WATER WORLD

Ontario Place, Toronto’s lake-defying 1971 showpiece, is a modernist marvel with an uncertain future

- DAVE LEBLANC

‘The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead / When the skies of November turn gloomy,’ sang Gordon Lightfoot in 1976’s ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’. Canada’s most famous living folkie (Leonard Cohen RIP) knew that November is not the best month to visit North America’s Great Lakes region. The first icy winds blow, battleship-grey clouds win the arm wrestle with the sun, and the five enormous lakes, so vast they’re ocean-like, churn up some very wicked weather. Indeed, the Witch of November (as locals call the strong wind across the lakes) can produce 140km/h gusts and 11m-high waves. And the SS Edmund Fitzgerald’s 29 lost souls – the boat had sunk a year before Lightfoot’s commemoration – was just the latest in a long list of the lakes’ casualties. The Great Lakes Storm of 1913, for instance, sent 12 ships and around 250 sailors to their watery graves.

Inserting five futuristic pods and some artificial islands into the third deepest of those lakes might be seen as foolhardy. Bauhaus-trained Eberhard Zeidler (born 1926) and Briton Michael Hough (1928-2013), the two émigrés responsible for Ontario Place, certainly had buckets of nerve to think that they could drop something smack-dab into the choppy soup of Toronto Harbour back in 1968. ‘It’s crazy, Eb and Michael saying: we’re going to take on those forces and build something,’ laughs Toronto-based architect and heritage advocate Catherine Nasmith. ‘What were they thinking? People had so much nerve in that period.’