Reflections of Physical Model

The massing model of the church is done. This is the first step in modeling the whole urban block. Once that is done, the next step is photographing the model to represent my idea of connecting the site to its neighbouring St. Catherine Street. The photo-montage images will be worked into the final 36" x 60" panel as well. The model starts to give a sense of the church's squat proportions.

You can find the fourth photo-montage below. This is the first one that attempts to start describing the concept of 'otium' and 'neg-otium'. The engraving 'The Pilgrim's Progress' from This World to That Which is to Come, by John Bunyan can be found at the right of the church, also the elevation which faces my proposed new garden connecting the neighbouring Belgo Building. This is an introductory gesture to open up the closed environment that surrounds the church. In the background is the six-storey Belgo Building, an amazing early 20th century experiment with the living of shopping. This building, in addition to retail stores, incorporated valet parking, daycare, women's boutiques, smoking and gambling rooms for the men -- very high standard hospitality for the emerging consumer. It was an early attempt at structuring the way people shop and for us today, adds a level of interest as to the way people were intended to live at the shopping centre. Through changes of ownership and as you can imagine, high upkeep, this way of life disappeared. Since then, the consumerist lifestyle has changed tremendously so this project will later take a critical look at the way contemporary shopping centres are designed.


Walter Benjamin is a German writer who I'm concurrently studying as part of this studio. He looked in tremendous depth at the Parisian Arcades during the early 1900's when the covered arcades rose to prominence and gave birth to the department store. He writes:

The arcades were "the original temple of commodity capitalism": "Arcades -- they beamed out onto the Paris of the Second Empire like fairy grottoes. Constructed like a church in the shape of a cross (in order, pragmatically, to connect with all four surrounding streets), these privately owned, publicly traversed passages displayed commodities in window showcases like icons in niches. [...] The Passages "are the precursors of the department stores." The phantasmagoria of display reached its apogee in the international expositions.

Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing. MIT Press, 1989. Page 83.