Obituary: Architect Stig Harvor (1929-2024) designed pool at 24 Sussex, Sparks Street Mall

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Ottawa architect Stig Harvor left an eclectic imprint on this city.

Harvor came of age in Nazi-occupied Norway, immigrated to New Brunswick and obtained degrees in civil engineering and architecture. He spent 35 years in Ottawa as a commercial and federal government architect and designed the pool house at 24 Sussex Dr., along with the Brooke Claxton Building, now a federal heritage building, in Tunney’s Pasture.

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He was also one of five architects on the design team for the Sparks Street Mall. The pedestrian mall was a novelty at the time since it banished cars — then in their ascendancy — from three city blocks.

“I was always interested in urban design and city planning,” Harvor once told a reporter. “I felt, if you were in Ottawa, if you want to talk about those things, you can always say, ‘We have to do it better in Ottawa because we are the national capital.’”

Harvor was also a prominent peace activist during the 1960s, campaigning against the Vietnam War and for nuclear disarmament.

He died earlier this summer at the age of 95.

Harvor’s son, Finn, said his father could be a workaholic, but was fundamentally good-natured. “He was idealistic and principled,” Finn said. “He was a born organizer.”

Stig Harvor was born on Feb. 1, 1929, in Helsinki, Finland, where his father, a Norwegian businessman, sold pit props: wooden beams used to hold up the roofs of coal mines. The family remained in Finland until November 1939, when the country was attacked by the Soviet Union, which sought Finnish territory to bolster the defence of Leningrad (St. Petersburg) against a potential German attack.

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The Harvors fled to Norway, but the Second World War soon followed them. In April 1940, Nazi Germany launched a full-scale invasion of Norway and quickly seized control of that country.

By then, Harvor’s father had already left to work in New Brunswick, so for the next five years the family was divided. Stig Harvor and his mother lived under German occupation; they communicated with Harvor’s father only when a letter could be smuggled through Sweden.

The family reunited in New Brunswick after the war’s end in 1945. Harvor was 16. He knew only a few words of English, but somehow managed to excel in school, earning a scholarship to the University of New Brunswick.

He studied civil engineering, played varsity soccer and earned another scholarship to study architecture at Montreal’s McGill University. At McGill, he met a fellow student, Steven Bleyer, a Holocaust survivor who had once been left to die in the camp hospital at Auschwitz. They became lifelong friends.

After graduating from McGill in 1956, Harvor launched his career in Ottawa, joining the firm of Balharrie, Helmer and Morin Architects. A decade later, he established his own firm, Harvor, Menendez Architects.

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In 1973, he moved to the federal government, where, as a senior project manager in public works, he became involved in Phase 4 of the Place du Portage federal complex in Gatineau.

Two years later, he was handed an unusual task: Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau wanted a sauna and pool built at 24 Sussex Dr., the official residence of Canada’s prime ministers since 1950.

Harvor met with Pierre and Margaret Trudeau to discuss their ideas about the project. A decision was made to build a separate pool house — to contain the smell of chlorine — and connect it to the historic home with a tunnel.

Harvor designed a building made entirely of wood, with an extended skylight and a seating area next to the garden. He chose cedar for the exterior so that, when it weathered to grey, it would match the colour of the old stone house.

To avoid the political cost of spending public money on the project, the Liberal Party raised $200,000 for the pool house through private donations. It became a focal point of Trudeau’s leisure time.

A twice-married father of two, Harvor enjoyed swimming and cross-country skiing in Gatineau Park. He also threw himself energetically into high-minded causes and was an inveterate writer of letters to the editor.

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Among many other things, he called for Chaudière Falls to be de-industrialized and argued against putting a four-lane road through the Glebe to extend Carling Avenue.

“While geometry teaches us that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, the same principle is not true of traffic,” he wrote in the Citizen. “For safety and speed, traffic depends on free flow, not straight lines. This can best be achieved by going around a residential area, not through it.”

Harvor campaigned against the Vietnam War and served as chair of the Canadian Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. He later joined the Co-operative Housing Federation of Ottawa and fought for more and better affordable housing.

He also argued passionately in favour protecting old neighbourhoods, making streets more pedestrian friendly, and preserving historic buildings, such as 24 Sussex.

“Some people know the cost of everything and the value of nothing,” he once told a reporter. “It’s very important, I think, for any nation to have a sense of its own history and how we came to be what we are today. And, when we replace these old memories of the past, we really lose something in our own lives today.”

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