On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams

We've lost the Dog River grain elevator by fire.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/corner-gas-grain-elevator-fire-1.6238606


Funeral music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFg3MlXhNKQ

The building to come, meant to host both the Main Branch of the Ottawa Public Library and the geneology resources of Library and Archives Canada in years to come, now has a name: Ādisōke.

Details in this Twitter thread:

https://twitter.com/opl_bpo/status/1423307279139549189

Listening to this at the moment:

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-grand-dame-of-green-design-cornelia-hahn-oberlander-1.6053176

Listening to this during my afternoon job search activities...

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/unreserved/how-indigenous-architects-are-resisting-colonial-legacies-and-reshaping-spaces-1.5971556

Writing workshop in progress this afternoon, for practice and for mental health.

Tonight, I get to watch a lecture on architecture organized via Zoom by Carleton University's Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism. Been wanting to attend those, but timing pre-Pandemic never seemed to work out. Especially with the distance between Carleton U and Orléans. Zoom lectures are a boon right now!

Houses that used to be storefronts. There's ways to look for them, depending on the history of your neighbourhood. Dylan Reid discusses some of them - applicable in Ottawa and Gatineau as in Toronto - over at the Spacing Toronto blog:

http://spacing.ca/toronto/?p=61839

I think this is a name I know, probably from the Ottawa Small Press Book Fairs...

https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/1932-2020-otto-graser-ottawa-artist-architect-bookstore-owner-dies-of-covid-19/wcm/80093f8e-4982-4ec4-afd6-8d8800edb080/

Update: I rummaged through my e-mail files at NCF and GMail. It turns out that I did know Otto, at least via Facebook...

From 2008.

I'm sure I'm not the first fan of "Second Galactica" to take a picture and make the Joke.

Getting back to a theme discussed before: backing down from dreams is a thing that Ottawa seems to do a lot of.

There’s a bit of evidence for that theory that most people are likely to ignore in their daily travels throughout Centretown. If you’ve ever looked at the north-facing side of the eastern tower of the World Exchange Plaza, you might have seen it without noticing yourself. Inside the shopping-mall portion, the first three floors before they closed up the six-screen movie theatre on the third to refit it into office space, it’s slightly more difficult to ignore.



There’s this staircase on the north side that goes up from the food court on level two. The space that it leads to serves as a greenhouse now, but it was originally built to be the vestibule connecting the World Exchange to the Sparks Street Mall. There was, in the original plan, an enclosed, elevated walkway that would allow foot traffic between the World Exchange and Sparks Street. If there’s imagery of that aspect of the plan online and viewable by the public at the moment, I’ll be pleasantly surprised.

I don’t know why that part of the plan went by the wayside, but the vestibule – with then-functional doors – was part of the finished building. The walkway never happened.

There’s similar stories across the city. The five-screen theatre that was supposed to be the third floor of the last real expansion of the main building at Place d’Orléans Mall, for one. The unbuilt portions of Moshe Safdie’s original design for the expansion of what used to be Ottawa City Hall and is now the Diefenbaker Building at the north end of New Edinburgh and Lowertown. The freeway network imagined by Jacques Gréber and company that we now see still only pieces of, aside from the Queensway. Probably more than that missing from this particular narrative.

Since we already have two books in a series entitled Unbuilt Toronto, thanks to author and historian Mark Osbaldeston, we can begin to imagine the contents of such a book focused on the dreamed-of-and-still-unmade ideas for Ottawa. We need such a book, just as we need a proper historical atlas of the region. There are at least three different models we could consider for that book that come to my mind, and all three of them need more time and either ink or bandwidth than we have time for right now to explain and debate properly.

Hopefully, in my next writings on the subject, I can revisit those three models of historical atlas properly. Preferable, the books that I’m thinking of will be in hand as well. Especially in the case of an in-person discussion.

Anyone in my friendlist here know any architects who want to specialize in designing laboratories? I found an ad via one of the local temp placement companies this afternoon?