenda for Canadian architects. Addressing a convention, the prime minister asked them to build in order “to touch the hearts of Canadians” and “represent the unity of our country.” The resulting wave of modernist buildings, completed around the centennial year of 1967, marked a new role for architecture in Canadian society. These were bold and ambitious buildings: Simon Fraser University, Place des Arts, the Museum of Vancouver shaped like a traditional Squamish hat.

Open this photo in gallery:

The Ontario Science Centre in Toronto, inspired by the latest Japanese architecture, delivered a magnificent concrete building and an innovative museum. Architect Raymond Moriyama was in his mid-30s when he received the offer to design it; he thought the phone call was a practical joke.

Open this photo in gallery:

But the province hired his small firm, and by the time he was 40 the centre was open, snaking down into the deep Don Valley in a remarkable grafting of nature and technology. It became a landmark for two generations of Ontarians, and remained so until the provincial government shuttered it this year on a bogus excuse.

Open this photo in gallery:

If such a project were announced today, Mr. Moriyama “wouldn’t have gotten the job,” said the Ottawa architect Toon Dreessen. “There would be an RFP” – a request for proposals – “and it would go to a big firm.”

Indeed, the landscape of design has changed radically. Ontario is busy commissioning a new, smaller science centre through a convoluted partnership between design firms, building managers and financiers.

It’s easy to guess who will be involved. Public design in Canada today is dominated by a crop of firms I’ll call the Big Twelve. The same firms show up again and again on public projects. DIALOG; Stantec; Arcadis/IBI Group; Lemay; NORR; B+H; Diamond Schmitt; Kasian; Architecture49; Zeidler; HDR; and WZMH, who are already working on the first stage of the Ontario Science Centre. This list includes most of Canada’s biggest architecture firms. The Big Twelve all have at least 200 employees; some are multinationals, mostly foreign-owned, with 10,000 or more staff.

By contrast, most architecture firms are small businesses. In 2023, the median firm in Canada had just eight employees. Most of their work is on houses. Architecture has always been something of a gentleman’s profession that rewards elite connections. Public design, in the mid-20th century, was an exception. Architecture – and landscape architecture, a nascent field at that time – became far more democratic.

But the moment passed. Beginning with the economic downturn of the 1970s, governments across the country, with the notable exception of Quebec, have become far more parsimonious and risk-averse in commissioning buildings. Today’s buildings are much more technically complicated than those of the Sixties. Contractual requirements are more onerous. And architects are now far down in the hierarchy: functionaries, rather than visionaries.

The Big Twelve are built for this environment. The Meighen Building renovation is the work of the Toronto office of DIALOG, a national design firm with roughly 350 employees. In a recent interview, Craig Applegath, architect and a partner of DIALOG, spoke proudly of the project’s efforts to retain most of the existing structure, thereby preserving its embodied carbon. These are parts of an ambitious strategy to reduce the building’s energy use and carbon emissions.

The vision was high-minded. But experiencing the building is grim. Its public areas are mean: awkwardly proportioned, badly lit, and finished with a palette of grey ceramic and dark wood that evokes a suburban dentist’s office. Some of the friezes from the façade are on display, in a public meeting room that’s used for citizenship ceremonies. It has all the grandeur of a three-star hotel ballroom.

On the street, people will not be inspired by the building’s 60-metre front façade, an expanse of taupe and white panels punctuated by a loading dock and gas meters. Neither will those who have a taste for skillful modernist architecture. The front façade lacks the hierarchy, clarity and compositional rigour that a professional would look for. It is, to be blunt, a mess.

Open this photo in gallery:

Mr. Applegath explained that the diagonal window pattern that snakes down the front façade, marking the route of a staircase through the building, evokes a stream meandering through Toronto’s street grid. “We wanted to have a façade that would reflect the city,” he said. This is the kind of pretext architects use to explain their compositional choices.

But the idea is borrowed. The winding-diagonal-stripe motif is at least 20 years old; it showed up in OMA’s radical design for the Dutch embassy in Berlin, which was completed in 2003.

Open this photo in gallery:

It recurs in a half-dozen buildings by prominent European firms including MVRDV. And in those cases, the diagonal stripe says something about the interior order of the structure. At the Meighen Building, it’s been reduced to an empty gesture. It accompanies a tight set of stairs that climb to locked office floors. On two visits to the building I saw almost nobody use them.

Still, this stripe idea seems to be useful. DIALOG is now recycling it for a police building in the Toronto suburb of Brampton.

Is such an architecture of meaningless flourishes the best we can do?

Certainly the current system encourages it. For the Meighen Building, DIALOG was not hired by the federal government. Public Services and Procurement Canada prepared a list of requirements, known as a “brief.” They hired Brookfield Global Integrated Solutions (BGIS) to manage the project. A separate study determined that the building needed a new façade. Then BGIS issued a request for qualifications, or RFQ, asking design teams to show their bona fides. Selected firms were asked to compete through an RFP.

The RFQ/RFP process involves a scoring system: Applicants win points based on their experience, expertise and other factors, including their fee, and the team with the most points wins. On paper, this is a holistic evaluation that balances a variety of inputs. In practice, comparable firms get similar scores. Then it’s all about the lowest bid.

This is standard. So too is a total silence about design quality. The Meighen Building’s 42-page RFQ set out a scoring system: Corporate Experience and Expertise, 20 per cent. Experience Design Management Expertise, 19 per cent. And so on.

The architects also had to prove they had undertaken three “similar public sector base building and fit-up projects of value in excess of $50-million” in the past 10 years. Only a handful of Canadian firms have such experience.

Smaller projects suffer from the same Catch-22. “If you haven’t done it, you can’t do it,” said Mr. Dreessen, the Ottawa architect. It is “almost impossible” for small and medium-sized firms to get public-sector jobs at all, he said – and when they do, these come with expensive insurance requirements and onerous legal burdens that push the risk onto the architects.

“Procurement is being done by people who don’t know what architecture or engineering is,” Mr. Dreessen said. “They do procurement for architecture, potatoes and toilet paper. They’re often well-meaning people and they don’t know the difference. A cheaper potato is fine.”

Cheaper architecture is another story.

In most procurement processes, “typically, it’s the least expensive firm that gets the job,” said Carol Bélanger, the city architect for Edmonton and a strong advocate for public design.

And, Mr. Bélanger said, “You get what you pay for.” If an architecture firm has promised a low fee, they can only put so much time into a building. They will assign more junior staff and interns to work on the project. Governments are getting design services – just smaller quantities of them, from people with less experience and expertise.

The results of that process are clear enough: messy details and an absence of imagination.

Too many public buildings across the country look basically the same. Their neo-modernist language is similar in Saanich or Saint John. They are glass boxes, white boxes or black boxes. They employ glazing, metal siding and so-called “aluminum panel” (which is, in fact, mostly made of plastic). Their aesthetic strategies rely on proportion, alignment and the deployment of daylight.

A few are beautiful, because the designers have put in the necessary time and effort to resolve a thousand details, and managed light and space in an artful manner, and created spaces that serve the needs of their users. The recently finished təməsew̓txʷ Aquatic and Community Centre in New Westminster, B.C., designed by HCMA, is one such example. Angled skylights draw north light into its main swimming pool, creating cathedral-like grandeur. Meanwhile, its main lobby provides space for high schoolers to hang out and do their homework.

Open this photo in gallery:

But too often, these buildings are simply sloppy. Like the Meighen Building, they shoot for subtlety and deliver a monolith that is boring from a distance and messy from up close.

To avoid such conceptual weakness and imprecision, Edmonton keeps its design fees set. When designers compete for a job, they win points if their fee matches a guideline from the Consulting Architects of Alberta. They can’t overcharge, but also can’t undercharge and “buy the job.” This ensures the city ends up hiring a mixture of small and large firms, local and national and international, usually teamed up to deliver a mix of technical expertise and design ambition. Right now one of the best landscape-architecture firms in Canada, CCXA, is completing a major downtown park.

Edmonton’s fees are higher than the norm. The City of Toronto recently hired undistinguished local architects for a major recreation centre with a fee of about 3.5 per cent – $4.7-million on a $128-million building. Following the Edmonton formula, the fee would have been about 7.7 per cent, or about $10-million.

That $5.3-million seems like a meaningful savings. But in many cases the savings disappear. First, architects can find loopholes in their contract. If a particular aspect of the building wasn’t clearly spelled out in the brief, or if a change has to be made, that’ll be extra. Certain firms in the Big Twelve have reputations for using this gambit aggressively.

And cheap design becomes expensive when you begin the messy process of construction. Architects are responsible for creating the drawings used to tender and construct the building. Their subconsultants include all the engineers and other specialists. Their collective work is highly complex.

Then imagine that during construction, the builders notice that the electrical drawings and the structural drawings aren’t properly co-ordinated. The builders will come back with “change orders” to modify their contract. An extra million here, an extra $500,000 there, and suddenly those savings on design fees have vanished. This happens all the time.

We are, then, sacrificing higher aspirations in pursuit of economy – but it’s a false economy, at best.

This is related to an uncomfortable truth: Canadian architecture is in a bad way.

Previous generations understood the symbolic value of public buildings. The Parliament Buildings in Ottawa were designed – through a competition – in the neo-Gothic style, a well-executed architectural homage to Britain. The federal Department of Public Works, in the late 19th century, planted a flag with public buildings in cities across the country. Even school boards had their own in-house architectural staff.

Open this photo in gallery:

This tradition of quality continued into the 20th century, when the expansion of the welfare state provided a huge boost for the design professions. Canada became, briefly, a hotbed of architectural quality. Government wasn’t just buying design; it was a patron of the arts.

Today the city architect is an extinct species, outside of Quebec and the City of Edmonton. That leaves the procurement machine to manage design quality.

The results are reliably bad. By the measures that do exist, Canadian architecture is lagging. International recognition? Vanishingly few Canadian buildings have won international awards this century. Few Canadian public projects are widely published in international journals. What about reputation? Which Canadian architects might have a shot at the Pritzker Prize, the lifetime-achievement award that is the most prestigious in the field? I can think of three firms at most: Toronto’s Shim-Sutcliffe, Nova Scotia’s MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple and Vancouver’s Patkau Architects. All these firms are 30 years old or more. And they are bit players in the world of public design.

Instead, the Big Twelve rule. Their business practices are built for the current environment. They acquire smaller firms with strong portfolios, and then advertise that work as theirs. When they partner with stronger “design firms,” they often implicitly claim the work as their own. They obscure the distinction between design and what architects call “production,” the more technical aspects of design. There is no firm line between the two. Both are important. Yet the distinction matters.

On the 20-kilometre Eglinton Crosstown LRT, the basic architecture of all the public areas was designed by Montreal’s Daoust Lestage Lizotte Stecker. But another firm, Arcadis IBI, advertises themselves as “co-design lead” on the project. This is technically correct, but obscures where many of the most legible ideas came from.

Recently a smart Victoria city councillor, Jeremy Caradonna, posted that the city was proud to hire DIALOG in part because they had “designed” Calgary’s Central Library. DIALOG staff, in fact, worked extensively on that magnificent project. But the main thrust of its design came from the Norwegian firm Snohetta. This sounds petty; it is not. Hiring DIALOG for a landscape in B.C. will not get you a project like the Central Library.

Open this photo in gallery:

“I think it’s the marketing departments of those firms that do that” obfuscation, Mr. Bélanger told me. “And I don’t think many people in procurement know the difference.”

So what better tools might we use to achieve design quality? Canadian governments should look to Edmonton, for the way it prioritizes design quality, or to the province of Quebec for its system of competitions.

A design competition is a process in which design teams are invited to present an approach or a specific design for a site, with the winner selected by a jury. This was a standard practice well into the 20th century, including Toronto City Hall in 1957. Competitions can be an imperfect tool. They generally require unpaid work from designers. All the same, they help ensure one important theme: The best idea wins.

In Quebec, a 1992 provincial policy created a system of competitions for cultural buildings. That has produced more than 55 performing-arts halls, libraries and museums, including the recently completed Insectarium in Montreal, an unorthodox and playful museum designed by a team of Berliners and Montrealers. Marie-Josée Lacroix, the former director of Montreal’s municipal design agency, said the rationale is simple: “We are building for several generations. It is essential to do well.”

Open this photo in gallery:

Jean-Pierre Chupin, an architect and professor at the University of Montreal, believes that a well-run competition provides a “collective judgment” of design professionals, building users and citizens.

Prof. Chupin, the Canada Research Chair in architecture, competitions and mediations of excellence, argues that competitions deliver better and more sophisticated results than the RFP/RFQ machine. “Requests for proposals are oriented toward problem-solving,” Prof. Chupin said. “They see the built environment as a problem that needs to be fixed. Designers in competitions, on the other hand, see complex situations that need to be transformed.”

This applies to landscapes as well. The Promenade Samuel-De Champlain in Quebec City, by Daoust Lestage Lizotte Stecker, is “perfectly in dialogue with the waterfront and the river,” and “offers a superb public space for all, including people with lived experience of disability.”

Open this photo in gallery:

Even in Ottawa, there is fresh evidence that competitions work: Block 2, a new office building serving Parliament Hill. The 2022 competition finalists included a range of ideas and designers, pitting the world-famous Renzo Piano Building Workshop against the upstart Toronto architects Partisans.

Prof. Chupin observed the jury process, and watched jury members sort out the knotty requirements of the job, from heritage preservation to security to urban design. “Some of the experts were very skeptical about this process at the beginning,” he recalled. “But as they explained the issues, it was clear that they were hugely complex.”

The end result, a design by David Chipperfield Architects with Zeidler and EVOQ, is unlike any recent project in Canada. It knits together a set of older buildings, some special and some forgettable, into a tight composition of public and parliamentary spaces. It is ambitious in its use of wood structure and its recycling of building materials from the site. It goes far beyond visual one-liners to make an integrated argument about retaining older buildings for their environmental and cultural value. It thinks big and deals with complexity. That is what design can – and must – do.

Open this photo in gallery: