REVIEW
Eloquent Journey
From wartime internee to creator of Ottawa’s new War Museum
In Search of a Soul: Designing and Realizing the new Canadian War Museum
Raymond Moriyama
Douglas & McIntyre
136 pages, hardcover
ISBN 1-55365-207-x
The story begins with a treehouse. In 1941, Raymond Moriyama was interned along with his mother and two sisters in Slocan, B.C.; his father was in a prisoner-of-war camp in Ontario, half a continent away. The 12-year-old Moriyama, injured in a kitchen accident, was further marginalized by his fellow internees, who mocked his scarred body. As Moriyama has said throughout his career, the experience was formative – not least because of the way the budding architect chose to take refuge, building his own hidden treehouse in the forest.
Sixty-five years on, in his new book In Search of a Soul, Moriyama returns to that first work: It was on Little Mountain, a hill by the Slocan River, “in the shadow of the Rockies,” he writes. “Remarkably, this spot shares many similarities with the war museum site in Ottawa. However, my tree house was not a museum – it became my sanctuary during wartime.”
This experience of building alone from branches and scraps, Moriyama says, taught him how to build economically and how to build into the landscape. The treehouse became a place of revelation about the natural world. “Every square foot of land below me was different from the next square foot, and the next one and the next. Is the whole world like this, I wondered, every square foot unique unto itself? It was magic."
Architects love stories like this, and they tend to come back to them in discussing the pure inspiration that underlies the messy facts of building. But Moriyama is a special case. These days, we tend to expect architects to behave like auteurs, with outsize egos and a steady repertoire of forms and concepts. Moriyama has been much more reticent, priding himself above all on pragmatism and modesty. He is one of the finest architects in Canada, but also one of the most Canadian of architects. So now, approaching the end of his career, what is he doing in the spotlight?
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The new Canadian War Museum has been greeted as a huge success, quickly winning architectural prizes and extravagant praise in Canada. On the dust jacket of In Search of A Soul, Moriyama’s pensive memoir of the museum’s design and construction, historian Jack Granatstein calls it “the best museum in the whole world.” That is an overstatement, but it is a fine work of architecture. Moriyama and his team must feel proud: it’s a complex business to create any building of cultural importance, and the new Canadian War Museum – a chiselled volume in concrete and copper just half a kilometre from Parliament Hill – is no exception.
After decades of lobbying from veterans’ groups, the federal government decided in the late nineties to replace the aging museum on Sussex Drive. In 2001, Jean Chretien’s government moved the planned new museum to central Ottawa’s LeBreton Flats. Then the pace sped up. Moriyama’s office, Moriyama and Teshima, formed an alliance with Ottawa architects Griffiths Rankin Cook, and in October 2001, they got the job. They had a limited budget and three and a half years to design and build. It was, as Moriyama writes, “tight but doable.”
Moriyama received the Canadian architectural profession’s highest honour in 1997 (after Moshe Safdie and before Frank Gehry). But beyond design excellence, he has displayed the prosaic skills that make for longevity in architecture: tact, a deep knowledge of construction, and complex project management. These qualities were also crucial for a project that involved extensive public consultation and a conservative public-sector organization as the client; reading between the lines, it’s clear from In Search of a Soul that the war museum’s board was not looking for an architectural icon. But they got one anyway, a personal work from an architect not known for making icons. The design process that produced the museum makes for a good story, both because the symbolic stakes were so high and because of the way Moriyama responded to them.
In a few respects, the project represents a full circle for Moriyama. His first major projects were cultural buildings in concrete, the war museum’s signature material. Toronto’s Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre, completed on the cheap in 1963 for a community association, still looks good, with its forthright, monolithic form balanced by warm redwood and varied textures of concrete. His firm’s next major project was the Ontario Science Centre, a huge coup for the young architect. Moriyama developed a clever three-building scheme for the museum, with a central gathering space shaped like a trillium (Ontario’s provincial flower), and massive exhibition galleries laid carefully into the Don Valley. Built in a consistent language of textured concrete, but insistently drawing visitors into a dialogue with nature, it was another important work for Canadian architecture.
Beyond that point, Moriyama’s firm rarely used the same vocabulary twice. They completed educational and government buildings, office towers, and a number of museums, including Science North in Sudbury, Ont. (which looks like a snowflake when seen from above), the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, and the National Museum of Saudi Arabia, in 1999. Where many architects insist on bringing their preoccupations to each new work, Moriyama and Teshima’s body of work is remarkably inconsistent – and that is a point of pride for them.
Against this backdrop, the Canadian War Museum at a glance stands out for the boldness of its forms and the degree of its ambition, just as clearly as it stands out in Ottawa’s staid cityscape. It was shaped by personal ideas and high concepts, more so than Moriyama’s previous work, and In Search Of A Soul narrates the design process with great clarity – and perhaps a bit of myth-making.
In the book, Moriyama describes the design process, writes briefly but movingly about the construction, and tours each of the museum’s indoor and outdoor spaces. Given a coffee-table book format, he offers fairly brief explanations of the finished building, enough for the general reader to get a solid idea of the museum – and the thinking that went into it. This is the longest thing Moriyama has ever published about his practice, and his firm’s work has never been the subject of a monograph. Thus it’s an especially interesting memoir by a man, who, at 77, must be considering his legacy.
Early on, Moriyama explains his attitude toward the new museum: it was “not to be just about architecture or about fulfilling the personal vision of one architect; it was about responding to the diverse perspectives of individual visitors, about expressing the contradictions and ambiguities of war and sacrifice.” Moriyama mentions a painstaking series of consultations with individual Canadians and community groups that elicited a variety of views. Women “tended to speak of home fronts and of universal suffering,” while men “spoke of heroics, of good times and bad, and of the direct experiences of war and peacekeeping.”
How to bring these together? Moriyama’s team developed the idea of regeneration. He explains it this way: “Our building would house the memories of devastation and sacrifice while expressing the power of survival and rebirth” – both in nature and in humanity. It’s a complex idea to represent, but then good architecture thrives on complexity. As Moriyama recounts, he and his team faced down the task by looking at different forms for inspiration. They studied battlefields, like the blasted earth of Passchendaele; Canadian landscapes from coast to coast; and war art, including the grand collection of the Canadian War Museum itself. And, crucially for Moriyama’s way of working, they looked at the site itself and its two aspects – east toward the Parliamentary Precinct, and west up the Ottawa River. Onto this framework, Moriyama added more ideas: a gesture toward the Peace Tower, for instance, and the dimension of nine metres, the distance a World War I trench soldier could defend by himself.
Then there was a personal recollection of Moriyama’s: the sound of the wind, “eerie yet oddly comforting,” as he experienced it in his childhood tree house. The sound inspired his first sketch, he writes: a few scribbles that represent the Gatineau Hills on the left, the sound of the wind and Little Mountain – his childhood sanctuary – on the right. The anecdote helps explain how Moriyama led the creation of such a striking building. On one hand, attention to the land is perhaps the central motif of his work. And he places modesty at the centre of his professional value system. An architect is never “the sun around which the universe revolve[s],” he writes in In Search of A Soul. Instead, “an architect [can] be a moon… reflecting the light of inspiration.”
But of course “inspiration” is wherever you choose to look for it – as Moriyama acknowledges, this was a personal work, and his wartime experience was a factor right from the beginning. Likewise, his status as a victim of injustice, and as a leader of Canada’s Japanese-Canadian community, comes up everywhere in the press about the museum, in the TV documentary that accompanies this book (directed by Katherine Jeans, it aired on Bravo in November), and in the book itself. He is at the middle of this story.
Indeed, Moriyama acknowledges the irony of “a former inmate of a Canadian internment camp” leading the design team. But, falling back on modesty, he is reluctant to push the point. He says he was never asked about his own wartime experience during the architect-selection process. Much later, he recalls, the topic came up when he was asked to tell his story for an exhibit about the internment of Japanese-Canadians. “It was enough to be involved as an architect; to be exposed in an exhibit would have been too much.”
That ambivalent attitude reflects Moriyama’s position toward Canada’s cultural establishment. He [Moriyama] is an insider who never forgets his beginnings on the outside, and over the past 50 years he’s both been willing to remind others of those beginnings and eager to move past them in favour of an integrated Japanese-Canadian identity. He’s put in time at society events, and he and his wife Sachi have been settled in Rosedale for decades – though they maintain their distance. Reportedly, very few guests see the inside of their house.
Professionally, his life is likewise a model of inward stability. Moriyama is semi-retired, along with his partner of 40 years, Ted Teshima, but the firm is now led by long-time partners Teramura and Diarmuid Nash, and two of Moriyama’s children: his sons Jason, who collaborated closely with him on the museum’s design, and Ajon. Moriyama acknowledges their contributions with the proud air of the patriarch of a family business, giving credit also to Griffiths Rankin Cook. But the Canadian War Museum comes across, in the book, as unmistakably his project. And though the product of collaboration, it shows off all Moriyama’s characteristic qualities, including his willingness to create buildings that symbolize.
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The form of the finished building has a terrible beauty, just as its creators intended. Each of the subtexts that Moriyama suggests is apparent; the museum does speak to the riverside landscape, to the Peace Tower, and to Passchendaele, ruined cities, and the Canadian Shield. Its interior walls of recycled copper from the Library of Parliament are aesthetically stunning and historically rich. The building is expressive, to a rare degree for a contemporary building, about its sources of inspiration. This makes the book a useful guide for a visit.
But the clear narrative of In Search of A Soul slightly obscures the fact that these forms are contingent. Like most thoughtful architecture made today, they’re the unpredictable result of a complex process. Thus the modest greatness of this building: it is an icon that springs from its sources rather than imposing a shape on them. Unlike Santiago Calatrava’s birds or Daniel Libeskind’s crystals — or even Moriyama’s earlier snowflake or trillium – the building when seen from afar doesn’t have a simple message. It is a bunker, or a battlefield where the grass is growing up again, or a mountain by a river.
The book reveals the process that generated this multivalent form. Moriyama’s team developed, remarkably, 64 distinct design proposals, which were ultimately winnowed to three different options. With more public consultation, they refined these into the final design, which answered a call from the museum board for a strong “vertical element.” And then they set out to build it.
In the book, this is the point in the story at which Moriyama skips from a narrative of design largely into description of the finished project – and with the help of fine photography by Tom Arban, the book captures the building surprisingly well. Each of its central conceits and characteristics is clearly on display. There’s “La Traverse,” the zig-zagging, trench-like outdoor walkway across the museum’s green roof. There is the deliberately “compressed” and irregular lobby area, designed to begin a process of reflection on war and loss. Moriyama speaks about the remarkably well-crafted concrete walls in these public spaces: the material has three startlingly different textures, from a smooth, measured “memorial pattern” through another that mimics damaged buildings. (There are shades of his 1960s work here.)
Then there are the museum’s highly symbolic spaces, most especially Regeneration Hall and the Hall of Remembrance. Regeneration Hall is a tall, off-kilter volume that combines a staircase with a vertical gesture to the Peace Tower – which is just visible through a well-placed window. Asymmetrical steel support beams create an uneasy feeling of instability, light shines on sculptor Walter Allward’s maquettes for the Vimy Ridge memorial, and recordings add Moriyama’s eerie sound of the wind, which in this context is meant to suggest the dead silence of a battlefield. Then there is the centrepiece Hall of Remembrance, where on November 11 a shaft of sunlight catches the original headstone of the Unknown Soldier. It is “somber and austere, yet calm and meditative,” in Moriyama’s words.
In Moriyama’s account, all this adds up to an incredibly rich array of direct and indirect signification. (There are many more examples.) Most of the spaces live up to their billing, but sometimes his explanations simply overreach. For example, he writes that the museum’s “complex system of tilting planes that collide and intersect with one another…. express the tension and upheaval of war, and are a physical representation of the devastation of the land.” And the idea of regeneration “is implied in the way the jagged planes come together within the museum to form spaces of contemplation, memory and spirituality.” The building can certainly be read this way, but such aesthetic arguments ring halfway hollow. Those “jagged planes” may be expressive, but they’re not all that different from the jagged planes at the centre of the Bata Shoe Museum, or of several solid academic buildings Moriyama and Teshima have created at Toronto’s York University in the past generation.
Even one of Moriyama’s central ideas for the building – a “Mast of Remembrance” -- wound up getting erased for cost reasons, and the war museum’s board chose to install slate tiles in many public areas rather than the concrete the architects called for. There’s no surprise in such compromises; the building, more so than most museums, was created under financial and time pressure. Ever the pragmatist, Moriyama writes that “a skilled architect knows how to balance budget and quality design” and cites his pride at getting the job done. So, then, why not acknowledge clearly what the compromises were, and why not reflect on how his own past work crept into the design? These details don’t fit the story so neatly, perhaps, but they are also part of it. To talk about architecture as it really is, we need to understand why a modest architect would strive to make a building with a soul – but also how he gathers the scraps and branches to do the job, and finds a way to piece them together.