The newly redesigned Hamilton Children’s Museum includes a 3,800-square-foot expansion.Cindy Blazevic/The Globe and Mail
Three bright blue gables peer out over Gage Park in Hamilton, Ont., their pitched roofs and patterned walls fronting the park’s tree-lined allées.
Clad with glazed blocks laid in an irregular rhythm, the new extension to the Hamilton Children’s Museum resembles a child’s drawing in blue pastels, scaled up to life-size with flair and nerve. Each gable corresponds to a room, making the building easily legible from the park.
It is rare in Canadian architecture for a building to embrace colour. This 3,800-square-foot expansion to the museum, designed by Toronto-based firm Workshop, does just that. It offers an unmistakable message that our public buildings don’t have to be boring.
The expansion addresses long-standing limits for the city-run museum. For 40 years, the institution occupied an 1875 farmhouse that belonged to the Gage family (whose acreage became the grand Gage Park), but the building was cramped and lacked an elevator. Since reopening on Jan. 10, the museum has been “exceptionally busy,” says Franca Hicks, curator of collections for the City of Hamilton. “It’s easy for people to find their way in to see us now.”
No doubt. The house is now joined by the bright-blue volume of the addition, punctuated by a long stripe of yellow – an accessible ramp made conspicuous – out front.
The expansion adds on to the 1875 farmhouse that’s been the museum’s home for four decades.Cindy Blazevic/The Globe and Mail
That ramp leads into a long, glassed-in link that runs parallel to the park, clearly separating the 19th-century farmhouse from the new construction. In the latter, oak cabinetry provides curved cubbies for little kids to explore, rising in the centre to define an arched doorway.
In the exhibition spaces (designed by local firm HofK), preschoolers toy with city-themed blocks and enjoy a farm playground below windows that frame axial views to Gage Park.
Throughout the link, the steel columns and beams that support the roof are painted in what project architect Elaine Chau calls a “lemony-fresh yellow.”
If you are an architectural historian, this colour may bring to mind 1970s “High-Tech” exuberance. If you’re anyone else, you may get hungry for a Popsicle. “We like playing with colour in a lot of our projects,” Chau says. “It’s an easy way to make a space feel fresh and also to highlight elements you might not notice.”
Bright colours might not seem radical, but think back to when you last visited a library or museum: You probably saw a lot of grey. “A lot of architects avoid colour,” says Workshop principal Helena Grdadolnik, “because it takes a certain amount of aptitude and confidence. Matching greys and whites is a lot safer.”
The exhibition spaces are designed by HofK.Cindy Blazevic/The Globe and Mail
This aligns with the relentless cultural conservatism among the too-small group of people shaping Canada’s built environment. Major building projects generally end up with the dozen or so corporate firms that dominate Canadian architecture. They deliver risk avoidance. They don’t do lemons or pastels.
Workshop, however, does. Founded by Grdadolnik and David Colussi, the firm has spent a decade competing with larger firms for public commissions. In their work – on schools, university libraries, homeless shelters – bright hues leaven modest budgets.
It probably helps that Grdadolnik spent years working in Britain, including at the public-sector Commission for Architecture in the Built Environment. Many contemporary British architects share an interest in the playfulness and polychromy of Victorian architecture.
That lineage is concordant with the buildings of 19th-century British Canada, when treillage and patterned brick and were the norm. The old Gage farmhouse itself, with its original bargeboard trim painted in cerulean and baby blue, is a case in point.
Such personality is vanishingly rare today. There is a lesson here that bringing in different voices is important to moving the culture forward. Kids aren’t the only ones who need some joy.