Архитектор Брюс Кувабара: общественные здания должны быть открыты миру и вплетены в городскую ткань

Bruce Kuwabara speaks about buildings the way some people speak about landscapes — as places shaped by history and the movement of people. Two of his most defining works, the Canadian Embassy in Berlin and Kitchener City Hall, share a single architectural belief that public institutions should open themselves to the world. While one emerged from a rapidly changing mid-sized Canadian city and the other from a reunified European capital, both reflect Kuwabara’s enduring conviction that institutions serve the public best when they are accessible and woven into the fabric of urban life. ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW When Kuwabara arrived in Berlin in the late 1990s, the city was still raw from reunification. “There were literally thousands of buildings that were built in the reconstruction of Berlin,” he said. “I’ve never been to a place that enjoys that level of debate about architecture and buildings.” The embassy competition was political from the start. The Canadian government assembled a joint venture team representing Quebec City, Winnipeg, and Toronto — a geographic coalition that, as Kuwabara put it, was “politically, very smart.” The jury initially preferred a different scheme, but the minister of foreign affairs, Lloyd Axworthy, intervened. “The building was born in some controversy,” Kuwabara said. Berlin’s planning authority, led by Hans Stimmann, imposed strict rules on the site at Leipziger Platz, a historic octagon near the former line of the Berlin Wall. The embassy had to conform to the reconstructed street wall, as if stitching itself into the city’s repaired skin. “You had to adhere to the walls … you couldn’t project out, you couldn’t back off the wall. You had to make the wall,” he said. The site itself had once held the Wertheim department store, erased by war and division. The embassy would become one more layer in Berlin’s vast reconstruction — not a monument, but a participant. ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW Most embassies are built like bunkers. Kuwabara’s embassy is built like a street. He insisted on a public passage that cuts through the building at ground level, allowing pedestrians to walk from Leipziger Platz into a courtyard and out the other side. It’s a decision that decades later still endears Germans to Canadians, a shortcut through Canadian soil in the busy streets of Berlin. “There’s no other embassy like it,” he said. “No other embassy would let you walk through the ground floor outside.” This was not a flourish. It was a declaration, he said. Asked by Axworthy to articulate what it meant for a building to be Canadian, Kuwabara answered with a single word: open. “A lot of people like Canadians for their openness and friendship and generosity,” he said. “The concept of open … was the term I placed upfront.” The embassy’s circular timber hall — copper clad, skylit, warm — became the architectural heart of that openness. Its materials, drawn from across the country, turned diplomacy into geography: Manitoba Tyndall stone, Douglas fir, Quebec granite. ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW But the embassy’s most surprising ancestor lies in Stuttgart. In the 1980s, British architect James Stirling designed the Staatsgalerie, a museum built into a sloping riverbank. Its defining gesture was a public route that wound through the building without requiring visitors to enter the galleries. Kuwabara visited it while working on another project, and it stayed with him. “I was just blown away,” he said. “That idea of being able to walk through a site without going into the building really played out in Berlin … and in Kitchener.” Stirling’s influence became the invisible thread between two cities that once shared a name. Each going through a different sort of transition: Berlin, remaking itself after division; Kitchener, remaking itself after industrial decline. Kitchener City Hall, completed in 1993, predates the embassy but anticipates it, said Kuwabara. It is organized around a rotunda — another circular gathering space — and framed by red sandstone “civic walls” whose width matches the typical storefronts on King Street. The building doesn’t dominate downtown; it completes it, he said. “In my mind, they were describing a kind of courtyard,” Kuwabara said. “An open C-shaped courtyard with the rotunda in the middle.” Where Berlin demanded conformity to a reconstructed urban plan, Kitchener offered a looser canvas. Yet Kuwabara imposed his own discipline: a belief that civic buildings should be open, accessible, and anchored in the life of the street. ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW The rotunda, like the timber hall in Berlin, is a democratic room — a place where the city gathers itself, he said. Yet the embassy and city hall share more than a circular room. They share a worldview, said Kuwabara. Both reject monumental isolation. Both embed public routes through institutional architecture. Both use material palettes that speak to place. Both place gathering spaces at their centres, insisting that civic life happens not at the edges but in the middle. And both were built in cities undergoing transformation — one global, one local. Kuwabara sees these parallels clearly. “The Berlin project is really about an institution that actually builds the fabric of the city,” he said. “Not by doing some crazy form, but basically building the walls.” The same could be said of Kitchener, he said. Kuwabara’s affection for Berlin is unmistakable. He speaks of its debates, its cultural energy, its willingness to argue about architecture. “People don’t just accept stuff that is going down,” he said. “They question everything.” ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW He misses that. Similarly, he still sees Kitchener’s City Hall as one of his greatest achievements. It was the project that put him on the map, won him his first Governor General’s Award in Architecture, and led to many of his projects to come. Its success also landed him a teaching position at Harvard University in 1994. Decades later, when putting together proposals for other projects, he would often send juries to Kitchener to assess his work. In both Berlin and Kitchener, he said he left behind buildings that embody the values he admires: openness, publicness, and a belief that architecture should serve the city rather than dominate it. The embassy and city hall are not twins. They are two answers to the same question: How should public buildings behave? In Kuwabara’s work, the answer is ultimately the same. They should open themselves to the world.