An Irregular Idea 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gazing at the lawn that borders the parking lot of Arts Court—the downtown nexus for Ottawa’s homegrown arts scene—and the ring road that is Waller Street, you couldn’t be blamed for seeing only hardscrabble grass, a few pieces of unfortunate litter, visitors from the nearby Mission getting comfortable, and students blazing a dirt path shortcut en route to Ottawa U.

 

Peter Honeywell, the executive director of the Council for the Arts in Ottawa (CAO), sees it a bit differently. On this nondescript slab of land that was once home to an Ottawa police station and is now zoned for cultural development, Honeywell envisions a thriving and colourful multi-purpose arts complex housing a performance space, a café and—why not?—the kind of affordable, live-work studio space that is sorely lacking in this city.

 

Honeywell feels the project could be quickly phased in over the next two years and would be an effective temporary measure until the site is ready to be fully developed permanently. The idea is that with a permanent complex in place, the temporary one could be relocated to meet other cultural purposes.

The vision is ambitious but Honeywell isn’t just musing aloud: since June, he and CAO administrative assistant Zoë Ashby have been helming a working group devoted to project, including Arts Court manager Sandra Merriam, SAW Video’s Jason St-Laurent, and local architect John Donkin. The group recently emerged from a heady conceptual phase with a plan to play out their vision by Spring of 2007. The secret ingredient? Steel shipping containers.


Marginal architecture
Dwelling design with shipping containers is, admittedly, a marginal type of architecture.

“It’s a weird thing,” notes the project architect John Donkin, “and in this culture [Canada] most people try to avoid weird things.”

Not so for Honeywell and his friend Drew Mandigo. The two had the same eureka musings about a year ago and the Arts ContainR Project was born.

Though the practice is obscure, there is an environmental benefit to recycled containers as a building material. Countries that import more than they export often have an excess of unused containers—and in some ports the surplus has reached capacity.

Through human ingenuity, surplus containers have been used to create emergency shelters, childcare facilities, homes, sheds, exhibition spaces, and artist studios in cities around the world. Two of the more famous projects include the live/work Container City in the heart of London's Docklands and the Nomadic Museum built in New York City in 2005 and then reassembled in Santa Monica, California earlier this year.

Other benefits to shipping containers: they are durable enough to withstand trans-oceanic transport, can be moved around on flatbed trucks, and are cheap—a typical, full-sized container will set you back about $2,000. Get five of them, and you’re looking at more than 1,500 square feet of interior space.

The challenge, however, is designing the space effectively.

“What I’m kind of turning over in my head is: How do you build with these things?” says Donkin. “Essentially you have a structure that’s like a bowling alley.”

Container architecture has been most successful in relatively benign climates like that of England. The effect that Ottawa’s sub-arctic-to-swampy seasonal swings on such a structure will be another matter.

“Technically, the biggest problem is insulation,” says Donkin. “Put it on the inside and you make a small place even smaller. Put it on the outside and you disguise the container and affect its mobility.”

 

“But,” Donkin adds. “I think these problems are solvable. The biggest hurdle will be the approval processes.”

A global trend happening here?
If the enviro-friendly nature of the project is not enough, there’s also a certain caché to this global architectural movement.

“If it’s happening in all these other cities,” asks Honeywell, “why can’t it be happening here?”

“Maybe the biggest benefit in Ottawa is to tell people that it’s not permanent,” laughs Donkin. “If you don’t like it, don’t worry. It’s not going to be there forever.”

Despite the recent proclamations of provincial funding for projects such as the GCTC’s new Irving Greenberg Theatre Centre, a proposed multi-disciplinary arts centre in Orléans, and the Community Concert Hall project on Elgin Street, lack of facility space for local artists remains a major issue here. Published in April 2003, the City of Ottawa’s 2020 Arts Plan emphasizes the chronic lack of facilities for local artists in the 15 years before the plan was authored. Today, little has changed.

“We’re not doing this because it’s frivolous,” said Honeywell. “All the studies show that we need it, we need the space.”

Given the condominium construction trend that has hit the Market and Centretown neighborhoods, Honeywell is particularly worried about the lack of affordable space in the downtown core for artists.

“We just don’t have affordable downtown spaces or live/work areas. I can’t imagine how a young artist starting out could afford space in the downtown core.”

That’s where 60 Waller comes in.

The humble plot is a sugarplum that has danced in the heads of artists and local art administrators for years. Back in the 80s architectural drawings proposed a kind of Arts Court redux, including a performance space and a meeting place for the community.

 

 

Although Honeywell points out that the vision for the complex hasn’t changed dramatically, he also estimates that such a facility would cost somewhere in the ballpark of $30 to $50 million—making it something that is not going to happen over night. So what’s to be done in the interim?

“My vision for this site is to create a space in conjunction with the cultural district,” says Honeywell. “It’s really to expand a space that has not been utilized to its full potential.

 

According to the latest timeline imagined by Honeywell and his group, they would ideally purchase three, 40-foot-long containers in the Spring of 2007. If the project is approved by the city, they group would acquire an additional four containers to house a temporary performance space by Fall 2007. Add another two to three containers to the back and you have a café meeting space for artists, and, if zoning permits, the all-important live/work studios.

All of this, of course, hinges on the project getting the green light from the city, but the Arts ContainR project is heading into what Honeywell dubs “the bureaucracy phase.” He has made contact with Colleen Hendrick, the City of Ottawa Director of Cultural Services and Community Funding.

“If I don’t have a site, I can’t get the containers,” says Honeywell.

And his dream will have to remain just that, for the time being anyway.

  

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