Claude Cormier Oral History

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Claude Cormier Oral History

Nov 17, 2023

Landscape Architect Claude Cormier, is the subject of the nineteenth oral history in the award-winning Pioneers of Landscape Design® Oral History Project series.

This series of richly produced segments explores the influential landscapes and experiences of his early life, milestones in his trailblazing career, and the evolution of his unique design philosophy.

Oral History Framework

Video clips are divided into three categories: BIOGRAPHY, DESIGN, and PROJECTS.
Each clip is between two and five minutes long.

Interview: Claude Cormier was interviewed by Charles A. Birnbaum in August 2023.

Claude Cormier Oral History Transcript

Reflections: ��ұ�� contacted Cormier's colleagues and professional associates to share their stories and memories.

Claude Cormier Reflections

YouTube Clip Listing by Category


BIOGRAPHY 1. Claude Cormier, the third of four children, was raised on a farm and sugarbush near Princeville, Québec, a French-speaking part of Canada, with his brother and two sisters. His mother, Solange, was a teacher and his father, Laurent, an “avant-garde” politician who was very “progressive” in his attitude about new technologies. There was no notion of “play” living on the farm, but work could be fun. Cormier received a chainsaw for his sixteenth birthday. Everything was very pragmatic; as farmers they were feeding the world. 2. As a teen, Cormier worked in a nursery in Québec City one summer and became the top salesperson out of the 100-member sales force. He was partnered with the business owner’s son who had trisomy. The fellow’s disability did not inhibit the pair. In fact, they were a strong team that was built on trust and the sum was greater than its parts. This informed Cormier’s design approach for addressing the disabled so that they were part of the solution and not viewed as a problem to be pushed to the sides. 3. Cormier’s father said Claude should become an agronomist. He didn’t envision Claude being a farmer but instead working with science. Cormier enrolled at the University of Guelph and was interested in genetics. He wanted to invent a new flower. After a year he had to get out. Following his father’s death from cancer at age 44, Claude and his brother kept the farm, which proved to be overwhelming. Ultimately, his mother sold off the farm equipment and the livestock but kept the property. 4. At age twenty, having only ever worked, Cormier took a year off and inspired by Jack Kerouac’s influential book On The Road went hitchhiking. He spent three months traveling west to Vancouver then south to San Diego, California, before heading northeast to Montréal. He called it a fantastic trip during which he discovered the world and himself. California was an amazing place that made the idea of returning to the farm boring. 5. After two years at the University of Guelph, Cormier concluded “science and I are not compatible” and opted to move to Toronto to study landscape architecture. In the city the “farm boy” discovered culture. The school of design opened new worlds along with new ways of thinking and seeing. He discovered night clubs and loved going out, art museums and galleries, secondhand clothing stores and foods from different ethnicities. Academically, instead of focusing on plants he was dealing with the urban built environment. During his fourth year, his thesis adviser, Michael Hough, did not approve of Claude’s project. Claude went to the architecture school to get a new thesis advisor and found urbanist Blanche Lemko van Ginkel. It was the beginning of Claude embracing a new way of thinking about landscape architecture and issues of urban design and city making. 6. Cormier was working in a small landscape architecture firm in Toronto doing a project for Phyllis Lambert, a member of the wealthy Bronfman family and the founder of the Canadian Center for Architecture (CCA) in Montréal. Lambert studied architecture in Chicago under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (and convinced her father to commission Mies to design the Seagram Building in New York City). Cormier was put in charge of the CCA project but quit because he didn’t feel he had enough experience; however, he developed a friendship with Lambert. His takeaway was to know your own ability. 7. At 32, having worked for seven years in a landscape architecture practice, Cormier wanted to go to the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. He convinced Phyllis Lambert to pay for his tuition in exchange for doing a plan for CCA’s landscape maintenance. It “was the game changer in my whole life and practice.” At Harvard, Cormier opted to focus on history and theory rather than studio. Mentors included professors Mirka Benes and John Stilgoe. He embraced the values of Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr., as well as his studio professor, landscape architect Martha Schwartz, who he called “my hero.” Though very different, Olmsted and Schwartz, he said, create designed landscapes from scratch. Claude saw the two as his spiritual parents; Olmsted created healthy environments with nature in the city while Schwartz used artificial elements in her projects. 8. After Harvard, Cormier decided to go back to Canada rather than stay in the U.S. and work for his professor, landscape architect Martha Schwartz. His first office was in his bedroom next to a washer and dryer. Over time his business grew into an internationally respected bi-lingual office. Cormier recognized the need for an entrepreneurial spirit and to fight, speak up, and negotiate – skills not taught in school.			DESIGN 1. Cormier believes each project should be anchored by one big idea. The idea should resonate with the site and its history without duplicating it. It should also embrace notions of hope, joy, and beauty. 2. Cormier distinguishes between kitschy and kitsch and cites the Blue Tree project he did at Cornerstone, in Sonoma, California. With only an $8,000 budget he created an eye-catching project by covering a Monterey Pine with 80,000 blue balls/ornaments. His intervention transformed the basic character of the tree, which he thought was powerful. For Cormier, the project created value where there was none. 3. In Québec humor is culturally important. Entertainers such as Celine Dion and Cirque du Soleil create mis-en-scene theatricality. Mood, feeling, and experience – details that bring a smile to the people. 4. From his Harvard professor Martha Schwartz, he learned not to back down. Cormier notes that all of the projects his firm created that are now considered icons were initially rejected. 5. Cormier got his education during the “postmodern” movement which saw the blurring of lines between the historical, contextual, and what he calls “a bit of tackiness.” He labels himself a “landscape conceptualist” and neither an intellectual nor a modernist. He favors one clear idea per project, clear naming of a place, and the ability to transmit a message quickly. 6. According to Cormier, color is not decoration; it is full of meaning. School buses are yellow. Swimming pools are blue. Color is also political. He cited the Blue Tree project in Sonoma, California, featuring a Monterey Pine covered in 80,000 blue balls/ornaments, a color inspired by the California sky. 7. Cormier says he “likes to blur the lines and create new genres in terms of social design” and says people should be the center of attention in a landscape. People are both voyeurs and exhibitionists; the landscapes are runways for people to show off or watch. He cites Sugar Beach in Toronto in which the main promenade diagonally cuts through the center of the landscape rather than being relegated to the edges. 8. Cormier cites his Harvard professor Martha Schwartz as a “raw artist” – a thinker and an intellectual. Cormier considers himself more a doer than a thinker and someone focused on getting things done. Small projects allowed him to test ideas. Experimentation is essential because it gives one “the ability to trust your intuition and the notion of being bold.” Risk taking, he says, is where success resides. 9. Four weeks before his death Cormier reflects on the importance of building a great team that both challenges and empowers him. The team is his “family” and he’s comforted by the knowledge that the team he has built “will take over the business and take it to another level.” 10. The opening of Love Park in Montréal proves to be aggravating rather than celebratory when Cormier learns that he and his team, who designed the project, would neither be seated prominently at the project’s unveiling nor given a speaking role. Cormier urges landscape architects to fight for recognition. As designers landscape architects address social, cultural, economic, and environmental issues through artistry. The profession’s work on small projects creates great value.		PROJECTS 1. For Montréal’s new convention center, Cormier’s charge from city officials was to make the “building a little more feminine because it’s too masculine.” His initial idea was to populate the ground floor with trunks of trees recently felled in an ice storm, but that was rejected because the wood would rot and was infested with insects. He decided to create artificial tree trunks and rather than paint them brown, to mimic trees, they would be pink – an artificial but not fake forest. City officials were skeptical, but the building’s architects embraced it; and MAC Cosmetics provided underwriting. The project was completed in 1998 and today it is an icon. Cormier said that project gave him the confidence to be “out there” and “present” and not be ashamed of being a gay man creating “subversive landscapes.” 2. To accommodate myriad physical and programmatic challenges, Cormier addressed the design of the historic park by deploying unexpected solutions that included grading that was inspired by the nineteenth-century French engineer Adolphe Alphand’s approach to Parisian parks, while also incorporating a Victorian-style fountain, bridges inspired by those in Venice, and a humorous, defiant gesture that makes the design unique and visually powerful. 3. Cormier’s first major project featured a pedestrian pathway built over a 400-year-old section of Montréal. The central blocks-long pedestrian spine features numerous pathways that branch off diagonally. The pathways each terminate at a building’s front door. If the terminus is a residence, the path is in wood; if it’s a cultural institution, the path is constructed from limestone; and, if it’s a municipal/city building, the pathway is concrete. 4. Cormier won an international design competition to create a landscape across a small waterway from a sugar terminal. The site, Cormier said, was “full of sugar mist.” Channeling George Seurat’s images from “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Grand Jatte” and “Bathers at Asnières,” he created a sandy beach with the commercial terminal as a backdrop. The site is dotted with permanent bright pink umbrellas, rocky outcrops with supersized candy stripes in red and white, and a central pedestrian walkway. 5. In a section of Old Toronto, Cormier created a park with a supersize Victorian fountain to honor the past, augmented with 27 different life-sized cast bronze dogs in recognition of the site’s use for the “Woofstock” dog festival. The dogs, many spouting water, are focused on a golden bone atop the fountain. Meanwhile, a lone cat sculpture looks away at two Canadian warblers on a nearby lamp post. 6. Along a kilometer-long stretch of Sainte-Catherine Street in Montréal Cormier had to create a visually powerful design on an almost non-existent budget. His solution was multiple strands of pink plastic balls suspended over the street – a total of 200,000 balls in all. The installation lasted six years and was then replaced by the temporary installation, 18 Shades of Gay, with balls representing the colors of the rainbow flag. 7. Architect Daniel Libeskind invited Cormier to join his team in a competition to design a Holocaust Memorial in Ottawa. Cormier demurred saying he was a Catholic and wouldn’t be able to bring anything to the project. Libeskind convinced Cormier to participate by saying “you bring the light and I’ll bring the darkness.” The team, which also included photographer Edward Burtynsky, beat out nearly 80 others to win the commission. 8. Following a $200 million renovation of rectilinear, modernist 1960s buildings designed by Henry Cobb, Cormier was asked to create an installation that unified the buildings and plaza. His solution was a 30-meter diameter stainless steel ring suspended between the two Cobb buildings. The protected visual corridor between the buildings framed the “borrowed” views to the Olmsted-designed Mount Royal Park in the distance. Cormier’s design honors that viewshed and places him in conversation with one of his chief sources of inspiration, Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr. 9. Following a 2018 terrorist van attack in Toronto that left eleven dead, a competition was held to develop a park on York Street, a major thoroughfare. Cormier’s submission was inspired by an image in Toronto Life magazine that featured a series of hand-drawn red hearts superimposed over an aerial photograph of Yonge Street. Cormier decided a heart-shaped water basin with seating would be his big idea. The seat rim of the 55-meter-diameter basin is lined with red tiles, inspired by Antonio Gaudi’s tile work in Barcelona’s Parc Güell. Cormier also included cast bronze sculptures of native Canadian animals including a beaver, wolf, squirrel, owl, and woodpecker. The site features some 47 trees, so “not overly planted” as Cormier observed. 10. In a converted former garage Cormier created a space that would be his home. Working with architect Jacques Bilodeau, the one-level space was designed to become two floors with the innovative use of a ramp that can be raised or lowered. Cormier chose the architect based on another of Bilodeau’s projects that Cormier characterized as a “place of instability and miscomfort.” Of his home, Cormier said the place reflected his values.

Production Credits and Acknowledgments

EXECUTIVE PRODUCER
Charles A. Birnbaum, FASLA, FAAR

INTERVIEWER
Charles A. Birnbaum, FASLA, FAAR

PROJECT MANAGER
Charles A. Birnbaum, FASLA, FAAR

CINEMATOGRAPHER
Barrett Doherty, ASLA

EDITOR/ANIMATION
Barrett Doherty, ASLA

ASSISTANT VIDEO EDITOR
Stephen Godanis

TRANSCRIPT EDITOR
Alice Darling,
Secretarial Services
Allan Greller

RECOLLECTIONS COORDINATOR
Claudia Bonaccorsi

��ұ�� would like to thank the many people who contributed to making the Claude Cormier Oral History a reality.

This project could not have been realized without the generosity, talent, and efforts of many individuals and organizations. We wish to give special thanks to Claude Cormier and the team at CCxA Architectes Paysagistes, (Sophie Beaudoin, Marc Hallé, Yannick Roberge, Guillaume Paradis, Delphine Lesage, and Liette Locas);the Hubbard Educational Foundation; Maglin Site Furniture; Agency Landscape + Planning; deeproot; ERA; gh3*; KPMB; Nina-Marie Lister; University of Toronto John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design; Diamond Corp; Ivanhoé Cambridge; Janet Rosenberg & Studio, Inc.; LGA Architectural Partners; The Planning Partnership, SmartCentres, Suzanne Sauvage, Waterfront Toronto, Aldershot Landscape Contractors, Daoust Lestage Inc.; Eventscape; Landscape Forms; Public Work; Mirka Benes, Martha Schwartz, Beth Kapusta, Jennifer Luce, John Danahy, Robert Wright, Lee Friedlander and Fraenkel Gallery, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Edward Burtynsky, and Toronto Life.

Additional thanks to those that contributed personal reflections including Julie Bargmann, Sophie Beaudoin, Nate Cormier, Michelle Delk, Juan Du, Gina Ford, Chris Glaisek, Pat Hanson, Gary Hilderbrand, Thomas Kerwin, Bruce Kuwabara, Phyllis Lambert, Nina-Marie Lister, Ian MacKay, Michael McClelland, Guillaume Paradis, Yannick Roberge, Janet Rosenberg, Don Schmitt, Elise Shelley, Brigitte Shim, Marc Treib, and Michael Van Valkenburgh.

We are grateful to ��ұ�� staff members Aileen Beringer, Claudia Bonaccorsi, Justin Clevenger, Allan Greller, and Nord Wennerstrom who all wore myriad hats throughout this process.

Photographs, prints, and drawings reproduced courtesy of the following individuals and institutions:
Cormier family, Charles A. Birnbaum, Marc Cramer, Barrett Doherty, Lee Friedlander, CCxA Architectes paysagistes, Edward Burtynsky, Neil Fox, Sid Lee Architecture and Menkès Shooner, Dagenais Létourneux Architectes, Geneviève L'Heureux, Cornerstone Festival, David Giral, Guido Guidi, Raphaël Thibodeau, Annie Ethier, Benoit Rousseau, Jean-François Savaria, Rion Rizzo, Industryous Photography, Carol M. Highsmith, Mark Pechenick, Will Lew, Adrien Williams, David Boyer, Turenscape, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, bKL Architecture, Nicola Betts, Denis Farley, Jean-François Vézina, George Munro Grant, A.M. Pattison, Joseph Legare, Vito Riccio, Jesse Colin Jackson, Stefan Ruiz, Michael Muraz, doublespace photography, Marmen, Nirmit Gire, Naresh Tevathasan, Kaarle Mäkelä, Dick Rowan, Gene Daniels, Greg Girard, pizzodisevo 1937, Robert Taylor, A. T. Service, Robert Garry, Kunal Rakshit, SimonP, Matt Janicki, Amghayar, Lëa-Kim Châteauneuf, Ken Ohyama, Epicgenius, Jean Gagnon, Bobak Ha'Eri, Chris6d, Infrogmation, v104, Anirudh Koul, Alberto-g-rovi, Quintin Soloviev, Florstein, Smallbones, Thure Johnson, Frettie, NASA/James Blair, jikatu, Municipalidad de Talcahuano, Sailko, Bitstorm, Rhododendrites, Rowanlovescars, Saffron Blaze, Jean-Pol Grandmont, Didier Descouens, Cameron Brow, Caroline Bergeron, Ryan, FellowWikiNews, Marc, Gerd Eichmann, Superchilum, P199, and Michel Lambert.

The Frances Loeb Library, Special Collections, Harvard Graduate School of Design; Archives of Ontario (MacDonald Hall, Ontario Agricultural College, I0004370; Judging pavilion, Ontario Agricultural College, I0004365; View of the University of Toronto and buildings along College Street from the Ontario Hydro Building on University Avenue, I0005530); Canadian Centre for Architecture (Interior view of the lobby of 880 Lake Shore Drive Apartments showing Phyllis Lambert and the architect George Danforth, Chicago, Illinois, PH2000:0666. HD, Guido Guidi is the photographer; Portrait of Phyllis Lambert with the Farnsworth House in the background, Plano, Illinois. PH1999:0452 - HD, Guido Guidi is the photographer; Portrait of Phyllis Lambert with the Farnsworth House in the background, Plano, Illinois. PH1999:0453 - HD, Guido Guidi is the photographer; Philip Johnson, Mies van der Rohe and Phyllis Lambert in front of an image of the model for the Seagram Building, New York City Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Philip Johnson, architects; Kahn & Jacobs, associate architects, 1954-58. ARCH252088 – photographer unknown); City of Toronto Archives (Fonds 124, f0124_fl0008_id0094; Series 1465, s1465_fl0053_id0002; Series 1465, File 622, Item 4; Series 1465, s1465_fl0037_id0025).

Claude Cormier Oral History

Oral History Framework

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