10 Apr How we got gulled into approving the Nova Centre

If you’ve had occasion to visit Argyle Street in Halifax lately, you may have noticed a few things:

• Disruption due to construction of the Nova Centre has put this once lively, inviting street on life supports. Victor Syperek’s iconic Shoe Shop is closed, and the two adjacent bars  in his three-bar complex are so dead, you could play darts on Friday night without fear of injuring anyone. The nearby Carleton Music Bar and Grill, a popular venue for interesting musical and political happenings in the city, is literally getting by on crowd-funding—but probably won’t last long. The Foggy Goggle could more aptly be called Sleepy Goggle.
• The Nova Centre itself, a heavily subsidized combination convention centre and office tower finally rising from its long empty excavation, turns out to be shockingly huge—a gigantic, lumbering colossus that looms over the street, gobbling up sunlight. It looks and feels awful.

How did this happen? How did a project that was debated and reviewed ad nauseam end up astonishing so many Haligonians with its massive, leaden girth? A blog produced by a group of longtime Nova Centre critics has published a detailed and persuasive explanation. Here’s a sample.

To learn how architectural advertising fools us, let’s go behind the scenes to see some tricks of the trade.

 1. Cropping the View

This perspective of Nova Centre was generated from a digital model, so its geometry is liable to be internally accurate. The trick here is in the tight cropping of the image. It shows only the building, so you’d never know it’s in the middle of historic Halifax, near the Grand Parade, or that its building mass is much larger than anything else downtown. To estimate its height, you could count the number of storeys, but there are no neighbouring buildings to help you understand what that means.

Did you notice the leaves in the upper left corner? That’s a common trick. The tree doesn’t exist, of course. This is downtown, not a pastoral landscape where buildings are lower than trees.

2. Altering the View

Here’s a rendering of Nova Centre that includes some neighbouring buildings. We can recognize the brick-clad Marriott hotel on the left and the 1960s Centennial Building on the right. But wait – both of them have been moved away half a block so that we can see the whole Nova Centre. This composition suggests that its urban surroundings are spacious, not the narrow city streets of Halifax.

Actually, the Centennial Building and the Marriott are a block away from the Nova Centre. By the simple expedient of erasing the block that contains the Shoe Shop, the Foggy Goggle, and the Carleton, the promotional illustration we were shown made them look as if they were right next door in an open, airy neighbourhood. I understand how citizens could be fooled by this sleight-of-hand, but how did provincial and municipal planning departments fall for it?

I also want to underscore the miraculous tree in the upper left corner of the top illustration. By comparing the two pictures, you can see the tree would have to be an eight-storey sequoia. Yet it lends a homey illusion of modest scale to the deceptive behemoth.

The Willow Tree blog goes on to deconstruct 12 more ways the developers misled the public with drawings that misrepresented their project. These pictures don’t look anything like the building that’s going up on Argyle. Have a look.

It appears more and more as though we have approved another Scotia Square, the notorious design blunder of the 1960s that turned several crucial blocks of downtown Halifax into a dead zone. Ironically, I expect Halifax’s centre of action may shift north to Gottigen and Agricola, streets cut off by Scotia Square half a century ago, or south to the area around the Seaport Market and Barrington Street. Or both. But it’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to visit Argyle St.