The final fate of the old Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton’s Glenora neighbourhood was announced earlier this month by the provincial government. Join me in collecting your winnings if you forecast that the building, a recognized masterpiece of Brutalism, would be annihilated after a period of futile musing over potential re-uses. The old museum was closed in 2015, with its main collection destined to end up in a more spacious and up-to-date facility closer to the heart of Edmonton’s downtown. The new museum turned out to be slightly more attractive than Edmontonians initially feared, but as a building it is utterly characterless. When future generations decide to pull it down, probably within 40 years or so, there are no materials or decorations or fixtures anyone will be anxious to save for their own sake.
This is not true of the old Glenora palace, with its eloquent Tyndall-faced outer surface and the splendid marble and black granite of its entrance hall. My very image of Alberta was influenced, I’ve realized this week, by the original RAM: its pharaonic power, linked visually and psychically to the Age of Reptiles, was an unspoken addendum to its teaching of Alberta children on 1980s field trips.
It may very well be the handsomest public building of any kind in the province, which is not to deny that the museum might have needed a new building, or even that the survival of the old RAM ought to have been guaranteed. Brutalism at its best can be artistically powerful, but in the long term it all tends to be expensive and leaky, as the government now insists, even when it is not actively hostile to the human spirit.
All of which is to say that I share the feelings of mourning expressed to CBC News by my friend Sen. Paula Simons, who is a fellow Alberta taxpayer. I can sit here telling myself that, sure, there might be every reason a new museum cost $375 million to build. It was part of a “downtown revitalization” urban-planning vision that included the expensive new barn for the Oilers; Edmonton’s downtown remains defiantly unrevitalized unless “vitality” is code for “stabbings and drug use,” but I suppose I can’t fault the ambition. There’s still a lot of juice left to be squeezed from the ubiquitous COVID excuse for what otherwise resembles bog-standard urban decay.
It’s just curious that a process for rehabilitating a museum, an institution consecrated to heritage preservation, would assign no apparent value to the original building itself, given its popularity, its high artistic and material quality, and its own place in the historic life of Alberta. That it is dedicated to be replaced by a “new, welcoming green space” raises questions about double wastefulness as rents skyrocket in Edmonton, but there was and is never going to be a glittering new mega-condo obtruding onto idyllic Glenora, which is the traditional redoubt of the city’s professional and political elite. Those who live in million-dollar homes there must be wondering how long it will take for the “welcoming green space” to be colonized by unwelcome neighbours, in the now-typical fashion of all urban parks.
National Post