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.

Panoramas

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:

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]

Symposium Poster

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

"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

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.

Progress

One week from Symposium and the studio group is starting to brandish their X-acto knives and whip up some cardboard models. I've made some decent progress over the past week or so -- mainly having nailed down a program statement for our proposed intervention at the church site.

Since posting the two collage panels a week or two ago, I've been exploring the idea of atrophy or 'urban decay'. This was entirely based on intuitive observation upon visiting the site for the first time. Using decay as the initial step towards understanding a part of the site, I've been able to refine this thought a bit more. My observation is that the connection between 'leisure space' (i.e. garden, plaza, etc.) and 'labour space' (i.e. all surrounding offices) is largely under-developed or completely absent at the site. The existing underused parking lot which swamps the entire site has forced its numerous occupants to the periphery of the site for social gathering. There simply isn't a comfortable go-to place within the site's boundaries.

***

Since the 1960's, the Church in Quebec has experienced a relatively pronounced decline of piety throughout much of the province. Church participation has dropped from 88% of the Quebec population to only 28% over one generation but interestingly 90% still claim Catholic affiliation. This drastic shift of energy has been refocused in large part to the modern shrines: shopping centres. In 1890, the commercial district of Old Montreal fully relocated to St. Catherine Street between Bleury and de la Montagne. Thus began the age of retail frenzy along St. Catherine Street. The shift of commercial concentration from Old Montreal to St. Catherine has since established the area as the main shopping artery in Montreal.

Over the years, St. Catherine Street has seen an explosive development of public life through shopping, however, the Gesù Church has not adjusted at the same pace. This falls back to my initial reading of the site as a place of decay -- the site has not yet developed its economic (labour) and social (leisure) connection to the thriving activity of St. Catherine Street. My architectural proposal is to expand the church's existing creative centre (currently hidden in the basement of the church) in the form of a public exterior garden, semi-private mixed-use space for temporary exhibitions, and an uncompromising visual link through the neighbouring six-storey building between Gesù and St. Catherine. That means booting out ye olde tyme PharmaPlus shoppe from the ground level of the neighbouring building. I am also proposing an architectural intervention composing of mainly commercial space to make an economic connection to St. Catherine. All existing city parking spaces will be moved underground to free up the entire site for public leisure -- more greens! Woohoo!

I've just learned an interesting etymology of the term leisure. Leisure is traced back to the word otium meaning essentially the same thing, but used to describe the social, academic leisure of the Greek intellectuals and philosophers. The Great thinkers at the forum steps of the School of Athens can visually illustrate this form of academic leisure. Interestingly, the antonym of otium is neg-otium which means trade!


Here is the third of an on-going series of photo-montage panels. This piece is composed of three layers of historic maps of the same area. To the right is Paul Klee's Angelus Novus drawing. The link best explains it in its own terms. The whole piece is an attempt to convey the message of 'past, present, and future'. At the top is an overlay of an early 1900's shop front as it would have appeared in the early shopping districts. The Angelus Novus is the embodiment of the present, with the ability to see into both past and future. To the bottom left is a distorting shape that starts to delineate the city plan to suggest the future of a changing urban dynamic.

Montreal Trip #3

This was the busiest trip so far to Montreal, starting at 5am until 5pm. The reason for going down this time was twofold: meet our professor Kelly Crossman at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) for research orientation and also to meet our studio professor at his office for student presentations of assigned readings.

Our time with Kelly was very interesting because we were conducting a mini research assignment of Montreal in the 1960's -- specifically the circulation planning of the city. Based on what was called the 'Morgan Plan', the city orginally intended to run their east-west freeway right through Old Montreal and build 'super-blocks' of multi-use high-rise towers and thousands of parking spaces. Ex-members of CIAM, Sandy van Ginkel and Blanche Lemco (who had both left France for Montreal) strongly advised for alternative designs to the freeway. After picking through newspaper clippings, drawings, correspondence, and agenda notes, as supplied by the CCA Archives, we were eventually able to piece together the narrative of this important urban plan (from a heritage point of view). Ultimately, the freeway was moved north of the originally proposed location, replacing an existing railway artery. Upon reaching the existing train station, the freeway tunneled under the modern city centre and pops out to the east side.

At lunch we met with Phyllis Lambert, founder of the CCA (a testament to the youth of our architectural heritage). She became particularly well known during the mid 1960's for her role as consultant in the development of the Seagram's Building in New York and the Toronto Dominion Towers, both by Mies Van der Rohe. But in founding the CCA, she has managed to compile one of the most extensive archives of architectural material in North America. We spoke about Canadian architectural identity in a cozy restaurant near the CCA.

Late, we hustled over to Louis' office to blaze through student presentations of their reading material. After our meeting I scoped out the site a bit more and started composing photo-montage images of my observations (below). Through this exercise I hope to be able to isolate what I think is the essential quality of the site so that I can move onto designing a program for our proposal.

Montreal Field Trip

Immediately after the drawing competition, we packed our bags for an organized field trip to Montreal to visit our site at the Gesù Church. Our group of four rented a vehicle and drove down late at night to check in to a hostel and party it up a bit in the city. Next morning, we spent a full day surveying a portion of the building.

The purpose of this visit was to gain a sense of the site and generate some initial feelings of purpose to derive ideas for the rest of the project. A supplementary assignment to surveying the building is creating a 'photographic essay' of the building. A sort of narrative expressing our initial impression of the site or the building or anything at all we find significant to developing our project. We are meant to generate thought from this and weave in and out of it through the course of the semester.



OBSERVATIONS:: From what this church was intended to be, and what it became are two very different things. From the get-go, the design of the church was done up by an Irish architect in New York who had never visited the site, nor designed the building in drawings, but rather dimensions. The numbers were sent to Montreal to the Jesuits were to fill in the blanks. Additionally, higher authorities within the local parish wanted to keep another main church in downtown Montreal as the central church to the city and the Gesù church was not to exceed the other's height. We're told that historically, all kinds of dancing, performing arts, galleries etc were flourishing at the very doorstep of the Gesù but for some reason, the architecture never really followed suit. Instead, it has become an ugly duckling - incomplete towers, huge chunky proportions, careless repairs, set on a bed of cracked asphalt. In the winter, ice has been known to fall very dangerously - in one instance it broke right through the lower roof of the building! There's also no easy way of getting into the building. That's a long story in itself. It is also blessed to be next to the American Consulate. Some friends were escorted off of the neighbouring empty lot because we were photographing the church. Charming.

For the next few days, teams will compile their survey measurements and overlay them on Louis' final survey notes. The 'official' purpose of the survey is to see how close we are to the actual drawings which are already in CAD. I'm hoping that once we do this, we'll find strange things about the building to talk about, given it was constructed from numbers and not drawings. It's so strange to even consider architecture without drawing of any kind. Without any representation of the building, what gets lost? What would the list of dimensions even look like, and how would they be organized?

Here are some photos of the Gesù church and its nearby surroundings: