by Robert Smythe
There is good and not-so-good news for one of the city’s favourite heritage buildings, the Medical Arts Building at 180 Metcalfe Street, which has been designated under Part IV of the Ontario Heritage Act as an individual building having historic and architectural significance.
Lying just outside the boundary of the Centretown Heritage Conservation District, it was not already recognized as a heritage building. The heritage designation does fulfil a long-standing (1980s) request from the Heritage Committee of he Centretown Citizens Community Association.
The Medical Arts Building as it is today.
The Medical Arts Building (designed by architects Noffke, Sylvester and Morin in 1928) is the quintessential 1920s skyscraper in miniature. It was built, owned and managed by a holding company—the principal shareholders of which were the doctors themselves.
The 50 medical offices were quickly filled. On-site services included two surgery suites, a radiology clinic, pharmacy and branch of the Bank of Nova Scotia.
Although it was designed to have an extension of a further three floors, with the intervening Great Depression and World War II this never happened.
In fact, no sooner was the project announced than the possibility of building it was threatened by a Government of Canada suggestion to widen Metcalfe Street into a broad boulevard approaching Parliament Hill. However, this idea was quickly scuttled.
The Medical Arts Building is an example of the North American trend of purpose-built medical office buildings. Two comparable Canadian doctors’ buildings are the Medical Arts Building on Sherbrooke Street in Montreal (Ross and Macdonald Architects, 1922) and Toronto’s Medical Arts Building on Bloor Street (Marani and Lawson Architects, 1927-29).
The Montreal building has been proposed as the historical basis for the Montreal Waldorf Astoria Hotel, a project that was announced in 2008 but is still unbuilt.
In the heritage planner’s report recommending the designation, the architectural design is said to be a “rare example of the Art Deco style in Ottawa … a bridge between the decorative styles of the 19th century and the unadorned modernism of the 20th century.”
The proposed tower addition. The arrow indicates the existing heritage structure.
Designation done: now let’s add a tower
With the heritage designation of the Medical Arts Building in place, the planners could move onto the real business at hand—approval of a 27-storey tower that will rise on top of and behind the historic building.
Normally, interventions to a heritage building on this scale require City Council to approve a “Permission to Alter a Building Designated under Part IV of the Ontario Heritage Act.” But, with the designation being no more than 30 seconds old, this stage of the process has been eliminated for now. The designation report indicates that an “Application to Alter” could be submitted at the time of a Site Plan Control application.
The new and expanded Medical Arts Building would become tall tower number six in a glut of tall buildings all clustered within a 60-metre radius—the other five being Tribecas I and II (above the new Sobeys); 91 Nepean/70 Gloucester Streets; and 96 Nepean Street.
In terms of urban design, 180 Metcalfe probably implements the Centretown CDP’s guidelines more faithfully than the last three on this list, by placing a tower set back from its base.
As in all this yet-to-be-realized quartet, the amount of landscaped area is woefully small: the podium would cover 80 percent of the site, leaving just narrow strips around the base.
Zoning moves
In the time-honoured game of playing the old zoning bylaw off against the new by picking the most pro-developer parts of each, this was a masterful exercise in leaping though loopholes to wiggle around the overall policy directions of the Official Plan.
Through a zoning sleight-of-hand, the applicant is requesting an amendment to the performance standards of the current zoning bylaw by “relinquishing their right to have office and medical uses in the first 37 metres of height of a building on the property (approximately 12 storeys) in favour of a hotel being permitted in the first six storeys of a building on the property.”
The planning report suggests that the applicants are really doing the community a favour by building the hotel.
A developer’s right to have an office occupy all 12 floors in a residential zone, which currently only allows 12 floors, is a generous interpretation. Somehow the proposed new hotel use will “result in a quasi residential use that is viewed as being more compatible with the community.”
The planning rationale continues: this specific request requires an amendment to the new Centretown Secondary Plan as, under that plan, commercial uses are only permitted on the first two floors of a building.
The recently approved Community Design Plan would suggest that hotels should only be permitted in the new growth area along Catherine Street, but not in the high-rise residential area where the Medical Arts Building is located.
Just two months after the Ontario Municipal Board returned its ruling on the Centretown CDP, the City of Ottawa has begun to change it. The promise that community design plans should provide predictability and consistency is broken.
Developers’ helpmates: an unseemly role for the City of Ottawa?
It’s been recommended that the City’s Planning Department assign special “ambassador” planners to work with individual development companies on their planning applications.
Do Ottawa’s 20 largest developers need special hand-holding to get through the City’s development approvals process?
With the financial wherewithal to hire the best of lawyers and consultants in planning law, our builders know the route through the maze better than most of us. There is no current backlog of applications languishing on planning department desks, and the City of Ottawa’s self-imposed strict time limits for issuing approvals are generally met.
When planning officials are bound by their professional associations’ codes to act in the public interest, they are tasked with a quasi-legal role as regulators of planning legislation. If they volunteer to serve as advocates for one side of the equation (the developer applicants), there are legitimate questions of objectivity and impartiality.
A trial developer ambassador program is being proposed by the City of Ottawa. The developers’ concierge service is but the most recent version of the City’s attempt to facilitate approvals more efficiently.
In the past, there has been a “one-stop shopping” process for applications, the Task Force on Streamlining the Development Process, and many occasions when the city has declared itself open for business.
Most citizens don’t realize that, since amalgamation, the majority of the planning department’s operations are not paid through property taxes. They are directly funded by the developers through the industry’s application fees, building permit fees and various charges for reviews, which go into a dedicated fund for paying our planners.
This alone could create a bad public impression. When planning officials define the very group they are meant to be regulating as their “clients,” Ottawa’s communities and neighbourhoods are left to wonder.
BANK & QUEEN (Laura Secord)
Renovations to a designated heritage structure were halted earlier this summer, but not before the 1940s Vitriolite glass panels on the old Laura Secord, deemed by the City to be of architectural significance, were stripped away. What has been revealed is the original stone quoins of the Trafalgar Building, which was designed by Edgar Horwood in 1905.
The building is owned by Toth Holdings, also owners of the Medical Arts Building. Now, faced with the discovery of older historic material, the City will have to decide whether this corner should lose its 1940s modernization entirely and allow the building’s original appearance to be part of the new storefront.
494 LISGAR STREET
Three wood-framed workers’ cottages and a brick house occupy one parcel of land that has been derelict for well over a decade. A marijuana grow-op has seriously damaged the structural integrity of the brick house, rendering it uninhabitable, and the small cottages are in poor condition. Formerly, the City of Ottawa had re-zoned the block of Lisgar between Lyon and Bay as heritage-residential in order to encourage their preservation, but this has since been rescinded. Under the provisions of the Residential Demolition Control Bylaw they cannot be demolished until plans for a replacement development on the site have been approved.
BANK & SOMERSET (Somerset House)
Construction activity in the shell of Bank Street’s most vexatious eyesore, with the owner and a consulting engineer attending in hard hats, was spotted last month. One lives in hope that the owners, Capital Parking, may soon find a commercial tenant to kickstart the landmark back into life.
146-148 NEPEAN STREET
These two derelicts were destined to become the site of one of the Centretown CDP’s tall towers, but one of the buildings had previously been a dry-cleaning plant, and there were problems with soil contamination. The two have recently been circled by Modulok perimeter fencing, so demolition may be imminent.