In conversation with urban design guru Larry Beasley on the lessons we can learn from Ottawa’s plans for the victims of communism memorial
Portrait of Beasley at speaking engagement. Hweely Lim.
Larry Beasley, Vancouver’s celebrated former director of planning, is in demand for his expertise on urban design everywhere from Dallas to Rotterdam, Moscow to Abu Dhabi. But, as chair of the National Capital Commission (NCC)’s advisory committee on planning, design and realty, Beasley’s advice to the federal government on its planned Memorial to the Victims of Communism in Ottawa has been rejected. The Conservative government is pressing ahead with the controversial monument, although the design has been scaled back. In this exclusive interview, Beasley spoke about the best way to plan memorials. This is an edited version of our conversation.
One of the reasons it resonates with people is that it was such an elegant and beautiful design. If something comes out of the design process and it is remarkable, people tend to forget if there were sins committed in the process. The second thing is there was a wide appetite at the time in America for some sort of monument to the Vietnam conflict. So that, too, helps.
Having said that, the Second World War memorial that was also put on the Mall in Washington was very controversial, partly because it expressed itself a lot more strongly in the landscape of the Mall. The Vietnam memorial is a very modest, gentle kind of memorial, and probably more impactful because of that.
As an immigrant to Canada from America, and having had friends who fought in that war, it was very moving for me, partly because of the very unusual design.
It’s contrasting, in that the monument that’s now proposed is a much stronger expression in the landscape, and it is in a more touchy kind of location.
And also on Parliament Hill. The Mall in Washington is important, but the location of the Vietnam memorial is at the other end from the major government facilities. It’s not competing with the image of the American government, represented by the dome of the Capitol and the open space leading up to it.
And it’s a kind of theme that would resonate a lot more broadly with Americans than the theme here would resonate with Canadians. The theme of [the victims of communism] isn’t of the stature [to create] the wide public understanding that the Vietnam Veterans Memorial would have in America at the time it was put forward. It was very much in the top consciousness in America.
The way we express our memorials is different today than it was in the 19th and early 20th centuries. There’s now a much wider repertoire of possibilities. If you look, for example, at the Royal Canadian Navy Monument, it’s very symbolic and, by the way, proving to be very popular.
And it’s been very well-received. But you can see it’s a very symbolic expression, not the old-fashioned approach of a bronze statue. The nice thing about the process that’s been underway for many years in Ottawa, which produced some very good contemporary memorials, is that there was quite a good adjudication process and a very careful site-selection process, and a bit of an arm’s-length association between the proponents and government.
Two things happened. One is that, several years ago, the responsibility for managing the conceptualization, as well as the implementation of monuments, moved away from the National Capital Commission, which is one step removed from government, and shifted over to [the Department of Canadian Heritage].
Second, in more recent times, the governments of the day have been more interested in using monuments and memorials to communicate themes. In the past, memorialization was not so much a part of the government’s communications strategy. Some of the more recent memorials have been sponsored by the government and have been communication vehicles for government.
The 1812 memorial on Parliament Hill, for example, is a good indication. That was a part of a whole communications program the government has. I’m not trying to interpret the politics of why that was the case, but it was the case.
In the past, what tended to happen is that organizations would come to the NCC. The NCC has a very well-articulated policy on the location of monuments according to their stature, saving certain sites for the primary monuments of the country, identifying sites where monuments were appropriate. That was managed through the NCC, at arm’s length from government, working with the sponsoring organizations.
In recent years, there have always been competitions, truly independent panels, the advice of our committee, and other kinds of advice. The projects then move forward.
As I understand it, the monument is basically sponsored by the government and has been implemented through a department of the government. The NCC is put in the position of an approval authority, but it’s much more constrained than if it was managing the project from the beginning.
That’s right. Had it emerged through the advocacy of organizations across the country, the NCC would have laid out a suite of different kinds of sites appropriate to the budget, scale and nature of the monument.
It would have chosen one of those, then the project would have been managed with independent adjudication and moved forward. I don’t think we would have seen the location that was selected by government for the site on the table. There are many, many other sites where this monument would have fit quite nicely in the capital.
From the very beginning, we did say to the NCC that this wasn’t the best location. This location, according to all the approved plans that have been long on the books, should be held for an office of government. There is limited space north of Wellington Street for government buildings.
There are so few sites that it’s important to hold the sites that are there for future buildings, given that government goes on for hundreds of years. So our advice was that this site wasn’t appropriate for this kind of monument.
Our second piece of advice was that, if this location were pursued, we would lay out some design requirements that would leave room for a building, or would push the monument away from the primary image of the capital—which should be about the government of our country: the legislative branch, the judicial branch.
I believe in the arrangement that was previously in place. These proposals emerged out of the spontaneous organization of people in the country, sometimes with government support, sometimes not. Then, the NCC could manage these proposals within a context of policy. They could go through a competitive design process and have an independent adjudication, with the NCC board being the final decision-makers through that well-articulated and transparent process.
We are only an advisory board. We don’t make decisions. We give independent advice that the NCC board and the government can take or leave. Put me aside; our committee is composed of very distinguished architects, landscape architects, designers, urban planners and economists. We represent a perspective across the whole country. We bring a belief that the capital is a national asset, and we worry for the nation.
They will get our advice. Regardless of the politics of the day, every member of our advisory committee gives independent advice, whether they listen to it or not.
I don’t think anyone in our positions, if we were constantly not being listened to, would participate. Having said that, if you look back over the past decade, I would say our advice is followed 95 per cent of the time. We’re humble enough to know our advice won’t always be followed.