Midterm Critique

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.

Graduate Architecture Colloquium 2008

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.

Old Registry Office, Ottawa

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.

Thoughts on Sustainability and Green Things

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

Wellington Street West Art Competition Winners

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

Wellington Street Art Competition 2

[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.

Final Tower Presentation

-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.

Tower Revisions

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.

Semester 1 Finals

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.

Symposium Outcome

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]

Crystal ROM Leaking

The ROM, also known as the Michael Lee Chin Crystal, designed by Daniel Liebeskind has gone from bad to worse in popularity among Torontonians (and spreading towards all Canadians as well). You can start calling him Leakskind. The high-profile 'starchitect' has committed the ultimate faux-pas in failing to keep water out of the building. The very first task of any building (particularly one with a seven-figure budget) is to provide shelter and the ROM has failed in doing so.

I feel a bit sad for the folks in Toronto because there has never really been a truly unique work of architecture come out of Toronto that has had the same effect as the Guggenheim in Bilbao or the Pompidou Centre, Paris. It tries, but never really breaks the threshold of creating any architecture of international merit. (The CN tower doesn't count). Alsop's OCAD building is a nice urban gesture, but internally, it's like working in any regular mundane office. The University of Toronto Residence Building by Morphosis might have some prominence, but it's still comparatively low-key at an international scale. The ominous black TD Towers by Mies Van der Rohe is an example that shows the same yearning for an internationally celebrated architect to bring good architecture to the city; I would criticize the TD Towers for being an exercise of scaling two Seagrams Buildings rather than one -- in the end it just isn't Seagrams. On the same note of authenticity, the ROM has a striking resemblance to the Denver Art Museum and has been criticized of copying and pasting the same formal elements to the Toronto site. Sidenote: the Denver Art Museum leaks as well. Toronto must be down on its luck, this just after being booted out of first place by the Burj Dubai.

The ROM was just never welcomed by the public. The museum directors wanted a glittering gem of contemporary stuff and they got that, even though the public thought it was a bad fit for the context. It goes as far as being described as a "cancer growing from the side of the Royal Ontario Museum". Perhaps the museum directors were caught up in the gamble or fanfare for the next best thing in Toronto. Friends of mine visited the building on opening day/week and found that there was still sawdust on the floors, electrical sockets left uncovered, and coffee spills all over the angular walls. The bigger spill however was millions of dollars into the crystal gem, which doesn't seem to have payed off. If refunds were possible in architecture, this would be one of those moments.

Pit Lecture

Malcom Quantrill is the opening lecturer for the Pit Lecture Series. Quantrill is a British architect and highly accomplished writer with an interest in Finnish architecture and cultural studies. He has written about Alvar Aalto and Reima Pietila, but has also published books on Norman Foster and our own Canadian success Brian Mackay Lyons (Halifax). Quantrill is co-author of The Architectural Project with our own director Marco Frascari.

Feel free to pop into the Architecture Building anytime between 6 and say, 7:30 tonight.

***

Post-Lecture Thoughts:
There were a lot of provocative quotes by Louis Kahn and references to various masterpieces of architecture with an undercurrent theme of timelessness in buildings (i.e. stripped of style). It was however, rather confusing on the topic of 'otherness' which is the central thesis of this lecture. The silence at the end of the lecture was testament to a lot of hovering question marks over peoples' heads. Otherness seems to have alluded to light and history as the instruments that make a building take on this quality. "The sun does not know its power until it hits a building".

Oh my, Dubai!

Hey everyone. Paddy hooked me up with this really crazy site about Dubai. I still can't believe my eyes. Have a look and see what you think. We're in trouble...

'Dubai is ####ing Nuts!!!'