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2 THE REAL TASK BEGINS

In an effusive letter written January 1, 1964, from his family’s home in Belgium where he was spending Christmas, Niki Goldschmidt, the man who would become known as “Mr. Festival” in Canada, was among the first to send Southam congratulations. He also, characteristically, offered himself as artistic director for the new enterprise and, if that didn’t work out, as director of the national festival that was being proposed. Closer to home, Southam had discreetly suggested to the prime minister that someone should be appointed to run the project. There was no question in Pearson’s mind who that man should be, and he offered Southam the job. Within a month, Southam had given notice to the Department of External Affairs, the Prime Minister’s Office had announced his appointment, and he had moved into new offices at the Victoria Building on Wellington Street, across the street from Parliament.

Southam’s new minister was the secretary of state, Maurice Lamontagne, a sophisticated Quebecer with a long interest in the arts and an earlier influential role in the creation of the Canada Council. Southam, assisted by his able secretary, Verna Dollimore, who accompanied him from External, plunged into the same whirlwind of activity that had launched the project in the first place. His imposing new letterhead and cards read “Office of the Co-ordinator—the National Centre for the Performing Arts.” In reality, he would become the mastermind for all that ensued.

The document setting out the duties of the coordinator might have been written, and perhaps was, by Southam himself.¹ Silent but friendly advisers in the Prime Minister’s and the Secretary of State’s offices, such as Henry Hindley, Lamontagne’s assistant secretary, who would eventually draft the NAC legislation, lent an elegant hand to the writing of the specifications for the oncoming work. The government approval had been twofold: to create a physical centre for the performing arts in Ottawa and, in addition, an annual national arts festival to occupy it during the summer months. This idea had grown directly from Vincent Massey’s suggestion in his Canadian Club “festival” speech ten years before where he’d stressed that, without a building, there could be no festival. The plan now called for the first performance to be presented in Centennial Year, 1967. The position of the coordinator was to be the linchpin in planning. He would coordinate all the meetings through his office and receive and disseminate all the pertinent information. Southam was pleased to find himself as the benevolent ringmaster at the core of the proceedings.

The first decision Southam made was that he needed advice. He turned to his friend Peter Dwyer at the Canada Council and asked him to create a series of arts advisory panels comprised of leading figures from the Canadian arts world. They settled on four panels in all, one each for operations, theatre, the visual arts, and the combined interests of music, opera, and ballet. The visual arts panel resulted from a felicitous development in government policies at the time which called for any federal building project to spend at least 1 percent of its capital cost on art to embellish the structure. Southam was determined that the new performing arts centre would take full advantage of this initiative.

Advisory arts committee members were the leading artists working in Canada. From (left to right) theatre directors Tyrone Guthrie, John Hirsch, CBC’s Robert Allen, conductor Nicholas Goldschmidt, NFB’s James Domville, Jean Gascon, the COC’s Herman Geiger-Torel, (unidentified man), and Interdepartmental Steering Committee chair Gordon Robertson. Photo © NAC.

The leading arts professionals that Dwyer selected were a roll call of who was who in Canada’s arts world at the time. At the invitation of the Canada Council, they were asked “to advise the organizers how their art form should be accommodated in this new building,”² in both the physical design of the centre and the way in which it would be put to use. Many were already acting as advisers to Expo, where cultural activities were to have a leading role, and they all believed they were contributing to something unique and special in the growing cultural life of Canada. Their collegiality and pride in what they were about to do is recorded in the careful notes kept of their meetings. Renowned theatre director Jean Gascon set the tone for all the discussions when he declared at the outset, “The Centre must have a heart that beats.” In short, the new building must not be just a roadhouse for travelling shows but a place where real artistic activity was created. This goal became the guiding creed for the work that followed.

Gascon took charge of the Theatre Advisory Committee, which included Michael Langham and Douglas Campbell, his colleagues from Stratford, Leon Major from Halifax’s Neptune Theatre, and the talented and strong-willed genius John Hirsch from Winnipeg’s Manitoba Theatre Centre. Quebec theatre was represented by Gascon himself and Yvette Brind’amour, the director of Théâtre Rideau Vert. Old hands including Toronto’s Mavor Moore were also on the committee. For the Music, Opera, and Ballet Committee, the multitalented Louis Applebaum took the chair, with the distinguished and austere Dr. Arnold Walter of the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Music to assist him. Also tapped were Jean-Marie Beaudet from the CBC, Dr. Frederick Karam from Ottawa University, Zubin Mehta as conductor of the Montreal Symphony, and Gilles Lefebvre as head of Les Jeunesses Musicales. Herman Geiger-Torel, the ebullient general director of Canada’s only professional opera troupe, the Canadian Opera Company, saw future potential for his company in the centre and became a keen and active supporter. From the ballet world, Celia Franca of the National Ballet and Ludmilla Chiriaeff of Montreal’s Grands Ballets Canadiens were selected, and they met for the first time on this committee. Southam ensured that a technical adviser was also present to record the discussions. He hired Wallace Russell, the expert from Dominion Consultants who had written the Brown Book, as the secretary to each of the committees, with responsibility for reporting back the technical implications of any ideas that emerged.

A flurry of meetings was held through early 1964 as the work of these advisory committees got under way. From the beginning, there was a noticeably different character and mood in the groups for music and for theatre.

In the Music Committee, Applebaum insisted from the outset that “they needed to create a program for the community” and that it would be useless “to have a large structure without roots in the community.”³ This philosophy guided the thinking of the music advisers in the kind of orchestra they would recommend and the outreach that the NAC would have, especially into regional schools and Ottawa’s two universities. When the new orchestra was finally created, the solid connections it already had with interested people and organizations in Ottawa served as a foundation for its work and was critical in providing its audience. The question of building up a loyal audience was certainly worrying, but Southam had reassured the group that at least two independent private impresarios (Tremblay Concerts and Treble Clef) had made their living in Ottawa bringing in classical music. These private companies were about to be put out of business by the new NAC, but they had proved that there was an appetite for good music and performance in Ottawa.

In the Theatre Committee, in contrast, members found common ground only when they were discussing the physical needs for their particular art form. Without question, they agreed, the new theatre in the complex should be a “voice room” designed specifically to serve the spoken word. But right from the beginning they worried about the subsidies that would be needed to produce theatre in Ottawa and fretted that this cost would draw money away from the regional theatre groups across the country. John Hirsch, although he would soon join the new centre and be its theatre adviser for a time, was particularly vociferous on this point. On other matters, too, committee members were often divided: they debated whether the company should have a base in Toronto, from which it would extend to Ottawa, or even have its home in Montreal. Some thought that the Stratford Festival could form the core of the English-speaking company, but there was no agreement over what it could do with this mandate or where it should locate. Meanwhile, Stratford’s director, Michael Langham, opposed any move to Ottawa, believing that his company’s winter home should be in Montreal, where it would have ready access to the National Theatre School. Altogether, this committee mirrored the splits in Canada’s theatre world in general: the simmering rivalries among the various groups that were trying to establish theatres in all areas of the country. As a consequence, while the creation of an orchestra forged ahead, little progress was made in planning a resident theatre at the Arts Centre.

The three theatre men (left to right), John Hirsch, Leon Major, and Jean Gascon, examine the model for the “voice room”—the NAC’s proposed 900-seat Theatre. Photo © Capital Press Photographers/NAC.

The Operations Advisory Committee included managers of the best performing houses and established organizations in Canada: Hugh Walker from the O’Keefe Centre and Walter Homberger from the Toronto Symphony.⁴ It was chaired by Ottawa businessman Bertram Loeb, the senior brother and “brain” in the Loeb family (which included the founding organizer Mrs. Faye Loeb), one of the richest Jewish clans in Ottawa. Southam diplomatically placed a local citizen on each of the committees: Gilles Provost, a rising young francophone director, for theatre, and Lyla Rasminsky, the wife of Louis Rasminsky, the governor of the Bank of Canada, for music. Whether they were there to offer solid advice or merely to be used as “window-dressing” was a moot point.

Southam recognized the limits of his own knowledge, and he had no hesitation in hiring the best people he could find to fill the gaps. Soon into the planning process, he persuaded Bruce Corder, an experienced theatre manager who had worked for years at Covent Garden in London before coming to Toronto to run the O’Keefe Centre, to join the small team in the Coordinator’s Office. Corder was suave and well-spoken, yet tough minded and determined. He would be the ideal colleague for Southam—the skilful manager of operations and enforcer of difficult decisions who enabled his boss to stay above the fray. Their partnership in the years to come would ensure that, through Southam’s good connections, the Arts Centre was supported at the highest levels, while, thanks to Corder’s wide knowledge and experience, the systems and operations practices laid down for the day-to-day running of the building were of an equally high quality. The excellence with which these two men built their “artistic ship” enabled it to continue sailing in later years, even though its masts, sails, and rigging, and much of its key personnel, would be blown away by government budget cuts and poor leadership throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. Similarly, the strength of the original systems made its recovery possible when the NAC again changed direction in the mid-1990s.

Southam gave considerable thought to the fundamental management principles he should follow: whether the future festival should be run by the centre, how various levels of government should be involved, and how the new centre should relate to the Canada Council for the long-term benefit of the performing arts. He had clear ideas about what he should do, and he made every effort to ensure that the structure of the planning system and the future organization would come firmly under his control during the development process. And there he met very little opposition.

Southam thought they should not delay construction of the Arts Centre by having an architectural competition, so he went again to see the prime minister. Pearson concurred that there was no time to lose and told him to “go out and find an architect.”⁵ At the time, few Canadian architectural firms had any experience in building theatres. The only one that had two to its credit was the Montreal-based firm ARCOP, whose clever design partners were doing some of the best public projects in Canada. Among them, ARCOP had designed and built the Confederation Centre in Charlottetown and was currently working on both Place des Arts in Montreal and the Queen Elizabeth Theatre in Vancouver. Soon after being named coordinator, Southam picked up the phone and invited the ARCOP architects to come to Ottawa to talk about the new Arts Centre.

The firm was generally run on an egalitarian basis among the partners, with projects divided up among them. After the proposed performing Arts Centre was discussed in-house, Fred Lebensold was assigned as the architect on the job. He was a strong-willed, opinionated Polish Jew with a well-known stubborn streak when it came to his work.

The Department of Public Works was the formal client for the development, and the man in charge of its building projects was the chief architect, James Langford. He had applied for and won the job in Ottawa just a few months before and, by all appearances, was an even-tempered, unassuming, self-described “Prairie boy.” After a brief stint playing professional football with the Calgary Stampeders, he had started with a small architectural practice in Saskatchewan and then served as the province’s deputy minister for public works. The job in Ottawa was a big step up, but he was talented and knew his way around the Canadian architectural world. At thirty-seven, he was now responsible for all the Canadian government’s building projects, supervising a staff of more than 180 architects and engineers and taking care of such important and prestigious undertakings as Canada’s controversial new embassy in Australia. He took his responsibilities as a public servant and his role to protect the Canadian taxpayer seriously.

Scarcely a few months into his new job, the proposal for the National Arts Centre landed on his desk. Langford knew the architects at ARCOP and liked the way they worked, meeting among themselves every week to criticize each other’s projects. In an unusual move for a rank-and-file civil servant, he was called in to meet personally with the prime minister to affirm Southam’s choice of architect. He had no hesitation in supporting ARCOP’s suitability for the job, although he didn’t discuss with Pearson that day what he was really worried about—the $9 million price tag that had been attached to the proposal. Langford believed that this cost estimate was far too small, and he was equally dubious that the complex could be built in time for the Centennial celebrations. He “knew for a fact,” he told others, that Toronto’s O’Keefe Centre, “while it had been built privately by a brewery company and the real costs swept under the carpet,” had cost far more to build than what was being projected for the Ottawa building, yet the Toronto complex was only a third of the size of what was being proposed for the capital. No one at the Art Centre office paid any attention to Langford’s observations, particularly not Hamilton Southam. Later, Langford would be called on the carpet at parliamentary committees to defend his departmental bosses from complaints about delays and rising costs, although it had been clear to him from the outset that this was going to be a difficult job where “regular procedures were not to be precisely followed.”⁶

Architect Fred Lebensold conferred frequently with the patient chief architect for the Department of Public Works, James Langford (centre), examining the building model with Hamilton Southam. Langford ran interference with the politicians as building costs rose. Photo © NAC.

From Southam’s viewpoint, cost was a secondary matter. Although he believed that “no public servant should think of money as a detail,” he was convinced that he was “doing the right thing” and that cost was not the prime concern. He had a clear vision of the complex, one that was already set out in the Brown Book. After an early meeting with the American impresario Sol Hurok, he had discarded the notion of a 3,000-seat opera/concert hall that would accommodate the travelling road shows of hugely successful American impresarios. He had sternly informed Hurok that “we are not in this for profit.”⁷ Instead, Southam favoured the European style of opera houses and theatres, with their intimate auditoria and superb acoustics. There was no model in North America for what he wanted, so, shortly after becoming coordinator, he sought and received Maurice Lamontagne’s blessing to go to Europe to research ideas.

On April 17, 1964, the core design team of Hamilton Southam, Wallace Russell, Fred Lebensold, and Jim Langford left Canada for what would be a whirlwind, month-long trip across the continent. Langford, who had not visited Europe before, remembers a “fabulous trip” as they “went everywhere,” visiting twenty-five different theatres and halls, seeing performances, and studying technical facilities from Prague to Munich to Copenhagen. While Russell, Langford, and Lebensold stayed in small hotels and pensions, Southam, at his own expense, booked into grander hotels and met with equally grand friends that he seemed to know in every city. Nevertheless, they experienced an enormous amount together—and Southam ensured that they saw the best. The memory of seeing Maria Callas singing at La Scala still lingered in Langford’s memory over forty years later. Southam already knew Milan and Florence well, having “liberated” the opera houses as part of the Allied Forces during the war, although he never boasted to his companions about these experiences. As a Jew, Lebensold balked when it came to going into Germany so soon after the war, but he rejoined the group in Paris before returning home.

Russell meticulously documented their technical observations of each facility, recording everything from a hall’s mechanical equipment to styles of seating and crowd control. Southam noted that Vienna’s Staatsoper had the best orchestra pit in Europe, and he made sure that they obtained the exact dimensions to guide the NAC’s architect. The Austrians tried to sell them mechanical stage equipment, which they rejected as being “too complex,” but this exposure helped them later to find better and easier solutions in Ottawa. Europe’s experience became their model: “good acoustics” were key and “everything was to be top drawer.” Years later, Southam would often tease Langford whether Canadian taxpayers had received good value from their trip. Langford, who wrestled many times with Southam over costs and scheduling, would ruefully always admit that this excursion had been well worth the money.

On June 1, 1964, back in Ottawa, Southam was “exhilarated” as he fed the details of the advisory committee meetings to Lebensold, who then single-handedly worked up the design concept for the building. He did not take the advice of the advisory committees lightly. Like Southam, he attended many of their meetings and listened, although perhaps not as carefully. The intrepid Russell, as secretary, continued to record the technical implications of each group’s discussion and provided them to Lebensold. There were long debates among the artistic advisers on the Music, Opera, and Ballet Committee over such matters as acoustics and the size of the backstage required for large-scale ballets, while on the Theatre Committee the advisers focused on the size and shape of the stage—the virtues of “thrust” versus “proscenium” stages— sight-lines, and other theatrical necessities. All the participants took their duties extremely seriously: they were working together on something new that they believed would be good for Canada.

Langford saw Southam and Lebensold as two of a kind—both single-minded, strong-willed men. Once Lebensold had settled on an idea, he was “unmovable.” Even Southam found him hard to handle, but he enjoyed his company and went along with his suggestions. Langford found the development of the architectural process engrossing and, even though he was there to defend the client’s interest, he was frequently included in the weekly meetings and debates at ARCOP’s offices in Montreal. Southam didn’t like conflict. Rather, he would “wine and dine” his way through problems, Langford said, often leaving the clever but less-sophisticated Public Works architect feeling like a “bumpkin” in awe of the coordinator’s skills at “manipulating” people.

Langford had to review the project for his department and arrange the contracts and tendering, all the while trying to ensure that Canadian taxpayers got their money’s worth. It was a tough task at times, often conflicting with Southam’s grand and glorious ideas. When the first prices came in, as Langford had feared, they were far beyond the original estimates. Yet, in the minds of the organizers, there was no question of cutting back. They were aiming for the best—and that was going to be expensive. It fell to Langford to devise the solution that would allow them to proceed. Although previously unheard of in government circles, and against his better judgment, he broke down the total work into three separate contracts. Ensuring that “the tendering process was all handled correctly,”⁸ the first phase would excavate the massive hole in the ground. Next would come the foundations and the garage, while the final contract would be the rest of the building. The first two would eventually come in roughly on budget, but the last contract would spiral well beyond estimates. Langford took the gamble that, by then, the job would be too far along to turn back. Eventually, he would be proved right, though not without gut-wrenching struggles along the way. Going into construction, the price had already risen to $16 million, and it would continue to rise, higher and higher, along with the political clamour around it.

From the start, the change of site from Nepean Point to Confederation Square presented huge additional costs and problems. The designers were determined to avoid the mistakes of Montreal’s Place des Arts, where a single exit kept visitors sitting in their cars among exhaust fumes waiting to leave. The garage in Ottawa was to open in several directions; an exit on Slater Street, a block away from the centre, required a concrete tunnel for several hundred yards. Its excavation brought furious complaints about dust from the British High Commission, located directly overhead on Elgin Street. As the plans worked their way through various government departments in the traditional approval process, Dr. R.F. Legget, the National Research Council’s building research director and a soils expert, warned that if the design team wanted an underground garage alongside the Rideau Canal, they were sure to have water problems. He was right, and the design for the 900-car garage required special shoring, which was prohibitively expensive. Lebensold also determined that having the building’s main entrance open to the world, facing Confederation Square, would create massive traffic jams. Despite objections, he made the controversial decision to turn the back of his building to the city and to lead people down a long curving ramp to the front door facing the canal. The basic hexagonal shape of the building was taken, Lebensold claimed, from the shape of the site—and he made it the dominant motif throughout the rambling structure.

Southam was “so convinced we were doing the right thing”⁹ that cost remained a secondary issue in his thinking. His relationship with Langford could be “abrasive” at times, as the two of them struggled to keep the project under control. Despite these efforts, costs began to jump upward in leaps and bounds.

To kick-start the project, James Langford broke the job down into three separate contracts. The first was for the enormous excavation of the site. Photo © Ottawa Citizen/ UPI. Reprinted by permission.

The building was to be “an architectural and engineering marvel,” well beyond anything that had been built in the city since before the war. The change in location from the more distant Nepean Point to the site along Confederation Square opened up possibilities for a cultural hub to the city which had been partially foreseen. On the land immediately adjacent to the south of the hexagonal NAC site on Elgin Street, the previous Diefenbaker government had already proposed a large museum. The working drawings by Vancouver architect Ned Pratt had been prepared for tender, and the old Roxborough Apartments on the corner of Laurier and Elgin streets, where former Prime Minister Mackenzie King had made his Ottawa home, had already been torn down in preparation for future construction. When Langford arrived in town as the new chief architect, he saw immediately that the two cultural buildings could be complementary to each other, and he set about trying to have Pratt and Lebensold talk to each other. Before he could make much headway, however, the museum project was cancelled by the new Liberal government. The land where it was to be built sits empty to this day.

As more construction problems cropped up, the price tag of the Arts Centre accelerated, moving rapidly from $16 million to $21 million and then to over $26 million. Each time Southam called on the prime minister to break the bad news, Pearson would say, usually after a reflective moment, “We shall do it all the same”¹⁰—and so inform his finance minister, Mitchell Sharp. As the price went up, there were cries of outrage in the House of Commons, and Pearson was called upon on several occasions to issue reassuring statements and progress reports to the parliamentarians. Later, Sharp would explain that, in Cabinet, “the Prime Minister was so for it that we did not feel it appropriate to oppose it.”¹¹ Southam concurred: “We felt unassailable really. It was the right thing to do and the right time to do it.”

For the independently wealthy Southam, the times were exciting: his parents had had a similar dream, and “now here we were given the opportunity.” He was in his element. But for others involved in the job, it was not so easy. Langford’s bosses railed at him for not controlling the development better, and at one point after the site had been excavated and the foundations put in, serious consideration was given to filling the hole in again or filling it up with water, to make it into a lagoon in the summer and a skating rink in winter. Langford worried constantly, but Southam remained calm. He had his personal pipeline to the prime minister and, through his own shrewd organization, he also had the best artistic people in the country behind the development. “We had enormous impetus,” he recalled. “There were a lot of talented people behind it. This gave me the energy to meet with the prime minister.”¹² In Canada, in the early 1960s, these connections were enough to get the job done.

Besides car fumes, dust, and water problems, the project presented a fascinating array of structural issues. Engineer John Adjeleian, one of Canada’s leading structural engineers with Toronto’s SkyDome later to his credit, became architect Lebensold’s alter ego, taking the architect’s concepts and translating them into structural reality. The lively and intelligent American-trained Adjeleian was of Armenian origin, and he meshed well with the headstrong Lebensold. The two wrestled constantly with the rising costs, as Lebensold called on the resourceful Adjeleian to come up with economical solutions to his artistic vision.

Good acoustics were a priority, and the mechanical-electrical systems would have to run silently to accommodate both music and the spoken word. Although not a theatre person, Adjeleian became fascinated with the paraphernalia involved in theatres and concerts halls: screens, pulleys, and backstage equipment, the sound baffles and special music shells that had to be planned for and incorporated into the building. The requirements for the elaborate curtain being created for the opera hall by artist Micheline Beauchemin—how it would be hung, where it would rise and fall—opened a new world to him. His most important engineering achievement was to create the column-free spaces that Lebensold wanted throughout the building. The three tiers of balconies in the opera hall cantilevered out seventy feet over the auditorium, and Adjeleian marvelled years later that “you could look up and not see a column anywhere. You could see three balconies of people without a supporting column! How,” he asked, “did we do that?”¹³

He also saved money. One initiative, after much heated discussion among the consultants, called for the use of moulded fibreglass in the ceiling tiles, then an architectural precedent. Another of his more interesting challenges was the creation of the box seats, and especially the Royal (State) Box, a nicety that the protocol-conscious Southam had insisted upon. That particular conundrum was how to cantilever the box without having another box hanging over it in the tier above, as happened in the classic European opera houses. This thorny question occupied Adjeleian for weeks.

The hexagonal grid that dominated the building design deviated entirely from traditional right-angled solutions. Some critics would later say the building suffered from “hexagonitis,” but this shape was a popular innovation in modern architecture. The most repeated form in nature, used by bees in constructing honeycombs, it had recently been applied in Canada by Buckminster Fuller in his design for the U.S. Pavilion at Expo 67. Everything was triangular, “more mathematical than material,” Adjeleian recalled, and this shaping required “thousands upon thousands of calculations.”¹⁴ Computer-aided design was not yet in common use in architecture, and all the work was done the old-fashioned way with a slide rule.

Similarly, the use of concrete for the building, which “enabled the marriage of architecture and structure,” was at the cutting edge during the sixties. The style would later become known as “brutalist,” but it was considered then as “an expression of the time.” Outside the building, an entire city street was rerouted to accommodate the construction.

Adjeleian, despite his later triumphs, always maintained that the National Arts Centre remained his favourite building. “They were fun times,” he recalled. For Langford, despite his troubles, it was the same, and although it was against regulations, he would often ride up in the construction bucket on a Saturday morning to take photographs of the site as the building rose up out of the ground. Colleagues on this massive undertaking became friends for life and, like old war veterans, they continue to hold an annual reunion and golf tournament, known as the “Disaster Open.”

One of the remarkable innovations dreamed up by Jim Langford and his deputy architect in Public Works called for 1 to 3 percent of the capital cost of any project to be spent on “artistic embellishment of the building.” They made sure that the policy was imposed on federal construction projects, and Langford got a lot of flack for it, especially from his staff in regional offices across the country. The result, however, was that a lot of art (“not all of it good”) was placed in new federal government buildings.

It did not take long for Southam and his associates to spot the new policy, and they immediately struck an artistic advisory committee of some of the most distinguished people in Canada’s visual arts community to take it in hand. With the new building’s budget standing at $12.8 million in July 1964, nearly $390,000 was earmarked to buy art for the new centre. Southam’s family had always been strong supporters of the National Gallery of Canada, and this aspect of the work was close to his heart. He had convened the first meeting of the Advisory Committee on Visual Arts at his home in April of the previous year, and Donald Buchanan, the director of the National Gallery, who was also organizing the arts exhibitions for Expo, accepted the chair. Other members of the committee included Montreal’s Andrée Paradis, an attractive “belle-laide” of a woman who was editor of the avant-garde Montreal magazine Vie des Arts, and Eric Arthur, a top architectural consultant from Toronto.

When the group agreed that “art and architecture should be married on this project,”¹⁵ that basic principle meant that architect Fred Lebensold would play a controlling role in the selection of artworks for the building. Their first meeting set out some ideals, several of which would hastily be discarded, including the stipulation that all the art should be Canadian. These artistic proposals were to be channelled through Hamilton Southam, who would convey them to the Department of Public Works to foot the bill. Lebensold and one of his partners, Guy Desbarats (who would later become deputy minister at Public Works), attended the first meeting and agreed to provide the committee, within the month, with crucial information regarding the “spirit of the building.” In the meantime, committee members would draw up a list of artists for potential commissions.

True to his promise, Lebensold soon returned to a meeting of the advisory committee, where he outlined the interior spaces for them. Four main inside units—the Salon, Theatre, Studio, and Opera—would need art. The “jewel of the entire place” was the Salon, which would also serve as a VIP room. The Theatre, he proposed, should be subdued, with interest focused on the performance. Lighting would be a major source of decoration there, and he had the lighting expert to do it. The Studio should be “bare and naked,” and the artwork placed in it would be “its only decorative element.” The Opera was to be different from all the rest. It would be subdued during performances, but at other times would “spill over with light, colour and luxury,” lending a special atmosphere before performances and during intervals. The intricate opera house lighting, by designer Bob Harrison, gave a gorgeous elegance to the hall, but its thousands of individual light bulbs also imposed a lifetime of special equipment and maintenance costs on the centre. Skilfully sweet-talking the committee, Lebensold kept full control of the overall interior design of the building to fit his architectural vision. “The Architect’s opinion was to have major consideration in any decision,” read the minutes, a fact that was tersely reported to the government’s Interdepartmental Committee, which was “steering” the project.

Lebensold soon returned to the visual arts group with a shopping list of “decorative requirements,” setting them out in a detailed memo that called for a tapestry ($25,000) and tall sculpted doors ($15,000) for the Salon, and stage curtains for the Opera and the Theatre ($50,000 and $25,000, respectively), among other things. Names of leading artists swirled about—Jean-Paul Riopelle for the Main Lobby, and Alfred Pellan or Harold Town for a mural in the Studio lobby. (William Ronald would eventually get this job on Lebensold’s say-so after the architect paid a visit to the artist’s studio.) Southam had his own tastes and preferences and, on his European research trip, he had already visited the studio of sculptor Ossip Zadkine in Paris. He immediately “gave in to one of his desires” and ordered an exquisite bronze free-standing sculpture of The Three Graces to stand in the new centre’s lobby. Southam liked the work so much that, later, he ordered a similar sculpture for his own home. As building costs rose, Treasury Board eventually set a ceiling of $500,000 on the visual arts budget—a colossal sum for the day. Among the better acquisitions was an exquisite tapestry by French artist Alfred Manessier, inspired, he said, by the light he had experienced during a visit to Southam’s beautiful cottage on the Rideau Lakes. He would not be the only artist to claim inspiration from Southam’s idyllic summer surroundings, but his commission came with a special Canada Council grant that permitted him to travel from Paris to Canada to install his wall hanging.

Canadian artists were not forgotten. There was the magnificent Beauchemin curtain for the Opera, a piece so large that no loom in Canada could weave it. On a commission that would rise to $75,000, the artist went to Japan for a year to create it. Sculptor Charles Daudelin won the competition for an enormous free-standing exterior work, which still adorns a major outside terrace and casts an elegant high shadow against the back wall of the building. In one of the foyers, artist Jean Hébert devised a glass and metal Tree Fountain designed to filter light through its colourful segments. He struggled with the colours and special moulds, and when Canada’s glass companies could not meet his demands, he asked for additional monies for a special kiln to fire the glass tiles himself. His contract rose from $15,000 to $25,000 as the committee justified its decision on the basis that it was advancing technical knowledge for Canada’s glass producers.

From the start, the visual arts were to play a big part in the NAC building. In Paris, Hamilton Southam visited the studio of the artist Ossip Zadkine and couldn’t resist purchasing The Three Graces for the NAC foyer. Later he picked up another version of the piece for his own house. Photo © NAC.

By this time the Visual Arts Committee was in full cry and ready to propose another $300,000 worth of items to the Public Works Department, but, in an unusual move, Southam felt it prudent to draw the line. The beleaguered Langford struggled in vain to maintain the budgets, but Southam generally took the artists’ side when issues arose and, with his wily diplomatic skills, usually got the commissions through. When the National Arts Centre Act was finally passed and a Board of Trustees was created to replace the Steering Committee, the visual arts team would be the only advisory committee retained by the board until the building was finished. Such was the importance placed on the visual and plastic arts in this period.

Southam and his colleagues had anticipated “the threat of gifts of art,” and, from the start, they were determined to resist. In practice, they employed “a lot of smoke and screens to avoid gifts,” and they accepted nothing without the Visual Arts Committee’s approval.¹⁶ Somehow, Southam managed to circumnavigate this policy on at least two occasions, accepting an Orrefors glass chandelier from the Swedish government for the Salon and a bust of Chopin from the Poles. “After all,” he reminisced later, “I had served in both countries.” The new National Arts Centre was becoming ever more “his house,” which perhaps it had always been. In 1972, when the NAC was finally in full operation, an unexpected $30,000 turned up in the Visual Arts budget. Southam wasted no time in commissioning a puckish mural of football-playing owls from Vancouver artist Jack Shadbolt and orchestrating a grand celebration for its installation in the Restaurant during a popular run by the Vancouver Playhouse in the Theatre.

While his artistic advisory committees buckled down to work, Southam occupied himself with the fundamental issue of how the Arts Centre would function. A raft of files crossed his desk, ranging from questions on how the new centre would attract audiences (“good halls and theatres generate their own audiences,” he claimed confidently) to how best to acquire a fine organ for the concert hall. Southam lost no opportunity to talk up his centre with the public, and his daily diary was crammed with speaking engagements ranging from the music teachers in the Ottawa area to Canadian Clubs all across the country. He maintained a huge correspondence as he sought support everywhere for the project.

His former colleagues in External Affairs kept him abreast of cultural affairs internationally. Ambassador Arnold Smith, wiring from Paris, reported lengthy conversations with the French culture minister, André Malraux, whom Southam would meet on his European tour.¹⁷ The French already had a plan to retain their Expo pavilion after the world’s fair so they could pursue their cultural interests in Canada. They wanted to turn it into a maison de culture for Quebec, which the federal government resisted as being “too local.” There was also intelligence on Charles de Gaulle’s forthcoming visit to Montreal for the Centennial celebrations. Federal concern over the growing nationalism in Quebec and the potential role of the French government is evident in these official telegrams.

But for Southam and his colleagues, the Arts Centre they were designing was to showcase a cooperative Canada, an ideal reflected in the work of the recently appointed Bilingual and Bicultural Commission. There was never any doubt that the new centre, like its new director general, would be completely bilingual and bicultural. Two issues were central to Southam’s planning. The first was his decision that the organization would be “national” in character and scope. The local consortium, the National Capital Arts Alliance, had helped to secure the government’s approval and, although the local organizations did not yet know it, Southam had bigger plans for his Arts Centre that would leave little room for them. He proposed that the new centre be “more than a complex of theatres in Ottawa” and also “address its activities to be truly national and even international in scope.” Local developer William Teron, the president of the NCAA after Southam left the post to become full-time coordinator of the new project, later expressed bitterness and shock at the manner in which local arts groups had been frozen out.¹⁸ When the music groups complained about their lack of real local representation on the arts advisory groups, Southam told them firmly that “this is national.”

Second, Southam, along with a team of public servants in his minister’s office, had to devise a management model for the new Arts Centre. Their negotiations were initially cooperative rather than adversarial. At the time, a small coterie of individuals, many of them with similar backgrounds (if not always socially, then in terms of their education), was at the core of government policy-making in Ottawa. Together they refined the design of the managerial structure of the organization and began work on funding models. These memoranda, usually intimate and informal in tone, formed the basis of the legislation that would officially create the new organization. Not surprisingly, Southam favoured from the outset a managerial model that placed an administrator in full control at the top, assisted by an advisory board of trustees appointed from across the country. In later years, as delays developed and costs soared, Southam was increasingly required to defend the organizational structure to his political masters and their officials.

By mid-1964 Southam and his team favoured the “Brussels” managerial model, based on the Palais des Beaux Arts that had been built in the Belgian capital in the early 1920s.¹⁹ It called for tenant organizations in the building, including an independent orchestra and theatre companies in both languages, which would be subject to an overall artistic policy set by the centre’s trustees and management. These arts organizations would have their own charters and boards of directors, raise their own funds, and pay fees to the centre for their use of the facilities. The attraction of this approach to Southam was that the new Arts Centre’s board would not be required to “find the large amounts of money nor take the considerable risks involved in artistic productions or the presentation of artistic groups.” Those risks would, rather, be “courted by companies resident or visiting the centre.” The centre’s activities would be confined to “the efficient management and financial maintenance of the Centre” in accordance with a defined set of artistic principles: “encouraging performances of the highest standard in music, opera in any language, dance, drama and poetry readings in English and French … whether they were authored by Canadians or not.” The centre would also arrange appearances of the best professional performing groups in Canada and encourage the development of a resident orchestra and resident English-and French-language repertory theatre companies.

A “national festival organization” would run the annual festival—the second part of the government’s original commitment. Because the festival was to “grow out of the centre’s activities,” Southam wanted to run it as well.

Southam envisaged the future Arts Centre as the hub of artistic activity on the national scene. It would encourage the development of performing arts schools in the national capital area and also provide offices and administrative arrangements for the headquarters of a national performing arts organization, establishing a library and museum and providing other services that might prove useful for the performing arts in Canada. In addition, the early working papers contain several references to the place of film and the role of radio and television in the new centre’s activities.

By October 1964 the artistic working groups were hurrying to complete their tasks, but the debate continued in government circles over the operational model the new organization should adopt. Southam’s preference for the Brussels concept was resisted by officials both at the Secretary of State’s Department and in the Privy Council Office who favoured some sort of hybrid arrangement that combined Southam’s model with the arts-producing example of the Stratford Festival. Just how “national” the place should be was also under discussion, as was the question of where the money for the centre would come from. In January 1965 a seminal meeting organized by the Canadian Conference of the Arts at St-Adèle, Quebec, brought Maurice Lamontagne together with representatives from all the key cultural organizations in the country.²⁰ The objective was to discuss the broad picture of arts financing in Canada, but the organizers also used the occasion to obtain comments on the new arts centre before the government finalized the legislation that would create the NAC.

While the organizers hoped to have this new act mentioned in the government’s next Speech from the Throne, it was not likely to be introduced into the House until the following September. In the meantime, the Interdepartmental Steering Committee would continue to deal with problems on behalf of the future Board of Trustees. Among these issues was resistance from the still feisty but now outgoing Ottawa mayor, Charlotte Whitton, who was refusing to let the city hand over the deed to the site so construction could start. The committee recommended expropriation, but, after Don Reid, a new and friendlier mayor, took office, it was able to negotiate a ninety-nine-year land lease with the city. Just to be sure, Prime Minister Pearson wrote personally to the mayor, reminding him that a deed to the property was still required so that work on the excavation could at last get under way. With Centennial Year only two years off, time was pressing.

Secretary of State Maurice Lamontagne (centre), flanked by Fred Lebensold and Hamilton Southam, presented the NAC project to his parliamentary colleagues. Lamontagne, Lester Pearson’s “Quebec lieutenant,” was an elegant and erudite supporter and left Southam to his own devices. Photo © NAC.

With the excavation contract in place and the shovel finally in the ground, the Department of Public Works pushed vigorously ahead with tendering the next two phases. Southam and his colleagues were already discussing an opening festival at the new centre for 1967, but, early into the work, Jim Langford warned that this date would be all but impossible.

By the fall of 1964, as the artistic advisory committees were finishing most of their work, the Operations Advisory Committee was coming into its own. Under Bertram Loeb, a new name was added to the list of experienced theatre managers already in the group: François Mercier, a well-known Montreal litigation lawyer with strong Liberal ties and also chairman of Montreal’s Place des Arts. (He was destined to become more closely tied to the NAC later, when he was appointed the second chair of the Board of Trustees.) The job for this committee was to supervise the legal and operational practicalities and to target and solve pending problems. There was, for instance, a shortage of trained stage staff in Canada, so most touring companies brought in their own teams.²¹ It was no accident, then, that Joseph Mackenzie of the Canadian Labour Congress was on the committee as the group assessed future needs, ensuring that the NAC would be a union house.

The organ lobbyists were also pressing, contacting government MPs and insisting that they have a formal hearing during the planning process. It fell to the Operations Committee to resist a grand organ on the grounds that it would have little use or appeal to Ottawa audiences. They pushed back the proposal by saying there was nothing in the budget for it and that Public Works would have to find other monies to pay for it. The idea for an organ was dropped—until it materialized much later in a gift from the Dutch people in memory of Canada’s service in Holland during the war.

Southam tracked all these particulars closely, with a masterful breadth of attention and eye for detail. After the 1965 election had again failed to produce a majority for Lester Pearson, his long-time Quebec colleague and friend Maurice Lamontagne was cut from the Cabinet, and the feisty Niagara MP Judy LaMarsh took over to manage culture. Lamontagne’s competent undersecretary, Ernest Steele, stayed on under LaMarsh.

There was bad news on the construction front—completion would be delayed well past 1967, most likely until 1969. Southam also warned Steele that the budget ceiling, now at $26 million, was about to be exceeded. Despite Pearson’s steady support, the runaway costs were causing a Cabinet revolt. A report reached Southam that one solution about to receive serious consideration was the postponement of phase three— the construction of the building itself. In the interim, the garage would be roofed over and the site on Confederation Square covered with sod. Langford later confirmed that plans and drawings had been prepared in case this option was accepted.

Southam fought back eloquently, stressing that this was “the Government’s only centennial project in Ottawa.” He was sure that the government, “for the $25 million already spent, would not want a silent, grass-covered slope covering the empty tomb of its own centennial project,” and he argued that the new centre, “more than any other Federal Government project, was doing more to quicken interest in Ottawa among members of the small but influential group of creative Canadians scattered from Halifax to Vancouver.” He stated that the centre was useful in “refurbishing Ottawa’s image in the rest of the country” and urged Steele to inform the Cabinet that the new centre had attracted the interest of all the country’s leading arts organizations and was perceived “as an important factor in developing theatrical and musical life of the country at the highest level.” In a passionate conclusion, he said that “the Centre is more than a building,” that any postponement would be “a victory for the forces of provincialism,” and that the group of “creative Canadians” now supporting the project would “melt away.” Because of the centre’s site on Confederation Square, “this unhappy development would be exposed to the world’s gaze.”²² Fortunately, Southam had allies in Cabinet, among them the Ottawa-based public works minister, George McIlraith. In the end, the project was spared the proposed delay, although the construction cost ceiling was fixed once again, this time at $31 million.

While the logistics of construction and future operations were being thrashed out, Southam was soon writing again to Ernie Steele, laying the groundwork for the centre’s artistic life. He had hired a Canadian-born arts administrator, Henry Wrong, a nephew of his old External Affairs colleague, Hume Wrong, as his overall programming consultant. Wrong had been working in New York as an assistant to Sir Rudolf Bing at the Metropolitan Opera. Also engaged was John Hirsch (as a theatre consultant), Jean Beaudet from the CBC, and Louis Applebaum, as an adviser on music. Strenuous efforts continued for the development of an orchestra as well as English and French resident theatre, although Southam still thought of these groups as independent companies and tenants of the NAC.

Despite all the problems, the construction went steadily ahead. Photo © Ottawa Citizen/UPI.Reprinted by permission.

For now, the chairmanships of these possible future companies were entrusted to three local volunteers: Louis Audette, the president of the Ottawa Philharmonic; F.R. “Budge” Crawley, for theatre; and Lawrence Freiman, who was heading a group trying to create a Canadian Festival of the Arts. Their task was to push the planning forward on programming, but, in Southam’s words, “progress was slow.” What Southam wanted from Steele were official appointments to head the Music, Theatre, and Programming departments, including the Festival. Either Beaudet or Applebaum would suit the first, he thought, Gascon or Hirsch the second, and he nominated Wrong to head overall programming and direct the Festival. No time should be lost, Southam urged, in appointing Bruce Corder as head of the administrative branch looking after the new house, box office, technical departments, and, of course, accounts. Detailed outlines of the duties of these officers, as well as a carefully worked out management chart, accompanied Southam’s request. He wanted these individuals in place before a newly formed board become active. The consistent and methodical fashion in which Southam planned and implemented the many facets of this complicated new federal government institution ensured that it would have the correct support and proper structures for the important national role that lay ahead.