File:Ottawa City Hall - Lunch time (48626443423).jpg

Ottawa City Hall - Lunch time

I often walk through City Hall during my lunch time walks. The biggest reasons that I include it in my noon hour walks relate to the open airy architecture, the regular art exhibits, and the fact that it is a public gathering space - always filled with people. If I’m being completely honest, however, I should also add that I appreciate the cool air conditioning on a hot summer day as well. 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.”