File:Grid lines (48635134618).jpg

Ottawa City Hall - Lunch time on the patio

The outdoor patio / lunch hour at the Ottawa City Hall gives the sense of a day at the beach. When viewed from the inside, the reflections of the coloured chairs and umbrellas dance across the waters of the infinity pool (or whatever this water body is called!). The stone lion at the back of the patio area is presumably standing guard over the municipal employees eating their lunch. Maybe he’s necessary, I was certainly more than a little envious watching them as my office doesn’t have a beautiful patio like this one!

City Hall is one of my favourite buildings in Ottawa, architecturally speaking and so it’s interesting to read exactly how architect Raymond Moriyama envisioned city hall, and to appreciate how successful he was in creating this vision.

“One night, in the late 1980s, architect Raymond Moriyama came to a vacant lot in the heart of downtown Ottawa and traced footsteps in the freshly fallen snow. He was there to envision a new regional government headquarters, where citizens felt welcome and politicians from 11 different municipalities could somehow come together as one. He had been asked to design such a building on Laurier Avenue West. It would be bounded by the Cartier Drill Hall and Lisgar Collegiate to the east and by the provincial courthouse and a former teacher’s college to the west.

The tracks, made after the first snowfall of the season, revealed where people were coming from, where they were going. And, to Moriyama’s eyes, they offered a glimpse of the shape his new project would take. It was here that the idea of a main street — a thoroughfare, with side streets extending in all directions, to all the key buildings and places nearby — came to him. “If you listen carefully enough, you find the answer,” Moriyama says. “I was amazed how clear it was.” He tells the story today from the atrium of his building, which is now known as Ottawa City Hall. His silver hair is slicked back and his Order of Canada pin adds a pop of colour to the lapel of the master architect’s navy suit. All around him, people hustle to and fro, paying him little mind as he explains his vision for the building that first opened 25 years ago this month [now just over 29 years ago] to house the former Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton.

Moriyama might be better known in Ottawa as the man behind the angular, emotional Canadian War Museum, but city hall should not be dismissed. Its modesty belies an airy openness. Thousands of people pass through its doors each week. Some are just passing through, or only stay long enough to play a tune on the polished baby grand in the atrium. But countless others come to participate in the political process that ultimately gives the place its purpose.”