“Architecture has graver ends: capable of the sublime…” Le Corbusier
In his seminal 1931 publication Towards a New Architecture, Le Corbusier celebrated Canada’s Great Lake’s grain elevators as heroic architectural achievements exemplified by Thunder Bay’s ‘Pool 6’, which was then the world’s largest. Thunder Bay has begun an ambitious project of converting its industrial waterfront to public trails, parks and villages. This era of transformation has also seen the removal of some of its heroic industrial legacy including Pool 6, which was imploded a decade ago.
The Iron Ore Dock (IOD) designed by C.D. Howe and built in 1944 still stands today. Transforming this 500-metre long heroic structure as a permanent element in an urban waterfront network offers a remarkable opportunity for a reinvigorated community identity.
The IOD embodies one of Canada’s most brutalized eras of resource extraction and was once one of the most toxic locations in the Great Lakes – as the home of The Blob – a massive accumulation of creosote which floated alongside the IOD’s north channel. The industrial legacy of the IOD stands in stark contrast to an emerging environmental culture and its location in the iconic northern landscape of staggering beauty, overlooking Thunder Bay’s ‘Sleeping Giant’.
The IOD Park Concept explores ‘transformation scenarios’ that take advantage of the site’s monumental scale, purity of form and the contradictions inherent to the site’s context. The transformations fuse dichotomous elements into a new composite of mega-structure, meadow, theatre, forest, music hall, bird sanctuary, outdoor cinema, waterpark, cathedral to the northland and zip-line course. Through landscape architectural and experiential characteristics of inhabitation of the IOD and its site we challenge the traditional roles and space of nature and human occupancy.
The IOD Park concept positions architecture and landscape architecture as agents of urban advocacy and environmental sustainability in the preservation, transformation and site remediation of the monumental IOD structure on the shores of Lake Superior.
IOD Park has moved to the Thunder Bay Art Gallery for fall 2010, and may continue to exhibit throughout Ontario or abroad.
