The Outsider of Canadian Architecture

It was a serendipitous fluke that I encountered Douglas Cardinal, the outsider of Canadian architecture. It was January 1988, and I was testing my manhood by seeing if I could survive the rigors of VIA for a month in the midst of winter. (Actually I was sneaking up on the Calgary Olympics, to savor its cultural side.) But I started out in Halifax, where the BeauxArtsy main train station was in the midst of a rehab. I thought there might be an interesting architectural angle in the restoration so I tracked down the man in charge of the work. There wasn't really a marketable story there, but I advised me that if I were really interested in Canadian architecture, I had to pay a visit to Red Deer, Alberta. Huh-? What was it? A zoo in the prairies? No, he explained, it's a small town between Edmonton and Calgary that is graced by Douglas Cardinal's first masterpiece, St. Mary's Roman Catholic Church. Douglas Who?

So after savoring the Calgary art shows--one in particular in honor of the first sports medico at the University: he turned out to be the University of Pennsylvania's jock doctor until he found Canadian U's more amenable to his profession--I sashayed up to Red Deer. I was thunderstruck. The church was simply a glory of light and the new liturgy. Who was this guy, I started asking around. (My piece on the place was entitled, Ronchamps of the Prairies, when it appeared in Connoisseur.)

Cardinal is a Metis, whose father was a gamekeeper for the Forest Service. He was tossed out of the architecture program of the University of British Columbia after one year as being unsuitable for the profession. (Heh, what do Indians know about architecture? Bauhaus Teepees?) Unperturbed, Cardinal went down to the University of Texas, where, working as a draftsman nights, he worked his way through by age 29. When he returned to Red Deer, he later told me, he said what he most usefully learned in Austin was to believe firmly in your new ideas and never be intimidated by authority. (That would be so B:C.)

In Red Deer he ran into a German Oblate missionary to the Indians (talk about Cultural Exchange) who had an itch for ecclesiastical architecture that would embody the ideals of Vatican II for a more participatory liturgy. The two of them sat down and tutored each other on two thousand years of church buildings. Out of their lucubrations came St. Mary's. Plus Portland Cements computers. Yes, Douglas had picked up a hankering for computers down in Texas, and told me with a gleam in his eye that it would take seven mathematicians a hundred years to come up with the complex calculations supporting the ripple concrete roof so stunningly shielding the parishioners from the elements. Portland Cement was willing to support this visionary because they saw future business in his innovations.

Jump ahead two years, and I read in the New York Times that Douglas Cardinal's $250 million Canadian Museum of Civilization was about to open in Hull, Quebec, across the river from Ottawa, on whose shores gleamed Moshe Safdie's National Gallery of Art. I called Hull for a Sunday afternoon appointment, and expected some flack to take me on a quick guided tour, dump some press releases on me, and vanish. Not so. Cardinal himself showed up. (He's so ordinary looking he could have been a janitor!) And for four hours he briefed me on his theories of architecture and how he overcame bureaucratic inertia to get his computer generated building off the ground. (Its smooth rounded surfaces simulate the glaciation that bequeathed Canadians their land mass. And he carefully pointed out how he complemented Safdie across the river!)

Needless to say, the Canadian architectural establishment was pissed at some goddam Indian getting the most lucrative commission in the history of the country. But Pierre Trudeau was not miffed. The Prime Minister saw in the Metis a perfect metaphor for his vision of a MultiCulti Canada. He silently advised Cardinal to start building, or the goddam bureaucrats will chew you to death. His version of how they all tried to slow him down if not stop him would make a great CBC documentary some day. I arranged to have lunch with him last summer after reviewing the grand Gustav Klimt show at the National Gallery of Art.

It was ten years since the CMC had opened and I wanted to see how it had held up. Perfectly. And he proudly reported that it was now the most visited site in all of Canada. Not bad for a poor old Indian who started his architectural career getting kicked out of the UBC! Funny thing, though. I can count on my left hand how many American architects, big and small, had even heard of him. And his visibility in Europe is even more befogged. Some bright graduate student should do a dissertation on the problematics of architectural reputations.

It's in state of scandalous imbalance, partly due to Star architect publicity mills and partly due to the professions clannishness and provincialism. But by the mid-twenty-first century, every Canadian kid will have visited it and tasted its visual pizazz personally, if the CMC's place as a must see tourist site continues its steep gradient. The computer is not used here to generate meaningless visual hoopla, as in Frank Gehry's Bilboa Guggenheim: it is employed to bring ordinary citizens and their national heritages into more illuminating contact. Cardinal works for the ages.