Architecture as story: Canada's pavilion at the Venice Biennale
What's the first image that comes to mind when you hear the words "Canada" and "building"? A log cabin, perhaps? While Canada lacks a defining architectural style, it has no shortage of structures that could pass as the archetypal Canadian building. I have a different suggestion.
The archetypal Canadian building is not the igloo nor the longhouse; not the CN Tower nor Habitat '67; not the Château Frontenac nor the Centre Block on Parliament Hill; it isn't even Red Green's Possum Lodge, nor Bob and Doug Mackenzie's house. The world's most Canadian building isn't even located in Canada. No, it's not the kitschy Canadian pavilion at Epcot, and it's not the bombastic Canadian embassy in Washington, D.C. You'll find it in an overgrown, mostly forgotten corner of Venice, Italy. This one-story, unheated building -- more a glorified shelter -- is our nation's pavilion in Venice's Giardini Publici, the quiet public park that comes alive once every two years when it hosts one of the world's top art exhibitions, the Venice Biennale. The Giardini contains an eclectic assortment of national pavilions, giving the park the look of an overgrown world's fair.
The Canadian pavilion shares the grounds with pavilions from Korea, Norway, France, Venezuela, and about twenty-five others located in no particular order between groves of trees and along the gravel pathways. The pavilions were designed and built by the individual nations over the course of the past century, and thus proudly display the aesthetics and ambitions of their country at the time of their construction. Great Britain's entry is all columns and empire; the American pavilion is a Georgian mini-mansion; the imposing "Germania" pavilion looks like a design by Albert Speer, Hitler's architect. Picture the rich neighbourhood in every city where a Tudor-style mansion sits next to a Spanish monster house. If Disney's Epcot theme park had been built half a century earlier by the League of Nations, it surely would have looked like the Giardini Publici.
Canada's entry in this outdoor architecture museum was built in 1968 and says a great deal about the nation's identity and outlook as a young country coming into its own. Tucked in a far corner of the park -- appropriately to the right and slightly behind its colonial master Great Britain, Canada's diminutive pavilion is a low structure the size of a small bungalow and clad in dark red brick. The building sports a glass wall that faces onto an interior courtyard. Trees overhang the angular roof, and one grows up through the pavilion itself, the canopy erupting from an opening in the wood ceiling. The roof is defined by white steel beams rising to a central point, not-so-subtly evoking a tipi. "Canada" is spelled in capital letters beside the entrance, in a modern font that similarly identifies public schools of a similar vintage in Toronto. For a modest shelter -- one that bears a striking similarity to a washroom pavilion on the Toronto Islands -- the pavilion manages to cultivate a story of Canada as a country connected to nature, respectful of its First Nations roots, and modest yet proud of its accomplishments as a modern, postcolonial nation. In stark contrast to the Canada pavilion at Epcot which encompasses an embarrassing pastiche of Canadian clichés -- miniature Rocky Mountains next to a miniature Château Laurier, next to miniature totem poles -- the Canadian pavilion in the Giardini Publici acts like a concise, intelligent thesis statement for a nation ready to assume its role on the world stage. Like a frontier cabin or an embassy, the pavilion articulates Canada's story in a foreign land, and indeed tells that story with more coherence and grace than many of Canada's embassies and consulates abroad. Not bad for a tiny art gallery in a park.