The National Arts Centre’s ultimate inner sanctum, ‘The Nixon Room’, is a discreet VIP lounge encased in the heart of the concrete fortress. One could withdraw there, settling into one of its four high-modern leather armchairs, to write in anechoic solitude.
A tiny windowless keep, secure from aerial bombing, siege engines, or changes of the guard, it opens from a narrow staircase connecting the state box to the opera backstage. Used during the US President’s April 1972 visit—just weeks before the fateful Watergate break-in—oddly his name stuck despite other heads-of-state passing through; notably Her Majesty the Queen, China’s Premier Zhao Ziyang, the USSR’s Alexei Kosygin, and President Ronald Reagan.
Though a decade had passed since Nixon’s reluctant 40-hour junket to Ottawa, yet I’d sit in that room imagining the 37th President confined within its tight hexagon, fuming, openly impatient with Pierre Trudeau, restless, perhaps claustrophobic, waiting to be ushered into the gala show that he’d leave abruptly.
During state visits in the Cold War era, when the arts were deployed at the forefront of diplomacy, the NAC would showcase Canadian talent, usually in gala performances broadcast live on the CBC. Canada’s artistic face was predominantly white, bicultural, folksy, with a sprinkle of high culture: Gordon Lightfoot, Robert Charlebois, Maureen Forrester, Ginette Reno, Jon Vickers, Karen Kain, the premier ballet companies, Ukrainian-Canadian Shumka Dancers, Anne Murray, Stan Rogers, Ryan’s Fancy, Barry Broadfoot, Gordon Pinsent, to name a few.
Aside from state galas, on evenings when Prime Minister Trudeau was in attendance, typically he’d descend from the state box through the Nixon Room. I’d wait there to escort him backstage. His enjoyment appeared genuine, a curiosity not feigned, the only PM ever to show such interest in the NAC.
Liona Boyd. Classical guitarist. (14 July 2009, Ottawa.) Bastille Day. Corresponding by email with Liona Boyd who now lives in Connecticut. She’s written a song for Canada Day and attaches it as an MP3 suggesting I program it on the Parliament Hill stage next year. Last time I saw her it was the early eighties at the NAC. I opened the pass door to lead Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau to her dressing room. Earlier that day, she’d presented me her card with a Los Angeles address, gently insistent that I forward her all press clippings resulting from her visit. Her playing was poised, authoritative, with a light touch.
Sipho Mchunu. Guitarist, rancher. (June 2003, Gracefield, Quebec.) Juluka’s early-1980s NAC concert rates in the most-exhilarating category. Johnny Clegg was lead singer of a band made up of Zulus, including co-founder Sipho Mchunu, and whites in direct contradiction to the apartheid rules. Many of us actively opposing apartheid took heart, but nobody expected an ecstatic full house Zulu-dancing on the seats. I wonder, has a pop act ever incorporated dance so meaningfully? Hilton Rosenthal, the youthful manager and audio engineer mixed a clear sound. Sipho Mchunu explained to me how many cattle he could buy as a result of his tour income. Despite the band’s international success, he planned to retire. Though not fashioned from a gas can, his guitar had that distinctive township plucked sound. The dance duel, scorching in its energy and symbolism, had Clegg vying to keep pace with his Zulu counterpart. Hilton told me they’d just been banned in a southern US state, accused of ‘racial aggravation’, thereby causing cancellations on the next leg of the tour.
Peter Herrndorf. Arts Administrator. (February 2019, Edinburgh.) To the extent that brutalist architecture owes a debt to the medieval castle, Ottawa’s National Arts Centre with its thick masonry, sparse fenestration, giant metal doors, woven tapestries, and internal warren of corridors and staircases serves as an exemplar. Crenellate its roofline and you’d have a veritable arts fortress on the Rideau with the three performance halls clearly-defined as its turrets.
Given Expo 67’s architectural lightness of being, crystallized in Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic US pavilion, one might wonder at the weighty legacy vested in the Centennial Halls. Charlottetown’s Confederation Centre rivals the NAC’s brutalism but to my mind has aged better. Peter Herrndorf’s project to reverse the inward-looking and hermetic quality of Fred Lebensold’s Ottawa bunker with a weightless glass addition boldly addresses its fundamentally misconstrued orientation towards the Canal and away from Elgin St.
‘What does the land want?’ Louis Kahn, father of Brutalism, would ask when envisioning the use of a building site. To that one might add, what does the land want in this era? In reviewing the revamped NAC, the Globe’s Alex Bozikovic astutely noted that the original building’s hermitic and recessive interiority accurately evoked the Cold War-era’s defensive ethos, and who is to say, he asked, if this aesthetic will not come back into vogue one day?
Having worked there for more than a decade, I can attest that the public never sees the NAC’s secretions: the Nixon Room, a House Manager’s office accessed narrowly through an innocuous ventilation louvre in the lobby, the elephantine Rolls Royce engines majestic in the deepest mechanical vomitory. Occasionally, testing back-up power, they throb to life spewing black diesel fumes unaccountably over the Mackenzie Bridge.
Don Schmitt’s addition, all glass on a light alloy structure assembled like a kit and attached to the exterior of the original building, achieves the desired effect of presenting an open face to Elgin St. and towards Parliament. The imposing digital lantern, a fourth hexagonal turret, draws the eye and promotes Canadian performing arts. An expanded lobby fosters a new stream of events and services.
Unintentionally, though, the addition reinforces the medieval interiority of the original building: new and old lobbies connect only through complex counter-intuitive passages and lifts. Really, they feel like quite separate spaces, rendering the original foyer even dimmer and further removed from the scant natural light it once enjoyed.
The new architecture, as a metaphor for Canada’s performing arts in the high digital era, has clear affinities with marketing, brand-image, and identity-driven programming. The massive lantern displaces theatrical immediacy where performer and audience co-exist intimately in bounded space and time to connect instead with online platforms and devices at all scales. While its external digital skin constantly projects an ‘elsewhere’, what lies within that hexagonal stack is yet another VIP lounge.
Time will tell if this architecture will be the highlight of Peter Herrndorf’s legacy, or if that lies in other achievements—the biennial regional ‘scenes’ that solved the NAC’s longstanding local versus national conundrum, his outstanding success in fundraising and sponsorship, or his re-casting of the Governor General’s Performing Arts Awards as a splendid live gala not intended for broadcast.
Great performances and great storytelling
Fascinating.....