I've been meaning to post this for a while. Here's a shot of my final project for last semester's studio. You can see the church in the very center and above that is the Belgo Building on St. Catherine Street. Attached to the side of the Belgo is my intervention: a covered market that breaks through the center of the Belgo, bringing pedestrians through to the church. The idea was to have shops in the extension to evoke a feeling of an arcade. In the church however, I turned it into a community centre with a restaurant in one transept, a charity book store on the opposite transept and an auction hall/theatre right at the altar. You can see blue strips coming out of the sides of the church -- these are artists' studios. On the roof of the Belgo, I planned out a community garden, and to the left of the church, a small arboretum.
The critics appreciated the model, but felt the program was a little too stretched. Maybe I bit off more than I could chew.
Alberto Perez Gomez, our guest critic made some interesting suggestions based on what I had told them in crits. He wanted to see the church completely disassembled and reconstructed inside the Belgo Building as a Galleria. He suggested an equally ambitious plan to alternatively lift the church (on stilts/piles) to turn it into an exterior space, again converting it into a galleria (commercial arcade). The general criticism was that the scheme was a little too shy -- not enough gusto in making an eye-opening statement. Fair enough -- I noticed after the model was finished that all my work was attached, on top or around buildings -- through this, the message seemed to get a little diffused. Above all else, the most important thing is making the idea communicable through the model or drawings. I felt that a lot of the projects in this semester relied heavily on verbal explanation, where few of the work spoke for themselves.
Nonetheless, the message that was well received by the critics was the idea that consumption/ shopping has become the new religion in our society. This, they felt was well communicated in the model. The central issue for this idea is that religion brought communities together in the
ecclesia, whereas shopping has simply distracted people from the community. It's a condition where there really is no large-scale venue that brings people together in a consumer setting
for the good of society - instead, shopping is all about the individual.
As a self-criticism, in trying to design a situation that combines charity with consumption, I came up with a half-cooked meal. The community garden seemed like the best situation where people can purchase a plot of land to harvest fruit/vegetables for themselves but also for charity. Soup kitchens exist, but rarely targeted at the masses. There's also second-hand stores that are fairly successful, but not really invigorating for this kind of project. Other students proposed turning the church into an art school, or using the open space as a community garden with people sharing tools and seeds etc.
Looking back however, I think that the studio could have made greater focus on dealing with the church itself. Charity, consumption, etc....these things are all secondary to the main problem of Quebec and their depopulated churches. What the heck can we do with all these incredible buildings? This question was really left on the backburner throughout the semester, but equally allowing us to freely explore all kinds of ideas, which can be unrelated, but extremely valuable to our personal thinking.
After the studio, we had a nice wind down period. We had dinner with our profs and shared some drinks and some stories from their days in Carleton. Torben might return to the school for a job placement, while Louis will be heading back to Montreal to continue with his professional practice.
[image courtesy of skyscraperpage.com]
[image courtesy of skyscraperpage.com]
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