Circles & Squares

Playing Cards

2009-04-23T01:48:00.004-04:00

[Image property of Richard Smith]

Plato-Aristotle Aces.

2009-03-18T12:05:00.003-04:00

THESIS ABSTRACT
RICHARD SMITH | MARCH 10, 2009

Reconnecting Fragments: The Labour of Love

Boat building and fort construction in maritime Canada form two of the first productive enterprises in the colonies, involving individuals from the community exchanging and developing ideas through the medium of the ship’s draught. This made a profound intellectual impact such as the genesis of engineering in Canada but also the transferring of one culture of building to another . Through this intellectual phenomenon came hybrid solutions to conventional building methods and high-quality construction of dwellings because of skilled boat builders. This creative and analogous relationship has since been divided by historical preservationism and the modernization of craftsmanship.

This thesis explores the theoretical writing of amorous attraction by Barbara Maria Stafford, and a discussion of the amorous qualities philia, and agapē in the writing of Alberto Perez Gomez. Together, these make up essential connective qualities that emphasize making connections between divided relationships and learning through similarity, not difference. Taking spoils of boats and appropriating them inventively, the fort will be transformed into a boat building and repair workshop with outlying trades buildings––common to boat building and fort construction.

Amorous attraction contends that we have forgotten how to think analogically, that we should conduct the nobler task of connecting using analogy rather than dividing by disanalogy. Coupling this process to the architectural process of craftsmanship and bricolage therein, the proposed architecture can help reconnect the vast potential of this hybrid vernacular culture of building.

Drawing Progression

2009-01-24T16:11:00.006-05:00

Jan 22, 2009

Dec 8, 2008

Sketches

2009-01-24T16:01:00.002-05:00

A bit of process work that has helped me in designing the boat building shop. Taking tracings of the main drawing at school, I've been pasting them in to my sketchbook and layering upon them. I've adopted the same technique for the final drawings.

Midterm Critique

2009-01-24T13:50:00.006-05:00

I bungled my midterm. It was poorly explained and defended -- maybe I was tired? I inadvertently emphasized only the functionality of the boat-building shop, skimming through the theory and poetics of the project, thinking the critics (same ones from colloquium) remembered the ideas of the project from the last crit. And so the question came up "If we are really going to talk about functionality, then why did you place your building away from water, on the top of a ridge, inside a fort?". Traditionally, boat construction takes place at the water's edge; I hadn't discussed or drawn the justification for its placement away from the water. Also, the use of spoils seemed to the critics to have been lost along the way which frightened me the most, despite several efforts at conveying spoils integrated into the building. I skimmed this part in my explanation too, ugh! The critics suggested to flip leftover boats upside down and use them for the roof of my building.

That said, I've revisited some of the main ideas and tried to rework them. To better "stitch" the boat shop into the fort (and manifest the idea of amorous attraction I proposed earlier), I'm introducing the concept of the compagnonnage, or the "journeyman", the apprenticeship of tradespersons to become master craftspersons. Five trades related to boat and fort building (wood-working, metal, fabric/weaving, glazing, and cooking) will be placed at the five bastions of the fort. In the medieval tradition, to become a master craftsperson, the journeyman must complete a masterpiece of his trade. I'm proposing that each bastion is a place to build and/or display these masterpieces, and that in concert, these trades exchange techniques and knowledge, generating hybrid solutions to their craft. The collaboration of these as a "trades centre" better justifies its placement. But tying it all back to spoils...? Maybe this is diverging too much.

"Les Compagnons" is a modern organized version of the same task the journeymen executed in the past. It is a program for youth to travel (in this case, across France) and study the built work of their predecessors. The program helps young tradespersons specify their trade and gain a mastery of their work.

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

2009-01-09T14:47:00.005-05:00

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili by Leon Battista Alberti has come up as a suggested reading which could be a very helpful source for my thesis. The text involves both spoils and amorous attraction, but one that exists in the dream state of Poliphilo who pursues his love Polia. The drawings depict spoils in many interesting scenes, and architectural elements celebrated in the text. A warning that this could be an epic tangent...

CHAPTER SUMMARIES

2009-01-09T14:30:00.005-05:00

[The first attempt at a written structure for my thesis].

Reconstructing Fragments: Amorous Attraction in a Game of Spoils

Chapter 1: The Structure of Spoils.
Subchapters:
a) Spoils and Memory
b) Cut and Paste: Verbatim Quotation
c) Appropriating Spoils
d) Case Study: House of Loreto

The term spolia, has a clear association to an initial violent act that removes a part from its source to be used elsewhere. Individual Spoils possess an innate ambiguity between simultaneously understanding their original purpose and context and their possible re-understanding. Spoils possess the ability to transport a fraction of meaning from its original source into a new context. They alone have the ability, in the right hands, to stimulate memories and touch souls.

Rome had begun conserving and reusing pieces of their civic buildings in the 4th century. Buildings were judged worthy of conservation because they were repositories of Roman traditions. Ruins were always dismantled for reuse and never demolished. The presence of past building traditions was always to be reconciled before its imbued traditions and “verbatim quotations” lost to a new ahistorical construction.

This project proposes to appropriate the spoils of boats and buildings as the pieces in a game of amorous exchange between fort construction and boat building. Spoils of boats can be disassembled and reused for the boat-building workshop and fortification, chasing the right fit; in reverse, the boats repaired and built from this workshop can employ pieces of fabric or rope from gabions in the building into their construction. The game becomes a sharing of pieces from the similar “other”.

From tradition, the house of the Virgin Mary is thought to have been transported by angels from Nazareth to Croatia, then again to Recanti, Italy; and finally a third time to its present location in Loreto. This practice of dis-assembly is a fundamental aspect in a game of fragments, where a building is never static, but able to move and be modified.

Chapter 2 – Games and Amorous Attraction
Subchapters:
a) Objective and Rules of the Game
b) After Descartes: Postmodern Annihilation of Resemblance
c) Amorous Attraction
d) Spoils as Analogical Devices and Storytelling

The game of spoils is a game played between boats and architecture. The rules are that spoils from boats (e.g. wood planks, sails, masts etc) are disassembled for use in parts of the boat construction workshop, and by extension the Fort Beauséjour. In reverse, rope, fabric or wood can be used the construction of boats. The game operates on its own course and meaning as a volunteer activity that can enhance the co-dependency of the regional boat building trade and architecture. The purpose of the game is to revive the similarity between, historically, a collaborative activity which is now two otherwise unrelated things.

Cartesian thinking created a will to divide things into smaller individual parts. It fuelled an annihilation of resemblance and a celebration of difference. The after-effects of this is a difficulty to relate between a seemingly infinite cosmos of individuality. Difference, be it cultural, artistic, or pedagogic, has many positive qualities but at a certain intangible point, we lose the ability or patience to relate between entities in a gigantic superstore of convictions.

Barbara Maria Stafford describes a Game of Back and Forth in her Visual Analogy, a work that attempts to restore analogy and perception to the forefront of some of the issues confronting our time. She argues that we have lost the ability or interest to work analogically, and as such are drifting further away from making connections, only emphasizing differences. Amorous attraction is used in the context of this thesis to describe the process that spoils undergo to find their proper fit, as well as a programmatic union between boat building and fortifications. Using an analogy of amorous attraction, we can begin to make connections between boats and architecture, land and water, invention and memory.

Storytelling using analogy with spoils. Need more info.

Chapter 3 – Transformative Exchanges
Subchapters:
a) Metis and the Workshop
b) The Bricoleur and Rural DIY Methodologies
c) Boats to Buildings and Buildings to Boats
d) Paradigm Conversion (Reason from Symbolism) (Boats and Buildings)

From mythology, Metis is the skillful intelligence that guides the Greek goddess Metis. This is conjectural knowledge that lies between reasoning by analogy and skill at deciphering signs which link what is visible to what is invisible. The thesis proposes that both the game of spoils and workshop spaces foster a development of the Metis sensibility.

Synonymous with Metis is the bricoleur, borrowed from the French word bricolage, from the verb bricoler – equivalent to the English "do-it-yourself", the core meaning in French being, however, "fiddle, tinker" and, by extension, "make creative and resourceful use of whatever materials are at hand (regardless of their original purpose)". The do-it-yourself attitude is commonplace in rural Canada, and equally in the maritime region of Chignecto. A person who engages in bricolage invents his or her own strategies for using existing materials in a creative, resourceful, and original way. The bricoleur is the intended worker of fragments to exchange between boats and architecture in the game of spoils.

Seafarers are often cited describing the boat they build and sail as a house of their own. The inhabitation of boats share many commonalities to that of inland buildings, such as shelter, structure, maintenance and decay, pleasure. Much can be learned from the other. Creating an exchange of spoils is a start to making a timeless partnership between disparate vocations.

At the time of the construction of the Fort Beauséjour, a paradigm shift was occurring – a shift from symbolic, metaphysical thinking to scientific methods. Vauban stripped all symbolic and analogical meaning from the fort in favour of prescriptive, scientifically grounded occupation of defensive buildings. Much the same way, boat builders drifted away from crafting symbolic meaning in their watercraft. Today, “superfluous” ornamental details are lost and the naming of a boat is one of the few residual myths associated with a traditionally romantic pastime.

Chapter 4 - Site
Subchapters:
a) Materiality
b) The Acadians: History and Tradition
c) Vauban: Paradigm Conversion
d) Spoils of the Chignecto Ship Railway

A quarry is situated near Fort Beauséjour. These stones were retrieved by native and Acadian workers to be used for gabions within the ramparts of the earth fort. Wood from nearby growths were cut to build an ephemeral palisade at the periphery of the earth-works. Small branches were cut to make baskets for the gabions. The two materials form the basis of the site’s construction. Local wood was also used for a short-lived but prosperous shipbuilding industry in the mid to late 1800’s.

Acadians worked the land’s inhospitable marshlands with dykes to transform it into workable farmland. The Great Expulsion of 1755 is a well-known fragmentation from their land. Acadian homes are often additive conglomerations of building extensions.

Vauban sacrificed all symbolic meaning from fortress design, to refine their defensibility that was grounded in scientific reason. Pentagonal forts can be drawn in many different ways (approximately eight methods). The traditional Roman method draws two immense circles, where the pentagon fits within the overlap of the two circles. References to the landscape are drawn with these circles. The fort’s embodied “size” on the draught is then much greater than its physical size. The Fort Beauséjour however skipped this entire process by simply using ready-made plans based on a set of rules outlined and drafted by Vauban.

The Chignecto ship railway was an abandoned project, lead by Henry Ketchum that sought to taxi full size ships from the Northumberland strait to the Chignecto Bay. The project was abandoned at the collapse of the British economy. Spoils of the railway and arched bridges were collected for reuse in the visitor’s centre.

Chapter 5 - Design
Subchapters:
a) Methods
b) (De)Monstration of Sea Monsters

The drawings use vellum which has translucent qualities. Cutout drawings or diagrams are added continually, recognizing a past thought, inspiring a new interpretation. The use of adhesives naturally collect atmospheric fragments throughout the drawing process. Fishing line is embedded in the site drawing to denote topological changes, and the geometric symbolism divested by Vauban is carved permanently into the board. Instead of using branches for weaving the gabion baskets, sailing rope is used instead. Denuded figures can be seen constructing these gabions in the drawing (referring to Pastor).

The partnership between fort and boat construction is made through the exchange of spoils. In trading spoils between boats and buildings, there is the potentiality of new uses for parts of each respective thing. In the spirit of bricolage, chimeric monsters, or hybrid building systems can emerge.

Conclusion

Bibliography

THESIS ABSTRACT rev.3

2009-01-09T14:15:00.004-05:00

Reconstructing Fragments: Similarity in a Game of Spoils

This thesis explores why today we possess a limited language of talking about resemblance and an exaggerated awareness of difference. Within this theoretical framework of what can be called a recession of similarity, this thesis proposes to appropriate the use of spolia in a proposed boat building and repair workshop to be sited within the preserved ruin and National Historic Site, Fort Beauséjour near Sackville, New Brunswick. The fragments of buildings and boats used in this playful, amorous exchange between boats and architecture will foster a sense of culture, play, and invention for the boat builder and rural community surrounding Fort Beauséjour, and an attraction of common bonds between otherwise disparate entities: boats and fortifications. It explores the discovery of similarity within difference. The game’s rules are defined as a “chase” or courtship of spoils to find its complementary fit – a timeless game that is not serious so as to encourage an attitude of voluntary play throughout generations with pieces of the building and boats. The playful exchange and appropriation of spoils will consolidate a regional language of similarity.

A PARTIALLY ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alchermes, Joseph. Spolia in Roman Cities of the Late Empire: Legislative Rationales and Architectural Reuse. Dumbarton Oaks Papers, Vol. 48 1994.

Colonna, Francesco. Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. (New York City: Thames & Hudson Inc., 1999).

Duffy, Christopher. Fire and Stone. The Science of Fortress Warfare 1660-1860. (London: Greenhill Pr; 2 Sub edition, 1996).
Techniques for the construction, repair, siege and defense of fortifications. Relevant to the place and time in which the Fort Beauséjour was constructed. Many of the building techniques outlined in Fire and Stone were in fact employed on site, according to archaeological studies of the site.

Hand, Chris. The Siege of Fort Beauséjour, 1755. (Fredericton: Goose Lane Editions, 2004).
Historical account of the Siege of Fort Beauséjour, by Major Chris Hand who joined the Canadian Forces in 1981 and attended the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario. The book is based on his master’s thesis.

Hanson, Maria Fabricus. The Eloquence of Appropriation. (Rome: Accademia di Danimarca, 2003).

Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1950).
Discusses the importance of the play element of culture and society. Huizinga suggests that play is primary to and necessary (though not sufficient) condition of the generation of culture. Play is a central characteristic to the activity of appropriating an amorous attraction of spoils.

Lefaivre, Liane. Leon Battista Alberti’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997).

Miller, Paul D. Sound Unbound. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008).
Article written by Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid. Describes DJ culture as a an archival impulse applied to a hunter-gatherer milieu of collecting clips to be patched in (as spoils) into remixed music. Identifies the problem of difference and multiplicity in this medium – we never move anywhere in a civilization of expanding forces of citation, remixing and sampling. An eternal expansion of information dividing a million-fold, and never creating integrity. With difference, comes indifference.

Rowe, Colin. Collage City. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984).
On the ideologies, philosophy, manifestations, and flaws of modern architecture. Most relevant is the proposition to reorient conceptions of the city from the utopian grand narrator’s single vision of the city to a more multivalent view of the city, micro-utopias.

Stafford, Barbara Maria. Visual Analogy. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001).
Argues that our culture has succeeded in creatively articulating differences, leaving us in a compromising situation that leaves us diminished in our ability to recognize the existence of the degrees of likeness. Stafford offers us a game of back and forth that exercises the analogon, where through due ratio we can link fragmented things.

Strauss-Levi, Claude. The Savage Mind. (Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1966).

William, Garratt. Loreto the New Nazareth and Its Centenary Jubilee. (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2003).

Wilson, Garth. A History of Shipbuilding and Naval Architecture in Canada. (Ottawa: National Museum of Science and Technology, 1994).
An historical overview of the interrelationship of science and industry in the colony in New France. The work focuses mainly on large-scale shipbuilding that impacted on international trade. It does however mention the coexistence of small boat building and the family-oriented trade that grew to prominence in the maritime region following the decline in large-scale shipbuilding.

Vergani, Gianmarco. The Culture of Fragments. The Journal of The Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation 6, no. (1987).
Collection of essays and articles that discuss fragmentation in a metaphysical sense. A theoretical work situated in the height of postmodern and deconstructivist theory. Provides a varied springboard of precedents on the topic of fragmentation and difference.

Vernant, Jean Pierre. Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society. (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Harvester Press, 1978).

Sketches

2008-12-15T15:37:00.003-05:00

Throughout this nuisant transit strike I've been stuck at home to work without my drawings. I was however able to work out some details (e.g. wall sections, corner conditions, foundations, glazing etc.).

Boat Construction Time-Lapse

2008-12-13T19:04:00.003-05:00

A sense of the process and space required to build a wooden boat.

Somerset Chinatown Article

2008-12-13T18:35:00.006-05:00

For my elective, Urban Heritage Conservation, I have been researching and working on new options for street furniture and public art as well as many other cosmetic improvements to Somerset Chinatown like colour, signage, lighting, and a theoretical western gateway to the community. Other students are proposing new marketing strategies, public spaces, parking and circulation changes etc. Our class's efforts have just been published in the Centretown News. You can read it online or grab the most recent issue.

Carleton students help Chinatown spruce up its look
Centretown News Online - Saturday, 13 December 2008

Thesis Design Progress

2008-12-09T17:57:00.014-05:00

Writing and theoretical research has been sidelined temporarily to allow for some intensive designing. I have come up with a second draft for my boat building workshop.

This is an older version of the existing site plan of the fort, above. There is string pasted on the board and now covered with vellum to pick up the topography lines as I draw. Choosing the point of entry was in question for a while because of the fort's geometrical regularity, but I soon realized that it was only a matter of convenience.

On my second panel, I have my proposal. It's still schematic; red represents walls that I'm adding, and yellow indicates existing work. The red + yellow square in the lower left marks the main entrance through the powder magazine whose enormous walls still stand. You then circulate east towards the existing defensive wall (the red saw-tooth form). The path then splits in two, with large boats for repairs to the north and small boat construction to the south. The yellow kite-like space at the top is where sails are sewn or repaired, and on the other side of the sawtooth wall, the eastern-most part of the building, are storage and lofting floors for drafting the boats.

In the earthworks of the fort can be found row upon row of gabions which are ancestral sandbags. They are made of small sticks weaved into a basket to contain rocks. The gabions are then stacked upon one another and backfilled to form a rampart. For my proposal I want to use the gabion as the building block for my proposal. My material palette for the whole building will be stone, wood and rope.

I found some interesting images from a boat workshop in the States somewhere, about how they transport the boats within their facility. I'm hoping I can do something along these lines where the boats are brought in by a short rail and distributed with this kind of mechanism.

Dr. Frascari and I discussed water-proofing; a building doesn't have to be water-proof but instead water-resistant. In the past century, buildings have become utterly dependent on vapour barriers rather than finding inventive ways of dealing with moisture. If the building is properly designed it can be ventilated without causing damage to the interior structure. The Querini Stampalia is a gallery by Carlo Scarpa in Venice which allows water to flood in and drain without causing any damage to the structure or material at all. Put in the context of a boat building workshop, it could truly animate the building's use.

Tumblr Blog

2008-12-05T19:31:00.005-05:00

Cook Until Browned withered away quietly. In its short life, I created a new page through Tumblr, with the same name and link through this site. I want to keep C+S focused on thesis. As you've noticed, there's very little thesis-related posting prior to this (which is going to change soon). Check out the new Cook Until Browned.

David Field Photography

2008-12-05T14:42:00.004-05:00

Beautiful photography + painting + model technique by David Field.

++Website++

Citrus Clock

2008-12-04T17:29:00.007-05:00

New clock design by Florian Dussopt, Julie Gerard, and Jérémie Renaud. From their website:

"This clock runs on the energy of a lemon, which powers it for a week or longer. This pedagogic project is a kind of shortcut intended to remind ourselves that nature, in spite of the various transformations to which we subject her, is still our direct energy source.
The somewhat magical dimension of the operation is in fact simple electrolysis, like a conventional electric battery."

See their website.

New Keith Loutit Video

2008-11-27T17:02:00.001-05:00

I love this guy's work. Enjoy his new entertaining video.

Metal Heart from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

Santa Coloma de Gramenet Cemetery

2008-11-27T15:57:00.005-05:00

European cities have been contending with a growing problem of space to bury their loved ones. Many new ideas are challenging ways to densify burials but also to use the burial grounds as multi-functional spaces -- spaces not just for the dead, but also the living. Traditionally, cemeteries were designed as "gardens of paradise", beautiful public places in their own right, but today that relationship is tenuous in many cases, and many cemeteries have turned to neglect. The Santa Coloma de Gramenet cemetery outside of Barcelona has introduced a contentious green solution towards a multi-functional use of a cemetery as a solar energy collection field.

This is a very unpoetic design of a traditionally thoughtful public space. It's becoming emblematic of our time where we are rushing to install solar panels onto every possible place at the expense of proper integration. In principle, I appreciate the partially conscious attitude of finding new areas of untapped energy, but at the same time see how our times are so dominated by practicality and insensitivity. In the future, when clean energy has achieved a certain milestone, there will probably be a cleanup wave to make solar panels better integrated. For now, it's a quick and dirty solution to harvesting clean energy.

Rotating Gear Machines are the Best

2008-11-20T15:42:00.001-05:00

Rolling Huts

2008-11-19T19:25:00.006-05:00

This just in, our project has apparently been done before. This is Olsen Sundberg Kundig's "Rolling Huts". Okay...not bad...but I don't see any secret society-carts, or seal-cutting-carts. Still, they look pretty cool and probably don't function very well, like ours. Nice.

Thanks Nico for the link.

CCA Charrette Website

2008-11-19T18:46:00.005-05:00

The CCA has just recently updated their website by posting all of the submitted work by students, including a brief write-up of the finalist teams. Here's what they had to say about ours:

"The jury greatly appreciated the humorous, narrative approach that nonetheless upheld the proposal's practical and critical objective by revealing the fundamental needs of the village residents. The small buildings proposed act as characters who recount the diversity of the activities and needs of the people of Nunavik. They weave a dialogue between the sedentary nature of the existing houses and the more mobile and progressive needs associated with the actual life style. The proposal's “fun” dimension, the appeal to the imagination and the potential for self-construction in this both didactic and anti-establishment approach are very stimulating and contribute to making the particular nature of daily life in the North better known."

To see the updated page, go here and click on 'projects'.

The Disappearing Male

2008-11-19T00:06:00.003-05:00

The chemical synthetic world we have surrounded ourselves with is starting to show more profoundly dangerous effects on the human race. According to a recent CBC documentary, synthetic materials are causing genetic alterations in the natural growth and well-being of males, signalling extreme concerns in human evolution. "Found in everything from shampoo, sunglasses, meat and dairy products, carpet, cosmetics and baby bottles, they are called "hormone mimicking" or "endocrine disrupting" chemicals and they may be starting to damage the most basic building blocks of human development." Watch this excellent documentary the CBC has posted on their website and consider making "drastic change".

Watch the full 45min version here.

Peripetics by ZEITGUISED

2008-11-15T22:18:00.000-05:00

Peripetics by ZEITGUISED from NotForPaper on Vimeo.

Thanks to Max for sharing this video.

Keith Loutit

2008-11-10T17:09:00.005-05:00

I found these videos through Boing Boing a few weeks back, and can't help but share them. Keith Loutit's Time-Lapse videos:

Beached from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

Bathtub III from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

After watching these scale-model-esque videos, I tried experimenting with a couple of my own images in photoshop. Here's a doctored up version of one of my pictures from Genova's roofline.

And Lisboa:

They could use a bit of polishing, but it's a fun start.

CCA Design Charrette

2008-11-09T11:54:00.017-05:00

[Google Earth Image of Inukjuak, from a link on CCA website]

[Image from Index of CCA/InukjuakImages]

"PREAMBLE
Nunavik, the vast Inuit territory of Northern Quebec, is gripped by an ongoing and systemic housing crisis. A history of inadequate and insufficient housing coupled with an exploding demographic has created an urgent public health situation manifested by severe overcrowding, deficient sanitation and ventilation, the spread of infectious diseases, psycho-social stresses, and violence. This crisis exists across Inuit communities of the North, but it is worse and worsening in Nunavik.

The housing crisis is a political and a historical issue, but it is also very much an issue of culture and of architecture. The extremely accelerated and forced transition of the nomadic Inuit into sedentary communities between 1930 and 1950 was an enormous cultural upheaval with widespread repercussions for the Inuit and their way of life. A sophisticated array of Inuit artefacts and nomadic architectures had evolved over thousands of years and is proof of a thriving material culture which was completely adapted to its northern environment. In contrast, the contemporary architecture the Inuit now inhabit is to a large extent derived from the architecture, the climate and the culture of the South. Is it any wonder then that the Inuit do not feel “at home” in their new homes?

This year’s Charrette challenges students to propose an architecture adapted to the northern environment; an architecture of the North : an architecture properly oriented for the wind which blow strong and cold from the northwest all winter whether we live in Montreal or Inukjuak ; an architecture which corresponds to the extreme variations in sunlight experienced from season to season at high latitudes ; an architecture which reflects the traditional but also the modern ways of life of today’s Inuit societies ; an architecture which addresses the present housing crisis in Nunavik."

[Image from Index of CCA/InukjuakImages]

THE STORY
In our group of five grad students, we dedicated the first of three long nights to understanding the major issues concerning the town of Inukjuak (pronounced Inoo-joo-ack). We bounced many different ideas off of each other but were very much hindered by our own limited understanding of the culture and how forcible of an intervention can be appropriated to such a fragile culture. One of the root problems in itself is that a violent intervention has already taken place by a government housing band-aid plan that has de-centered the Inuit culture altogether. To put things into perspective, the Inuit here are living in a suburban community model, cutting seals on their kitchen floors, because kitchen counters make no sense for this task. They eat on the floor and so the 'southern' kitchen and dining layout is completely inefficient for their intents and purposes. There is no correspondence between culture and home.

[Image from Index of CCA/InukjuakImages]

We struggled as a team to reach a balance between the extremes of a violent and timid solution. Where one of the project requirements was to design a temporary housing solution for eighty young men, we proposed to design eighty tools for these eighty men. The idea was that these eighty people would all have customized tools where they would have to work together as a community to build the houses (which we didn't design). As an idea, it was nice to chew on for a while, but we had a hard time representing and actually understanding the idea and practicalities as a team. Our group collapsed the day before we had to submit our project to Montreal. One member quit.

RENAISSANCE
We took the opportunity to start from scratch. Our new idea was to design a pre-fabricated cart, much like a boat trailer, but fitted with an inhabitation on it (think of it as a pop-up camping trailer). This time, we approached the project from a completely different angle. We decided to emphasize our design on responding to the social crisis that is a by-product of the housing crunch. So, we designed 35 unique carts that cater to specific events that are important to their culture, to their health, their education etc, and each cart having a backup function as a sleeping cart. We designed seal-cutting carts, star-gazing carts, kitchen-carts, science-carts, music-carts, dance-carts etc. The carts are all based on the nomadic lifestyle of the Inuit. Each cart can be hitched onto a vehicle, or pulled by several people, ideally to spaces between the hugely separated houses, or even to different towns. The carts can then be linked with a link-cart to make a whole cluster of events. So imagine a tool-making-cart linked to a story-telling cart linked to a kitchen-cart. The combination of these events create dynamic and flexible situations, all responding to the afflictions: privacy, stress, amnesia, and boredom.

As soon as the idea was formed, we started production and called in reinforcements. Because many of our original team members had other personal commitments, our team roster went as low as just one person manning the project at a time. Nevertheless, our great friends came to the rescue and helped draw 35 carts through the night. We managed to print the panel in just the right amount of time and rush to the bus station to drop off the panel in Montreal. The project was only 20 hours old by the time it was printed and en route to Montreal. The result:

[Our dream-team panel. Isn't she a beauty? Thanks Ed, Nico, Jess, Morgan, Max, Marc, Matt]

RESULTS
On the Monday evening, while attending the reception in one of the UQAM buildings, it was announced that our team won Honourable Mention! The judging was split into two categories, ACTION and IDEA (or agitation in French), with a 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and Honourable Mention in the action category, and two awards, 1st prize and honourable mention in the idea category. We won honourable mention under the IDEA category! Apparently the categories were formed spontaneously, based on the split in design strategies submitted by teams. The team that beat us was from McGill and submitted an all-text panel. It included test-site application forms for people to develop houses in the town, or so I believe. Another Carleton team placed second under the Action category. Congratulations and huge thanks to our whole team! Way to go Carleton!

NEW SLIDESHOW ADDED

LINKS
Watch Tugaliak (Ice Blocks)
Watch Qulliq
Watch Issaituq
CCA website

Graduate Architecture Colloquium 2008

2008-10-30T14:29:00.015-04:00

Last week I presented my thesis project for Colloquium. Steve Fai, H. Masud Taj, and Marco Frascari were present. The discussion was really interesting and helped me consolidate some topics of interest. The biggest one is developing the idea of the game which I'll elaborate below. For now, here are my slides and summaries of my discussion for each.

My thesis is this: I believe that designing and analogically playing with fragments is crucial to our sustenance, or well-being.

Central to this thesis is how to use fragments in a cosmopoetic way. From Barbara Stafford's Visual Analogy, "Our civilization is staggering under an explosion of discontinuous happenings exhibited as if they had no historical precedents. We are overloaded with personal statements, irreducibly distinctive subjects, and contradictory opinions." This thesis is a reaction to the naturally fragmented world we live in. I want to operate within this framework by using physical fragments in an analogical way, meaning drawing connections and similarities with these fragments, rather than emphasizing differences. To do this, I've come up with five points to structure a game that attempts to connect our attitudes of similarity.

The game is made up of five "points" [I was hesitant to use the word rules, fearing its restrictive quality]. The first point is translation where pieces of a building are reused for new applications to generate a new thing. In this case, the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei constructed a pavilion of 1001 windows and doors from the Ming dynasty. This project was assembled in Germany. Memory evades disposal, thanks to the artist for saving the pieces, and reconstructed to share in a new context. A relationship of similarity is set up to consider Chinese art in a German context. "How are our windows similar?"

The second point is reuse of a fragment as the same function, which is pretty much the simplest system of using fragments. It's much like recycling garbage or plainly replacing something with something better. A column capital or shaft is reused as the same function, but spatially organized to set up hierarchies based on the likeness of the objects themselves, but also how each piece came into being, or from where.

Lofting is a method of both construction and drawing in boat construction that makes use of a floor (stone or wood) to draw 1:1 scale draughts of boats. The process cuts out the trial and error events that usually occur when a boat drawing is scaled up from an AutoCAD file. The floor is reused as a wall, or repainted for more drawing. This ability to have a secondary function embedded in the functionality of a design is extremely useful and can conserve the memory of the previous functionality.

The fourth point is what I'm currently calling continual re-assembly or customization of "building blocks". The Merzbau is an example that changes constantly to suit Kurt Schwitters, while accumulating actual fragments like paintings, pencils, small memorabilia that are of value to him. As more pieces are adopted into the space, Schwitters adjusts the space accordingly. Likewise, a gabion or sandbag wall system is similar where these construction units can be adjusted to suit the inhabitant. I think its significance is largely energy-related, but I'm also thinking generally in terms of how the building is able to transform and conserve the traces of its previous states.

Recontextualization is relocating an object somewhere else. While all of the above points in some way involve a relocation (inherent to the definition of fragmentation), this is striving towards moving something like an entire building to somewhere else, where it takes on a whole new meaning and function. The House of Loreto is one such example. Also, just think of rebuilding a lighthouse in downtown Toronto. It creates a place of spectacle or discussion.

The site is Fort Beauséjour, New Brunswick. Historically, this is where events lead up to the Great Upheaval of Acadians, a precedent in fragmentation to start with.

The fort is situated on a ridge surrounded by marshland and overlooking the Bay of Fundy. My geometric sketch attempts to reveal the positioning of the fort. The 'size' of the fort is much larger when we consider what landmarks were used in drawing the pentagon and what method was used to draw the pentagon (there are about 10 different ways to draw one).

Aerial view of the site.
Panoramas to give a sense of the earthworks. You can see the beginnings of the Bay of Fundy off in the distance.
The Chignecto Ship Rail was a failed project, because of the collapse of the British economy. It was originally meant to transport full sized ships across the Chignecto Isthmus, but was only partially completed. Pieces of the brick arched bridges were reassembled in the visitor's centre (rule #1).

Which brings me to my program, a boat building and repair shop. Boat building and fort construction separately are two of the major social endeavours where communities would come together and exchange ideas and technology over the drawing. Through this process of learning, both trades eventually brought about the engineering as a discipline. Relating fragmentation to boat building is still to be refined. I really just picked the program from a hat as a challenge. Not an issue.

CRITICISM
After describing the five rules, it was brought up that I've made five different games and that I should reduce the five points to one game. Also, there is an issue of scale that I need to address. I addressed the minute pieces of the building but also the entire building as a fragment (House of Loreto). I have to intensify which part I want to deal with. Another great criticism was "does this game have rules?" For some reason I was quite reluctant to use the word rule because of its restrictive connotation, in favour of points. But, without rules, there's no game. I should look at games which imply a real life metaphor, like in Monopoly which is a game of capitalism, and Risk which is a game of aggressive world domination. So, what is it that my game talks about? After a lengthy discussion of the game, another point that I should consider the game as having unspoken rules. I'm quite interested in this aspect, where the rules have to be discovered. In Peter Zumthor's baths in Switzerland, five rooms contain experiences for the five senses, but at no point does it say on a sign or manual that this is the case. The way the space is designed, you figure out the game -- talking at a certain level makes your voice carry, or the design of a railing encourages you to reach out to a fountain of hot/cold water. Recommended I imply my rules through drawing or model.

CCA Design Charette

2008-10-23T22:56:00.006-04:00

I will be participating in a Design Charrette from Thursday October 30th to Monday, Nov 3rd with fellow grad classmates in Montréal. Last year, our class was well represented and got honourable mention for their design. A description of the project as copied from the CCA website:

The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), in collaboration with the École de Design de l'Université du Québec à Montréal, Université de Montréal, McGill University, Université Laval, Carleton University and Ryerson University is organizing a design charrette related to the ongoing housing crisis in Nunavik. Participants will be invited to propose design solutions at a variety of scales encompassing urbanism, architecture and industrial design.

The university charrette will run from Thursday October 30th to Monday, Nov 3rd 2008. All projects submitted will be exhibited at UQAM’s Coeur des Science (175, avenue du Président-Kennedy) from November 3-5th 2008. This is the 14th edition of the university charrette. It is now an annual forum for young creators in the fields of design and planning, bringing together the full range of design-related disciplines: architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, industrial design, interior design, and graphic design. In addition to university students, the charrette welcomes young designers (recent graduates) participating in internships with professional associations in Quebec.

The Flying House of Loreto

2008-10-18T16:21:00.005-04:00

From tradition, the house of the Virgin Mary is thought to have been transported by angels from Nazareth to Croatia, then again to Recanti, Italy; and finally a third time to its present location in Loreto. This practice of dis-assembly is a fundamental aspect in a game of fragments, where a building is never static, but able to move and be modified.

History.

Governor General "Art Matters Forum"

2008-10-16T22:10:00.003-04:00

[Image from the Governor General's website]

Yesterday, the Pit was transformed to host the Governor General Michelle Jean and panelists David Hughes, president and CEO of Habitat for Humanity Canada, Jean-Claude Marsan, architect and urban planner (U of Montréal), and Sheryl Boyle, assistant professor from Azrieli School of Architecture (Carleton), for a discussion of sustainability: "How do we sustain buildings? How do buildings sustain us?". I encourage you to read the framework for last night's discussion on the Rideau Hall blog. You can also watch the entire podcast of the event from the website.

Thesis Frontispiece and Abstract - First Draft

2008-10-03T20:04:00.011-04:00

A first draft of my frontispiece and abstract for my Thesis:

Amnesia and Fragmentation: Five Points Towards an Appropriation of Fragments

“Man, in a word, has no nature; what he has is…history. Expressed differently: what nature is to things, history, res gestae, is to man [1].” Amnesia is a condition that is currently affecting the architectural profession. In large part, this can be attributed to a relatively recent trend in the demolition of buildings. Paradoxically, historical preservation – the uncompromising retention of buildings in their former state is the polemic condition to a discussion of memory in architecture. Our attitudes and architecture, in a state of amnesia or memory stagnation.

This thesis seeks to explore through five points a game of using fragments as a solution to the problem of memory in architecture – a game which has rules, but is not serious so as to encourage an attitude of play with pieces, rather than a disregard or fear of altering meaningful parts of a building. This game of fragments includes translating the parts and materials of a historic building into new and unexpected applications. It also designs the parts of the building for dis-assembly, to encourage future reuse that accumulate greater meaning over time.

The play of fragments will respond to the more serious condition of amnesia and emerging issues of sustainability and energy shortages. The context of this thesis is the preserved ruin and national historic site, Fort Beauséjour in New Brunswick. A boat building workshop will be the proof of a theory of appropriating fragments. The architectural intervention will ground the aforementioned issues through the theoretical writings on fragmentation in Colin Rowe's "Collage City", Maria Fabricus Hanson’s “The Eloquence of Appropriation”, and Barbara Maria Stafford's "Visual Analogy".

1. Colin Rowe. Collage City, p. 118, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984)

Old Registry Office, Ottawa

2008-09-30T15:18:00.006-04:00

A recent case study in Urban Heritage Conservation seminar with Jim Mountain:

[Image of the Old Registry Office, Ottawa. Photograph from: Heritage Ottawa Official Website]

Context
In 1873, the City Registry office was built to contain both Ottawa and former Bytown’s official records of property history, land ownership, and names of land proprietors. The building was used for this purpose until 1909, later to be sold to the Federal Government in 1935. In the 90’s, the building was bought by the Viking-Rideau Corporation (developer and owner of the Rideau Centre). This purchase was part of a land-exchange deal between the Department of Public Works and Government Services. In this deal, there was no commitment to preserve the structure (Fleming). The Registry Office is only one of four remaining in Ontario, and unique in many architectural aspects, including its twelve-foot deep foundations designed to prevent theft of the official records by tunneling.

Key Issues + Solutions
The future of the Registry Office is dependent on development of the Viking-Rideau Corporation which is in the process of a major expansion of the downtown shopping centre. The new mall hopes to include about 110,000 square feet of retail space, including two floors, a third mezzanine, and two-storey underground parking. There is also much discussion of expanding convention space. The construction of this project will be taking place east of the shopping centre, on a surface parking lot at the corner of Rideau and Nicholas street. The vacant Ogilvy building overlooks the site, and is also bordered by a traffic loop on Besserer street.

[Figure 1: Proposed sketch of new Rideau Centre at Nicholas and Rideau. The current site from this perspective is a surface parking lot. Image from SkyScraperLife forum (http://www.skyscraperlife.com/canada/3429-rideau-centre-expansion.html#post70187).]

The Registry Office lies to the south of this proposed area of development, but Viking-Rideau wishes to move the existing structure from its current site to an alternative location at 60 Waller Street, the corner of Waller and Daly, to clear a path for future growth of the Rideau / Congress Centre. Viking Rideau has confronted the major issue of structural concerns in such a move, and have confirmed in an engineering study that the structure can be safely displaced to its designated alternate location (Fleming).

[Figure 2: Site map of proposed alterations to the Rideau Centre and the Registry Office. Image from Google Maps with modifications by the author.]

The Heritage Ottawa organization believes that the ideal solution is to leave the building in its place and that all future development does not encompass the building, but reveal it in its entirety (Fleming). Failing this, Heritage Ottawa claims they would reluctantly support moving the entire building to its alternate site.

Critique
Relocating a heritage building should not be considered a last resort in conserving the character of a heritage building. Relocating and reusing buildings and their fragments has been used since antiquity in both Western and Eastern cultures. Essential to heritage conservation is the notion of conservation versus preservation. The former is the sustainable continuation of a building’s use and meaning, while preservation is a lock-setting, freezing a building in time so that it can be looked at, but not inhabited as a contemporary. If a building or culture is to survive in a naturally functioning way, buildings have to adapt: to be moved around, expanded, disassembled, relocated, or turned upside down. The moment they are preserved as sacred objects, they lose functionality and cultural relevance. If we consider Rome as an example, Michelangelo removed stone directly from the Coliseum to lay the courtyard for the Farnese Palace (Crowther, 2). This is an example of using fragments from other buildings as an energy and material availability concern but also authorship of relating the meaning of the Coliseum to the Farnese Palace. In Japan, builders of traditional timber used a construction technique that allowed their buildings to be taken apart and rebuilt elsewhere, sustaining the cultural knowledge of how to build in their traditional techniques. In this way, “remodelling, removal and reconstruction of buildings is possible according to life styles’ (Kikutake, 26-27) – a completely different regard to heritage and sustainability as we perceive it today.

[Figure 3: Sketch by Wilna Clark of the Registry Office relocated to 60 Waller Street, next to the Arts Court. Image from the summer 2004 Heritage Ottawa Newsletter, Volume 31, No. 2.]

The main underlying issue of the Registry Office is location. Moving the Registry Office to its new location as one whole piece does strip the building of its original context, but it’s only moving to the next block. It still maintains its connection to the community. As an option, the excessive stone in the building’s twelve foot deep foundation could be re-used as benches or garden walls on the same location in the future Rideau expansion as a marker of its past presence.

Leaving the building as it is on the other hand will challenge the future design of the Rideau Centre to frame the Registry Office (having to expose all four sides of the existing building), but in doing so, turns the building into a museum artifact. Could we not allow the Rideau Centre to incorporate the Registry Office into its design and in doing so, truly recognize it as “an important source and reminder of local civic history?” It’s a tragic waste of embodied energy constructing such a building to keep it locked until Doors Open Ottawa.

Bibliography

Crowther, P. 1999, ‘Historic Trends in Building Disassembly’, ACSA/CIB 1999
International Science and Technology Conference. Technology in Transition: Masting the Impacts.
Fleming, D. "Future of Historic Registry Office a Concern." 2001. http://www.heritageottawa.org/english/frontpage/registry.htm (accessed 21/09/2008).
Kikutake, K. 1995, ‘On the Notion of Replaceability’, World Architecture, vol. 33,
p26-27.

1001 Windows and Doors

2008-09-25T23:53:00.005-04:00

‘The ready-mades are anonymous objects which the gratuitous gesture of the artist, by the simple act of choosing them, converts into ‘works of art’. At the same time this gesture dissolves the notion of work’.
[Paz, Octavio. The Ready-Made. Marcel Duchamp In Perspective. pp84 ( Prentice Hall International, London 1975.)]

Like the ready-mades in art, architecture can be strategically constructed out of fragments or found objects. This process relies on the availability of materials and their inherent ability to be reconfigured in a meaningful way. In an age of colossal wastefulness, there is an abundance of fragments for play.

One example of using fragments in architecture is Ai Weiwei's pavilion '1001 Windows and Doors' in Kassel, Germany. The pavilion consists of doors and windows from the Ming and Qing Dynasty.

[Image from: Galerieursmeile]

[Image from: Mark Magazine #12 February/March 2008. pg. 77]

The actual structure collapsed in a storm. Apparently the piece was meant to be indoors but at the last second, moved outdoors. The artist has embraced its new meaning accordingly. Part of the essential purpose behind using fragments is the reuse of pieces for their energy consideration...I hesitate to wonder how these doors and windows were transported from China to Germany. Probably using a lot of energy to do so, but nonetheless were reused in an interesting way.

Sorry...my fonts went awol.

New Site

2008-09-25T22:45:00.002-04:00

Ok, not to discourage my faithful fans from visiting the ever more spectacular C+S, but I've done the inevitable and created another blog. If I could get a drumroll and some jazzhands, I unveil 'Cook Until Browned'!

Cirque de Soleil - Corteo

2008-09-25T16:29:00.005-04:00

For my birthday present, Jess treated me to see a fantastic show of Cirque de Soleil, Corteo. It was spectacular. Cortéo means "cortège" (funeral procession) in Italian. This is the idea of the performance, a man who dreams of his own funeral procession. Couldn't take pictures, so here are some scenes from about.com:

Pop - Up vs. Tree House

2008-09-17T15:24:00.010-04:00

Treehugger has just posted an article about London architect David Adjaye's Pop-Up House project in the London Design Festival, and it appears a bit suspect to me... suspect, you ask? M'yessss... My most loyal fans may recall exactly one year and one day ago, the post entitled 'Ark Magazine', a publication on Jessie's winning pavilion design for the Wood Studio course in Helsinki. Some striking similarities here...

David:

Jessie:

David:

Jessie:

David:

Jessie:

SPOLIA

2008-09-14T23:38:00.002-04:00

[Image of The Lateran Baptistry in Rome, from The Eloquence of Appropriation: Prolegomena to an Understanding of Spolia in Early Christian Rome, by Maria Fabricius Hansen]

We cannot remember without architecture. Like landscape or literature, architecture is part of our collective memory and identity. When we think of the great basilicas of the past, they embody the cultural memory of a place and an identity embedded in the very way a column is crafted. At the micro scale of a column, we learn that these buildings were in fact made of fragments, or spoils, transported from distant places. These fragments, pre-fabricated by other hands are like quotations in the story of a building's life. Depending on the nature of these spoils, they often reveal surprising histories about the building's acquisition of its parts. Using these fragments was a natural act in medieval architecture, where craftspeople would 'unanxiously' use their fore-fathers' works. This way, it was understood that the language of architecture has already been spoken and that using fragments was a verbatim quotation of a tradition of building.

A Classical Example, (from The Eloquence of Appropriation: Prolegomena to an Understanding of Spolia in Early Christian Rome, by Maria Fabricius Hansen):

[Image of Santa Costanza, from: The Eloquence of Appropriation: Prolegomena to an Understanding of Spolia in Early Christian Rome, by Maria Fabricius Hansen]

"At Santa Costanza, built as an imperial mausoleum in the mid fourth century, variation in the shafts and capitals was used to structure the circular interior space. The shafts carrying arches are of plain grey granite except the outer pairs flanking the entrance and, opposite, the pair flanking the opening towards the niche with the imperial sarcophagus. These shafts are of red granite, indicating an axial quality in the round structure. Moreover, at the opening towards the niche the inner pair of shafts is also distinct from the rest as they are of dark grey granite. Of the two sets of composite capitals used in the building, the grandest is placed in the inner ring, the simpler one in the outer, indicating a hierarchy in the interior, with the inner domed circle being more important than the surrounding ambulatory."

In the information age, this great performance is hindered by anxiety of imitation and quotation, often falling victim to the absolute demolition of a building or its construction from newly fabricated pieces. This habit is wasteful of embodied energy and a contributor to cultural amnesia. Though spolia is an ancient and timeless technique of sustainable construction, the present-day challenge is a contemporary application of this practical method of design.

Intern Architects in Hell: On Acquiring Culture

2008-09-14T17:40:00.003-04:00

Intern Architects in Hell site

Building the Fort Beauséjour

2008-09-14T14:14:00.003-04:00

I've been learning about the construction of Fort Beauséjour lately. It's a pentagonal fort, that follows a standard simple-bastion style designed by the French military engineer Sébastien Le Prestre, Seigneur de Vauban, commonly known as Vauban. His designs set up basic and advanced principles for all defensive structures to be built under the French Empire, Beauséjour being one such example.

In the text Fire and Stone: The Science of Fortress Warfare 1660-1860 by Christopher Duffy, the author goes into a fair amount of detail as to how and why these forts were designed, how they were situated.

[Image from Fire and Stone: The Science of Fortress Warfare 1660-1860. Duffy, Christopher. 1975.]

Where the Fortresses Were Built
Relevant to Fort Beau is the section on Ground. "The healthiness of the site is one of the most important single considerations which determined the position of the fort. Swampy sites were notorious for killing off the garrison." The fort is surrounded by the Tantramar marshes, though elevated on a small patch of firm soil, the trees and scrub cut away by the Acadians. The advantage of a site like this is that the fort can only be attacked from a few (dry) points, allowing a smaller garrison and upkeep. With every yard of swampy ground approached on the fort, its strength increases proportionally. However, in The Siege of Fort Beauséjour, by Chris M. Hand, the author states that the fort was actually poorly located, being too far from the water to have any impact on shipping along the river, and too far forward on the slope to defend the crest.

[Image from Forts of Chignecto, Webster, John Clarence. 1930.]

How the Fortresses were Built
Once the principle of building or extending a fort was made, costs, memorandums, drawings, shape and properties were all drawn up. They made clear the relationship of the fort to the whole of the countryside, to the distance of a cannon-shot. In drawing their plans for a new fortress, engineers began with the center point, where an average even ground was thought to be best and then determined the main direction of attack to set up the front entrance. In this pentagonal fort system, the engineers would have a set of large scale drawings on a rotating table situated at the very midpoint of the site. They would then extend a chain connected to a peg right in the center of the actual drawing and align it with points in the drawing. Once aligned, the worker would place a picket in the ground and continue through all the major points of the five bastions as per the engineer's drawing.

[Image from Fire and Stone: The Science of Fortress Warfare 1660-1860. Duffy, Christopher. 1975.]

Depending on the hardness of the soil, different foundations were laid. At Beauséjour, the soil must have been hard enough to be able to use a less severe foundation system otherwise used in marshy areas. In those sites, long vertical spikes are driven into the ground, attached to a timber raft system upon which the bastions are placed. Instead, it uses a gabion system, which is essentially baskets filled with stone (which come from a nearby quarry) and placed over a simple timber raft system, then backfilled with earthworks. The gabions are an extremely versatile 'material' to work with, and will very likely become one of the primary building systems for my proposal. (Herzog and de Meuron used a gabion system for the Dominus Winery in France in 1997). The gabions are an economical and sustainable solution, perhaps better suited for non-military applications, given their tendency to collapse under cannon-fire.

[Image from Fire and Stone: The Science of Fortress Warfare 1660-1860. Duffy, Christopher. 1975.]

Drawing the Fort
Learning to draw a pentagon is not the most difficult part about starting a site plan -- it's figuring out which system the first engineers used to draw the pentagon. There are more than eight systems (see this website to gauge their complexity). What I'm learning is that the memory of this place is quietly being spoken through its geometry.

[Image from: The Siege of Fort Beauséjour 1755. Hand, Chris M. 2004.]

As I've sketched out above, these concentric circles which are used to construct a pentagon fit exactly to the edge of the site's ridge. This means that that proportion would determine the overall size of the fort and construction thereafter. In knowing the approximate size of that initial face (known as the line of defense), laying out the pentagon with pegs can commence. A revealing difference of rationality: the French built the south-facing line of defense as their main entrance which faces the direction of attack. After its capture, the British reversed the fort, moving the entrance to the back and converting the old entrance into a cannon battery, allowing full control of the ridge.

A lot is written about the difference of quality in leadership between the French and British at the fort, and this is an additional distinction, for what it's worth.

Murray & Murray Drawing Contest 2008

2008-09-13T20:43:00.012-04:00

Paraphrased Outline:
In today's urban spaces, we find ourselves waiting in the public realm for a significant amount of time in our life and waiting, as our Director Marco Frascari states is inseparable from the human behaviour of contemplation. This year, the school was to design a bus shelter for the campus O-Train station, a place of waiting and thinking. As always, the assignment is to do a hand drawing that responds conceptually (and this time technically) to the site and theme. The work had very little grad student input this year for some reason, myself included as having no submission. Here are the notable drawings pinned up for the contest, and consequently all of the finalists:

2nd Prize:
3rd prize. This design was more sensible than the former, but dropped to third place for doing a computer model for a hand-drawing contest. It's surprising it made it this far.
1st Place: by Mario Sebastian Savone in fourth year. Congratulations!

This one was interesting to me. The form of the building was the most exciting and resolved of the lot. Unfortunately, whoever did it chose to do a model and call it 'This is not a Drawing.' Too bad, missed the mark on the one single requirement.

The History of Evil

2008-08-18T23:32:00.003-04:00

Something tells me the history of fear didn't end quite like this...

'Old Stone House' Visitor Centre

2008-08-15T11:31:00.015-04:00

I've reformatted the final video, so it's quite a bit different from the official version submitted for the design presentation. So at last, here is a compressed unofficial promotional video of the Ermatinger Clergue National Historic Site Proposed Visitor Centre:

The visitor centre is designed to be a LEED building (Leadership in Environmental Energy and Design), the first of its kind in Sault Ste. Marie. The LEED system rewards building design on a points system that rates bulidings as LEED bronze, silver, gold, to platinum. Buildings are rewarded for meeting 'green' qualifications like maximum parking spaces, number of bike racks, percentage of renewable materials, use of local materials, geothermal heating etc. LEED has been a debatable system of evaluation since its formation, but a very good intention. I won't get in to it here.

For Sault Ste. Marie, this is a great step towards cleaner buildings and a more energy-conscious community. The Soo is already moving towards the three primary renewable energy sources: hydro, wind, and soon a solar collection field, but we sorely lack efficient buildings, under a hazy plume of steel-plant emissions. Having these energy sources is the envy of many northern cities, international cities. It would truly be a great transformation for a northern steel town to be a 'green' city. Who knows, maybe it would actually attract people to want to live in the Soo, countering its horrendous youth drain. Maybe our neighbourly glow-in-the-dark Sudburians might move in.

Back to the animation, you enter into the main foyer, with skylight above, providing passive solar heating, enter the 1812 Gallery, a tribute to the history of the War of 1812 in the Sault area. The theatre, across from the gallery seats 50 people. Leaving the theatre, visitors enter the site to visit the Heritage buildings which will have existing displays, bannock baking, activities etc. Re-enter the visitor centre through the gift shop.

There is no green roof, but don't despair. The roof will harvest rainwater and internally service the building. Solar panels on the roof. The building uses as much wood as possible, the most efficient renewable material available.

Would love to hear your comments.

Architects Win Gold!?

2008-08-13T14:21:00.011-04:00

According to a number of sources (mainly trusty old wikipedia, but also the book 'The Forgotten Olympic Art Competition' by Richard Stanton), there used to be an arts category to Olympic competitions up until the middle of the twentieth century. It included literature, music, painting, sculpture, town planning, and architecture! That's right, architecture used to be an Olympic event. Between 1912 and 1948, there were competitions in these artistic categories, with the possibility of winning Olympic gold, silver, and bronze. Imagine that! All of this, the vision of Frenchman Baron Pierre de Coubertin who wanted to combine art and sport, and promote 'athletes' of mind and body. After two cancellations, the Olympics that included de Coubertin's proposal was held in Stockholm in 1912. So, for about 35 years, the competitions were reasonably successful. Eventually a report was made that criticized all the art contestants for being professionals, (and ratings may have been a factor here as well) but in the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki, the events were derailed.

I guess they would have graded the projects for artistic and technical merit, like in figure-skating for example. Here's an Olympic Gold project in architecture by Jan Wils who designed the 1928 Olympic Stadium in Amsterdam.

Some of the other winning designs are stadiums, pools, circuses for bull-fighting, and sport parks. The closest Olympian to home is John Russell Pope who has designed a number of buildings in Washington D.C. including the Jefferson Memorial and the National Archives as well as the Union Station in Richmond, VA. He won silver for the Payne Whitney Gymnasium at Yale University:

Since the Sydney games, architecture and town planning has advanced as a major help to economic growth, and the image of a nation. Sydney truly set the bar for a modern Olympic game, entertaining the idea of reviving the art events. It revitalized one of the dirtiest brown fields in the world, introduced sustainability to mainstream architecture, and celebrated landscape architecture as a centerpiece.

What an amazing change that would be to include those same categories in Olympic sports today. The games are becoming more and more specialized now, with athletes so focused on one task for four or more years. It seems a little obsessive compulsive (though still awe-inspiring) to do triple axle sow cows for eight years straight. I wonder if athletes who could compete in more than one event, sports and arts, would be revered as another level of Olympian? By now athletes must be considered as professionals so it could be high time to introduce professional artists back in the games! Maybe that's the key to Canada's success at summer games, where our Olympians already need day jobs for lack of government funding -- might as well do art or architecture for coin! And of course, it would take steroids right out of the picture...or would it?

Ermatinger Clergue Visitor Centre

2008-08-13T13:41:00.005-04:00

Just completed the promotional video for the E-CNHS Visitor Centre. The deadline has shifted a little, so I still don't want to post the video until the formal viewing. In the meantime, here are some still images of the rendered model.

A bit of history of the buildings I've been modeling, from the City of Sault Ste. Marie website:

The Ermatinger•Clergue National Historic Site consists of two of the oldest stone buildings northwest of Toronto surrounded by period gardens. The first building, the Ermatinger Old Stone House, is restored to depict the domestic and professional life of Charles Oakes Ermatinger and other prominent residents and visitors of the House between 1808 and 1870 reflecting the nationally recognized historic aspects of the House. The second building, the Clergue Blockhouse, was relocated to the Site in 1996, and was the home of Francis Hector Clergue from 1894 - 1908.

Within the Ermatinger Old Stone House, staff and volunteers collect, preserve, research, house, exhibit and interpret artifacts that illustrate the 1808 - 1870 time period. The stories steeped in stone are presented through interpretive panels, interactive displays, and period rooms. In the attached Summer Kitchen Interpretive Centre, hands on demonstration and programming depict the daily life of the early 1800’s.

The Clergue Blockhouse is restored to the time when Francis Hector Clergue used the building as his residence and as the hub from which he directed his growing business empire (1894 – 1908). Interpretation of the Blockhouse, its link to the fur trade, the North West Company (1819) and the life of F. H. Clergue are presented through the use of interpretive panels, and interactive displays.

Roots of Breakdance

2008-08-07T00:13:00.000-04:00

Just for fun:

Ermatinger Old Stone House Light Study

2008-08-04T22:32:00.006-04:00

A short teaser of the 2:25 minute video I just completed for the Ermatinger Old Stone House National Historic Site Proposed Visitor Centre Promotional Package. (Longest title ever, yeesh).

Video rendered in Sketchup, exported into Artlantis.

Ermatinger Old Stone House

2008-07-24T16:24:00.005-04:00

Currently working on a digital rendering of the Ermatinger Clergue National Historic Site, Sault Ste. Marie, ON. Working with Chris Tossell Architect, I'm composing a video as part of a promotional package. More details to follow (with respect to confidentiality), but here are some process images so far.

Thoughts on Sustainability and Green Things

2008-07-13T15:45:00.007-04:00

A distinction: "Green" and "Sustainable". "Green" is a techno-scientific view of architecture popularized for the purpose of a new form of consumption. It is a recent term that emerged out of the affordable production of efficient building systems (e.g. wind turbines, solar panels, LED lights etc). These are objects or components that increase a building's efficiency and output and reduce one's carbon footprint. "Green" has little consideration to historical or human dimensions, compared to the notion of sustainability which is inclusive of so many more factors. A building can be green, but not sustainable.

[Image courtesy of Recyclingsupermarket.com]

Sustainability is an ancient concept. More than energy efficiency, it is a concept of well-being. Sustainability requires human and ecological well-being in tandem as one organism.

A sustainable building is one that goes beyond its energy-efficient trinkets to the holistic perspective of integrating its inhabitants into a happy community which is the basis of a prosperous society. A sustainable building is one that meets energy efficiency by default and surpasses this requirement by contributing to an economic, socio-cultural, and environmentally friendly micro-city that is integrated into a larger network. A sustainable community includes jobs that support a mixed income residency, promotes local culture, uses efficient public transportation, pedestrian friendly streets, promotes local industry, accessible education and historical sensitivity. A sustainable architecture is one that fits into this complex network of relationships that at the very heart of things contributes to building a community that will be happy and respective of its built and ecological environment. A building that is not respected or cared for --green or not-- is energy wasted.

A sustainable building will outlast one generation, have the flexibility to be modified, and reused in other buildings as spoils. Consider the analogy: "If your father's axe blade is broken and you replace it, but then the handle breaks and that is also replaced, is it the same axe?" The history and meaning of the axe is retained even if the physical pieces have expired and been replaced. I believe it is the same axe if this sustainable condition exists. A non-sustainable use of the axe (or building) would be to discard and simply buy a new one, erasing the history of the object in favour of a new consumer product. Rather than being a fixed thing, a sustainable architecture is continually adjusting to meet the social and economic needs of its residents while preserving the environment's ability to support it.

It is increasingly common to see high-profile buildings (e.g. all of the towers listed on one of my previous posts) decked out with all the eco-bells and whistles such as wind-turbines, solar panels etc which are highly photographic and sexy in magazines, but in reality tends to do all the damage of gentrification or modernist tabula rasa, meaning destroying sustainable micro-communities in favour of irrespective development.

Architectural offices that claim they do sustainable design will have a hard time producing a single image of a sustainable building. "Green" architects on the other hand will have a portfolio full of wind turbines and glossy green products.

Though it seems to be the solution to our environmental crisis, "Green Architecture" can be as superficial as buildings painted green and are not sustainable from a social perspective. Sustainable architecture is the essential goal.

::Green Skyscraper of Mumbai
::Halifax One of Canada's Most Sustainable Cities

NORDHAVNEN, COPENHAGEN: THE SUSTAINABLE CITY OF THE FUTURE

2008-07-08T10:35:00.007-04:00

A fellow graduate student and I are attempting this design competition as an elective for this term. There is a lot of opportunity to learn about sustainable communities, urban planning, transportation, economics, social development, and issues like globalization, urbanization, and gentrification.

Open international ideas competition
Competition period: 27 May to 26 September 2008
Final date for submission of questions: 4 August 2008
Questions and answers will be uploaded to this website
There is no deadline for registration.

CPH City and Port Development has launched an open international ideas competition for the Northern Harbour in Copenhagen, a new urban development area with room for 40,000 residents and 40,000 staff in buildings with a total floor area of three to four million square metres.

The vision for this unique site, which features waterfronts on three sides, is to create a dynamic, lively and sustainable city district with diverse, effervescent life and room for a broad mix of residents and enterprises.

The competition is open to everyone, but is in particular aimed at urban planners, architects, landscape architects and traffic planners, who are very welcome to collaborate with experts in special fields, eg sustainability.

Total prize money amounts to DKK 3 million. The jury can select between one and five winners of the competition. If more than one winner is selected, the winners will be invited to negotiations with CPH City and Port Development about adjustments/improvements to their entries so that the assessment panel can select the final winner. If CPH City and Port Development decides to continue work on the basis of the winning entry, such work will be carried out in collaboration with the winning entrant.

::AA - Nordhavn

Photos from New Brunswick

2008-07-04T13:18:00.007-04:00

A slideshow of our trip out east. Watch a much better slideshow by clicking here. At the Picasa website, click on slideshow.

Shenkman Sculpture Competition

2008-07-04T10:31:00.007-04:00

We didn't win the Shenkman project. I'm pretty bummed about that. I really did think we walked in with a tight project. Our panel turned out well, we had material samples, and questions during the formal presentation were all sorted out. Our project was also under budget so I'd be hopeful in thinking that funds weren't an issue...I really don't know what happened to sway the decision. I guess in these situations, it tends to ride on the jury's taste. Here's a condensed version of the panel we presented to the jury:

We also had a physical model to go along with the panel which I built over a couple of days leading up to the presentation. It got broken in transit which annoyed me...just a little.

Our concept was to create a torch -- an elevated sculptural light that would bend to the sky, lifting those seated with it. The piece would provide bench seating in the main public space outside of the theatre. Function is important to Jennifer -- sculpture that can seat, illuminate, or cool its viewers. Though the torch itself would be illuminated, so would the benches from inside the frame. All together, the whole space would be lit up at night (to Martin Convoy's specifications), providing a lively public gathering place outside of the theatre. One of the benches would be suspended by a tension-stressed pipe and both lit from underneath.

+Orleans Star Weekly: article of the public viewing including some of the competing teams' proposals

Wellington Street West Art Competition Winners

2008-07-03T03:08:00.006-04:00

Marcus Kucey Jones and Ryan Lotecki are the winners of the Wellington Street sculpture competition. Eighteen 5ft-tall fire hydrants will be carved out of marble imported from Italy. The hydrants will each have a theme reflecting a part of the neighbourhood, like an onion that denotes groceries, or a book for...library. According to the Ottawa Citizen article, "the pair chose the fire hydrant as a sculptural form because of its interesting shape and for the uncelebrated, but very necessary, role it plays in the urban landscape." Congrats to the two of them. You will see these sculptures installed by 2010.
...Your thoughts? Criticism?

+Miss Vicky's Offhand Remarks
+Hintonburg News
+Ottawa Citizen

Fort Beauséjour | Fort Cumberland

2008-06-25T12:09:00.011-04:00

:::SITE SELECTION:::
I've selected a site for my thesis, pending Marco's approval. Each thesis proposal requires a site as a starting point for a theory and a building design. A site selection can change as often as one is willing to start from scratch, but ideally should be the enduring focus of one's thesis. Though some advisers don't push for an initial site selection, Marco has emphasized this is the most important task at first, as well as a building type for the proposed site.

I've chosen Fort Beauséjour (aka Fort Cumberland), a French stone fort built in 1751-55 located on the west bank of the Missaguash River near Sackville, New Brunswick. The site overlooks the desolate Tantramar Marshes and the Bay of Fundy. It was originally built as a counter to the British occupied Fort Lawrence near Amherst. Upon partial completion, the fort was captured by British forces and New England volunteers; commander Louis Du Pont Duchambon de Vergor capitulated within two weeks. The fort was renamed Fort Cumberland and strengthened for use in the Seven Years' War and the American Revolutionary War.

The attack on Fort Beauséjour was the start of what became known as the Great Upheaval (le Grand Dérangement) of Acadians in the Maritimes. Fort Beauséjour was a much greater facility than Fort Lawrence, and so the British chose to abandon Fort Lawrence and permanently occupy Fort Beau.

At first, I'm amazed to find grown-over ruins in rural maritime Canada. On top of this, I'm excited to investigate the micro-histories of the site and through it, conceive of architecture from the site's FRAGMENTS. I'm really interested in studying fragments or the idea of fragmentation in architecture -- lately I've been researching physical and metaphysical fragments. Physical fragments are like what you see in Michael Reynold's architecture from Garbage Warrior -- pieces of refuse re-utilized or re-invented as something new and surprising, like glass bottle walls for example. With Metaphysical fragmentation, this is a whole realm of theory that is extremely diverse in opinion and literary stance, but a by-product of post-modernist thinking in architecture. I won't get into it now... At the heart of things is a drive to use fragments for storytelling, sustainability, and memory.

I'm interested in the Fort, but also Acadian buildings, which, according to Marco are the hardest to locate, not because they were destroyed in the Great Upheaval, but because they additive buildings. When searching for an Acadian building, one might find it within a Victorian home, and before that, a French Canadian home, but at the heart is the Acadian building. Like in Rome, you can find a building that has layers upon layers dating back centuries. The building's legacy is told through its evolution of pieces. In selecting Fort Beauséjour, I'm targeting a moment where this thought process was cut off, and proposing to continue that tradition, which goes against many preservation laws by desanctifying the building and renewing it with purpose.

Here's a recent collage I've whipped up in anticipation of this weekend. I found a journal in the library of John Thomas and Louis de Courville in Fort Beauséjour which inspired me a little:

From Friday till next Tuesday I'll be visiting the site.

Hedgehog in the Fog

2008-06-24T11:11:00.004-04:00

Considered the greatest animated film of all time, directed by Soviet animator Yuriy Norshteyn in 1975. Story of enlightenment and friendship. Relax + Enjoy.

Post Movie Plot Summary (just to fill in any gaps)

Shenkman Theatre Sculpture Competition

2008-06-19T01:57:00.015-04:00

Jennifer and I have moved on to a new art competition. We are now designing a sculpture for the main entrance of the Orléans Arts Centre which is currently under construction. The building which includes a 500-seat theatre is being designed by Ottawa firm and Carleton alumni Lalande + Doyle Architects (website under construction). The centre is budgeted at around $37 million and features an intricate curving glass wall composed of hundreds of specially cut glass panels. The arts centre is part of a three-phase project that includes housing, office space, athletic facilities, and retirement homes in a $220 million development of the Orleans suburban centrum area. The space approaching the main pedestrian entrance will be landmarked by an artist's sculpture.

Not to give too much away, but here are some digital sketches of our work so far. No real peeks until the competition jury makes their decision... for now it's a SECRET!!!
(I promise to provide more information on what I'm talking about once the artist has been selected). However, I do want to mention that we are also working in collaboration with Martin Conboy, a very accomplished lighting artist originally from Ireland, but working in Ottawa. I recommend a quick look through his web folio. Here's a fairly big sample of his high-profile jobs:

To my surprise, his website also includes a whole section of renderings or light studies which are in large part done by our own Prof. Yvan Cazabon!

+++CBC 2006 Article
+++Orléans Online Article
+++Carleton Magazine Article on Lalande + Doyle Architects
+++Martin Conboy website

Garbage Warrior

2008-06-10T11:43:00.006-04:00

I just watched an excellent film "Garbage Warrior" which I'd love to share my recommendation for everyone to watch. The film is about architect Michael Reynolds who, for 30 years in New-Mexico, he and his team have designed and constructed "Earthships", autonomous homes that are on the verge of being completely environmentally self-sustaining. Reynolds initially began experimenting on his own home with rammed-earth in car tires as wall structures as well as regular cans or bottles cemented into the walls. The houses would use indigenous materials to the whole planet while reusing wasteful materials whenever possible. They would also generate their own utilities such as electricity, hydro, even food! This makes the homes nearly independent from the “grid” so they would be less vulnerable following natural disasters or dependable on expensive, dirty or sometimes non-sustainable resources. The earthships would finally be able to be constructed by the average person. The documentary followed Reynolds and his team to Indonesia following the tsunami disaster as well as three other countries, where locals were quickly able to grasp the low-tech construction of the homes, making habitation cheaply accessible to everyone, in theory.

A big part of the film reveals how (literally) dormant and antiquated the American legislative system is and how entwined it has become to corporate businesses, to the point where changes in legislation is nearly impossible. Reynold's lobbying for the right to make a sustainable living site is repeatedly annulled by the State through subversive means, maintaining suburbia's ongoing choke hold on the environmental crisis. One last great feature of the film is that 80% of the cars filmed run on vegetable oil!

Watch this film, it renews some of the profession's integrity that many of our "starchitects" have pissed away over the past couple decades.

Trailer:

Design Principles for an Earthship:

+Earthship Biotecture website
+Walrus Magazine Article "The Earthship has Landed", and bidding the Postmodern Horse Adieu

Architect Lookalikes

2008-06-02T13:06:00.004-04:00

Just came across this pretty funny page at mirage.studio.7 during my "research".

Le Corbusier & Jean Luc Picard

Philip Johnson & Mr. Six

Sanford Kwinter & Sideshow Bob

Zaha Hadid & Ursula

Daniel Liebeskind & Lee Evans

Eric Van Egeraat & Brad Pitt

Frank Gehry & Darth Sidious

Frank Gehry & Gonzo the Great

Jean Nouvel & Dr. Evil

Snake Game on a Building

2008-06-02T02:57:00.002-04:00

Michael Wolf Photography

2008-06-02T01:33:00.006-04:00

In lieu of enviable economic prosperity on Eastern horizons, this, a recent series entitled "Architecture of Density", by Michael Wolf. Each monumental high-rise, photographed in Hong Kong shapes an urban experience of regularity, singular character, and massive functional compartmentalized living. Hong Kong has an overall density of nearly 6,700 people per square kilometer (Canada = 24/sq km), the majority of these citizens living in high-rise buildings, as shown. Such Brave New Monotony as this echoes the legacy of modern architecture, of reductive standardization, reinstating the importance of variation + irrationality and structured difference in architecture.

More photographs from Wolf's folio website.

Wellington Street Art Competition 2

2008-05-26T21:33:00.009-04:00

[image property of Richard Smith, of Jennifer Macklem + Kip Jones artists]

This past Wednesday Kip and Jennifer presented our art proposal to a jury of about a dozen multi-disciplinary critics at the Routhier Community Centre on Guigues Avenue. I played a low-profile role at the presentation, mainly to show supplementary views of our proposed sculptures. Both Kip and Jennifer did a great job presenting our ideas to the jury. Most of the questions were pragmatic in nature; none of those were directed at our conceptual position which is a long leap from my usual pedagogic critiques.
Will there be sharp edges? [no]
Can the etchings be aged? [yes]
Are those the actual plinths you envision? [in some cases, yes]
What material are they? [reinforced concrete plinth, aluminium + bronze sculpture]
What sort of longevity does it have? [1000 years]
Have you considered spotlighting? [for some, yes]
Have you done this before? [yes]
All these questions were expected by Jennifer and Kip and they answered each one with some persuasive flair (elaborations of the above yes/no answers). We walked out feeling good about the presentation. The results came back a couple days later however and we didn't win the project unfortunately.

TRACES:: We started with Jennifer's mock ups which involved translating them into FormZ on my computer:
Some of these mock-up schemes were abandoned because of major constructional issues. To form aluminum or bronze casts for sculptures as complex as these, there's a high chance of error in forming hard bends and curves. Even though the process of solid casting is over 5000 years old, a construction of this sort is by no means a quick process.

[image property of Richard Smith, of Jennifer Macklem + Kip Jones artists]

This initial development created numerous "sheddings" which formed a sort of junkyard of types which we were able to work with in FormZ:

[image property of Richard Smith, of Jennifer Macklem + Kip Jones artists]

With these pieces, we eventually evolved the project into a system of deforming a language of serial types which we had modeled out of our central idea of "weaving". Points, lines, and planes were shaped in an aesthetic way that eventually reached contextual sensitivity:

These surviving models were favoured for both their aesthetic quality, and their ability to be constructed. Different methods include water-jet cutting the aluminum, solid casting either aluminium or bronze alloy, or bending the solid planes of aluminum over a roller. All of the etchings would be done with a hand-held etching tool, and Jennifer had considered using public designs as a means of initial community involvement in the project.

Wellington Street Art Competition

2008-05-12T12:52:00.006-04:00

Since the end of studio, a job literally landed in my hands which I've been fully immersed in for the past couple weeks. I've been doing digital renderings of sculptures for an art competition with Jennifer Macklem + Kip Jones. The project coincides with a broader 20 year plan to redevelop Wellington street. The city of Ottawa plans to rezone certain parts of the street for new land development as well as fairly substantial improvements to public space and the streetscape and road improvements. That includes widened sidewalks, new landscaping, and artwork. Art pieces are to occupy a number of sites stretching from Bayswater to Western. The budget for the art commission is around $260,000.

After Thursday, which happens to be the jury decision date, I'll have some images posted of the work we did.

Jennifer Macklem and Kip Jones' website with past projects.
Wellington Street Reconstruction Project at the City of Ottawa website.
An article about the Arts Quad in Hintonberg.

Recto Verso

2008-04-28T00:06:00.010-04:00

Recto Verso is an architectural concept that depends on the three-dimensional two-sidedness of paper. While this seems obvious, in contemporary architectural drawing, this idea is quickly forgotten because of a dominant computer-based drawing medium that mainly facilitates a two-dimensional experience on-screen. In the traditional sense, recto verso drawings emerged firsthand out of necessity — the conservation of valuable drawing material by using both sides of the paper. However, over time the ancients developed a refined technique of representation that could incorporate elevation on the recto aligned with section on the verso, for example. The effect of this technique alters and heightens one’s consciousness of the space that is observed, creating a total front-to-back understanding of the space in the observer. This three-dimensional spatial sense — looking forward and backward simultaneously — is the essence of recto verso thinking and can be analogized with the mythological characteristics of Janus, Roman god of gates and doors, beginnings and endings whose two faces look into the past and future simultaneously.

Janusian thinking (same as recto verso thinking) is a more widely known concept that can be attributed to many creative fields, particularly architecture. It is especially important for the architect who uses this mode of thinking to visualize complex spaces. However, the drawing technique is mainly forgotten, a result of paper in plenty. To quote Marco Frascari, from his blog Zibaldone:

In architectural drawing the verso/recto approach usher us into different realms from which we are to take back mysteries to our particular realm. The magic of a recto verso conceiving is to alter someone's consciousness. The alterity of the recto verso architectural conjuring up is essential for the making of a proper architecture responding to the unknown other.

Contemporary examples of recto verso drawings are hard to come by, as this technique has long since evolved from its simple origin. Current practices naturally require more sophisticated methods of representing a building and its components than simply imitating its sectional form on the verso. Applications of the idea however are expressed in many surprising ways. The best example is not under architecture at all, but of photography and the work of Robert Heinecken.

From Heinecken's website: "The Recto/Verso photograms were made without the use of camera or film. A single page from a mass-circulation magazine was placed in direct contact with color photographic paper and exposed to light. The resulting image superimposes the visual and verbal information from the front and back of the magazine page. No collage, manipulation, or other handwork was employed."

[image: Robert Heinecken]

[image: Robert Heinecken]

[image: Robert Heinecken]

[image: Robert Heinecken]

[image: Robert Heinecken]

Robert Heinecken's portfolio of twelve photograms.

Architectural Jargon of the Day!

2008-04-27T18:13:00.004-04:00

Ruskin, as the initially quintessential
transcendental man of extensive space,
involved in pseudoscopic inversions, a
form of metalepsis, as a failing distance
invades the foreground, necessitating the
attempted displacement and projection
into the now vacant distance, which is be-
coming a wasteland without a future, is a
transcendental man of considerable modi-
fication, who can now conceive of an
extensive prisonbody that contained it.

Get real.

Janusian Thresholds
Author(s): Jay Fellows
Source: Perspecta, Vol. 19, (1982), pp. 43-57
Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of Perspecta.

Tower Slideshow

2008-04-26T19:52:00.003-04:00

Here's a brief slideshow of the "Bang!" Tower integrated with the neighbouring River Tower, by Peter F. Chiang.

Final Tower Presentation

2008-04-20T14:50:00.007-04:00

-Gasp!- At last, after days of painstaking diligence, the Bang Tower is complete, along with drawings and video! Hoooray for everything! It was an epic display of determination, madskillz and moxy on all of the group's part in the final few days of what I like to call the hardest studio ever. In the end, the group pinned up excellent projects and none of us will suffer a triple F- as threatened. Finally we can all return to so called reality and sleep for more than 3 hours a night. Can I get a woot!?

All the models were snapped into place on the site but this turned out to be completely pointless, unfortunately because our prof demanded the models be placed next to our pinned up drawings which meant it was impossible to see the buildings in context. This was a bit heartbreaking because some of us attempted to integrate others' towers into our own which was lost in this move. Nonetheless, we presented our towers one by one after a flashy introduction of the concept and program on a video we created in the dying hours of the night with panic sweats keeping us awake.

All of the towers were criticized for their weaknesses -- none for their strengths. My tower was criticized for having too rational a structure for so unpredictable of a conceptual phenomenon (i.e. atom smashing). Granted, there was a huge opportunity for a truly ridiculous structural solution but I felt that my floor plates were already overly aggressive and an irrational structure would just make things too incoherent. At the same time, I thought it wasn't really a fair criticism because had I chosen an unpredictable structure they would have equal reason to say I could have chosen a more rational structure. This kind of debate can go both ways. There was nothing to say about the actual final structure I ended up designing, unfortunately.

Aside from this, the question "why the mini tower?".
My tower sits on one of the main crossroads of the Hudson Yards, where pedestrians intersect at all levels. Because of this, I thought it would demand a greater footprint for commercial and pedestrian use, and also a higher density to encourage all the surrounding towers' programs. Secondly, based on the explosion concept which implies that energy is created and destroyed at the same time, one tower is for expending energy, the other for renewing it. It also had to do with setting up a "gateway" that looks down the entire site, while harnessing wind energy in the gap of both towers. It's also sitting on the "throne" of the site and so hierarchically I felt it demanded more presence, imposing a organization of the rest of the scheme.
They didn't quite bite down on these justifications, but it was probably because I was seconds away from falling asleep and could barely articulate these things.

The remaining criticisms were all over the map and weren't entirely useful to be honest. In fact to be totally honest, the critique was probably the biggest anticlimax we could have asked for. For such a brutal studio for its demanding level of production and quality, we didn't really get anything in return except euphoric relief to be finished. That in itself is priceless. (So is waking up in the same position 13 hours after the crit).

So, I won't bore you anymore. Here's the final video as I presented it at the crit (photos of the group project to follow).

This video is for educational purposes.

Artist Sean Odell

2008-04-11T21:06:00.007-04:00

Last year on my second night in Ireland I went to see Emm Gryner in concert who I learned was one of my classmates' brothers' wife. A year later, after sharing studio with my friend Ryan, I've learned that his brother who I chilled with over some Guinness in Dubby is a highly accomplished artist who shared exhibitions with the famous H.R. Geiger, and has even sold paintings to Rob Zombie. Have a browse at Sean Odell's website for some of his amazing artwork.

Dress Rehearsal

2008-04-07T01:10:00.007-04:00

The "found object" model as I've been mentioning has been sailing through its golden age the past week or so. After a preliminary hunt for scrap materials, we've collectively made a second wave for more metal and plastics, this time with a jackpot find -- a photocopier machine from one of the engineering buildings. It felt a little primal bizarro when this machine was wheeled in to studio, because like a pack of hyenas, we pounced on it and tore the thing to pieces. I've never seen a more crazed group of students in my life. Like a wounded wildebeest, we gutted the thing in a matter of minutes -- blood was spraying all over in the form of black ink powder. Just look at the carcass as we left it:

This tower is proudly brought to you by Sony, Xerox, Kenmore, and HP. At the base is soccer dad's Sony camcorder framing the tower's convention centre, with busted out lens indicating a water purification tank, trim from the Xerox machine rising up the central vertical axis providing sky gardens, and another part of the Xerox providing sun shade for a Polish Bistro at ground level.

The group has achieved a lot over the past couple of weeks and we're all at roughly the same level of completion with the exception of one of two who bypassed the flu bug and are a week ahead of the rest of us. I decided that a dress rehearsal was in order to test how well the group's models snap in to place, since we hadn't initially tested the fit of our bases. When all the models were rolled in to place, we were pleasantly mesmerized by its surreality. Each of us has had some kind of image in our minds as to how the models would look when they were in context with the other towers but we were blown away by how much larger it was in reality than in thought. Bearing in mind that each of the towers is approximately 6' tall, the level of detail and saturation of space with objects and structure was so uplifting. In this glorious state of euphoria, we then discovered that the elevator had broken down in the process and our models were stranded out of reach from our studios...####!

Aerial view of the site looking South.

Explosion Tower, looking towards the Hudson River.I was lucky to snag the site that I did because it's smack dab in the middle of the overall scheme. It sets up a pedestrian gateway to the main public space + having twin towers is great in this situation to lighten the visual density from ground level + frames views looking both ways.

With seven days left from today, it's crunch time to get the drawings done and touch up any of the model that is incomplete. Ohh, the relief to be done...

touristpictures

2008-03-31T20:43:00.005-04:00

I found some really amazing videos on youtube by this person named touristpictures. Here's one called Food Fight. This video shows different countries represented by their national food at war with the U.S. (e.g. WW2, Cold War, 9/11). See if you can identify them. Here's a website with breakdown of all the events: Food Fight.

This next one is just cool.

Back to the Future

2008-03-31T19:59:00.012-04:00

After coming down with a nasty flu a couple weeks ago, I've been seriously playing catch-up at school. Four days away from my model is pretty devastating. To bounce back, I pressed down on the big red emergency button returning to studio, summoning all nearby siblings to my aid. To my shock and awe, the key-phrase "I was hoping you could help me with some manual labour..." was a tough sell. Who knew? At any rate, I successfully bribed an undergrad with beer to help me catch up (a more enticing deal - building on the former lesson). For future reference to all those in town with two hands, manual labour + tedious + totally unenjoyable grunt-work is available......for BEER!!!

During March break, we had an exhibition of student work. Some of the work was from our prof's past studios, which typically include life drawings and the huge 6' drawings of skyscrapers. Our tower drawings should hopefully end up looking something like this one below, but after twelve weeks of life drawing, my pastel drawings look nothing like these ones.

As part of the exhibition, I also found my competition panel for the West End Pedestrian Bridge proposal from 4th year pinned up. Gotta love the bee theme:

Now, after a couple weeks of endless hours soldering copper wires into place, I've finally designed my 3D structure for the tower. At last! (The image at left is outdated). Even though most of the group had no idea how to design such a complex structural system, we knew some basic principles: a triangulated structure is the most efficient form of bracing, the steel columns should intersect at every first, third, fifth, or seventh floor so that they can be pinned into the floor slab in reality. Also, in places of greater stress (i.e. predominant wind loads, cantilevers, south-facing elevations etc) and nearer to the crown of the tower, there should be a tighter web of structural steel. Last rule, don't breathe in the solder fumes...the kids depend on that. Otherwise, the structure can be a very plastic, sculptural expression of the tower.

For the next three weeks that are remaining, we will have to paint the structure, integrate each tower into the overall site which is simultaneously under construction to complete the model. Then, just draw like a fiend to finish a 6' elevation and section, with a flashy video. Crunch time!!!

All School Meeting Discussion

2008-03-06T12:37:00.003-05:00

At the all-school meeting, Director Marco Frascari discussed how and where money will be used to improve the school, following David Azrieli's huge donation to the school.

David J. Azrieli, philanthropist, developer, and architect has just donated 5.5$ million dollars to the school of architecture, bringing his total donations to around 8$ million dollars. Azrieli is a CSA alumni ('97). The donation will become fully active in the next three years, so we won't experience immediate changes, but it means that the new Ph.D program will finally take flight. It will be the second Ph.D program in Canada and the "only one of its kind", based on its emphasis on design rather than theory. The donation also has an impact on concentrating student space in the building, meaning we will at last be able to kick out the computer engineering students from the 5th floor to make space for our currently over-cramped students. Other changes include: better computer facilities, wireless internet (which is long overdue) and big improvements will be made to the Directed Studies Abroad program for grads and undergrads -- even rumours of it being paid for, this year (unconfirmed). Another great change is the revival of the school folio, which was one of the prized documents that the CSA produced in the 80's. Sadly, we will miss the boat on all of the above, but the incoming first years will get the full benefits of these improvements.
Ofcourse, the accumulated donations by Mr. Azrieli is so high at this point that by default, the school is to be renamed in his honour. We are now the Azrieli School of Architecture. All those opposed, tough luck.

Link to full article at canadianarchitect.com

Hudson Yards Takes Form

2008-03-06T11:48:00.007-05:00

With a month and a half to go, we've all achieved a fairly decent level of progress in our studio. Most of us have all the floor slabs cut and are now moving on to applying the double skin structure to the building. This basically means a second layer of glass in front of the outer walls of the tower to allow for an air cavity to let in natural ventilation. Remember you just can't open a window at the 47th floor to let in a breeze. It's like Apollo 13 up there. One of the many buildings that use this envelope system is the Swiss Re Tower (the Gherkin) in London, by Sir Norman Foster.

Here's the nearly-finished version of my tower with floor plates cut. Can you feel the explosion happening? Somewhat? Huh, huh?...
The Hudson Yards slowly taking shape on the mezzanine.

To the left of my "Colliding Particle Tower", the "Snowflake Tower", far left, "Slaughterhouse Tower", at the back, "Shark Tower", and to the right, a skyscraper from the other grad studio.
The "River Tower" in front.
Closeup of the "Slaughterhouse Tower"

The Spectacle of Demolition in the Age of Wastefulness

2008-03-06T11:41:00.004-05:00

The New Frontier Building, Las Vegas.

Which has come a long way from...

(Thanks Trevor, for the blog link)

Skyscratcher Model Vid

2008-02-28T20:03:00.007-05:00

Here's a rough-cut video of my tower as its coming along in studio these days. The unsightly blocky section has yet to be cut down like the rest of the tower - wait till next week for that get trimmed down.

All of the three dimensional design work is so much like making a sculpture. This is where our life drawing skills are starting to overflow into studio, in the likeness of shaping an anthropomorphic figure. Each tower should possess the innate beauty of a human body. In my situation, I have one and a half towers which raises the challenge of avoiding an obese looking building. This will likely be the ongoing struggle with my design -- to give the illusion of Olympian physique on a Siamese twin. I was able to get away with adding a half tower to the requirements because it satisfied my conceptual narrative. Ofcourse, that means 1.5x the work, but the proportion and contextual scale of one and a half towers to the site is appealing to me.

Haha, this video really is crappy, worthy of a professor's boot in the behind, but who cares. I don't want to reveal too much of the model just yet. At the very least, just to share some ongoing progress of the design.

The Birth of a Skyscraper

2008-02-25T00:29:00.006-05:00

...And...twins! The main one will stand 65 storeys tall, and the mini tower, at around 35 floors. Putting together the elevator cores took about an hour a piece. Each floor has to be scored into the plywood core about a centimeter deep on all sides and then split down the middle for the section cut (you can see the section line at the opening in the base which runs through the center of both cores).
Floor plates are added to the elevator core of the 65 storey tower. At the bottom is a 10 floor parking garage that collides into the tower, with the craziest circulation plan I've come up with yet. When that's presentable I'll give you a peek...

Here's a sneak preview of a 4th year student's tower they're finishing up now from last semester. Once all of my plates are chopped, I'll be moving onto soldering the structure together, like this one.

Found Object Model

2008-02-21T01:11:00.004-05:00

Part of the requirements for our skyscraper is to model the tower out of found objects. This includes anything out of metal or plastic that we can take apart from its original form. So far, a group of us have scavenged the hills of junk metal in Ottawa for anything of apparent value for our models. I picked up a 60 lb engine block as one potential unit to take apart, as well as a number of parts from car transmissions, a couple head-lights, a gas tank and a gear shift. This all probably sounds mad at first, but as the model develops, you'll see how the tower will come together. It turns into a three-dimensional collage.

Fallen Art - Tomasz Bagiński

2008-02-21T01:07:00.003-05:00

A personal favourite animation short.

Ted.com

2008-02-13T00:36:00.003-05:00

I've just discovered this great website Ted.com which is a pretty big collection of interesting talks taken place in Monterey, California about art, culture, sustainability, design, architecture, science etc. Have a browse for yourself, it's worth it. Here's a sample, on suburbia.

BBC-Horizon-The Six Billion Dollar Experiment

2008-02-12T11:44:00.003-05:00

Food for my thoughts: BBC segment on the particle accelerator in Cern, Switzerland:

Tower Revisions

2008-02-11T04:13:00.001-05:00

The sketch I posted a week or two ago describing my tower's program never really saw any fruition whatsoever. My prof half-glanced at it and repeatedly demanded I hide it from his sight. It was a bit premature in that it was way too detailed for that stage in the semester. So, it's inches away from the trash pile now. Since then however, the project has developed quite a bit in a slightly different direction.

Monday was a major pin-up in the Pit and our group was theatrically maimed in front of an all-school audience. I was able to show a near-finished site plan which was a plus, but I was obliterated for my sectional drawing, not for completion, but for common sense. I got a little hung up on articulating the tower's profile, without enough structural support or even conceptual justification. (I'll show just a rough sketch of the section because the full two-meter drawing has already changed a lot overnight...and I can't get a decent photo of it either).

In terms of the concept, I've been having tons of fun exploring 'colliding particles'. I've seen a number of clips of the Large Hadron Collider in Cern Switzerland which is completely fascinating. As of recently I wanted to literally put in an atom smasher in or around my building as part of its function, but never mind being ballsy, it's kinda ridiculous. It's gigantic to begin with and costs six billion dollars to build. So, instead I'm taking the cheap route: metaphor. In declaring people as particles, I'm using the Highline as the metaphorical particle accelerator, sending people whipping around my entire site, as shown in the site plan above (outer green circular line), eventually colliding with oncoming pedestrians at the very center of my tower, giving the tower its explosive form. In the explosion, energy gets destroyed (to operate certain programmatic uses, such as a ferris wheel, drop zone, etc.) and energy created as well (wind generators, photovoltaics, solar panels etc).

Since I haven't really talked enough about the Highline, here's a brief description of its redevelopment project by Friends of the Highline, showing the winning design by Diller & Scofidio. There's also an interview with Edward Norton. Huh?

Why the atom smasher? Well, it works. As for being appropriate for New York City, maybe not at all...particularly the exploding skyscraper part...yeeeesh. As an urban gesture, it's great -- the tower becomes an illusion brought to life out of a big bang (like the proton accelerator in Cern). The tower emerges as a fragmentation of the block grid of Manhattan, a universe on its own. This goes along the lines of Koolhaas' theory in Delirious New York of Manhattan becoming lobotomized in its overlay of fantasy skyscrapers on the mundane NY grid giving the city its core identity.

Colliding particles is a sub-human phenomenon, in that we don't physically experience this sort of event in nature, but rendering the idea inspires the imagination to create its potential 'observed' experience for the human senses. Applied architecturally, the idea of colliding particles works well. Based on the behaviour of particles in their collision, I can start drawing out circulation patterns, programmatic transitions, structure. As mentioned before, the idea of creating energy to be consumed and consuming energy to be created is an extremely powerful idea for a skyscraper, which will continue to evolve in the latter half of the semester.

Stand by.

Tower Construction

2008-01-28T16:04:00.001-05:00

[image courtesy of skyscraperpage.com]

Just browsing some info on the construction of the Burj Dubai, by SOM, I found this on a forum for skyscraperpage.com, which was really interesting: "To ensure the structural stability of the Burj Dubai during construction, the tower’s vertical and lateral movements are tracked with the help of a satellite-based global positioning system. During construction, any change in load distribution of the building is closely monitored in real time through the use of more than 700 sensors embedded in its structure."
Sounds a little overkill, but this process has been used quite commonly in recent times, and in earlier years, used aircraft bombsights for the same quality control.

[image courtesy of skyscraperpage.com]

Another interesting fact about the tower is its foundation. "The 800-meter (1,827 feet) Burj Dubai will need the mother of all foundations to support a super-structure that is expected to weigh 500,000 tons. The tower will rest on a 3.7m-thick triangular frame foundation supported by 192 rounded steel piles or support cylinders measuring 1.5m in diameter and extending 50m (164 ft.) below the ground."
It's hard to measure up foundations with other buildings because it all depends on the depth of bedrock. With Dubai, I'm not sure of the bedrock depth, but if so many skyscrapers are popping up so plentifully in the past decade, then it can't be at too much of an inconvenient depth. In comparison, the glorious Petronas Towers has an extremely deep foundation which may or may not still be the deepest. Composed of "barrettes" (like a bored pile or a drilled shaft, rectangular instead of circular), these structural members go as far as 130m deep! With the Petronas Towers, they had to improve of the karstic limestone below ground by filling all voids in the rock with grout for additional strength. The actual depth of the barrette foundation there is about 120m!

Tower Concept

2008-01-28T02:11:00.001-05:00

I've momentarily completed a draft of my tower brief...it will likely get chewed apart tomorrow, but I might as well celebrate that for the world wide web to gawk at.

Schematic Tower Concept:
“Colliding Particles”
A dialogue of: destruction and creation, stability and agitation, the fantastic and pragmatic.

The block grid of New York represents the rational human imposition on topography. Both city and tower combine their destructive energy to create a purely human environment that directly reflects his/her total desires. The skyscraper is the radical emergence out of the rational grid order into a realm of irrationality and fantasy.

The Colliding Particle tower will attempt to disrupt the man-made topography by means of broad tears in the proposed deck over the rail yards and affect other neighbouring towers by a radial-explosive gesture. The tower will terminate the Hudson corridor and redirect pedestrians through a fragmented landscape towards the water and ferry terminal or eastward to the Farley corridor. Pedestrians will experience entry to the tower by crossing numerous bridges over the exposed rails passing under or through the tower below grade.

* * *

Split-Core Tower Program:
Approximate Floor Area = 4200 sq/m, 70 floors total.

Top Ten [Green] Skyscrapers

2008-01-27T12:53:00.002-05:00

Have a look at some new projects under construction or on the drawing board for [green] towers. Uber-Eco-Towers: The Top Ten Green Skyscrapers

Museum Plaza, OMA

2008-01-26T00:47:00.002-05:00

Here's another interesting tower video I wanted to share. This is by OMA (Office of Metropolitan Architecture) where Rem Koolhaas has burrowed himself. As is often the case, Koolhaas' writings from Delirious New York have not been best translated into real architecture. The same applies for a number of writer-architects. Can't blame them, that's tough to do -- Delirious New York is still one of the best written treatises on architecture. Anyhow, in this video, don't bother with the actual design -- it's nothing special, just enjoy the funky vid. Nice tune too.

Sustainable Tower

2008-01-25T23:57:00.002-05:00

There's a great emphasis in our studio to design a sustainable skyscraper. Our prof is extremely emphatic in mastering sustainable energy systems (i.e. photovoltaics, wind turbines, passive heating and cooling). A skyscraper should not require air conditioning, being so easily accessible to wind as ventilation. Bearing in mind that architecture is responsible for 48% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, it seems appropriate to learn how to cool a building without chemicals and electricity. At the same time, there is an overwhelming amount of knowledge to be learned in the energy control of a 60-storey building. The image below is just a tiny fraction of some of the things to consider. I'm not sure how far we'll go into details for this project, but we do at least have to architecturally integrate wind turbines and solar panels into the building.

[Image from 'The Architecture of Everything' blog]

Some of the basic issues to consider as benefits to the sustainable skyscraper include:

+Utilizing a minimal footprint to multiply floorspace. This is in many ways a counter-balance to suburban sprawl through densification

+Reducing transportation costs by servicing a high-density building with a major public transportation artery

+Desiging 'vertical landscaping' to add to a city's green space.

+Harvest clean energy to create energy-autonomous buildings

+Design a 'vertical city' not just a high-rise development of compartmentalized spaces. Finding a hardware store and a fresh fruit market shouldn't be unusual in creating life in the sky.

As basic points, there are huge implications in the design process to tackle each of these possible solutions to improving a tower's efficiency.

Here's a video of Jacques Ferrier's 'Hypergreen' HQE building. This columnless tower is interesting in that the structure is entirely external, but also designed with varied opacity to control lighting and heat gain. This means that the south-facing structure will have tighter members to minimize harsh, direct sunlight, whereas the north side of the building is much more spread out to offer ideal office environments.

Another video on Sustainable Skyscrapers.

Initial Sectional Sketch

2008-01-25T02:14:00.000-05:00

Here's the first sketch of what I'm imagining for this tower's programmatic use. It's all over the place at first, but that's okay -- the program and design will change continuously throughout the semester. The first touches however include some key programs such as a public school which is apparently in high demand for Manhattan. Also, a bird sanctuary extends the atrium use at the center of the building, and yes that's right, there's a ferris wheel mid-height. I think it would be pretty sweet to have a ferris wheel go through the tower's central atrium, graze a bio-dome and then overlook all of New York City. When we all get our assigned sites, I want to try and negotiate with the group to design a continuous rides park including roller coasters, drop zones, and outdoor water slides as part of the an overall sub-scheme for our towers. At the very top of my tower, I'm still trying to come up with a fun use for the best seats in the house. Our prof was all smiles at the thought of a crematorium at the top of the building, thinking of people's remains getting sucked up into the wind turbines. Bad joke, but true story. At the moment I have an insane asylum, again, playing up the black irony of entrapment at the very summit of New York City. Other ideas: american gladiators gym, a slaughterhouse, or a playboy mansion. I think I'd better let this one stew for a bit longer...all suggestions are welcome -- the blacker the humour the better!

Expandable Table

2008-01-23T18:47:00.001-05:00

Credit to Uncle George for sending the clip. Thanks for sharing it!

Flight of the Conchords

2008-01-23T17:19:00.001-05:00

Thanks Jono and Mathieu

Feature Tower

2008-01-23T02:29:00.001-05:00

In fourth year, a classmate of ours, Venkatesh Prabhu made honourable mention for his design of a tower in Mississauga. That competition was won by MAD Design who revealed the Marilyn Monroe Building which we are familiar with. This is just some imagery to give you an idea of what is involved in this studio...and also sets the standard pretty high for us this term.

You can browse other tower projects at the Canadian Competitions Catalogue.

New Tower Project

2008-01-22T13:18:00.000-05:00

We are a couple weeks in to our new studio project. This semester, we are designing a 60-storey skyscraper in west Manhattan on top of the Hudson Yards. The Hudson Yards is the end of the rail line in Manhattan and represents the last frontier of development on the island. The scope of the assignment is huge as it is integrated into a formal urban regeneration plan issued by the New York Planning Department. This is the kind of proposal that New York developers and architects dream of. There's more floorspace in this project than Ground Zero and the site footprint covers two full blocks. Each student for this studio will be primarily concerned with one of 11 towers on a designated plot of land on either the east or west yard for their site which can embrace or reject the NYC planning proposal. At the end of the semester, each of the towers will snap into place on a giant site model.

The project has already gone through an official open design competition, but the city is requiring a second review of new submissions based on the initial lack of interesting proposals. Steven Holl has submitted the most developed of the schemes, and the design seems quite logical. The other proposals are done mostly by major New York developers and haven't quite struck the right chord with the site's potential yet, hence the second review.

Steven Holl's proposal:

Brookfield Properties’ proposal, led by Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill and Field Operations, with a large group of contributors including SHoP Architects, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and SANAA:

The Tishman Speyer and Morgan Stanley proposal, designed by Helmut Jahn and Peter Walker:

Kohn Pedersen Fox, Arquitectonica, Robert A.M. Stern, and West 8 collaborated on the proposal from the Related Companies and Goldman Sachs:

From reading a number of different blog sources, New Yorkers can't stand any of the proposals. The general climate is a rejection of glass and steel buildings which are generally alien to New York, in place of the art-deco style masonry buildings. The reality is that concrete or masonry is way too expensive for this scale of project. At the very least, New Yorkers want to preserve the certain 'character' they know best, of which none of the proposals seems to grasp.

This studio term will be the heaviest yet. Not only is the breadth of this project immense, but our prof is the most demanding in the school by reputation. We have an integrated life drawing course as part of the tower study as well as a trip to New York city. As our first assignment, we have had to draw up a site plan that adds a bit more spice and flavour than the developers' projects. Our prof truly is a no bullshit kind of professor. The more theory or cerebral mumbo jumbo in a building, the harder he hits. If he heard a peep out of me from last semester's project, he would have triple dropkicked me in a heart beat. Instead, he favours the one-liner, or one-word concept. Ultimately, it's what you show, not what you say that gets the best critique. So, my concept for this term is colliding particles. I found the following images which are quite seductive and inspiring for the site plan. It seems to capture the site's axial arrangement really nicely. The concept of creation that emerges out of destruction has interesting possibilities for an architectural project. While a bit too image specific for my liking, the image of collided protons appears like a city arrangement in itself and the patterns produced are beautiful arrangements of circles and squares, which is right up my alley. With these ideas in mind, I'm planning to rip open the proposed deck over the rail yards rather than seal it completely underground. I want the gashes in the landscape to allowing the towers and people to come right up to the rails.

Here is an image of my site plan to date. Eleven represents my tower footprint, with ten other classmates aligning with my tower. The cultural centre is essentially a horizontal skyscraper which another student will design. Hopefully you can get the feeling of collision from this scheme. The dark scrapes represent openings in the landscape to the train yard below. In our pin-up on Monday, it was seen as being too "candy-ass" so I need to run them right through the buildings themselves, no holds bars. The surrounding buildings also look too much like "little wimpy muffins", so that's up for changes as well. For next week, we have to hash out a 1:200 section of the tower (which happens to be enormous), all on vellum.

Check out these other sources on the topic:
//Gothamist//
//Urban Toronto//
//Link to all 5 Proposals//

Semester 1 Finals

2008-01-09T09:03:00.003-05:00

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.

Experimental Video Game

2007-12-28T17:49:00.000-05:00

I just came across this video of an experimental video game (if it can be considered a game?) called Night Journey. It's a video/art project of an individual that travels across a certain landscape with no actual destination, but with the function of reflecting on things that are found in this digital landscape. The website describes the game as a video experiment in finding 'enlightenment'. I don't think I've seen anything like this in a video game, but I'd be interested to how successful it could be with this purpose. What's equally interesting is the effort to make digital space poetic, not geographical as it's almost always intended to do. Quite possibly, digital modeling has maxed itself out in terms of geographic perfection. Weather conditions, lighting, texture, just about everything (except maybe the human body) are almost perfectly represented in video games. Just have a look at how this game starts to give new meaning to digital space.

Merry Christmas Everyone!

2007-12-28T17:29:00.000-05:00

I hope everyone is having a wonderful Christmas, this year. Best wishes to all!

At the moment, I'm having an extended recovery from finals with a glass of egg nog, some clementines, and a plate of rum balls on the table. Ahh, the life of being home again...

Christmas was extremely generous this year. I got a fencing foil which I've been waving around the house hysterically. Paddy has been getting most of the blunt end of my urge to stab things. Can't wait to get back at it in January. Also got some archie books: 'Fragments: Architecture and the Unfinished', by Robin Middleton, 'Space, Time and Architecture' by Siegfried Giedion. Also, mum's trip down to Traverse City to partake in the indulgence of western capitalism on 'Black Friday' scored me a new juicer. Woot!

Mark and Shashi are keeping their feet up and stomachs filled with holiday feasts at our place on their couple weeks of holidays. Uncle Mark went out on his first ski trip today, surviving a few falls. They head back to Gloucestershire on the 5th.

All the while, I'm not quite finished the semester, as I'm still trying to crank out a pre-thesis essay (15-pager). The general topic is fragmentation, hence the book by Middleton. However, the wonderful distractions of royal feasts, seeing friends and relatives is slowing things down a bit. No panic; enjoy home while I'm here.

Finals went well. When I get this essay out of the way, I'll put up some images of the presentation work.

Final Countdown

2007-12-06T17:42:00.000-05:00

One week today until crits! Let the Final Countdown begin!!!!!

Panoramas

2007-12-01T15:16:00.002-05:00

I've just discovered this neat little software tool which allows amazing photographic panoramas. PTgui is a sophisticated program which you pop in a certain number of photos and it automatically stitches them all together. It has incredible architectural implications because you can create elevational photographs out of inaccessible viewpoints, improving on the fragmented effect of overlapping individual images, and saving lots of time. It also allows you to create VR "lookthroughs" of spaces (i.e. single point perspective at centre of semi-sphere or full sphere). Have a look at some of the ones I've created for the Gesù Church as well as some from Ireland. Unfortunately, Blogger doesn't support the VR videos (or I haven't figured out how to post them) so you'll have to ask me to send them to you if you're interested.

This last image (as well as the one before the fish-eye image) are impossible views of the side elevation. I should be well inside the neighbouring buildings. Just from taking pictures from a single point on the ground level in all different directions, the program figures out how to stitch the images together. This can have a major implication on photographic documentation of buildings, in addition to the touristic novelty:

Happy Birthday Paddy!

2007-11-22T21:55:00.001-05:00

RMC Fencing Tournament

2007-11-06T12:36:00.000-05:00

I've just recently been added to the varsity fencing team! On Saturday, we drove from Carleton U at 5am down to Kingston for the day to compete at a fencing tournament at the Royal Military College. I'm competing with a group of four on the school foil team. We traveled with the men's sabre and women's épée team. The way it works is each team of four for every weapon competes against other teams of four, from other universities or private clubs. To win, each team has to make 45 touches before the other, and each player has to make 5 touches in every bout within 2 minutes. It's organized into a round robin at first and then instant knock-out after each team plays three other teams in the round robin.

The men's foil team started the day off (in fact, I was the starting player and only rookie on the team...Pressure!). It was all good though, I didn't do too bad in the first bout -- lost 5-2. We ended up barely winning the first series 45-36ish. After that, we completely dismantled the next team 45-22, but got whooped 45-28ish in the next series. We were able to gain enough points in our group to move on to the knock-out round but lost horribly in the first series...I won't even repeat the score. But whatever, it was lots of fun and our team deserved hundreds of style points. We ended up placing 17th out of 35 teams, which ain't too shabby for having a huge rookie on the team.

I snapped together a load of clips from the tournament. In every clip, Carleton is on the left side of the screen. If you don't know what's going on, don't worry, it's hard to decipher in real life. It's really fast. Keep on eye for the green/red light in the background to every bout, it tells you which side made a hit. (You won't find me in the clips, my madskillz are too frightening to watch).

Symposium Outcome

2007-10-29T12:30:00.001-04:00

The symposium started at 9am on Friday with student crits running all day until 4:45 in the afternoon. The morning panel was lively and quite fiery in some of the critiques, mainly with our level of timidity in slicing up the existing church. There were a lot of projects that made their interventions around the church, but rarely dealing with the actual church. In general, it was concluded the church is so shitty, it's not worth fixing; instead, you can fix what's around it. Greg Andonian (one of the senior professors at our school, my prof in 4th year) was up in arms at the amount of time wasted in reading a lot of the biblical texts. 'Analysis is Paralysis ... just design!' He also grilled us for all claiming to have a solution to the problem of the site. This, he says, is not the way to bring life back to the site -- there are a thousand problems with the site that we can't see, so just do something broadly interesting and all the problems will start to disappear.

My crit was last of the day. The afternoon critics were a different crowd. The presentation went well, and I was thankful on the one hand for having all day to observe the other crits and fine tune my oral presentation; on the other, the critters were tired and seemed like they wanted to wrap things up. Here's a retrospective explanation of my panel:

The roots for this project go back to the initial site visit with Louis and my site observation that the area around Gesù and the church itself is in a state of decay. Through exploring the site and its context, I found a lot of rough edges to the place, informing me even more that there is some kind of atrophy happening here. Through the Photographic Narrative, I started to express this conviction. The five images show that areas around the site have been vandalized, occupied by the homeless, littered, and architecturally faceless (i.e. blocked up windows/openings). The area is unmistakably neglected and disconnected from its context.

In revisiting the site, I found myself falling into the same shoes as people using the site for themselves (e.g. employees of neighbouring American Consulate Building, UQAM etc). These people never use the site in a meaningful way, but rather cross it to get to St. Catherine Street or sit at its periphery to eat lunch or smoke. People can be found in dozens at lunch break sitting on cement parking slabs, rotted wood fence posts, or even on the ground in a minute strip of grass between sidewalk and parking lot. In finding myself wanting to inhabit the same area of the site, I realized how low the standards of public living has dropped. There just isn't a go-to place on the Gesù property; there is NO public space.

This observation helped nail down what I felt was the essence of the site: Leisure Space (the public realm). The buffer between leisure space and its surrounding context of mainly labour-oriented building uses just hasn't been established. The boundaries between public + private space, personal + communal, and labour + leisure space just hasn't been established, or if it has, it's been left in the same state of neglect that the public can naturally see. This spatial turmoil, where the intermingling of these spaces are happening is causing a low standard of public life. Eating food in a parking lot is a trip-up in honouring humanity, ourselves. It's like letting a highway come in to your living room.

To step back a minute, I want to illustrate a historical phenomenon that has occurred on the site since the early 20th century. This is the occurrence of two major shifts in Montreal. The first, the relocation of the commercial district of Old Montreal to St. Catherine Street. This progression of events de-centered the old district as the main shopping area of the city. In doing so, the main shopping artery of St Catherine Street appeared and therein, the birth of the department store. This was a major economic and developmental explosion for the city, coupled with the dismantling of city defensive walls which allowed suburban growth. The second phenomenon is the decline of religious piety in Quebec. Since the 1960's the church has gradually dropped in religious participation from 88% to 28% but yet while Quebecers deny this involvement with the church, they still claim affiliation as Catholics. So this is an interesting shift from being religious to spiritual. And in this, the spirituality is happening outside and around the church but not actually in it. The connection between these two major shifts in Montreal is equally interesting. The church, for centuries has taught the commodification of salvation. If you are Catholic and pay your dues respectively, you will go to heaven, etc. With the decline of the church, rise of the shopping life, the transfer of this energy and coinage of 'buying' salvation refocused on the shopping centre and personal commodity.

In all this, St Catherine Street became a bustling community of trade. But one block away, the Gesù church could not keep pace with this level of development. It was left in the dust with no connection to its neighbour.

To go back one step further, to the idea of leisure space, I initially interpreted it as a public garden space, but as Louis has pointed out, there is an etymological link between everything I'm saying: Otium & Negotium. Otium is the Latin meaning for the garden of leisure where Greek philosophers would share knowledge. Its antonym 'negotium' means trade. What a coincidence! This makes an relevant connection of co-dependency of the meaning of these words. Without a popular public space, you dwell in a state of poverty; without a thriving commerce, your public spaces will lack popularity and became unsafe.

Here, I'm proposing my intervention. This is where a mediation between these two spaces is needed, and I'm proposing a strategy to restore this link between St Cats and the Gesù church through the design of a public leisure space. The design will include the expansion of the Centre de Créativité, an arts-based organization hidden in the basement of the Gesù to spill into this public garden in the form of an outdoor theater, its existing art exhibitions, choir practice etc. In making visible the church by smashing out the ground level of the Belgo building (currently sited between the church and St Cats), and celebrating the existing dynamic program of the Church, I hope to improve its contextual fit.

[end presentation]

Summary of Responses (from memory):

Silence.

[Gesù Member]: idea makes logical sense. Why not expand Centre to outside? Public theater would be beneficial and interesting.

[me]: in the Belgo building at about the fourth floor there are dancers that can be seen/ heard. It creates one of the few uplifting feelings at the site. A ground level theater might benefit both parties.

[Kelly Crossman]: Clarification on the panel where St Catherine Street is. How do you want to open up the Belgo Building? There are some interesting examples to look at with contemporary gardens such as the Trinity Church garden in New York, Inigo Jones' park in London.

[Steve Fai]: I like the project. It would be fun to design. Gardens are the most difficult things to design. You have to think how people step on the ground. Materiality is the most important thing here, and I don't see any indication of making that step yet, but that's next. Look at the project in Ferrera -- the main cathedral. It is found through porous arcades.

[Louis]: this is what I'm interested in seeing next. Richard is reading [Walter] Benjamin [The Arcades project], and we are essentially encouraging him now to design an arcade through the Belgo building. I want to see how that is reconciled.

[Me]: The Belgo building is an amazing building because of its previous use as an experimental shopping centre. There used to be valet parking, gentlemen's cigar clubs, gambling etc...

[Gesù Member]: And a zoo!

[Me]: ...all these things. It was an experiment in living at the shopping centre. These are concepts tying in to Benjamin's writings. I want to propose a contemporary use of the shopping centre.

[Gesù Member]: It's true, most of the shopping places in Montreal and everywhere else are so uniform and sell the same thing. It would be nice to see something new here. Making a connection to St. Catherine Street but creating something new is a good thought experiment.

[end]

Zeitgeist

2007-10-25T17:10:00.000-04:00

This is a must-see movie I just watched. If you have seen Loose Change on Googlevideo, you'll enjoy this as a kind of sequel, by a different director.

Zeitgeist.

Symposium Poster

2007-10-24T14:44:00.001-04:00

This is the final panel as submitted today. When printed, the poster will be 5 x 3 feet tall and mounted on foam core. I'll be printing out a couple new collage images to accompany it as well. I'd like to hear your questions or criticisms of the poster - it'll help me prepare for the presentation.

2007 Visiting Critic Symposium Outline

2007-10-23T13:42:00.001-04:00

"Urban Aedification"
The Architectural Liturgy of Re-Imagining the Sacred

The Carleton University School of Architecture presents "Urban Aedificaitons: The Architectural Liturgy of Re-Imagining the Sacred" as the theme for the 2007 Visiting Critic Symposium. There currently exists over 3000 religious sites in the province of Quebec with 650 of those on the island of Montreal alone. Due to shifts in religious, economic and social landscapes, a significant number of these sites, which once signified presences in our cities and villages, are necessarily undergoing a process of transformation. Through the composing of new stories for our built heritage, architects have a responsibility and role to play in the tradition of re-imagining these sacred places. Is there a future for religious heritage? What are the stories that have to be told? This symposium offers participants a forum to engage in multi-faceted discussions of the issues, implications and context that are involved in the process of re-presenting an "existing" so that we may inhabit the present while also acknowledging our collective heritage.

The 2007 Symposium is inspired by the Visiting Critic Studio. This graduate-level studio is being guided by Louis Brillant, who brings his wealth of knowledge and intimate experience of these architectural issues to the academic context. Students have been asked to contemplate the re-imagining of one specific project in Montreal. Once serving the non-extant Ste-Marie Jesuit College, the Gesù stands as a reminder of what was once there and the opportunities that exist if we are able to imagine them. Students have explored the historical, urban, social, ethical, and philosphical issues surrounding such a task and their projects will frame the discussions that take place over the two-day event, which also includes student exhibition, lecture presentation and panel discussion.

***

Edification: [latin: aedification] n. Intellectual, moral, or spiritual improvement; enlightenment.

***

Tentative Schedule of Events:
Friday October 26, 2007
Morning - Late Afternoon: Student Crits
Late Afternoon: Opening of Student Work Exhibit
Evening: Lecture - Louis Brillant, Reception, Dinner

Saturday October 27, 2007
Morning - Afternoon: Panel Discussion

Prospective Panel Members/Critics
-Louis Brillant
-Marco Frascari
-Steve Fai
-Greg Andonian
-Torben Berns
-Member of Gesù Organization
-Member(s) of Heritage Conservation Group

Reflections of Physical Model

2007-10-21T03:12:00.003-04:00

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.

Do Make Say Think

2007-10-19T16:13:00.000-04:00

3 Guitars

2 Drum Sets

1 Violin

1 Saxophone

2 Trumpets

Imagine playing a guitar with a trumpet.

Me Like.

http://www.myspace.com/doomachesatan