The National Capital Commission has begun work with a team of consultants on an illumination plan for the capital that NCC chief executive Mark Kristmanson says will help transform central areas at night.
The NCC awarded a $168,765 contract to an international consortium of experts June 30. The members of the consortium are now in the capital to start sketching out initial concepts for a lighting master plan.
The team includes Ottawa building services firm MMM Group, Quebec City-based Lumipraxis, which has worked on the illumination of the Quebec capital, and Alain Guilhot, an internationally renowned lighting designer from Lyon, France.
“He has lit Quebec City, Lyon, Constantinople, Beijing and Madrid,” Kristmanson said. “At one point, he lit the Eiffel Tower. He’s a great expert in this field, so we’ll be listening to him.”
Over the next two-and-a-half days, team members and the NCC will begin to map out the project, lay out the NCC’s expectations and learn from the consultants’ experience illuminating other capitals, Kristmanson said.
“We’ve got to familiarize this team with our capital and our needs. And we’ve got to understand from them what potential they see and what they can bring that we may not have thought of.”
While here, the team will make site visits to five viewpoints on both sides of the Ottawa River. The areas include the Rideau Canal, Wellington and Sparks streets, the ByWard Market, Dow’s Lake and major bridges.
The group will first visit the areas in daylight, then return at night “to see it in its nocturnal state,” Kristmanson said. “This will start developing the thinking.”
Though it will take a decade to fully implement the lighting plan, the NCC plans to share initial concepts with the public this fall.
“What I would expect to see is some further developed maps and viewlines and more detail on under-lit assets, and maybe some that are over-lit,” Kristmanson said. There should also be suggestions on how the illumination balance and hierarchy would work.
“We want the capital to be very distinctive at night, and we want to bring out the best in our architecture,” Kristmanson said. The NCC also expects the plan to reduce electricity use, perhaps quite substantially, and curb light pollution.
Kristmanson hopes some elements of the illumination plan can be implemented by 2017, perhaps at the renewed National Arts Centre and the new Global Centre for Pluralism in the former war museum on Sussex Drive.
The NCC will also be meeting with officials from Public Works, which is developing its own exterior illumination master plan for the parliamentary precinct, and exploring the possibility of temporary installations with the Department of Canadian Heritage.
A decade from now, Kristmanson said he expects the core of the capital to be “completely transformed” by the lighting plan and new development on LeBreton Flats and Chaudière Island.
“What I would like by 2025 is that people think of a beautiful nightscape that picks up all those great assets we have.”
