by Janet Smellie
Northern News Services

NNSL (DEC 02/96) - Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be driving (your Porsche of course) lazily along towards Ottawa, only to have your tires set off the national anthem as they hit the rails that line an underpass?

OK. Probably not. But it could happen.

A recent ideas competition to design an urban gateway to the capitol city not only received such a proposal, but the unique idea came from Northerners.

Sponsored by the Public Art Program of the Karsh-Masson Gallery in Ottawa and open to teams of architects, artists and designers throughout the country, the contest gathered ideas for re-designing the interchanges that lead from the city's main highway into Ottawa's Centretown.

Yellowknife architect R. Wayne Guy along with a team including Inuit artist Bill Nasogaluak, landscape architect Karen LeGresley Hamre and artist-architect Kayhan Nadji not only submitted a proposal, but were one of the top 14 top entries exhibited recently at the Karsh-Masson Gallery.

The team's design includes a 65-metre-high copper inukshuk in silhouette, so it faces both directions, on top of the underpass at Metcalfe Street.

The copper inukshuk would have 13 segments for each of the provinces (including Nunavut) with each segment including a stone carving from one of the provinces or territories.

"Inukshuks were originally placed as landmarks to deflect migration of caribou into areas like rivers where hunters could jump in their kayak's and catch them. They're the icon of the North," Guy told xxNews/North.

"The analogy is that as animals migrate, so do commuters," Guy said, adding, because the roofs of the Parliament building are made of copper, and there's a noted reserve of copper in the Precambrian shield, copper would be an ideal material.

Metal grating would be laid in the road at intervals over an 85-metre section of the highway would allow drivers to hear the beginning of Oh Canada as they drove the three-second stretch.

The proposal also included adding stainless steel top-lit piping of various lengths being suspended in a niche to either side of the underpass so pedestrians could run their fingers along the tubes and make music to the Souls of the Ancestors Dance while they walk.

While Guy's design didn't win first prize, out of 140 entrants it was one of 14 to be featured at a gallery in Ottawa's City Hall.

The winner, a group from Quebec City, led by architect Claude Belanger, features a narrow, glassed corridor that includes a giant screen, broadcasting images of nature for passing motorists -- serene forest glades, waterfalls, snowstorms -- either continuously or in a split-screen format.

Guy says that, while Belanger's design won first prize, it doesn't mean Belanger's will be the one used when the city actually builds the new gateway.

"It was just an ideas competition. The new gateway could integrate many of the ideas produced including some we presented."

Guy is hopeful that parts of his design can be included when city planners get down to business sometime next year.