Resurrecting Gesù

This year’s professor for the Visiting Critic’s Studio is Louis Brillant, architect from Montreal and alumnus from Carleton School of Architecture. Louis completed his graduate studies at McGill University and has a specialized knowledge of conservation in liturgical buildings in Canada. We sat down with Louis Friday morning to review this semester’s brief, which will focus exclusively on the Gesù Church in Montreal. Our task is to architecturally elevate the site from its current state of neglect. Historically, the Gesù Church has been a meeting point for discursive artistic events but has since diminished in its social role. It really has slipped into a state of urban abandon; inside, the extravagant appearance of the church is unsuspecting. Resurrecting this historic relationship of the church to its immediate neighbourhood -- from a contemporary gaze -- is a fundamental condition to respond to this term.

The semester is structured to have bi-weekly desk-critiques with Louis. Much of the course reading will revolve around religious texts to help navigate the religiously hopeless folk, like myself. Readings of note include: Genesis, Dante’s Divine Comedy, James Joyce’s Ulysses (pity on the poor sucker stuck with that one…).

On Tuesday, the group is meeting in Montreal with Louis to survey the existing church at Bleury Street. There seems to be multiple lessons in this exercise: 1. get experience surveying a large-scale building 2. learning the importance of communication – something always goes wrong in surveys. This struck a parallel theme to our Murray & Murray competition (underway, and rockin’ out). While the Tower of Babel was a project derived from human-made plans and drawings, Noah’s Ark on the other hand was a project derived from instructions by word of mouth (i.e. mouth of God). The relevance of this lies in how information is translated. From an absolute idea which is perfect in your head, something is interpreted and then translated as soon as it leaves your head. Interpretation occurs in how instructions are said, and then how it is represented on a drawing for example. This is passed on to others to read and interpreted again to construct the physical reality of an originally perfect idea (so, going from 'dream stuff' to 'real stuff', blurring occurs). Stuff like this can happen. Our trip to Montreal will prove that between holding the dummy end of the measuring tape to translating the information onto CAD and then using this presumably definitive information to derive a new building, there will ultimately require a certain level of interpretation. When we compare our survey notes 'as-is' to how it is meant to be built, I'm sure we'll find allllll kinds of discrepancies.

On the home front, the house is an explosion of stuff. Moving in happened, then happened again when Paddy and I moved J’s stuff into the house. It’s a mess. Thursday I’ll be getting internet, and the next day a cell phone, with a bonus girlfriend!

Back to drawing…