04-13-2015, 08:35 PM
The convent is part of a complex of buildings intimately associated with a sizeable Polish community that clustered in that part of Kitchener. It’s as much a monument to those people as it is a piece of architecture.
When I was in high school in Kitchener in the 1960’s, a substantial chunk of my class was comprised of the Polish kids from the Ahrens Street corridor. It was neat to feel their presence in what was not at the time a very cosmopolitan city.
Often I see here reviews of new building renders to the effect: “Meh, it’s nothing special, but I don’t hate it.” A common assessment of old buildings is: “It’s nothing special – there’s better stuff, so it might as well come down.” When a lot of the former get built, while at the same time a lot of the latter get razed, you end up with a bland urban landscape.
It’s not enough to place all bets on a new progressive framework without maintaining in place pieces of the mosaic that show how the city has evolved. We all visit the world’s great cities to see places that have both a future and a past.
It’s pretty much a truism now that Kitchener’s “brick and beam” buildings are the aspirational workplace environments for the innovation sector. But those industrial relics weren’t always so treasured. To wit, try to find them in Waterloo. Sometimes it takes out-of-the-mainstream initiative to prevent the “you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone” syndrome.
I’m told that the Region has shown interest in adaptively re-using the convent as affordable housing, but that the Diocese is intent for its own reasons on pressing on with the application for demolition. So maybe Heritage Kitchener’s move to designate is in fact an out-of-the-mainstream initiative that will buy time – time to maintain what may later be valued as a modest contributing piece of urban fabric.
When I was in high school in Kitchener in the 1960’s, a substantial chunk of my class was comprised of the Polish kids from the Ahrens Street corridor. It was neat to feel their presence in what was not at the time a very cosmopolitan city.
Often I see here reviews of new building renders to the effect: “Meh, it’s nothing special, but I don’t hate it.” A common assessment of old buildings is: “It’s nothing special – there’s better stuff, so it might as well come down.” When a lot of the former get built, while at the same time a lot of the latter get razed, you end up with a bland urban landscape.
It’s not enough to place all bets on a new progressive framework without maintaining in place pieces of the mosaic that show how the city has evolved. We all visit the world’s great cities to see places that have both a future and a past.
It’s pretty much a truism now that Kitchener’s “brick and beam” buildings are the aspirational workplace environments for the innovation sector. But those industrial relics weren’t always so treasured. To wit, try to find them in Waterloo. Sometimes it takes out-of-the-mainstream initiative to prevent the “you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone” syndrome.
I’m told that the Region has shown interest in adaptively re-using the convent as affordable housing, but that the Diocese is intent for its own reasons on pressing on with the application for demolition. So maybe Heritage Kitchener’s move to designate is in fact an out-of-the-mainstream initiative that will buy time – time to maintain what may later be valued as a modest contributing piece of urban fabric.