Civic sensibility. (the new City Hall building in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada)_

A small town in Canada has revived the European concept of community through public building with this inspiring and carefully detailed civic centre.

In 1953, Aalto spoke of 'the time-honoured European concept' in which a community's public buildings and open spaces were grouped together to create places where 'citizens without differentiation could gather'. He went on to suggest that 'this order of things has now been shattered', citing the advent of the commercial office building as a cause for the conspicuous decline of public buildings.[1]

Twenty years later in Kitchener -- a prosperous industrial city in the south-western corner of Ontario with a population of 170 000 -- the City Hall was demolished to make way for commercial development. The site was cleared as part of an urban renewal initiative to build a new shopping mall and city government was relocated into space in a nearby office tower.

As the inadequacies of this space became increasingly obvious, the city fathers followed the example set by their neighbours in Toronto and Mississauga and in 1988 established an architectural competition to design a new City Hall for Kitchener. The recently completed building was the winning scheme selected from 153 submissions in that two-stage national competition.

There is a preoccupation in Canada with the building of the city. It is seen as an important element in developing a social democracy in a country which is growing. It also represents an assertive response to the shortcomings of urban planning and the demise of the public domain created by the overwhelmingly commercially motivated forces of development in cities close by in the USA.

At the same time increasing bureaucratisation has seen the typological model for the city hall develop; from a single large public room built over an arcaded market at the heart of the town -- like the Palazzo del Broletto in Como -- to an elaborate complex of private offices.[2] Consequently the aim of this particular project was to re-establish the physical fabric of the city and restore civic life in Kitchener.

The plan of the building, with its organisation of the principal spaces into two long low walls of civic offices with a slab and tower of administrative spaces, confirms the shape of the city block and creates a distinct, market in the wider urban setting. Like Aalto's plan for Saynatsalo it defines a wedge of space through the site for public access. Set within a relatively informal city grid the design of this space also reflects the particularity of the site in a series of moves that recall Stirling's proposal for the Staatsgallerie. The plan defines a route across the sloping site from Duke Street on the northern edge through a rotunda and down on to a new public square which conspicuously fronts King Street -- the main street of the town. Within the overall plan a new angled wall, emphasised externally by the introduction of a sweeping stair, establishes an alignment with Gaukel Street and creates a new vista that links City Hall with the town green of Victoria Park.

In sharp contrast to the main elements that establish this urban composition within the larger context of the city, the new public domain is marked out by an assembly of smaller emphatic fragments. Located in the space between the two wings of larger buildings it is an assembly of emblematic signs and spaces planned to develop activities and patterns appropriate for urban life. While these elements are familiar, their placement, design and physical dimension are extremely successful. The new city square, bounded by a bookstore, cafe and day-care centre, which were built as integral parts of the development, is a lively place, while a reflecting pool there also becomes a well-used outdoor ice-skating rink for the whole community during the winter. A speaker's platform, placed thoughtfully between street and square, addresses both city and city hall. And a curving silver wing that marks the main entrance also serves as an elevated lookout over the square reminiscent of the portico of the National Gallery in London. The rotunda, signed by a drum of red Indian sandstone, signals a meeting place within that has already been enthusiastically adopted as a public room for a wide range of cultural activities, meetings and debates.

This move to express the smaller yet symbolically important pieces of the programme exposes ambiguities. Perhaps the design of the Council Chamber itself is the most obvious, for although this is arguably the space of greatest significance in the City Hall, it is surprisingly disengaged from the ensemble of square, rotunda and tower. The choice of materials and detailing appear to underline that separateness. It is also the palette of materials and the detailing of their assembly within the building that tend to emphasise skin and surface at the expense of the development of hierarchies of structure and material. So not only does the selection of Indian sandstone or timber suggest the exotic, but the details of juxtapositions, framing and reliance on mastic pointing tends to underline a view of these materials as decorative veneers rather than enduring substance. Ironically, it is the careful choice of material, the meticulous detailing and its thorough integration with the systems of enclosure, sunscreening and servicing which combine so effectively in the design of the skin of the civic tower to make that particular element, with its obvious reference to the commercial office building and the faceless bureaucrat, one of the more potent and perhaps inappropriate images of this impressive public building.

The new City Hall reconstructs a truly civic centre for Kitchener. It also highlights the energy of the city fathers and their concern for the res publicae. At a time when the patrons of public buildings in England are increasingly dependent on funding from a lottery, and civic space in much of North America is viewed as dangerous territory, the achievement of this particular community and its architects presents an inspiring view of the city in the late twentieth century.

1 Aalto, Alvar 'The Decline of Public Building' from Sketches: Alvar Aalto. MIT Press, 1978, pp111-112.

2 Pevsner, Nikolaus A History of Building Types. Princeton University Press, 1976, pp27-28.