New Town in Canadian Wilderness by Philip Johnson
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto 
on 11.27.08
It is hard to build in Washington DC; there is a lot of history and a lot of approvals required. Surprisingly, it is easier to build there than it is the Canadian wilderness; that is what philanthropist Joseph Hirshhorn found out when he tried to build a new town "planned towards happy living" north of Lake Huron, with Philip Johnson as his architect. Blake Gopnik writes in the Washington Post:
Joe Hirshhorn, a child of the tenements, had made a decent fortune on Wall Street in the 1920s and had started using it to buy modern art. But the huge uranium strike he bankrolled in Canada in 1953 -- just in time for the nuclear arms race -- allowed him to think bigger, and to bring several of his interests together. As a mining magnate, he needed a place to house his workers. As an arts patron, he wanted somewhere to showcase his collection, which he now had the money to expand to museum size. And as a new-minted philanthropist, he wanted to help the world, in this case by giving those workers a model town with that art at its heart. That town was called Hirshhorn.
Click on image to see video in new window
It has been reconstructed at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington by Terence Gower in a n exhibition called Public Spirit: The Hirshhorn Project with renderings by Sticky Pictures, a Brooklyn based design and animation house; read an interview in Archinect here and click on the image above to watch a video.
It is all very dated and reminds me of my Kenner Girder and Panel building set, and the planning of a town that needs buses to get you from downtown to the apartments is of another planning era, but what would it have been like to have such a museum, such center of culture up there. Instead, according to Robert Fulford,
And what happened to Hirshhorn, Ont.? As soon as the newspaper stories broke, merchants from Blind River informed Hirshhorn that they considered the new town a threat to their local businesses. The Ontario government showed no enthusiasm. The early estimate of the investment necessary, US$35-million, was thought to be much too low. Hirshhorn lost his enthusiasm and let it die. But for a while the idea of an art centre with a population of Hirshhornians, deep in the woods of northern Ontario, was a bizarre but grand Utopian dream.
How little things have changed in 50 years.
More on the exhibition at the Hirshhorn:
More urban planning and eco-towns in TreeHugger:
Eco-Towns: Three Models of Green Urban Planning
Freiburg Has Solar Flair
Ecocities of Tomorrow: A Visit to Freiburg
How to Build a Green, Car-free Community: Vauban
Follow @TreeHugger on Twitter & get our headlines with @TH_rss!
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More like same-old-suburbia-town photoshopped into Canadian wilderness.
thank god, the last the thing wilderness needs is more people in it. Whether the town is green or not. Green existing towns before building new ones. Remake the land that has already been compromised instead of the virgin untouched.
This looks surface-parking Lego-fest like a really bad idea to me, and I suspect you soft-pedaled your own scorn, here Loyd. But it is unclear that it would have been easier to build it near, let alone in, D.C. Nor does it seem probable that a magnate's love of modernist art and architecture would be shared by many of these shoe-boxed workers, making them happy to forget about the toxic radioactive slag from uranium mining. Fulford might bemoan it, but likely because he, too, sees himself as a man of culture, able to enlighten the parochial yobs.
Natural villages and towns are best to grow on there own. This concept of a prefab one horse city is about as cultural enriching as Kraft dinner or the projects of Chicago. Why should industrialist's be permitted to carpet bomb our forests with their ideas of Utopia while perfectly good towns are thrown to the side because they're not backed with a mines bank roll? I'm very happy and impressed with Blind River for standing up for its rights.
This place is utter crap and thank god for tough restrictions. Where are the green roofs, the solar panels, the solar hot water, the enhanced public transit services, the bike routes. All I see is clear cutting for deciduous trees lining the roads and buildings, massive parking lots everywhere and absolutely no level of "happy" attached, same old, same old. I don't mean to be rude, but Philip Johnson you don't know anything about happiness, health or the type of architecture that the world needs. Look deeper and perhaps you'll see the light one day. I hope he hears this and if he wants to talk, he can find me if he wants.
At a glance, the architecture and arrangement of the buildings looks a lot like Urbana-Champaign in Illinois, my new home-town.
Now that I think about it, it sounds like he was hoping for was a college town, like Urbana, IL or Blacksburg, VA. I can understand the draw. having lived in both places.
I've gotta be back math-factory after the holiday on Monday Morning, though. :-)
i love all of you for saying how bad of an idea this is. cause that's the first thing i thought of when i read it.... why make a new town when we have soooo many already. green the ones we have first before making new!