| Written by Michael Swan, The Catholic Register,
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 The redevelopment plan for Toronto's City Hall/Nathan Phillips Square as proposed by the winning design of PLANT Architect Inc.
“It started off that they were going to tear everything down, you know? And then we started to scream and holler,” Fr. Massey Lombardi told The Catholic Register.
Plant Architects expects to have drawings which will show what the new redesign looks like in the fall.
“We finally arrived at where they are going to keep the elements the way they are and move it. It was a far cry from where they were going to take it down completely,” said Lombardi.
When he was director of the now defunct justice and peace office of the archdiocese of Toronto, Lombardi pushed forward the idea of a peace garden that has stood as a warning of the horror and shame of nuclear war since 1984. Twenty-four years ago Hiroshima survivor and Toronto resident Setsuko Thurlow convinced Hiroshima Mayor Takeshi Araki to share his city’s eternal flame with Toronto. Lombardi also collected water from a fountain which commemorates those killed in the nuclear attack on Nagasaki.
The Peace Garden was blessed by Pope John Paul II, inaugurated by Queen Elizabeth II and proclaimed by then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.
When Plant Architects won a 2007 contest to redesign Nathan Phillips Square the plan was greeted with horror by peace groups and religious organizations who have met, prayed and protested at the site for nearly a quarter century. City council responded to the furor by setting up an advisory committee of those who loved the Peace Garden just the way it was originally designed by architect Ken Greenberg. Plant Architects met with the committee several times over two months this spring.
The Plant redesign had always incorporated the eternal flame and water, but Lombardi and others complained the new Peace Garden was unrecognizable, contained no explicit reference to nuclear war and was marginalized in its new location away from the main action near the front doors to city hall.
“We think the Peace Garden is something that needs to be preserved and honoured, and that history needs to be honoured,” said city councillor Joe Mihevc, who has been smoothing ruffled feathers for Mayor David Miller on the issue.
Though some friends of the Peace Garden want to see the Greenberg design preserved in its entirety and simply moved, Mihevc is firm that the garden will fit into a new, modern design.
“It’s trying to combine both a vision of the new and combining it with the heritage of the old — that is, trying to be balanced,” he said.
Plant Architects partner Chris Pommer, who heads the Nathan Philips design team, said he is not trying to arrogantly ram through a fashionable, new design. The months of consultation with the Peace Garden advisory committee have been useful in helping his firm come up with ways of preserving the history and heritage of the original, he said.
“There were high emotions involved last year,” acknowledged Pommer.
For now, the designers at Plant are working on practical problems in the design — making sure the water flows and doesn’t snuff out the eternal flame — and the current design is schematic. Pommer expects further meetings in the fall with both the advisory group and city representatives. At that point the drawings will be more detailed.
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