The Past

Embedded within the site is the original Aboriginal landscape - the promontory, the Ottawa River, the Chaudière Falls - marking a 5,000-year old stopping point on a key passageway into the interior of the continent. Also embedded in the site is the early 19th Century military landscape - the Barrack Hill of the Royal Engineers, designed to protect the Rideau Canal from invading Americans.

The mid-19th Century transformation of Barrack Hill, a small military outpost, into Parliament Hill, seat of the new government of the Provinces of Canada, was an astonishing feat. At a time when transportation was still rudimentary, when construction methods still relied on less sophisticated building practices, and when Ottawa was considered little more than a muddy shanty town, a set of buildings began to emerge out of the wilderness that would forever change the image of the city and the identity of Canada on the world stage. Many now concede that this collection of High Victorian buildings on their magnificent and dramatic site constitute the finest Gothic Revival com-plex in the world. And they symbolize much more - they represent in a visual form the tradition of Parliamentary democracy that is central to Canadian culture and our identity which is admired around the globe.

The great English novelist Anthony Trollope visited Ottawa in 1862, when the buildings were still in the early stages of construction. His words were prophetic: The buildings stand nobly on a mag-nificent river, with high, overhanging rock and a natural grandeur of position. The glory of Ottawa will be - and, indeed, already is - the set of public buildings that is now being erected on the rock which guards as it were the town from the river. I know of no modern Gothic purer of its kind, or less sullied with fictitious ornamentation, and I know no site for such a set of build-ings so happy as regards both beauty and grandeur.

And a great Canadian novelist of our own time, Jane Urquhart, evokes a similar sense of wonder in her novel Away, set in Canada at the same time period. The following passage records the first visit of her heroine to Ottawa in 1868:

They had been travelling for almost ten hours when the river, the forested hills of the Gatineaus, and the spires of Parliament came into sight. The surround-ing air was now clear of dust, splotches of snow and puddles lay in the fields. Even from this distance the stone walls and slate roofs of Parliament - absurd in the middle of the wilderness - were visible. "It's beautiful," Eileen said, surprise evident in her voice. "From this distance," said Lanighan..."it's the most beautiful thing in the world."

(Bruce Hutchison, 1944)

Perhaps it requires the sensibility of a novelist to capture the spirit of Parliament Hill. There is a romantic quality to the site that has only been enhanced by the historical associations that have grown up over the years. Frederick Todd, one of the great landscape architects and urban planners in Canada at the end of the 19th Century, said this about the nature of Parliament Hill and Ottawa:

Considerable has been said recently about Ottawa being made the 'Washington of the North'. Many of the beauties of Washington are certainly well worthy of imitation, but it would be a mistake to copy too closely the plans which have proved so successful there, for the location of the two cities is so absolutely different... Washington stretches over a gently undulating country, Ottawa is bro-ken by steep terraces and picturesque cliffs. The Potomac winds its way quietly through the city of Washington, while the Ottawa and Rideau Rivers rush through Ottawa by leaps and bounds. The Government buildings of Washington are of the Colonial type of architecture, as best suited to long stretches of com-paratively level ground. Your Government buildings are pure Gothic, the style which is perhaps better suited than any other to a picturesque style.

A few years later, similar thoughts were expressed by Thomas Mawson, Canada's other great turn-of-the-century urban planner. When confronted with a foreign architect's proposal for a west-ward expansion of the Parliamentary Precinct in a classical style very reminiscent of Washington, he responded:

I shall be surprised if on mature thought Canadians will care to experiment in this style. If it had been the intention to rebuild the present parliament buildings... there might have been an excuse for this type of design which is foreign to Canadian sentiment. Surely the picturesque qualities which the present parliament buildings undoubtedly possess should give the suggestion for the completion of the government group.

And of course, Noulan Cauchon, Canada's pre-eminent urban theorist at the turn of the century, who combined a classical Quebec education with a background in engineering and surveying, and became one more proponent of the distinctive character of a distinctively Canadian Gothic, noted:

The buildings of Parliament Hill are the key note of our national being, expressing our intellectual and political ideas...The boundlessness of possibili-ties of the Gothic is one of the primary characteristics of the northern mind.

Thus, within the span of just a few generations, the magnificent complex on Parliament Hill had already begun to define a particular Canadian identity and a particular Canadian style.

Even after the original Centre Block burned down, in 1916, every effort was made to reconstruct a new building that would harmonize with the surviving buildings and continue in the spirit of the place. Recall again the passionate words of Bruce Hutchison writing in 1944 after the new Centre Block and the new Peace Tower were in place.

How can a complex of buildings evoke such emotion? Who were these architects, masons and stone carvers, and how did this complex come into being? The story begins with the surprise decision by Queen Victoria to choose Ottawa as the capital of the combined Provinces of Canada. No one will ever know how much influence it had, but Lady Head, wife of the Governor General at the time, submitted to the Queen her private sketch of the magnificent hill overlooking the Ottawa River. Once the decision was made, an international design competition was held. The winning architects - Thomas Fuller, Chilion Jones, Frederick Stent, and Augustus Laver - chose 'Civil Gothic' as the style most adapted to the special challenges of the site, poised as it was between the wild escarpment on one side and the ordered urban core on the other. According to the architects, the Civil Gothic style allowed the scenery from the river to be of the "boldest and grandest character" while that from Wellington Street would be "more park like."

This was not the careful, archaeologically correct English Gothic of Westminster, completed just a few years earlier. This was a much more flamboyant Gothic which drew on the traditions of Italy and France and northern Europe. As historian Victoria Angel has noted, the architects were young radicals who had come under the influence of the great critic and theorist John Ruskin. He had urged the development of a new more vibrant Gothic, emphasizing the decorative and picturesque qualities of the building, and the importance of richly patterned materials. Frederick Rubridge and Samuel Keefer, the young administrators of the project, encouraged these tendencies.

The masons and stone carvers were brought from other sites where new directions in architecture were being established, such as Cumberland and Storm's University College in Toronto. They developed a rich decorative scheme relying in part on carving and in part on the rich texture and polychrome of various stone varieties. It was a tough challenge.

Add to this the bad state of the roads and the hardness of the rock, which required powder to remove it, and then the immense quantity of stone which went to loss in dressing. This owing to the irregular joints of quoins, window and doorjambs, and the tedious labour round arches of windows, quatrefoils, and batter to basement walls. The work had to be of a better class than the specification called for; no stone would be admitted into the work, unless it was dressed on the face as well as the beds and joints.

A masonry contractor for
the Parliament Buildings

The result of this labour, difficult as it was, gave a vitality and richness to the site that helps us in part to appreciate its continuing power and its irreplaceable value. As John Ruskin himself pointed out in his Seven Lamps of Architecture of 1852 - the life of the whole, that spirit which is given by the hand and eye of the workman, never can be recalled. Another spirit may be given by another time, and it is then a new building; but the spirit of the dead workman cannot be summoned up, and commanded to direct other hands, and other thoughts.

The work of craftsmen continued on the interiors of the buildings, where every effort was put into creating both an aesthetic and a functional space. As historian R.A.J. Phillips notes in describing the very first occupation of the East Block by transplanted civil servants from Quebec, Montreal and Kingston: the objections, of course, were in the loss of the cultural benefits...and in the difficulties of establishing comfortable domestic arrangements. There was little cause for objection in working conditions, for the East Block was, after all, the handsomest and most modern office building in the country.

The dreams and aspirations embodied in the buildings and grounds of Parliament Hill did not come without a price. The climate could be harsh, the terrain unforgiving, and the specifications challenging. There were cost issues and contract disputes. The Library of Parliament was the last of the four buildings to be constructed, and it could easily have been scaled back or even eliminated as a cost-saving measure. Instead, it was in some ways the most magnificent structure of all, an extraordinary pavilion that continues today to inspire visitors to the Hill. The project was carried through because of a faith in the emerging country, and that faith was well rewarded. Within six months of the opening of Parliament Hill, in 1866, a new Canada came into being with the newly completed buildings as the political and symbolic centre.