CITYSPACE: ARCHITECTURE: NICKEL CITY

Engaging the true north, charred and pitted: Plans for an architecture school, a sports complex and an arts centre could transform life in the mining town

LISA ROCHON Saturday, May 24, 2008

SUDBURY -- When we sing that familiar song about the true north strong and free, we comfort ourselves with thoughts of a mythic north with lakes too numerous to name and great outcroppings of granite travelling hard along the land. Images of Sudbury and other northern cities don't even register in our minds.

Travel north and you will discover the romance of the pine and paper birch forests. Sure. But when I arrived here a couple of weeks ago to speak at a French-language book festival, I discovered there is nothing mythic about Sudbury's chewed-out downtown or the vinyl-clad, suburban-style housing that sits atop powerful ridges of rock. Even now, despite massive attempts to replant something green in Sudbury, the city is noticeably bereft of trees - it's still grim enough to recall its acid-rain legacy as a pitiful moonscape.

But then I started to drill down. There are plans for the new Northern Ontario School of Architecture with the potential to spawn a creative renovation of the city's downtown. And promoters of a multiarena sports complex and a major new performing arts centre are riding the wave of the city's economic upswing. On Thursday, both arts and sports committees presented business cases to the public.

Initial designs of the sports complex hold the promise of a serious place-maker here in nickel city. Along with other projects being considered, it could transform a place known better for open pit mines and unending road repairs into an urban centre that privileges the arts, education and recreation. Sign me up - this is a dynamic recipe for the revitalization of any Canadian community.

The 150,000 or so people who live in Sudbury have been through enough. Postwar, they endured the bitter stench of burning slag, the sulphuric fumes that forced children to stay indoors. Acid rain devastated the region's vegetation, causing vast amounts of erosion. Unfettered logging stripped the city's surrounding forests to provide raw material for towns booming elsewhere. What should be a majestic topography has been endlessly charred - the rock that emerges in monumental swells throughout the city is black and pitted.

Education is the key to reconnecting Sudbury with its mesmerizing landscape. The new school of architecture - the first since 1971 in Canada - is being intelligently conceived as a centre of sustainable design, where concepts of northern living would be explored. Designs for northern communities would be given some theoretical weight, and then tested by students through co-op work experience.

A new building for the school is planned for Sudbury's downtown. It could be set within a beautifully renovated existing structure or, indeed, could be a much-needed iconic work of new architecture in the downtown. Whatever shape it takes, the school must represent the most advanced marriage of form and function, one that expresses a daring optimism for the north while also pushing the most advanced ideas of clean, sustainable living.

The architecture-school project is already blessed to have the input of Rick Haldenby, the O'Donovan director at the University of Waterloo's School of Architecture. He's a force of a man who dared to move his institution from the dreary, sprawling setting of the Waterloo campus to the charged setting of a 19th-century warehouse complex on the river in historic Galt, Ont., now part of the amalgamated city of Cambridge.

Sudbury officials liked what they saw during a visit to Cambridge. And in 2007, Haldenby gave lectures to Sudbury's chamber of commerce, Laurentian University's board of governors and members of the Art Gallery of Sudbury, convincing them of the potential for an institution such as an architecture school to reignite the creative fires of a smaller city. A steering committee led by Blaine Nicholls, a local Sudbury architect and a former classmate of Haldenby's from the University of Waterloo, is now preparing a feasibility study.

The next step is a pitch to senior levels of government, and to the mining companies operating in and around the city. If all goes well, the hope is that the school would welcome its first class of approximately 60 students in the fall of 2011.

The sports complex is planned for a difficult site on the outskirts of the city alongside the busy commercial strip of Lasalle Boulevard and to the east of the vast Frood open-pit nickel mine. In the preliminary design by Toronto-based Maclennan Jaunkalns Miller Architects, with Sudbury-based Yallowega Bélanger Architecture, the regional recreation centre would have four soccer fields, a speed-skating oval and four hockey arenas, as well as as a pool and gymnasium.

The site features enormous black granite outcroppings and marshland. That explains the way the complex design navigates up and into the site, and why the main public entrance is elevated above some of the arenas. Blasting of rock and basic services to the site will mean high civil-engineering costs even before the architecture can begin.

The potential for engaging the thrust of the land in northern communities is huge, but it is rarely attempted. Sudbury's Science North (1984) by Moriyama & Teshima Architects is a remarkable exception. The original building sets dramatically curved walls of glass and concrete directly against the rock, and visitors are led down through a serious crevasse as part of their journey into the local geography.

Local miners carried out the excavation work. "Their pragmatic intelligence and knowledge of the hard rock saved us over $300,000," recalls Raymond Moriyama in an e-mail to me, "but, more important, they created a contextual beauty in concept and reality." As well, the city's then-dominant mining residents, Inco and Falconbridge, contributed a total of $6-million to the Science North Project. If they are seriously committed to the people of greater Sudbury, the foreign conglomerates that now own the mines should prepare to contribute importantly to the reinvention of the city.

In a city that once turned its back on the dramatic rock that defines its landscape, it's exciting to hear about the potential of the sports complex site from project lead, Victor Jaunkalns. "This site is perched up high and the view of downtown Sudbury is distant and painterly," Jaunkalns says. "You have the landscape of paper birch and pines and it has a real delicacy to it - and the rock is pretty dramatic."

In the feasibility study, the centre proposes a series of dramatically angled folded planes, with a hefty foundation of local stone anchoring the building to the rugged site. "The modern, tectonic qualities of the project and the prismatic nature of the landscape - these were fundamental to the scheme," Jaunkalns says.

The proposed performing arts centre promises the kind of acoustics required for the city's symphony orchestra, and the flexibility to host theatre, music and dance - something smaller and more refined than the Sudbury Community Arena where Elton John performed recently.

The arts centre is imagined as an icon within a revitalized cultural district downtown, on the west side of Paris Street across from the bridge of flags. "We imagine it as more than just a building," says committee chair Diane Salo. "The building is the jewel in the crown. We want to rejuvenate our downtown and celebrate the arts and cultural community which exists in Sudbury. It's vibrant, successful, full of its own heritage and character."

If accepted, the performing arts centre should put out a national or even international competition design call. In the north, within this country's mystical and misunderstood landscape, only architecture of provocative, enduring beauty is worth building.