The Uglification of Canada

I live in Ottawa, home to some of the country’s most stunning heritage neighbourhoods and public buildings befitting the nation’s capital. But, over the last decade, I’ve watched as the city’s most walkable, beautiful streetscapes have become overrun with jarring conversions, cookie-cutter condos and otherwise uninspiring, low-quality developments. It’s a purposeful and systematic architectural “uglification” that, increasingly, almost brings me to tears.

Within a 20-minute walk of Parliament Hill, there are seemingly endless examples of unsightly builds that have replaced historical gems. In Sandy Hill—a community that princes, prime ministers and lumber barons have all called home—lovely, century-old residences on Nelson Street were destroyed to make way for a massive square block of Lego-looking grey studio flats with no visual connection to the area’s history. This pattern repeats further into the city, as unsightly infill dots the banks of the Rideau Canal, replacing a formerly rich collection of Italianate, art deco and beaux arts buildings. Near ByWard Market, pretty local shops and grand government buildings have given way to a canyon of faceless highrises.

This trend is not limited to Ottawa. In Calgary, on the banks of the Bow River, where I grew up, roughly 100 acres of the iconic Paskapoo Slopes were paved over for a development punctuated by tacky towers and concrete lots, on the pretext of supporting a 2026 Olympic bid that ultimately failed. The quintessentially Albertan post-war duplexes and four-plexes characteristic of the adjacent community of Bowness, founded in 1869, are being replaced by modular structures more akin to freight train cars than actual homes. The trend isn’t limited to housing, either: new schools, hospital additions and community centres all resemble nondescript interconnected blocks, clad in the unsightly corrugated metal that’s recently become Canada’s go-to finish. If you were dropped from the sky and asked to identify where you’d landed, you’d be hard-pressed to figure out what country you were in, let alone whether you’d found yourself in Peterborough, Prince Albert or Petty Harbour.

Related: A Heritage Building To Call Home

How did we arrive in an architectural age where new automatically equals hideous? Canadians aren’t necessarily known for our risk-taking, but there are a few more concrete reasons for all this uglification: suspicion of government spending, sprawling suburbanization and the condo and office-tower booms, to start. Municipalities have also largely ceded visions for their communities to private developers, leaning into fee-driven procurement processes that privilege frugality and functionality over all else—even when the results are atrocious. Maybe the most troubling factor of all is the public’s helpless acceptance of our architectural mediocrity, which we’re only just beginning to realize can harm our economy as much as our psyche.

Architecture isn’t merely about buildings. It’s part of the very fabric of Canada, its genius loci (or “spirit of the place”). Heritage neighbourhoods like Sandy Hill, Lowertown and Bowness were thoughtfully built communities—one wealthy and two proudly working class—whose textures, details and colours reflected their actual setting, partly because their local governments set explicit aesthetic standards. From an economic standpoint, striking downtown streetscapes, neighbourhoods and landmarks draw tourists, increase property values and attract capital and talent, which, in light of recent American chaos, has never been more relevant. We can’t entice the world’s best workers to Canada, instead of Melbourne or Mexico City, when our built environment looks as though we live inside a Minecraft video game. Ultimately, it’s harder to drive creativity, productivity and innovation when we embrace a default aesthetic of “all function, no form.”

Examples of Canadian buildings that reflect what “better” looks like still exist, like the cedar-shingled craftsman bungalows of Victoria, the Prairie School structures and a slew of iconic buildings that wouldn’t look out of place on a postage stamp: Quebec City’s Chateau Frontenac, Saskatoon’s Remai Modern, Newfoundland’s Fogo Island Inn and plentiful new Indigenous cultural centres, largely popping up on university campuses. But producing more buildings that endure and excite will require a larger policy reset. In 2023, the Regulatory Organizations of Architecture in Canada, or ROAC, released “A Vision for the Future.” The report, eight years in the making, includes calls to build more structures that speak to regional distinctiveness; to build community in remote, rural and suburban environments, as well as in cities; and to boost citizen involvement in design processes and decision-making.

One of ROAC’s core demands? A national architecture policy that, in their words, “articulates a bold vision of what Canadians should expect from the built environment.” This deep desire to improve Canada’s architectural offerings is reflected in hard data: a national Angus Reid poll from 2022, commissioned by the ROAC, found that Canadians are nearly unanimous in prioritizing accessibility, aesthetic beauty and sustainability in new building and infrastructure developments. Three-quarters of respondents said culture and heritage should be key considerations in community design.

At the municipal level, change could involve developing publicly supported design standards and codes that specify aesthetic requirements for new streets and buildings. Cities could draft stock patterns for speculative housing and generic office buildings, informed by local input. They could codify elevated design standards for landmark locations. A new wave of design competitions could generate more creative ideas and incentivize a greater number of small and medium-sized businesses to participate.

Right now, public-architecture contracts in Canada are typically shared among precious few firms. Similarly, real-estate development lies within the control of a limited number of companies. On both fronts, the people in charge will need to stop treating development projects like short-term commodities and begin viewing them as long-term community assets. This means designing for the human experience; selecting high-quality materials that improve with age and evoke a sense of warmth; and incorporating natural elements, which have been shown to improve mental health in civic spaces.

Related: A Look Inside the School of the Future

Other cities and nations have already recognized this beauty imperative. Medellín, Colombia, whose dangerous living conditions were long reflected in its run-down visual landscape, has become an example of architectural transformation, with bleeding-edge skyscrapers rising alongside centuries-old churches and beautiful public spaces, like Medellín River Parks. Sweden, meanwhile, gave birth to the Architectural Uprising, or AU, a people’s movement that has been consistently railing against the “continued uglification of our cities,” as they call it, along with the politicians, policymakers and architectural professionals who enable it.

Founded in 2014, the AU’s Facebook community quickly grew to tens of thousands of followers and, subsequently, into an international network of hundreds of thousands, with chapters in Brazil, Israel and Ukraine. The AU’s advocacy has had direct influence on projects around the world. Three years ago, Ekmansgatan 5, a traditionalist, context-sensitive apartment complex in Gothenburg, Sweden—an AU-supported proposal—defeated a series of dark, boring modernist boxes to win the city’s “Best New Architecture” title. Further west, in Norway, the recent Risørholmen housing development was originally planned as a series of angular highrises; after public backlash, including some from the AU, it was reimagined as a cluster of classically inspired white houses with red roofs.

More than 30 European countries already have official national policies that stress the role of architecture in creating high-quality living environments. The U.K.’s Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission was established to promote forward-thinking design of homes, villages, towns and high streets, ensuring new development is more likely to be welcomed than resisted. It presented its findings in the Living With Beauty Report, which detailed three principle objectives: to ask for beauty, to refuse ugliness and to promote stewardship. In response, the government noted, “We need to build more homes, but as the Commission reminds us, there should not be a choice between quantity and quality; we want and need both.”

Related: An Indoor Swim Spot With an Outdoorsy Feel

Back in Canada, Edmonton is an unexpected beacon for the rest of the country. In 2005, former mayor Stephen Mandel raged against the city’s “cheap and easy” public building design, saying, “Our tolerance for crap is now zero.” Within a few years, Carol Bélanger was appointed city architect, and Edmonton’s procurement process for public buildings, such as recreation centres and libraries, was revamped. (The city adopted a qualifications-based selection process.) Subsequent design competitions for five park pavilions were huge successes. The Borden Park Pavilion garnered the city its first Governor General’s Medal in Architecture since 1992, breaking a 26-year dry spell. The 2022 Prairie Design Excellence Award went to its Capilano Library, while Borden Natural Swimming Pool clinched a Royal Architectural Institute of Canada gold medal this year. The Edmontonian model is one that could be replicated everywhere else.

As I make my way around an increasingly ugly Ottawa, challenged to find a single street that hasn’t been desecrated by some new crappy building or lacklustre development, a specific quote from the AU often comes to mind: “The battle for better architecture is ultimately a battle for culture and identity.” Canadians feel this, even if we can’t always articulate it. Public trust is critical to engendering support for the density changes needed to address our housing crisis, as well as the infrastructure costs underpinning our current nation-building efforts. But when every new rec centre and rising tower subtracts from the beauty of what was—instead of giving people something better than what’s being replaced—it’s nigh impossible to expect them to embrace these transformative changes. That’s why an architectural overhaul is not just a nice-to-have, it’s essential.  

At a time of deep geopolitical upheaval—including with our once-closest ally—the country has the perfect opportunity to pivot away from the fast-food, franchise-focused, American model of architecture. Arch slogans and patriotic marketing won’t suffice: we need to create uniquely Canadian places that people love, residents want to live in, tourists want to visit, foreign talent wants to move to and businesses want to invest in. So let’s get on with building beautiful.

Suneeta Millington has served as chair of the Prime Ministers’ Row initiative, on the board of Action Sandy Hill and on the steering committee for the National Arts Centre’s Southam Club. She was also appointed to the inaugural board of directors of the municipal services corporation formerly responsible for the revitalization of the ByWard and Parkdale Markets in Ottawa.