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Thank you to Concordia Council on Student Life (CCSL); Concordia Faculty of Fine Arts; Concordia Fine Arts Student Alliance; Concordia University Alumni Association; Concordia Department of Art History; Daniel SĂ enz from CUJAH; Michael, Nima and everyone at the Topological Media Lab at Concordia University; Braden Scott; our ever generous Faculty Advisor Dr. Cynthia Hammond; Harley Smart and Takeshi Mukai at Anteism; Michael Ryan for design support; and of course all of our contributors, participants and speakers this year.

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All efforts have been made to contact the owners of the images printed in this journal. If your are the copyright holder of images that we were not able to secure permission for, please contact architecture. concordia@gmail.com for further inquires.

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Light at the Museum: Skylights & Architecture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City

The definition of skylight is twofold. Most commonly, it is known as a light emitting tstructure of windows that composes all or a portion of a structure’s roof. On the other hand, skylight is the scattered light that falls away when light travels through the atmosphere, forming the blue light of the earth’s sky.

Skylight and sunlight combined make daylight. To maximize the viewer’s experience with the work, museum technicians rise to the challenge of harnessing natural light, in tandem with artificial light sources, to pull out the hues particular to the works contained within a space.1 Lighting is crucial to the viewing experience, but the apparatuses that enable this privileged viewership are kept invisible.

Circumstances at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City — the diversity in medium of the works, the expanse of time covered by the collection, and the fact that the museum is composed of multiple structures built at different points in history according to the design of several architects — render the lighting of works challenging. Unpacking the history of two western pavilions of the Met, the Charles Engelman court and the Robert Lehman collection, combined with a phenomenological recalling of my own experience within the architecture of these skylights renders the functionality of these structures visible.

The central focus of the Charles Engelman court is the facade of the Branch Bank of the United States by architect Martin F. Thompson (fig. 1). Completed in 1824, the facade is exemplary of mid-eighteenthcentury English Palladian tradition. The building was located between Nassau and William streets until 1915 when the building was demolished. However, the facade was salvaged and was incorporated as the entrance to the American Wing, designed by architect Grosvenor Attenbury in 1924. Originally a standalone building in Central Park, northwest of the museum, the facade, along with the American Wing, was subsumed into the Charles Engelman court in the 1970s by Irish architect Kevin Roche of Kevin Roche John Dinkledoo and Associates.2 Roche was tasked with creating a cohesive design for the entire western elevation - emblematic of that design is the expanse of slanted glass roofs over the west wing of the museum.

On the ground, swarming visitors orbit around highlights of the museum’s collection. Classical sculptures establish the legacy, longevity, and international significance of the Met’s collection.

Two beaux-arts lampposts designed by Richard Morris Hunt — the architect of the first major addition to the Met — flank the path to the steps of the bank facade, a pilgrimage rooted in New York’s urban history. Succumbing to the pull of the pavilion cafe, visitors gravitate languidly to the dining area, where I speculate the prices are sophisticatedly high. Through the skylight, natural light soaks the space, casting a shifting, structured grid over the entire court (fig.

2). The openness of the space is contained by this spectral structure, demonstrating the limitation of the vastness of the pavilion. The space is open, but restrained.

The Robert Lehman collection is located on the first floor, at the western extremity of the museum, protruding into Central Park. The wing is an end game of a hunt beginning in the sixties with the Met’s 4

Laura Josephine O’Brien

Matthew Kroger-Diamond

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heated pursuit of Robert Lehman’s art collection, culminating in the construction of a separate wing to house his collection in 1975.3 The collection contains objects spanning seven hundred years of European art. Fourteen rooms showcase paintings, drawings, glass, sculptures and textiles, organized around the central axis of the skylit atrium.

Opposite from the Charles Engel pavillion, the skylight is made up of cross-hatched, overlapping roofing that allows minimal skylight into the gallery. The herringbone pattern of the ceilings in the Robert Lehman collection lets in a diffused light that illuminates the hall adequately for visitors but disperses the light, reducing harm to the artworks, allowing them to be lit by warm artificial light sources.

Skylights are an under-appreciated aspect of museum architecture, an apparatus crucial to the viewing experience that visitors take for granted. By simply looking towards the sky, these structures can be admired on their own, emancipated from the objects that they irradiate, as structures that are beautiful, functional and illuminated.

1. Christopher McGlinchey, “Colour and Light in the Museum Environment,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 51, no. 3 (1993-1994): 44.

2. Morrison H. Hecksher, “The American Wing Pavillions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Winterthur Portfolio 46, no. 2/3 (2012): 69.

3. Hecksher, “American Wing,” 67.

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Laura Josephine O’Brien

Matthew Kroger-Diamond

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Ascending Towards The Heavens : Musings on Alien Rock 1, Edinburgh & The Conversion of The Church

Rock climbing gyms are strange creatures.

Like hermit crabs donning the shells of other critters, the majority of these sports centres are forced to carve out homes in spaces not made for them. This is because would-be climbing entrepreneurs have trouble convincing investors to lend them enough money to construct new facilities that, due to their necessarily large scale and specific safety requirements (not to mention their steep insurance fees), are quite costly to build from scratch. It’s much easier for fledgling climbing businesses to renovate spaces that already exist. In Montréal, we are most likely to find rock gyms squatting in old industrial spaces like immense warehouses (Horizon Roc) or storage garages (Shakti, Bloc Shop.)1 The location of these spaces in commercial non-neighbourhoods, paired with the “hardcore” nature of the sport, has undoubtedly contributed to the image of the urban climber as bad boy and outskirt rugrat.2 Even when rock gyms are lucky enough to occupy constructions that were designed for climbing purposes, they still court the industrial aesthetic — a look which undoubtedly suits the edgy vibe their clientele goes for. This is the case for Allez Up, which, after leaving its home of sixteen years in the Nordelec buildings in Pointe-Saint-Charles (now slated for condos), settled down the road in an impressive new complex that is, nevertheless, firmly anchored in the historic Redpath Silos (graffiti and all.)

Although the situation is not entirely different in the United Kingdom — here, too, you find a fair share of classic storage garage gyms and even a facility housed in a nineteenth-century water pump station (The Castle, London) — an entirely different type of building is also avidly pursued by home-seeking climbers: the disused church.

Perhaps this is where I should drop a disclaimer that I am myself a rock climber and even worked in a gym for a few years. For these reasons, I am not only familiar with this type of re-cycled architecture, but am always on the lookout for it, not just for scholarly reasons, but precisely to get away from my books — something I have failed to do this time around!

My fascination with the church as rock gym began with my arrival in a new town and my ritual hunt for a climbing centre. Climbing isn’t nearly as popular in the UK as it is at home in Canada, and I had long ago made my peace with the fact that I wouldn’t find anything in Scotland comparable to my Montréal gym. But Edinburgh is supposedly the Scottish capital of climbing—as it is the self-professed “capital” of so many things — so I had some hope. I rapidly found out that the place to climb in Edinburgh was a gym duo called Alien Rock 1 and 2: the first for long routes (seven meters and up), the second for bouldering (low walls, no ropes). Alien 2 is your typical boulder gym camping out in a middle of nowhere commercial depot, which makes evening comings and goings a little eerie, but Alien 1 has set up shop in a church. Neither of the gyms are in Edinburgh proper, they are located in Leith and Newhaven respectively. To get to there, you must bike or take a painfully slow bus. So bike I did.

I checked out Alien 1 on an uncharacteristically sunny day. Having looked it up online, I knew the gym would be in a church and I was 10

excited; seeing as this was the first church converted for climbing that I had ever heard of. How novel, I thought. As I rode along the blue Firth of Forth up to the gym, the church seemed rather smaller than I had expected. Squat. But much taller than the university’s climbing facilities and I rallied around this fact as I locked up my bike and walked through the stoney archway into the gym within. Going inside was like walking into the ’90s (1994 to be exact, the date Alien Rock opened.)

Here was a gym that hadn’t yet moved on, at least aesthetically, from climbing’s dirtbag and dreadlocks days — and I mean this in the best of ways. The walls were full of earth browns, carrot oranges and sky blues with “tribal” marks painted on some of them. A dinosaur fossil relief reared its head at the base of the lead wall. Plaster features and artificial pockets had been moulded on the walls in an attempt at natural rock — moulded by hand, it seemed, because I could make out fingermarks.

And above all the cries of “take!” and “climb on!” the vaulted roof soared. I smiled, the place was taller than it looked from the outside.

I approached the arrête of a wall and touched the deep finger grooves in the plaster. I could imagine them making the place, going at it for weeks, carefully shaping the wet plaster into bumps and holes that will remain fixed until they tear the whole thing down. Most gyms avoid doing this now, because it makes for frozen patterns that are more difficult to change up and impedes proper route setting. But in the ’90s this was a very groovy (heh!) way of referencing real rock face.

An employee came up to me. “Hiya, just checking things out?” Yes, I told him and how wonderful it was that their gym is in a church. He waved his hand. “Oh, you’ll find loads of them in the UK. It’s very common.” Despite advertising myself as a total UK noob, I was quite intrigued by his response. And he was right, too. A quick Internet search revealed at least a dozen gyms that boast ex-sacred sites as their home turf, some sporting irresistibly clever names like Altar Rock in Derby.

All these finds raised some questions in my art historical brain and I made the crossover from athletic to aesthetic curiosity. Why is it that the British have deemed it fit to parcel out so many of their churches to climbers when it is practically unheard of in Canada? (Or so I thought.

Turns out there’s a Sherbrooke climbing centre that calls l’église Christ Roi its sanctuary. But it is advertised as unique in Canada.)

While there is an obvious poetic appeal to setting up a climbing gym in a church, especially if you happen to do business in Newhaven — think secular ascent to paradise, dramatic whiplash Falls, appurtenance to a congregation of sorts — ecclesiastic buildings are far more difficult to

Stéphanie Hornstein

StĂŠphanie Hornstein

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convert into usable climbing gyms than the sturdy relics of the industrial epoch. First of all, they are old and, in Britain, really old. Before they can be renovated, they must be gutted and safety-proofed, both lengthy and expensive processes, which could involve entirely replacing walls and installing structural support. Churches are also heavily protected by heritage policy and their plot status as “spaces of worship” means that developers have to get their plans okayed by conservators and municipal leaders before they can do anything — something which is far from being free of controversy in more religious regions.3 Lastly, while churches may represent some of the tallest buildings around, their height is far from even. So although the Alien 1 steeple stands at thirty-seven meters, inside, only a few climbs sneak up to ten meters.

The other routes, due to the slanted roof, have to remain content at eight or even seven meters. This makes no small difference to a climber. As such, the distinctive shapes that make churches so recognizable inside and out can be rather limiting if you happen to be a rock wall designer (and Lord knows there are some.)4 But these difficulties still don’t explain the lack of church gyms on this side of the ocean or indeed why hardly any sacred spaces are converted in Canada at all. The States seem to be less squeamish about it than us.

In Montréal’s history at least, when a church ceases to function as a religious space its structure is rarely preserved; instead, it is knocked to the ground to make way for new building endeavours. Numerous Montréal examples exist (or rather, no longer exist) in Pointe-SaintCharles and in the old Dorchester (René Lévesque Blvd) stretch where steeple after steeple was felled along with other buildings in the 1960s urban “renewal”. There are rare exceptions, of course; we can think of the Dawson College library or the Concordia Grey Nuns reading room (however, it must be noted that both are — strictly speaking — chapels that were attached to larger convent complexes). We also must not pass over the Montreal Museum of Fine Art’s Bourgie Hall, which has brilliantly transformed a church from hull to (concert) hall. But all three of these projects are in some way state-funded and devoted either to quiet study, or to the experience of music, which is, perhaps, not so far removed from spiritual contemplation. Privately owned instances also exist in Canada: Toronto has a church-cum-condo complex called Victoria Lofts and the apartments at 315 Prince Arthur Ouest are housed in what used to be the First Presbyterian Church, but these are still rather unique cases.

I do think there is value in engaging with our built heritage in different ways: possibly as a café, a library, an arts centre, a performance space, a recording studio, or a mishmash of all of the above! Such a project already exists in Little Burgundy. Having just officially opened its doors in November 2015, Le Salon 1861 consists of a community events space, a “co-working” centre, a green energy laboratory and a locallysourced restaurant all brought together under the roof of what used to be the Église Saint-Joseph. Why not take things one step further and let those homeless climbers into our churches, as they do in the UK? But, perhaps before we do so, we need to consider the potential adverse effects that the transformation of more churches into climbing gyms might have on the urban climber’s bad boy reputation. I think that, despite the all too literal ascent towards the heavens, the enshrining of the sport, the weekly pilgrimages, our rock climber will be left less alter boy, more urban explorer — intergalactic explorer, even, if we put faith in Alien Rock’s snappy name.

1. Zéro Gravité, which occupies an old cinema in the Mile End, is a noteworthy example of a gym appropriating a non-industrial, non-ecclesiastic building.

2. For an all too literal instance of the climber taking on the urban landscape check out the B. Bro’s attempts on the Van-Horne viaduct: https://vimeo.com/35531440.

3. For instance, as this columnist remarks, “the Church of England isn’t wild about this.” See “Churchgoing,” The Economist, 20 October 2005, http://www.economist.com/node/5056498.

4. As interest in rock climbing has been steadily on the rise, more and more people can build careers as rock wall designers. Look no further than Walltopia for a case and point.

5. Cotterell & Co, Edinburgh really milk their locale—a fact highlighted by their promo video which touts their converted Salisbury church as a “stunning place to visit,” making shopping into cultural tourism. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPcYdJRcGZM. 6. An interest for these kind of projects are already beginning to appear in Montréal. I went to a public municipal meeting in January 2015 about the revamping of a church in Little Burgundy to a community centre with small shops and studios. See also Xhurches, a website devoted to recording ex-churches and their new vocations: http://xhurches.org/. Their data, however, is far from extensive: they only show two converted churches in Canada and two in the UK

The British, on the other hand, are continually finding new — and might I add — commercial vocations for their ecclesiastic architecture.

In Edinburgh alone, I have seen renovated churches take on the guises of coffee shops, concert venues, nightclubs and even a posh interior lighting store.5 Are the British less troubled with architectural legacy?

Hardly; the UK is at the forefront of heritage preservation battles and you can bet that every new owner of these churches had to fight tooth and nail to put up their business there. Is it possible that they are just less prude about commercializing these spaces than Canadians are? Their relationship with history is different from ours after all.

Maybe the overbearing power, that the clergy exerted over the Québec population until the ’70s, is still too present in public memory and encouraged a destructive attitude by the time quiet revolution came around? Who knows. The reality remains that we knock down churches while the British renovate. Yet so much can be — and is — done with derelict churches. The Spanish town of Llanera, for instance, permitted a group of skateboard enthusiasts, the aptly-named Church Brigade, to makeover a Romanesque structure with a halfpipe, ramps and murals galore, showing that there is no need to put a wrecking ball to a soul that can still be saved. This statement has huge implications for cities like Montréal where, as Mark Twain famously noted, you can’t “throw a brick without breaking a church window.”6 Maybe we should stop throwing bricks.

I’m not advocating for the über-commoditization of churches into sleek and inaccessible upper-class housing developments — far from it. But 12

Stéphanie Hornstein

StĂŠphanie Hornstein

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Oversight

In the Engineering Pavilion of Concordia University’s EV (Engineering and Visual Arts) Building are stacked atria connected by spiral staircases. While studying the movement of bodies on the staircase between the 11th and 13th floors, I was drawn to a piece of foam taped along the glass edge, at head-height. It was presumably there as temporary means to protect users against bodily harm. Though striking and imposing in design,the spiral structure’s threat to the body is ultim-ately made visible by the foam’s aesthetic incongruities. A staircase functions to direct movement, and is a transitional space, but this three-floor section of stair receives little traffic. Oversight examines and challenges functionality in design and architecture as it relates to users’ bodies in stillness and motion.

If utilitarian architecture such as this is meant to protect, facilitate, and direct, what happens when we need to protect our vulnerable bodies from it? What if we get lost because our human understanding of space does not correspond to the architects’ logic? Oversight responds to the EV Building’s clean, corporate design by infiltrating it with a visceral tangle of fleshy materials. The installation emphasizes, with humour, the body’s awkwardness in relation to sleek architecture. The space is humanized by employing uncomfortable, decaying materials which allude to bandaging, caging, protecting and softening.

Oversight was on view on the 11th floor of Concordia’s EV Building, Engineering Pavilion, from October 29th to November 3rd, 2015. This project was undertaken for the undergraduate course “Drawing from Sites and Actions” (DRAW 399), taught by Francois Morelli, fall 2015 semester. Huge thanks to David Kruse and Tereza Tacic.

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Sophia Borowska

Sophia Borowska

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La Grande Bibliothèque du Québec: Institutional Identity

In the past century, library architecture has undergone significant changes that have mirrored the shifting perceptions of this contemporary public institution.

Although the accessibility of knowledge is seemingly inextricable from the very concept of public library, early design practices revolved predominantly around storage and classification. Functions that consequently shaped this institution into a knowledge repository rather than an “engine of intellectual life”.1 Up to mid-20th century, library buildings were predominantly Neo-Classical, projecting an “austere and forbidding”2 image, though the democratization of these public facilities was stimulated as early as 1850s.3 A new wave of library architecture arose at the turn of the century. These designs rejected heavy embellishment in favor of transparency and simplicity carried out through a curtainwall façade and an open-plan interior. Inaugurated on 30 April 2005, Bibliothèque National du Québec (BNQ), also known as Grande Bibliothèque du Québec (GBQ) or Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ), is a perfect instance of such architecture for it incorporates aspects of both “traditional” and “contemporary” library design that are manifested in the two separate bodies of information held in one structure — central Public Library and National Collection of Quebec.

In order to trace the identity of this institution derived from the symbolism of the two housed collections, the following paper examines the Grande Bibliothèque du Québec in relation to the two architectural concepts that became the basis of “new” library architecture — open plan of the interior and transparency of the material. These notions, in turn, will be partially associated with the theoretical accounts of French designer and architect, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, most commonly known as Le Corbusier, where the architect articulates the “correct” plan manipulations. Interestingly enough, the latter aptly coincides with the requirements imposed on the architects and listed in the interview with the library’s CEO, Lise Bissonnette.4 Thus, for the sake of coherence, this discourse will be divided into sections according to the three main conditions: a distinct sense of cultural institution; engagement of the diverse public; and a clear spatial distinction between the two libraries within a single structure.

Cultural Authority & Appeal to Broad Audience La Grande Bibliothèque was conceived in 1997 as a merger of the Bibliothèque Saint-Sulpice (then already the National Library of Québec) and Bibliothèque centrale de Montréal; Archives nationales du Québec were introduced to the project at its final stage, thus resulting in the name BAnQ.5 The history of this institution extends well beyond 1997 and is, in fact, a rather complex topic due to the particularity of provincial context. As a result of strict religious patronage, Québec does not have an extensive record of public libraries, even though it is the only province with a national library.6 Therefore, as the library’s CEO Lise Bisonette says, it was crucial for the building to project a clear image of a cultural institution.7 Since La Grande Bibliothèque maintains a special bond with the province of Québec, the competition for its design was the first international architecture competition in Quebec.8 However, due to budget restrictions, the number of submissions was relatively scarce — the competition only received thirty-seven proposals. While discouraging to some, the conservative budget arguably ensured resourceful 20

and sincere proposals. The winners, John and Patricia Patkau, who together run the Vancouver based firm, Patkau Architects, received the commission as their proposal intricately conveyed the complex nature of the library’s collection and its potential to accommodate future expansions;9 the couple worked on the project together with two other Quebecois architects.

Historically, Québec has had a unique relationship with public libraries.

The Catholic Church maintained strict censorship on the majority of literary works even when the two public libraries, those that would later merge into one Grande Bibliothèque, were established: the Bibliothèque Saint-Sulpice (1915) and the Bibliothèque de la ville de Montréal (1917). Having worked efficiently for several years, the Bibliothèque Saint-Sulpice was forsaken in the late 1920s and stood inactive for almost a decade. Meanwhile the Bibliothèque de la ville de Montréal was operating as the first municipal public library in Montreal.

Bibliothèque Saint-Sulpice was subsequently revived under the office of George Cartier in 1960s when the Quiet Revolution liberated the province from the Catholic protectorate, and in 1965 a report was issued to appoint status of a national library to the Bibliothèque SaintSulpice. Finally, in 1997, the Richard Committee, chaired by Clement Richard (the minister of cultural affairs from 1981 to 1985) proposed to consolidate the collections of Bibliothèque Nationale and Montreal’s municipal library into one space.10 Of interest for this paper, however, is the fact that the Bibliothèque Saint-Sulpice and the Bibliothèque de la ville de Montréal were located in close proximity, in Montreal’s Latin Quarter: the Bibliothèque SaintSulpice — at 1700 St. Denis; the Bibliothèque de la ville de Montréal — 1210 Sherbrook East. Public hearings were held to determine the location of the future GBQ, and finally the site of the Palais du Commerce, situated at the heart of the neighbourhood was chosen.

Though some criticize the demolition of the Palais which structural capacitates were not evaluated for their potential to serve as a library,11 Lise Bissonnette says that the construction of the BAnQ has functioned to revitalize the area that had previously been loaded with urban problems.12 Indeed, glass architecture could be a powerful engine of urban self-discovery.13 Standing as Québec’s intellectual separation from the old regime,14 the Bibliothèque has embraced the spirit of the contemporary library while also exhibiting its cultural authority in Québec. In this respect, its glass façade is both symbolic and functional. The glass skin functions to mediate between the exterior traffic and interior tranquility, while its simplicity and literal transparency project an image of intellectual omnipotence.15 The glass plates used for GBQ were specifically manufactured in Québec and had never been used in North America before this project.16 Not only is this ceramic glass opaque but it also is louvred at an angle to conceal the interior yet reveal the exterior — or, in other words, the exterior is entirely composed with layered glass plaques. Its transparency, however, is only reserved to the strips of

Elena Ugarova

regular glass windows running across the façade. Similarly, the walls, merely space partitions,17 are not restrictive: their louvred structure creates sense of freedom, simply establishing a certain view. Both glass and wooden elements are arranged to expose just enough of the interior to ensure visibility and accessibility to its collection. This interplay between the indoors and the outdoors of the library is afforded by its plan, which, as Le Corbusier dubs it, is an architectural generator.

The plan “proceeds from inside out; the exterior is the result of the interior.”18 The Double-Yolk19 Patkau’s design has been frequently described as “profiting from the financial restraints”20 for it is spatially concise yet dynamic. Since one of the requests was to assert the prominence of Quebecois Collection,21 the Patkaus chose to establish two complementary spaces inspired by Anne Heber’s Les Chambres de Bois (1958)22 and described by John Patkau as “an egg with two yolks”.23 Being wrapped in the louvred curtain-wall façade, the interior is divided in two envelopes partitioned by louvred walls of yellow birch - the layered wooden plaques adjusted with a slant to admit light and air. In this manner, the structure of the glass façade parallels that of the interior partitions.

Surrounding its bookcase aisles with casual studying areas located against the glass exterior wall, the Public Collection occupies twothirds of the interior. The National Library (Québecois Collection) is a reversed space. The study zone is enclosed in the multi-story archival collection, approachable by the staircase. In this manner, it takes the form of a traditional library layout with an almost panoptical configuration.24 Through its circulatory nature, such “traditional” designs were meant to evoke a sensation of “universal knowledge […] in a universal space.”25 Although, technically, the space of National Collection is rectangular, it does emulate a very similar experience.

Bookcases enclose singular study areas, limiting the circulation system to the space amongst them. Meanwhile, the design of Public Collection remarkably combines premises of contemporary and traditional library architecture: although heavily dependent on the open floor plan of the modern edifices where the study areas are spread over the perimeter, it allows the patron to observe the collection from its center (the staircase), once more recalling the panoptical layout.

This distinctively double nature of GBQ becomes particularly captivating once one considers the library as an institution. As a public building, the library occupies a virtual middle ground between “the archival and the exploratory” it offers a body of already established information to encourage further investigations.26 La Grande Bibliothèque, however, is also a mediator between the two provincial communities: the anglophones and the francophones. In fact, the first francophone-oriented library, the predecessor of GBQ, Bibliothèque Saint-Sulpice was founded over a century ago due to the resistance of conservative French-speaking religious leaders towards the library movement spurring in the rest of Canada.27 This multilayered functional Elena Ugarova

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and conceptual character is translated to the visual language via complex yet effortless architectural promenade — the idea developed by French architect Le Corbusier on the onset of the 20th century.

Spatial Experience The concept of architectural promenade emerged out of Le Corbusier’s interest in the physical experience of space, which he contended was best manifested through a succession of dramatic views.28 Furthermore, according to the architect, the views should be meticulously guided by regulating lines, resulting in a perfect rhythm of the interior.29 Although seemingly abstract, this approach neatly resolves the library’s intent to be a place of discovery rather than an educational resource.30 In fact, in her introductory essay to the interview with John Patkau, Lise Bissonnette dubs the GBQ’s spatial arrangement as architectural promenade. This “new” library architecture makes great use of the meandering interior promenade made possible by virtue of the open plan. The emphasis is subsequently shifted from archival preservation to audience engagement; visitors are invited to wander off and find the most comfortable study space.31 The GBQ building begins on the metro level and extends four storeys above the ground. The ground level has multiple entry points to the large hall accommodating the areas with major crowd density: cafe, auditorium, exhibition hall, and conference room.32 The entrance hall is separated from the collection by the louvred wooden wall that extends two storeys high. Thus, the only access point to the library itself is a grand opening at the end of the corridor, at the corner of Boulevard Maisonneuve and rue Berri. Passing through the high archway, one is immediately faced with the choice: either to progress straight to the reception or to turn right and ascend via the ramp, the stairs or the elevator. The routes are not only meticulously articulated via the interplay of volumes and surfaces but they also intermingle. The space is organized around lateral and longitudinal axes.

According to John Patkau, due to budget limitations, the agreement was to keep the structure as cubic as possible and to introduce a major circulation system for the finer spatial experience as well as for the facilitation of library services.33 Indeed, the entrance point places the visitor right in the middle of Public Collection. The service stations are located along the elevator shaft, thus, in the middle of each floor as well. One of the inspirations for the central staircase and elevators was Will Bruder’s Phoenix Central Library that has, according to John Patkau, a very efficient central circulation system.34 Clear axial geometry between the diagonal stairs, the vertical elevator shafts and the horizontal floor planes result in a smooth transition between interior levels and balances the peripheral flow.

The perimeter circulation, in fact, is described by Patricia Patkau as a “donkey trail.”35 The journey begins with the ramp, leading to the National Collection somewhat in a manner of a processional axis.

Having arrived to the second floor, visitors are faced with the choice yet again: to proceed to a very secluded space of “traditional” library setting or to turn left and ascend alongside terraced reading room.36 The path then transforms into a peripheral reading area on the perimeter of the library, where the inner balconies thrust through the wall, as if to ensure a dramatic view against a more secluded plane, at the end of which one could find another terraced level being a mirrored imaged of the first one. The trail culminates with the open study area right on the third floor. The last storey is accessible via the central staircase or elevators. This perimeter circulation is made possible due to the curtainwall that is now so often used in modern libraries. Yet it is a unique feature of GBQ:37 although reading spaces are frequently shifted to the well-lit perimeter, they are not necessarily developed as one continuous promenade.38 Le Corbusier states that volumes and surfaces are “the elements through which architecture manifests itself.”39 Indeed, observing the interior from 22

the uppermost studying level (the apex of the “donkey trail”), one could notice a rather peculiar structural feature. Transitioning from a bookcase aisle to the reading sections, the visitor becomes aware of the spatial discrepancy of these two places. However, a significant difference in the height of these spaces is revealed only when the eye wanders down the staircase shaft while simultaneously leveling with the floor plane of the third storey. Only at this moment does one fully perceive that not every floor offers a peripheral reading zone. In addition, the storeys with this peripheral configuration have the ceiling twice as high as the collection floors. In other words, the height of the uppermost studying area on the side of rue Berri incorporates two levels of collection spaces. As Lise Bissonnette says, “in some modern libraries, there’s such a sense of everything being equal [but] here you get the feeling that the world is a varied place.”40 It is clear that through choice of material, interior design and attention paid to the library users the Patkaus were successful in achieving a democratically designed library for the 21st century. Not only did the architects successfully consolidate the democratic spirit with the institutional authority but they also managed to highlight important historical and cultural features. The structure fully lends itself for the patrons’ visual and physical encounters, acknowledging the value of the audience’s engagement, while simultaneously maintaining its archival functions. In fact, it effortlessly introduces the book repository into the overall architectural experience. Although highly distinctive, the bookcase aisles are not isolated, but are gracefully integrated into the library. The Quebecois Collection becomes the apex of this scheme: not only is it the first stop of the visitors’ architectural promenade but its asymmetrical placement to the main axis aptly contrasts this thematic archive with the rest of the general public collection. Meanwhile, the intricate network of louvred partitions manipulates one’s spatial awareness, managing to blend yet distinguish the outside and the inside, in order to truly emphasize the weight of this cultural institution; any public library is an important cultural symbol for its hometown yet the GBQ also bear a historical value so treasured in the province. The timeless materials used stand as the embodiment of omnipotence and freedom of knowledge, making this building indeed the Grand Library of Québec.

1. Lise Bissonnette, “A Space of Freedom,” in Logotopia: The Library in Architecture, Art and the Imagination, ed. Sascha Hastings and Esther E. Shipman (Cambridge, ON: Cambridge Galleries Design at Riverside, 2008), 38. The author cites the report on the expectations from la Grande Bibliothèque.

2. On date of the “stimulation”, the Public Library Act in England see Ken Worpole, Contemporary Library Architecture : A Planning and Design Guide (New York: Routledge, 2013), 42.

3. On austere “old” fashioned architecture see Liz Greenhalgh, Ken Worpole and Charles Landry, “Part 3: The ‘Libraryness’ of Libraries,” in Libraries in a World of Cultural Change (London: UCL Press, 1995), 52.

4. Sofia Galadza, “Two for One,” Contract 48, no. 2 (2006): 76-77.

5. Birdie MacLennan, “The Library and its Place in Cultural Memory: The Grande Bibliothèque Du Québec in the Construction of Social and Cultural Identity,” Libraries & the Cultural Record 42, no. 4 (2007): 350.

6. Ibid., 349.

7. Ibid., 76.

8. David Lasker, “Opening the Ivory Tower,” Building 51, no. 1 (2001): 30; David Theodore, “Competing Visions,” The Canadian Architect 45, no. 10 (2000): 22.

9. Lasker, “Ivory Tower,” 31.

10. For a general overview, see William Weathersby Jr., “Patkau Leads a Team of Canadian Architects to Create a Cultural Beacon at the Grande Bibliothèque in Montreal,” Architectural Record 194, no.

10 (2006): 39.

11. On the libraries’ opening see MacLennan, “Cultural Memory,” 356-7.

12. On Bibliothèque of Saint Sulpice’s revitalization see ibid., 363.

13. For the proposal and the development see ibid., 373-377.

14. Theodore, “Competing Visions,” 24.

15. Lasker, “Ivory Tower,” 30.

16. Hisham Elkadi, Cultures of Glass Architecture (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 38.

17. MacLennan, “Cultural Memory,” 368.

18. Elkadi, Glass Architecture, 39.

19. MacLennan, “Cultural Memory,” 377.

Elena Ugarova

20. Wall are no longer required to be the supporting elements due to the columns and the curtain wall structure.

21. Le Corbusier, Towards an Architecture, trans. Frederick Etchells (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2007), 88.

22. Sascha Hastings, “Grande Bibliotheque du Quebec, Patkau Architects with Croft Pelletier and Menkes Shooner Dagenais Architectes Associees,” in Logotopia: The Library in Architecture, Art and the Imagination, ed. Sascha Hastings and Esther E. Shipman (Cambridge, ON: Cambridge Galleries Design at Riverside, 2008), 47.

23. Ibid., 25 24. Theodore, “Competing Visions,” 24 25. Trevor Boddy, “Les Chambres De Bois,” The Architectural Review 219, no. 1312 (2006), 74.

26. MacLennan, “Cultural Memory,” 377.

27. Hastings, “Grande Bibliotheque,” 47.

28. On the link between the “old” fashioned circular library interior with the panopticon structure see Ken Worpole, Contemporary Library Architecture: A Planning and Design Guide, 45.

29. Ibid., 45.

30. Ibid., 38.

31. MacLennan, “Cultural Memory,” 341.

32. Flora Samuel, “5 Elements of the Architectural Promenade,” in Le Corbusier in Detail (London: Architectural Press, 2007), 128 33. On the lines see Le Corbusier, Towards an Architecture, 112.

34. On the rhythm see ibid., 119.

35. Galadza, “Two for One,” 77. This is clearly a reference to Le Corbusier’s chapter, “The PackDonkey’s Way and Man’s Way,” in his 1929 book, The City of Tomorrow and its Planning.

36. Worpole, Contemporary Library Architecture, 48.

37. Technically, the latter two are on the metro level but, since the entrance in on the ground floor, here they are referred to as being on the RC. 38. Hastings, “Grande Bibliotheque,” 47.

39. Weathersby, “Grande Bibliothèque,” 39.

40. Hastings, “Grande Bibliotheque,” 48.

41. Ibid., 47.

42. Ibid.

43. Worpole, Contemporary Library Architecture, 83.

44. Le Corbusier, Towards an Architecture, 102.

45. Galadza, “Two for One,” 78.

Elena Ugarova

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Haberdasher

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Damien Smith

Damien Smith

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We live from our bodies: from because human perception and action extend outward from the materiality of the flesh and organ and bone to items and sources of sensation that exist outside the boundaries of the skin. From because the body is the center of human experience... Our relationship to all else is structured from the position, location and attributes of our bodies.1

Sensorial Mapping of the SaintJoseph’s Oratory in Montreal: Examining the Relationship Between the Senses, Spirituality & Architecture Through Illustrations and Words

I sit on the concrete rise of a circular monument filled with colourful plants. My sense of smell picks up the aroma of flowers; delicate, calming, rejuve- nating. My vision extends from my outstretched feet — dirty boots — along a concrete path that stretches to the base of a towering staircase. It follows the staircase up — observing the people ascending, either on foot or on knee — a sign of dedication and devotion. My gaze continues. Like the people, it climbs slowly until it reaches an arched maroon door at the top of the stairs.

From here it moves more quickly, first left and then right, following the contours of a massive building, resting on the hundreds of ant-sized people that gather on a lookout. It continues climbing. Up another staircase, up massive columns, up and up, and observing, and up, until it takes in the sight of an immense, muted green dome; pausing on a cross lit from the backdrop of the sky. I begin drawing.

My hand touches the concrete beside me. It is rough, and warm from the sun. A gentle breeze comes in contact with my skin, sending shivers up my arm. My hairs stand erect. My ears are filled with the sounds of people talking, the ringing of bells, the squawking of seagulls, the clicking of cameras.

I taste the aftermath of my coffee on my tongue. I close my eyes and begin drawing.

The building I am seeing, touching, smelling, hearing is Saint- Joseph’s Oratory in Montreal: a catholic church primarily founded by Brother André, who looked to Saint Joseph for spiritual guidance. Frère André praised Joseph, believing him to be a pivotal component of his own supposed healing powers. My motivation, however, is not to reassemble the Oratory’s history (although it is very interesting.) For my purposes, the only story of relevance is the profound connection between the Oratory’s architecture and the power of healing.

I am here on a more personal mission: to map out my sensorial experience of the Oratory. To give precedence to my bodily sensations in order to feel, understand and communicate with it directly and honestly. Through this embodied under- standing, my aim is to think about the ways in which the senses play into my overall experience of the Oratory, and to ask: how intimate is the connection between my sensorial experience and the facilitation of spiritual health? What kind of relationship exists between the material architecture of the Oratory, and my immaterial senses of perception?

While walking through the space, I paused to draw my immediate surroundings: the following pages are a chronological documentation of my journey. In addition to writing, these illustrations became a key way to express my sensorial experience. Through the sense of sight, I

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drew what I saw before me: I call these drawings visual illustrations. For example, figure 1 (opposite) was drawn while sitting on the concrete rise (as described in the previous page.) Remaining in the same location, I closed my eyes and drew again – allowing my marker to move in relation to the sensations of sound, touch, taste and smell. I call these drawings blind manifestations. For the sake of congruency, I have rendered them at a lower opacity, and paired them with their corresponding visual illustrations.

Standing at the mid-point of the Oratory’s grand, exterior staircase I pause on the concrete steps, watching people climb past me. The sound of panting and heavy breathing not only becomes a symbol of physical endurance but to many, a sound of devotion. Reserved for those ascending on their knees, the middle staircase is made of wood as opposed to concrete: a material physically softer, but still unforgiving. I listen as the sounds of panting become supplemented with moans and prayers that bare testament to devotion more physically grueling. I observe an old man on his knees slowly pull his body upwards, stopping at each step, whispering, praying, eyes closed. He is exhausted but determined, and eventually he reaches the top – touching his forehead to the ground.

For the duration of the climb, we all move together — moving farther and farther away from noise and messiness of the city, and to many, moving closer and closer to god. The heavy breathing, the feeling of concrete, the view; all are products of the architecture of the staircase — each has a profound influence on the overall sensation of space. I continue climbing until I reach the top. Looking behind me, the verticality of my ascent sinks in. I find a seat at the side of the staircase and begin drawing the intimate details of the concrete. Worn from the millions of visitors, it

Katrina Jurjans

Katrina Jurjans

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has begun to erode; a physical imprint of devotion and curiosity. I close my eyes and run my fingers across its uneven surface. I feel its history in my fingertips.

There is a strong link between the material body and the spiritual body, which is increased as the devotee’s love intensifies...While the spiritual body normally exists separately from the physical body, at times they may interact or even merge together. The spiritual senses come to be merged with the physical senses, and the deity and heaven may be sensed with the material body.2 Opening the doors to the Basilica is like pushing through into another world. Its volume is not the only thing to inspires a deep breath: the spatial positioning of the Oratory is also striking. The structure sits on top of the spiraling, often dark, labyrinth I have already climbed, like a magnificent, colourful bird perched on a crooked stick — its radiant wings spread open, projecting beams of coloured light through the air; its song a deep organ vibrating off the walls, further accentuates the feeling that the Basilica is a world of its own, disconnected from the messy chaos of the streets far below. I walk straight through a hallway of space created in-between rows of pews until I am about half way to the front altar. I sit down on the hard, dark wood, and commit myself to remain seated for an hour to take in the orchestra of senses all working together to create a feeling of sacredness.

Humanistic geographer Yi-Fu Tuan states, “a key to the meaning of place lies in the expressions that people use when they want to give it a sense carrying greater emotional charge than location or functional node.”3 The emotional charge in the Basilica is palpable. I watch as people flock to the alter, kneel down and pray. A woman waves her arms frantically, grasping onto something felt but not seen. I watch symbolic gestures animated with devotion. Watery-eyes. The constant touching of self: hands to head, hands to heart, hands to shoulder, hands to lips; drawing an imaginary line that connects these body parts, I watch people form a constellation of hope: faithful and genuine.

It is said that “repeating the divine name leads to a real and palpable sense of seeing an inner light”, and this is what I hear: a choir of people talking to God.4 People using the action of speaking and listening in order to visualize something that exists beyond the physical body. In other words, I observe people using bodily experience to connect to something entirely out of body.

The body is a conduit: giving and receiving information. Profoundly influenced by the space of the Basilica, individual experiences become acutely affected by the physically tiring act of ascension, the height of the Basilica’s ceilings, the feeling of the pew’s cold wood on sensitive hands, the light pouring in through the stained glassed windows; transformed into a canvas of colour only when it penetrates into the Basilica’s interior and the spatial affordance of finding peace in an area of filled with people — a corner to be alone. Our bodies become actively engaged with the myriad of spatial dialogues that surround them, and as all of these things come together like words in a sentence, they create a distinct sense of space fully dependent on their cohesion.

I close my eyes and listen. A triangular relationship: body, architecture, spirituality is forming.

1. Karen Franck and R. Bianca Lepori, “From the Body,” in Architecture from the inside Out: From the Body, the Senses, the Site, and the Community (Chichester: Wiley-Academy, 2007), 46.

2. June McDaniel, “Introduction: Spiritual Body, Spiritual Senses, Past and Present,” in Perceiving the Divine through the Human Body Mystical Sensuality (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 7.

3. Yi-Fu Tuan, “Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience” in Philosophy in Geography, eds. S. Gale and Gunnar Olsson (New York: Springer Science & Business Media, 2012), 409.

4. Joseph Molleur, “A Hindu Monk’s Appreciation of Eastern Orthodoxy’s Jesus Prayer: The ‘Inner Senses’ of Hearing, Seeing and Feeling in Comparative Perspective,” Religion East & West 9 (2009): 73.

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Katrina Jurjans

Katrina Jurjans

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- Il y a encore du monde dans ce building?

- Mmm, oui. Il a le 25e étage, où vous êtes, le 16 et le 17 il a Cofely. Il y a la Serbie aussi, mais ils ne sont jamais là.

- La Serbie?

- Le commerce, oui.

Bruxelles Capital

Je discute à l’entrée de la tour I du WTC (World Trade Center) avec le gardien de sécurité. Nous sommes à Bruxelles, en plein cœur de Manhattan : c’est ainsi qu’on a dénommé le quartier des finances. Ce n’est pas pour rien, il arbore plusieurs passerelles aériennes, fontaines, centres d’achats, mais surtout plusieurs gratte-ciel recouverts d’un verre teinté noir permettant de voir sans être vu. Mais lorsque la pénombre s’installe, on peut très bien apercevoir les lumières au néon qui resteront allumées toute la nuit, semblable au cerveau de ceux qui quittent le boulot beaucoup trop tard pour atteindre quelconque quiétude.Ceci est ma deuxième visite et je suis toujours aussi fascinée par la faible quantité de lumière qui émane de ce colosse de 28 étages.

Contrairement aux autres gratte-ciel qui le bordent, il n’a que quelques fenêtres illuminées à son actif; surtout au 25e étage.

Mundus receptio Dans le hall d’entrée on se retrouve nez à nez avec la réception. Un large tuyau descendant du plafond comme s’il traversait les étages supérieurs se déploie en un dôme terrestre englobant le réceptionniste, lui-même absent. Absence encapsulée par cette Terre de cuivre sous lequel jonche un bureau au vernis acajou serti d’un combiné téléphonique à lignes multiples. Seul le gardien s’assoit parfois derrière le comptoir lorsqu’il se fatigue d’être debout.

Sur les quelques étages accessibles par ascenseur on retrouve cette même présence fantomatique; le temps semble s’être arrêté depuis la fin des années 80. Le rouge vibre de partout : dans les fauteuils capitonnés en cuir rassemblés par petits groupes, aux plafonds en cubes de plastique, même dans les tuiles du plancher et sur les murs où on le retrouve décliné en différents tons. La foire alimentaire s’avère déserte. Plusieurs de ses commerces affichent des avis de fermeture et des panneaux «TE KOOP» Cartes du monde World Food Canadian Sundae Ice Cream Une flèche nous emmène à Brasiliva «Au 25e étage il y a vous»

Non, il n’y a pas moi. Il y a plutôt une bande d’artistes ayant repris ces lieux abandonnés pour y créer de nouveaux espaces de travail, de réflexion, de création. C’est grâce à eux si j’ai pu découvrir l’endroit.

De longs couloirs avec de multiples bureaux, tous recouverts d’une moquette grise poussiéreuse, de grands murs blancs séparés par des plafonds suspendus, on décèle peu d’activité. Néanmoins, on remarque parfois des câbles ou un modem internet, un extincteur placé attentivement au coin d’un mur, plans de salle, affiches et annonces scotchés dans les fenêtres et sur les murs.

En octobre dernier, le collectif JUBILEE organisait notamment en ces locaux une série d’évènements, conférences et projections répondant au contexte d’agitation sociale contre le « Projet Européen » en traitant notamment des questions d’économie néolibérale et de démocratie.

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Anne-Marie Trépanier

Anne-Marie TrĂŠpanier

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Dans sa conférence intitulée Brussels and the Urbanization of Finance Capital, le géographe de formation David Bassens nous présente le Quartier Nord de Bruxelles, zone où le capital financier s’est imprégné physiquement et dans lequel se manifeste le désir de construire une ville européenne mondiale (European World City.)1 Le WTC I est en quelque sorte la pierre tombale d’un projet mort-né qui n’aura jamais su s’attirer le prestige et les retombées économiques espérés.

reflets de lumière d’ambiance trop éblouissants. À gauche des deux tours, il y a un avion qui plane. Là aussi, le temps s’est arrêté.

La poignée d’artistes maintenant installés dans ces lieux s’approprie les ruines des grands joueurs. Sans eux, ces locaux seraient probablement voués à un abandon permanent. Tous rassemblés dans une grande salle bien fenestrée, nous écoutons notre locuteur décrire en détail le Manhattan de Bruxelles. Il suffit de tourner la tête pour témoigner de l’ampleur des dégâts.

1. David Bassens, « Brussels and the Urbanization of Finance Capital », (présenté dans le cadre de The Cost of Wealth un projet organisé par JUBILEE et le Goethe-Institut, Bruxelles, Belgique, 15 octobre 2015).

Bruxellisation Phénomène émergeant dans les années 60 - 70, la bruxellisation désigne la destruction du patrimoine architectural bruxellois à des fins de modernisation. Le procédé donne parfois lieu à des horreurs architecturales qui détonnent drastiquement avec leur environnement. La bruxellisation se perpétue encore aujourd’hui, mais à un rythme plus contrôlé. Elle se manifeste principalement dans la permanence des chantiers et zones de construction ainsi que par certaines manœuvres d’aménagement urbain considérées comme absurdes et arbitraires.

4. Eric Timmermans, « Le suicide de Ruysbroeck, entre réalité et légende », Bruxelles anecdotique, 31 août 2012, consulté le 11 novembre 2015, http://bruxellesanecdotique.skynetblogs.be/ archive/2012/08/31/le-suicide-de-ruysbroeck.html.

Dans cette grande tour de 28 étages, en plein cœur de Bruxelles, persiste le rêve d’un néolibéralisme mondial. Mais que reste-t-il d’effectif? À l’intérieur? Un bureau d’accueil en forme de globe terrestre qui demeure toujours vacant. Et à l’extérieur? Le mirage miroite toujours.

2. Thierry Demey, « Le Groupe Structures », dans Des gratte-ciel dans Bruxelles – La tentation de la ville verticale (Bruxelles : Badeaux, 2008), 84.

3. Georges Lebouc, « Architecte », Dictionnaire de Belgicismes (Éditions Racine : Bruxelles, 2006), 98-99.

Groupe Structures L’atelier d’architecture et d’urbanisme Groupe Structures est à l’origine des tours du WTC (1969-1974). Fondé après la Deuxième Guerre en 1949 par Jacques Bosseret-Mali, Raymond Stenier et Louis Van Hove, le groupe est ancré dans le courant fonctionnaliste à qui l’on doit quelquesunes des pires infamies architecturales de la bruxellisation. Le collectif opte pour une rationalisation excessive du mode de conception et de construction architectural. Matériaux usinés et structures préfabriqués, ils partagent avec le mouvement moderne une philosophie industrielle de l’architecture qui les mène à travailler sur des complexes administratifs et des infrastructures publiques.2 Fonctionnalisme, fonctionnaires: administration.

Schieven Architek! À Bruxelles, le terme architecte porte en lui de lourdes connotations péjoratives. L’insulte date de l’érection du Palais de Justice par l’architecte belge Joseph Poelaert (1817-1879) entre 1866 et 1883. Cette construction grandiose, élaborée par un homme aussi ingénieux que mégalomane, donna lieu à une vague d’expropriations et de démolitions de logements populaires situés dans les Marolles, forçant leurs résidants à s’exiler dans les lointaines communes d’Uccle et de Saint-Job. L’expression schieven architekt [architecte de travers] provient de la rage des citoyens déracinés qui ont vu leur quartier être littéralement écrasé par ce géant de pierre.

L’architecte lui-même, à qui on avait confié d’autres projets d’envergure tels que l’église Sainte-Catherine et le Théâtre de la Monnaie, mourut d’une « congestion du cerveau » avant d’avoir pu terminer sa dernière oeuvre, son génie l’ayant emporté dans la folie. La légende veut que ce soit un sort lancé par une sorcière des Marolles qui l’aurait rendu fou.3 L’architecte du XVe siècle Jan Van Ruysbroeck connut une fin tout aussi tragique. Il s’élança de la flèche de l’Hôtel de Ville de Bruxelles lorsqu’il constata avec stupeur qu’une des fenêtres de la tour gothique qu’il avait construite était décentrée. Il vint s’écraser contre les pavés de la Grande Place.4

Les tours jumelles En me dirigeant vers la sortie, je m’arrête devant un amas de clichés encadrés, des World Trade Centers des quatre coins du monde. Les cadres ont fini par perdre leur axe avec les années. On remarque facilement leur décalage en se servant de leur disposition en trio comme outil de mesure ou en observant les hautes tours comme s’il s’agissait de niveaux à bulle. Les photographies aux tons délavés dépeignent des zones urbaines aux allures utopiques sur lesquelles seront plus tard calqués les plans de revitalisation du Quartier Nord de Bruxelles, alors qu’on balayera la région, d’un revers de la main, pour y implanter quatre pieux de verre scintillant.

Seule une image détonne radicalement avec les autres. En la remarquant, je ne sais pas si je dois retenir un soupir ou un ricanement. Isolée du reste, elle semble siéger sur toutes les autres ou se tenir silencieusement en retrait. Je l’observe longtemps, sous différents angles pour éviter les

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Anne-Marie Trépanier

Anne-Marie TrĂŠpanier

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Yes, But How Much Water Does It Displace

Yes, but how much water does it displace? is an installation piece which explores ideas of place though material traces. The installation is comprised of hardwood flooring that was formerly used in a residential home, and that has been repurposed and inserted into a gallery. The composition results in a visual and historical layering of materials that adapt and fit into the space. They are however worn in and marked by stains, sun damage, and other remnants of its former life. The title alludes to a contradictory viewpoint of understanding materiality — in this case in a reductive way of thinking about materials simply as forms occupying volume (which can be measured by water displacement.)

This installation raises questions of material history and the capacity for abstract narratives to embed themselves in materials — histories that reveal themselves in the material’s marks of wear. Interested in how place and movement are made visible through these materials, Terrance Richard has reinstalled these floorboards differently from their previous layout, creating striking juxtapositions of light and dark in the noticeable stains and sun damage. These memories of local movements and arrangements of furniture, footsteps and spills, all function to recall its past domestic life. However, these markings remain unable to tell an unmediated story, as they have been removed from their original setting.

The maple hardwood used in the installation was of Canadian origin, sourced in Southport England though a Gumtree post (England’s popular free classified-ad website), and re-displayed in March 2015 in a gallery space in Leeds, England.

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Terrance Richard

Terrance Richard

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Wavespace

Wavespace invites you to play and explore.

With the goal of redesigning an existing memorial to create a mimetic public space, a playful landscape emerges to replace the memorial to sailors in the Old Port. The space features an abstracted sea; granite wave slices peel up to form a tiered and undulating landscape. The wave slices can be used for sitting, eating, playing, or skateboarding. By removing the solemnity of the original memorial play and curiosity are encouraged, drawing the users into the subject matter of the memorial, namely waves and the sea. The nearly flat waves are intended as a soft edge, inviting all ages and abilities into the space.

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Hannah Materne

This image is actually an object. See it by downloading and using the Anteism Press AR App on a smart phone or tablet.

Hannah Materne

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Living River

Living River transforms an empty lot in downtown Detroit into an oasis. This redesign aims to combat both the human and environmental water crises occurring in Detroit.

Despite water being a human right, water is repeatedly shut-off to residents unable to pay their bills. The water table continues to lower due to the widespread use of impenetrable surfaces such as concrete, which blocks the Earth’s natural water filtering systems.

Living River provides clean drinking water, via taps located under the lip of the illuminated boulders. Their lights increase safety in the park at night. The boulders, as well as dispensing water, are intended as play structures and benches, inspired by the designer’s time in Mossman River, Australia. By using pervious concrete and native ground cover, Living River represents a one hundred percent pervious park, allowing water to flow through it freely. This prevents harmful run-off and allows rainwater to pass through the park and re-enter the water table, filtering naturally in a process most other forms of concrete do not facilitate. Living River acts on the understanding of water as both a necessity and a pleasure, providing a calming, nature-inspired water access point.

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Hannah Materne

Hannah Materne

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Exceptional / Exceptionable Spaces

Symptomatic of the conditions of increasing migration flows, urban densification, shifting socio-political climates, war, disease, natural disasters, population growth, and market forces of global capital — exceptional spaces are springing forth globally in scale and form. The spatial fixities and topographies of urban space and their relation to shaping, inhibiting, aiding and transforming migration remain essential to understanding migration flows and diaspora patterns. Studying these patterns in relation to the urban environment affords the possibility of not only fostering interdisciplinary research, but also unpacking the conditions for an emerging network of methodologies for examining contemporary exceptional spaces. We will proceed by looking at four typologies to help us approach exceptional spaces: the parasitic and informal, resistance and survival. The “framing” of exceptional spaces in this context proceeds on the understanding that reference remains dynamic.

In no way do we presuppose a categorization or fixation on a particular feature or quality of what is under investigation.

Parasitic + Informal Spaces exist because of the relations between (sites) places at which events and objects (things) are located, occur, and expressed - the occurrence of these two relations is what manifests space(s). Invariably, alongside changing environmental conditions, spaces are shaped and constructed through social and material practices of people and things.

Since, according to Agnew, space provides the resources and frames of reference in which places are constructed, and people are an inherent part of how spaces take shape and become defined — exceptional spaces are specifically identifiable places that bear uniquely dynamic architectural and urban features, often connected by common struggles.1

Exceptional spaces cannot be identified as standalone entities.

Identification occurs relationally, through that which they remain juxtaposed to, namely the exceptionable. Spaces also function as “suppliers” and “by-products” of production, action, and exchange, as, for example, satellite settlements, “pop-up” villages and business and factory parks on the outskirts of cities. These remain dynamic and fluid within the landscape, yet inevitably parasitic to it. These spaces evolve from meeting the demands of the population in these urbanized areas while benefiting from alternative resources provided by the urban environment they are situated in. They remain, however, excluded from the urban from which they are fuelled and fuel.

The relationship between thriving urbanized cities and their byproducts is symbiotic rather than parasitic. The question remains: are the excluded suppliers and by-products parasites of the urban spaces or is the urbanized city a parasite of its suppliers? Moreover, the intimate transactions and exchange of physical material, information, and even populations between the included and excluded areas of the urban make the parasitical conditions reversible and conditional. Who is the parasite? What are the indicators of a parasitic space?

Shenzhen In Shenzhen, China, the term “urban villages” is familiar and often associated with cheap rent, over-crowding, substandard housing, and a variety of safety concerns. However, to renters and landlords, these highly centralized clusters of “urban villages” are goldmines. Being a special economic zone almost entirely reliant on migrant workforce, Shenzhen has a disproportionally huge demand for affordable housing as yet unfulfilled by city-initiated projects. Here the ‘urban villages’ 48

intervene in the system. Evolved from remaining agricultural land and transitioned to residential use over the long period of Shenzhen’s development, the building regulations of these sites are often vague.

Landowners are able to intensify and increase property value by building in-between existing apartment buildings, taking advantages of loose regulations long before the city establishes any official documentation.

The “urban village” phenomenon also betrays a unique economy.

Landowners became landlords with a handful of rental units as a result of un-regulated infill projects. Due to the huge demand for affordable housing by migrant workers, the annual income of a typical landlord in an “urban village” can hike up to billions of yuans. The landlord communities also have the option to incorporate their entire “urban village” teaming up with bigger real-estate investments for more return.

Renters are usually migrants with no permanent addresses, from hukou in Shenzhen. They favor the villages not only because of affordability, but also their proximity to CBDs and transportation nodes, and, inevitably, the vibrancy inside the high-density fabric. These villages may be eyesores at first glance, but there are no shortages of amenities, services and facilities. Ranging from a community health center to narrow streets filled with restaurants and shops, these “urban villages” are as well equipped as newer communities in their vicinity, only less expensive to live in.

Density and quality of housing are a major concern, again as a result of unregulated residential infill, yet the “urban villages” have become too costly to clean up. The amount of affordable housing units provided by “urban landlords” far exceeds the amount of units the city provides despite their poor quality. It seems fair to say that the problematic “urban villages” are parasitic. They feed off the city’s infrastructure and business districts, and in return they are the hosts of countless migrant workers who are actively constructing the future of cities like Shenzhen, whilst desperately needing homes that are affordable and livable.

Exceptional spaces, then, can be seen as parasitic to the conditions of global urbanization. What then is the exceptionable? Is it not that which is outstanding and even offensive to the status quo? In Shenzen, it is ultimately the exception to law, code, social and cultural standard. In the case of the urban we might then be speaking of spaces of resistance and dissent that are considered unlawful.

Resistance + Survival In contradistinction, we might say that the exceptionable is the comparative unit of analysis, the exclusive ‘authenticating extension’ that reveals something about the exceptional. It is this outer boundary of the exceptional that consequently reveals both the exceptionable and the exceptional space in question, as distinct and yet interrelated parts of the same whole, namely space and place. In this sense, upon careful inspection, exceptional and exceptionable urban spaces reveal something quite unique.

How should we do this? One way to identify an exceptional space would be to turn our focus towards global sites that remain “resistant” in some way. These sites retain common, yet dynamic features depending on the surrounding economic, socio-political or environmental conditions. For

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A nail house sits in the middle of a road under construction in Nanning, China http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32900601

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whether temporarily as manifestations of a deeper societal unrest (such as Tahrir Square, Zuccotti Park, or the Maidan in Ukraine) or enduring urban resistances (such as Torre David and Calais.) Today, resistance is perpetuated by a variety of architectural and urban components - as in the Calais migrant camp in France, or the slums on the outskirts of Sao Paulo and Dharavi, Mumbai, or the Sierre Madre Ghost Ship.

Under the pressure of urban and economic density, those attempting to survive within the spaces of the city are reacting by creatively constructing spaces that are seemingly natural “outgrowths” of current conditions, such as the self-built workers’ settlements sprawling on the roofs of Hong Kong’s high rise buildings, the once super-dense Kowloon Walled City, or life on the border of Tijuana and the United States of America. In this sense, exceptional spaces are stacked, wedged and liminal: these are architectural and urban spaces that remain markers of the not-too-distant, surrounding exceptionable space. In some cases, then, exceptional spaces can be whole cities, cities that are sites of “ruination” and abandonment, such as contemporary Detroit or the ghost towns of China, or the Chinese ghost towns in Mongolia or Africa, where people have either long packed up and gone, or never arrived at all. Under these conditions, what does survival mean?

Torre David Torre David is an unfinished forty-five-storey tower located in Caracas, Venezuela. The construction of what was to become Caracas’s new economic centre (Centro Financiero Confinanzas) began in 1990, but was suddenly interrupted in 1994 due to the death of the tower’s main investor, David Brillembourg, and Venezuela’s banking crisis. After the Tower had been abandoned for more than a decade, hundreds of citizens organized to take over and squat the concrete tower in 2007. At some point, up to 3000 people lived in Torre David up to the 28th floor, despite the fact that the building had no elevators, water or electricity, becoming the tallest squat in the world. On one of its sides, the tower’s glass façade had not been installed, exposing the concrete structure and gaping windows filled with brickwork constructed by the inhabitants.

Through its inhabitation, Torre David became, according to McGuirk, “neither a skyscraper, nor a slum, but some new kind of hybrid.’’2 Here, survival as a form of exceptional space is understood as a space emerging from a will to access primary needs such as a shelter and/ or other basic amenities. As slums are considered a “typical” form of informal settlements where the majority of people live in Caracas, Torre David becomes the exceptional space within those. Emerging as a vertical informal community, the typology that is Torre David does not exist elsewhere, it is uncommodified, illegal and certainly does not fit into any neoliberal definition of our contemporary world. Torre David was intended to be a very sophisticated symbol of capitalism, but the outcome is quite the opposite, an informal housing site appropriated by the poor. Justin McGuirk defines the tower effectively as “an emblem of speculative finance capitalism that has been taken over by those disenfranchised by the neoliberal policies of that era” — the poor.3

Exceptional Mobility - fleeting other spaces and places Numerous forces impinge upon people and prompt them to migrate (across landscapes and territories that are complex transnational urban spaces) and conglomerate in a given locality. One resulting consequence is an intensification of the density of a place within a given space especially within and on the periphery of contemporary global cities — for example, the hutment camps on the outskirts of El Ejido in Spain or Dubai. Again, consider the Calais camp, a modern geopolitical “waystation” of mobility where migrants either remain trapped in an urban liminal zone of exception with minimal resources, or attempt to rebuild their lives elsewhere. As Keller Easterling points out in Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture & Its Political Masquerades, “Desire and consumption are so addictive that the tourist is compelled to look for new territory, while the immigrant or refugee must travel to another territory to survive.”4 Emerging urbanisms break through and decenter existing frames of reference, forcing us to question whether the exceptional as exceptionable could also be the temporary and the mobile, such as migrant ships packed and abandoned by smugglers, turned away from their destination. Like many others adrift, these ships become mobile exceptional spaces of humanitarian crisis, socio-political turmoil and legal ambiguity.

Exceptional space in some instances aims towards nation building and border-extending practices. This can be demonstrated in revisiting the example of the numerous reef reclamation projects in the South China Sea and the sinking Sierra Madre ghost ship. Docked on a reef near the Second Thomas Shoal, located roughly 120 nautical miles from the coast of the Philippines, the ship is situated more than 800 nautical miles from the Chinese coast. The exceptional here is not just the standoff that ensues between the Chinese coast guard and a handful of Philippine mariners, but is the battle that is played out on an aging ship stranded in a reef. The conditions of this waiting game and resulting consequences determine the expanding geopolitical debate. Though this situation is unique, how many more like this will we see in the future — a blockaded fishing boat, another artificial island, a newly emerging ocean urbanism?

1. John Agnew, “Space and Place,” in Handbook of Geographical Knowledge, eds. J. Agnew and D. Livingstone (London: Sage, 2011), 19. See also Maria Rosa Antognazza, Leibniz: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). “Spaces exist because of the relations between (sites) places at which events and objects (things) are located, occur, and expressed - the occurrence of these two relations is what manifests space(s).” (Ibid.)

2. Justin McGuirk, “Torre David: A Pirate Utopia,” in Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture. (Verso, 2014), 176-179.

3. Ibid.

4. Keller Easterling, “El Ejido,” in Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture & Its Political Masquerades (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005), 55.

The tower in itself could also be defined as exceptionable in the sense that it is an isolated and isolating object, especially for the dwellers that live on the upper floors, further disconnected from the ground, this distance being decoupled through the absence of elevators. Throughout the years, dwellers self-organized the tower into a microcosm where all daily needs could be satisfied, from convenience stores to barbershops.

The alienating condition of the tower as “exceptional/exceptionable space” seems to unfold into an appropriation of the site where citizens try to re-create conditions of “normal” life through the use of wall papers, self-made partitions, decorations or curtains. Beyond an architectural phenomenon, Torre David represents a social phenomenon where citizens appropriate their city in an uncommon way, to fulfill their need for survival, thereby creating an exceptional space.

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Torre David. http://ideas.ted.com/communities-in-unexpectedplaces-from-iwan-baan/

Torre David. http://ideas.ted.com/communities-inunexpected-places-from-iwan-baan/

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Migrants’ camp in relation to the port of Calais and the Eurotunnel site www.bbc.com/news/uk-29074736v

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Thaly Crespin, Luisa Ji & Lee-Michael Pronko

Des migrants à l’assaut des camions sur l’autoroute qui mène au port de Calais, mercredi 17 septembre. Certains bloquent les poids lourds et retournent leur rétroviseur pour empêcher les chauffeurs de voir ce qui se passe à l’arrière.t www.parismatch.com/actu/societe/Calais-partir-a-tout-prix-599036

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Fountain House & the Ethics of Transkingdom Architectural Collaboration

As urban metropolises and indeed human populations continue to expand into the natural environment, the highly industrialized materials necessary to support this existence usurp resources utilized by animals, plants and organic matter within these landscapes. Artists and architects have been at the forefront of grappling with the inevitable consequences of this conquest of the natural world: from Land Art of the late 1960’s, when artists such as Nancy Holt, Robert Smithson and James Turrell concerned themselves with the natural elements and ideas of expansion, to today’s surge of BioArt, which includes cell manipulation, genetic engineering and the technological production of biomaterials. What these practices have in common is the employment of another kingdom; that is to say not solely Animalia, in which the human condition resides, but Plante, Fungi and/ or one of the three microscopic kingdoms defined by taxonomy.1 The breadth of such transkingdom collaborations is vast and begs to be surveyed by a qualified and highly ambitious research team, however my hope here is to merely enliven questions of ethics and consider the responsibility of architects working with living matter. I have chosen to focus on the temporary architectural sculpture Fountain House, designed by Berlin architecture collective Raumlabor that exhibited in downtown Montreal in the summer of 2014. By considering the objectives of Fountain House as described by Raumlabor, I will situate the work’s public reception in relation to its post-exhibition afterlife (or afterdeath as it be) to consider the ethical responsibility of transkingdom collaboration.

Raumlabor emerged as a collective entity at that fertile moment of transition from student to practitioner. The member base, which today includes: Andrea Hofmann, Axel Timm, Benjamin Foerster-Baldenius, Christof Mayer, Florian Stirnemann, Francesco Apuzzo, Frauke Gerstenberg, Jan Liesegang, Markus Bader and Matthias Rick had for the most part all moved to Berlin to study architecture. A small atelier shared by several of the members became the catalyst for collective work and eventually led to the unification of their experimental architecture firm. Their practice lies at the “intersection of architecture, city planning, art and urban intervention.”2 Projects such as Junipark — in which a youth survey about living conditions in Berlin shaped the program for a month-long multi-disciplinary festival that resulted in urban renewal proposals designed by and carried out by the youth — are emblematic of their commitment to community involvement and relational methods of architecture. Indeed, survey texts such as Nato Thompson’s Living as Form: Social Engaged Art from 1991-2011 or Nicolas Bourriaud’s canonical text Relational Aesthetics would be keen to include the work of Raumlabor. According to Raumlabor’s website, they “do not solve problems, rather initiate processes that give actors the opportunity to know, understand and use the city and its dynamics, as well as its possibilities.”3 Or as art historian Niklas Maak describes, “the utopian spirit of bricolage that characterizes all of these projects demonstrates a new understanding of what architecture can be.

Instead of being static, everlasting, inflexible and expensive, it can be removable, mobile, a stage for all kinds of scenarios.”4 This emphasis on process helps explain the ephemerality of much of Raumlabor’s work. Nevertheless, these statements beg the question of who exactly are the actors imbedded in such cross-disciplinary, relational and/or collaborative methodologies?

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I’d like to foreground these questions by briefly introducing a key theoretical position from which I’m approaching this analysis: the posthuman predicament of which philosopher and feminist theorist Rosi Braidotti has been an important contributor. According to Braidotti, the posthuman subject is not confined within its species; it includes all nonanthropomorphic elements. She considers it a monistic philosophy — one that unifies all living matter while rejecting dualisms, especially those that exist between nature and culture.5 However, the tendency to anthropomorphize non-human subjects risks confirming binary distinctions between organisms. It also denies the specificity of the non-human other altogether. My hope here is not to blindly encourage or simply recontextualize a transkingdom ethical criterion but to acknowledge the relationships within animal, plant and fungi kingdoms as unique in their own right.

With this in mind, let us turn to Raumlabor’s temporary architectural installation, Fountain House or La maison fontaine, 2014. The thirtyfoot tall, two-story cylindrical wooden structure was installed at the corner of Sainte Catherine Street and Clark Street in downtown Montreal — an ‘undeveloped’ site thwarted by city negotiations.6 This is just the kind of space that attracts Raumlabor: “places torn between different systems, time periods or planning ideologies, that can not adapt. Places that are abandoned, left over or in transition that contains some relevance for the processes of urban transformations.”7 Open to the public for its three-month duration, Fountain House was designed with overlapping archways leading to a centralized “rainwater” installation. The water pooled in a basin where it was redistributed as vaporous clouds. The walls were made of a living “skin” that consisted of grass and mushrooms — constantly growing and changing over the course of the exhibition. The space also functioned as a venue, hosting sanctioned performances that engaged sound, light and performative elements as well as numerous impromptu public happenings. According to Raumlabor member Markus Bader, the desire to construct Fountain House was to “provide a celebratory endpoint to this infrastructure that the water is in the city.”8 Given its conception as a space of generosity, in which visitors can acknowledge and indeed enjoy access to clean water, Bader sees the work as a “democratic luxury.”9 Just as those who entered its environment could drink from the rainwater fountain, the plants and mushrooms thrived on the moisture it provided. These included a variety of grasses as well as a species of edible Pleurotus, commonly known as Oyster mushroom, which according to Bader was intended to provide a harvestable food source to the viewer/ participant. My observations conclude that this urban wild-crafting aspect of the work may have gone unrecognized — prime fruiting bodies were continually left to decompose as they would in the forest.

Consequently, this staging of a mushroom’s life cycle integrated in a work of architecture, introduced viewers to the fecundity, veracity and

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explored this facet in a work called Unfolding Cul-de-sac, 2004, in which he inoculated Agaricus bitorquis (also known as “sidewalk” or “pavement” mushroom) under a layer of asphalt. Over the course of the exhibition, the mushroom decomposed, broke up and fruited through the asphalt — a notorious feat well documented in cities of the Northern Hemisphere.10 Fountain House, instead of punctuating the urban regressive undertones of fungi fruiting in the urban landscape, highlighted their disposition to coexist in transkingdom relationships if given the opportunity.

Overall, the work received much critical acclaim for the questions it raised about the relationship between nature and the built environment.

Given its predetermined impermanence, how are we to think about the work’s inherent nurturing of life — both plant and mushroom?

If, as Michael Marder has proposed in his philosophical deliberation Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life, plants have their own temporality, freedom and wisdom (and I extend his notion to include mushrooms), then what is the responsibility of artists and architects who engage in transkingdom collaboration? When the exhibition closed, I was witness to much of the three-day takedown process of Fountain House, where I learned the wooden structural component had been sold (albeit outside of an art context) thus carefully salvaged, while the mélange of wood scrapes and organic matter was seen hauled away in dumpsters.11 American artist Mark Dion, in “Some Notes Towards a Manifesto for Artists Working With or About the Living World”, writes that artists “must take responsibility for the plants’ or animals’ welfare. If an organism dies during an exhibition, the viewer should assume the death to be the intention of the artist.”12 Dion, who is well known as an advocate for wildlife conservation and preservation, while attempting to define an accountability for transkingdom art, unfortunately binds the artist’s responsibility to an imposed timeline — that of the exhibition in which a transkingdom collaboration takes place. Fountain House provided ample water, nutrients, and due respect to the plants and mushroom throughout the duration of the exhibition and only at its close delegated the fate of these organisms. On paper, Raumlabor effectively fulfilled Dion’s proposed parameters.

For those readers who — whether unfamiliar with posthuman discourse or more generally ambivalent or unsentimental about plant and fungi kingdoms — are not sympathetic of what I believe to be a problematic disposal of living matter, especially given that it transpired in the shadow of its limelight as an artwork, I will briefly introduce an example that stands to be more controversial from a traditional humanist standpoint.

If you are not intrigued by the posthuman predicament, please entertain the idea of equality across species, animal and otherwise. If you are unwilling, read no more.

In 2011, Belgian artist Tuur van Balen in collaboration with biochemist James Chappell synthesized bacteria that when fed to pigeons would make them defecate soap. The work is called Pigeon d’Or and consists of photo documentation; a registration of their new biobrick with the Registry of Standard Biological Parts; and a series of “speculative objects” such as an interface between pigeons and the windshield of a car, as well as a “contraption that allows these pigeons to become part of your house, part of the architecture.”13 The latter allowed for constant management of wild pigeons by enabling one to feed the birds and then direct their exit route, thus managing their function as soap applicators or as van Balen describes, to “[facilitate] bespoke urban disinfection.”14 To develop an ethical criterion for van Balen’s work is a complex and a rather subjective matter. Are we to address the pigeons, the living bacteria, the people and organisms effected by the production and distribution of soap, or does the project’s frame as an artwork somehow protect this transkingdom collaboration as an experiment of sorts? Van Balen positions himself somewhere in the realm of posthumanism:

fractions; tiny and yet intrinsically linked into an organic embroidery beyond our understanding. It is within this complex fabric that (future) biotechnologies will end up.14 Raumlabor too is keen to the implications of their cross-species employment and depict Fountain House as a micro ecosystem: Besides being a public place of interaction and interchange, the fountain house is a place to celebrate life. It lives with the water, the fundamental element of all. The skin of the building is more than just a shelter or an enclosure. It lives and changes. Plants, funghi [sic] and small organisms create their own small biological habitat on the outside, as well as the inside of the fountain house.15 As with much of Raumlabor’s work, ephemerality is central to this experimental architectural project. Indeed only its documentation remains, functioning as a relic within the artistic discourse in which it came to fruition. Meanwhile, the plants and mushrooms — despite having been celebrated during their short-lived performance — have withered away in neglect as they often do in our normalized anthropocentric worldview. While I hold Raumlabor, and the current scope of art and architectural discourse culpable for the death of these living organisms I do not wish to direct any blame — it is but a signpost in the evolution of today’s nature-culture continuum and reflects the need for an expanded vocabulary in discussing collaborative art.

1. The use of taxonomy in my research resonates with that of American artist Mark Dion: “Taxonomy, i.e. the classification of the natural world, whilst a useful tool, is a system of order imposed by man and not an objective reflection of nature. Its categories are actively applied and contain the assumptions, values and associations of human society.” Mark Dion, “Some Notes Towards a Manifesto for Artists Working With or About the Living World,” in The Greenhouse Effect, eds. Ralph Rugoff and Lisa G. Corrin (London: Serpentine Gallery, 2000).

2. “Raumlabor,” accessed 11 January 2016, http://raumlabor.net/statement/#more-62.

3. Ibid.

4. Niklas Maak, “A New Approach to Urbanity,” in Raumlabor: Acting in Public, eds. Julia Maier and Matthias Rick (Berlin: Jovis Verlag, 2008), 5.

5. Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2013).

6. I hesitate to use the word “undeveloped”, because its relevancy is contrived to a perspective of urban planning. In fact, if one is to acknowledge the plethora of organisms that have already evacuated this space for it to be considered an “empty plot”, we begin to see that the city block is highly developed.

7. “Raumlabor.”

8. “The Fountain House in Montreal. Interview with Markus Bader (Raumlabor Berlin),” YouTube video, 3:46, published by Goethe-Institut Montréal, 26 August 2015, accessed 11 January 2016, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=U22FkeG5vaQ. 9. Ibid.

10. Dario Ré, “Fungiculture in Contemporary Art,” (paper delivered at the Flux & Flow conference at Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, 28 March 2015).

11. Interview with the foreman of Premia Solutions Inc., 29 October 2014.

12. Dion, “Some Notes,” 66.

13. Revital Cohen and Tuur van Balen, “Pigeon d’or,” accessed 11 January 2016, http://www. cohenvanbalen.com/work/pigeon-dor.

14. Ibid.

15. “The Fountain House in Montreal. Interview with Markus Bader (Raumlabor Berlin).”

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Les Archipels Imaginaires II

The world in which humans evolve is material.

I reflect upon a human’s place in inhabited space, more or less densely populated and constructed. I inquire into the materials through which we get to look at it, grasp it, and discover it. Although human destiny is closely tied to ones living space, it tends to only serve as a scenery for our lives. However, at the very beginning, space is claimed through the action of walking. It is my contention that walking, explored through strolling, wandering, and a nomadic lifestyle is essential in the process of appropriating space.

It allows to reach a balance, an osmosis, both spiritual and physical, individual and collective. First, my approach consists of wandering, drawing a line into space. Wandering allows one to establish an intimate relationship with the space they cross through a multitude of elements — forms, lightings, colours, sounds, smells. During this wandering, a psychic and physical transformation operates and modifies our perception of space. It leads us to look at the travelled landscape with a contemplative and qualitative eye. I intend to urge the viewer experience this transformation by transposing the physical process of wandering into the pictorial space of my work, paintings and drawings.

In the modern city, the practice of cartography through a scientific and mathematic approach gives us a quantitative representation of the territory in order to make our daily routine efficient. In my artistic approach, my interest in using and revisiting cartographic methods to reproduce my experience of space comes from the fact that cartography also has the power of transforming the viewer’s eye to make them see another reality of the world, and of themselves. It is a tool that appeals to fiction through the imagination of those who conceive maps as well as those who look at them. In this way, the viewer can make the work’s pictorial space their own and give life, through their imagination, to a mental space where a multitude of stories are possible. In a different way, and through a different process, the viewer experiments the same mechanisms of transformation and appropriation at work during the wandering process.

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Kévin Pinvidic

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The Vertical Forest, Milan, Italy & The Pencil Tip, Seattle, WA

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Michelle Gagnon-Creeley

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Digital Architectural Environments: Perceptual Experiences of Translation Between The Physical & The Virtual

Digital architectural environments propose a place where space and time are perceived through a constant negotiation between physical and virtual realms. They explore the effects that technology and media have on the experience of the body within ‘other’ spaces and times. As the body is subjected to multiple physical and virtual spaces, it is in a state of constant translation. Thus digital architectures generate the need for a re-structuralization of space. Through the mediation of technology, we fabricate our own spaces with no boundaries between fact and fiction.

Computers, equipment and software have afforded interventions in architecture and reality that have contributed to the undeniable shift in how we experience spaces — advances that raise questions about the effects of technology on these experiences.

Architecture and the built environment are now experienced digitally as a “second life,” as an illusion of depth through stereoscopic technology, and as a network of multiple distant and digital spaces that have become our virtual realities. Keeping in mind that “architecture is permanent by nature, and new media is transient by definition”;1 access to experiencing spaces through mediated technology inevitably increases questions about the ways that inhabitation, understanding and perception of architecture, space, culture and art have and are changing. How do artists, architects and institutions adapt to these changes? What happens when artistic activities abandon physical materiality and take form as digital files and documents, experienced outside a physical space?

Technology and Space More than just a functional tool of making, technology turns into a dreaming device and resource that allows for the staging of infinite potentialities. Through technology, the projection and production of possible “futures” becomes an accessible way to stimulate the imagination. It is necessary to expand the definition of technology in order to include the Roman notion of machines of leisure for no specific purpose.2 By using technology as a tool of experimentation, one can simulate a state of disembodiment and dislocation . This introduces a parallel virtuality as an alternative reality. Here lies the power of technology to create illusion by framing external realities, and claiming their presence as real as they are perceived.

Technology’s effect does not provide answers or solutions but ambiguities between what is taken as truth and what is taken as fiction.

Keeping in mind that “resolutions” can be a danger to free perception, declarations of absolute “real truths” should be discouraged.3 It is important to continue negotiating spaces through constant translations of truth. In a digital architectural experience, the key is to maintain movement between perceptual realms (physical and virtual), as they are indistinguishable from each other, and yet, are insignificant without each other. Digital technology is present in the experience and presentation of physical and virtual spaces. Previous conventions of space are challenged, awaking and confusing the senses as well as our perception of place.

Places are the physical restrictions of space, marked through preconceived understandings of how we inhabit them and how they 70

inhabit us. Such spaces offer potential for “other” spaces, understood through past memories, present states and imagined futures. Spaces emerge depending on the physical or mental acts that unfold within a specific place. Many spaces can be generated or dissolved within a static place. Such explorations of space can activate potential experiences of architecture and environments. Cities, for example, have been constructed as social experiments that are bound to nostalgia and melancholy, unable to let go of the past.4 Such physical cities have been limited by the previous and current knowledge of the body within places. Limited by the comfort of the known and the constant borrowing of the past.

Furthermore, it can be argued that art — as it is a direct by-product of contemporary understandings of space and time — has been limited by the known spaces of its experience and presentation, to an extent. Work is limited to the space, rather than space opening up the potentialities of the work or the work opening up the potentialities of the architecture. As such, art and architecture reframe the experience of both as multiple representations of themselves—translated and mediated through digital technology, and creating illusions of space that elude the physicality of the places in which they are contained.

Virtuality and the Body Real, physical spaces have always existed in simultaneity with virtual spaces of translation. In fact, physical and virtual spaces can only exist symbiotically, as one cannot exist without the other. These shared spaces are where multiple physical and corporeal places connect and coexist.

The real and virtual becomes all and none at the same time. Virtuality has developed to be more than just a mere copy of real material space.

The virtual has been theorized as a simulacrum that, as social theorist and philosopher Brian Massumi asserts, “affirms its own difference and goes against the copy of the model in order to open a new space.”5 This is not only achieved through the assistance of digital media, but also through the potential of infinitudes of the mind; the dynamic emergence of memories, thoughts, wishes and illusions. This state of dynamic potentialities of space is full of perceptual and sensorial depth.

The looping existence of real and virtual creates a constant perception of multiple layers of them and their translations.

Santiago Tavera

Perceptual planes of dynamic notions of multiple spaces (top) within a contained place (bottom)

Illusion of spatial depth through translational symmetry - 2D and 3D

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Through the motion of translation between realms, the space in-between becomes its own perceptual experience. The body and the sense of a multiple-self, rather than split or doubled, exists in a constant motion between spaces. If this perception of the physical, of the body and of space is limited by the previous understanding of them, then digital technology can assist in their approximate translation. A state that has the ability to make the connections between the physical and digital more visible. The combination of the physical present place and the imaginative space disembodies participants, as they are situated within a delirious state of translation, thus challenging the notion of perception and the limits of the self. These changing contexts will challenge both architects and artists to think of space, the city, the experience of it, and the creation of it differently. Ultimately proposing a transposition of “spatial relations into temporal ones.”6 Social interactions develop beyond proximal sites and expand to infinite networks of multiple spaces and times.

1. Elizabeth Diller, “Eyebeam: Interview with Diller Scofidio + Renfro,” http://www.arcspace.com/ features/diller-scofidio--renfro/eyebeam/.

2. Jeanne Randolph, “Influencing Machines: The Relationship Between Art and Technology,” in Influencing Machines (Toronto: YYZ Artist’s Outlet, 1984), 8-9.

3. Ibid., 16.

4. Nikos Papastergiadis, “The Production of Spaces in Art,” in Spatial Aesthetics: Art, Place, and the Everyday (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2010), 77.

5. Brian Massumi, “Realer than Real: The Simulacrum According to Deleuze and Guattari,” Copyright 1 (1987): 91.

6. Elizabeth Grosz, “Cyberspace, Virtuality, and the Real: Some Architectural Reflections,” in Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001), 87-88.

7. Brian James Schumacher, “Potential of the City: The Interventions of the Situationist International and Gordon Matta-Clark,” (PhD diss. University of California dissertation, 2008), 31.

8. Jorge Luis Borges, “La Doctrina de los Circlos,” in Historia de la Eternidad (Madrid: Alianza Publishers, 1971), 33-34.

Digital Architectural Environments Digital architectural environments induce a state within the psychogeographical spatial experience where time is suspended and ultimately detached from reality.7 The perspective of being at once everywhere, nowhere, spaceless and dimensionless, undoubtedly allows us to formulate a different consciousness of the world.

Digital architectures enable understandings and ideas within a restructuralization and re-formation of space. Framing architecture through line and colour opens up a narrative of feeling, seeing and experiencing space differently. Reflective structures and designs imposed within architectural places confront the digital while expanding and multiplying it, blurring the lines of spatial and temporal dimensions, 2D and 3D, and finally physical actuality and virtual potentiality.

These spaces of translation are dynamic and formal places where the simultaneity of the real and fictional is emphasized. They are physical, animated and spatial collages that repeat infinitely. These translations are where processes of repetition, transformation and identification occur. When in a state of translation, the self remains in the cyclical space of the infinite and intangible present; the future never happens as such and the past is lost.8 Viewers constantly reformulate, project and recalculate the self in the present, where fragments of time are not lost but rather carefully selected. Instead of being constructed in a linear path, time becomes an infinite invisible city that builds itself repeatedly.

Time becomes visible only by the traces left of places and subjects, as outlines of their movements and existence.

These digital architectural environments collapse binaries into a single place, perpetually in motion while remaining still (dynamic stasis), visible and invisible, dark and luminous. Within the space there is no hybridity or fusion but rather a coexistence of “origins” in the process of translation, communicating and moving side by side, around each other or within each other, in an alternative eternal multi-temporal and multi-spatial architectural reality. Like in mathematics and physics, translational symmetry affirms that an object or subject remains the same even after shifting its locations and previous position, rendering the object and subject multiple — and ultimately infinite.

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Santiago Tavera

This image is actually an object. See it by downloading and using the Anteism Press AR App on a smart phone or tablet.

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Los Angeles River

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NoĂŠmie Despland-Lichert

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Todd Saunders’ Long Studio: Reframing Newfoundland Landscape & Cultural Identity Through Architecture

The Long Studio by Canadian born architect stationed in Norway, Todd Saunders, is a modern construction that coexists with three other similar works occupying the remote Fogo Is-land in Newfoundland. Completed in 2010, the studio is part of a collaborative project with the Fogo Island Arts Corporation and the Shorefast Foundation to revitalize the island’s local community and traditions as a proactive response to a diminishing population, economy, and fishing culture.1 Within the island’s scenic landscape, Saunders constructs a structural image that complements the textures and movements found in the surrounding nature. While the Long Studio plays an integral role in the social and cultural efforts towards reviving the island’s identity, it also stands independently as a commemoration to the topographical qualities unique to northern regions. By synthesizing notions of scenic landscape, Nordic regionalism, and modernity within a Canadian context in which the region’s social and cultural realities reside, the Long Studio represents both a modern attraction and a vernacular extension of the island’s community and landscape.

Although the abstract modern structure of Saunders’ Long Studio appears at first disparate from the quintessential architectural customs of the Maritime region, it incorporates materials and construction techniques idiomatic to the area. The studio itself is located nearest to the town of Joe Batt’s Arm on Fogo Island (fig. 1), yet it bears many architectural resemblances to the historic buildings of Tilting, which is a small village on the eastern end of the island.2 The studio’s long horizontal structure recalls the open floors of the fishing stages that facilitate air circulation and, in the case of the Long Studio, maximizes the amount of wall and floor space (fig. 2).3 In addition, the stilts supporting the front part of the studio facing the ocean are a component historically employed by locals to prevent water damage and to allow over-water construction.4 As architect Robert Mellin observes, Canadian maritime houses and outbuildings built as early as the nineteenth century are constructed on foundations called “wooden shores or dagger shores [that] create the impression not unlike the many legs of some insects.”5 While this piloti foundation of the studio prevents damage from the ocean waters adjacent to the structure, the entrance end of the studio is built on a concrete foundation, which is an efficient and more contemporary method of anchoring the structure to the ground.6 In addition to water damage prevention, the elevated construction of the studio evades the irregular rocky surfaces of the site that visually contrast the uniform linearity and geometric form of the studio.

The topography of the surrounding landscape plays a significant role in establishing the studio as both a site of attraction, and an architectural lens that captures the island’s Atlantic scenery. The coastal setting is representative of the northern Atlantic elements, composed of jagged rocks and powerful waters that embody a wild, remote, and almost inhospitable scenery. This wild terrain inherently juxtaposes the modern, monochrome appearance of the studio, which at first glance would fit more appropriately in a populated urban setting. However, unlike a large edifice crowding a cityscape, this studio is an unobtrusive structure with 80

the simple intention of framing the view of its dramatic surrounding.

As meteorological and seasonal changes in this habitat unfold, the studio remains a fixed platform for witnessing such occurrences. Its elevation above the ground enables an ideal perspective while its threepart design parallels the climate’s cyclical changes.7 The visitor enters the studio through an open but covered area associated with the warm but rainy spring weather. The open outdoor space continues through to a roofless section accommodating the summer sun. The visitor finally enters an interior space through glass doors that ensures an enclosed, protected environment for colder months. In this sense, the studio instills a visual and visceral connection to the wilderness through the large windows at both ends and through the roof skylight.8 The studio’s interplay between openness and enclosure beckons visitors to move through the space, allowing both observation of the landscape from the inside and immersion within it from the outside.

This correlation between the northern landscape and the studio’s construction parallels Scandinavian modernist attitudes that Saunders would be familiar with in Norway. In the early stages of Scandinavian modernism, a principle text called “acceptera” from 1931 stated that “While physical life is today characterized by its optimism and desire to push ahead, the aestheticism of ‘cultural preservation’ is increasingly turning into a downright defensive movement.”9 This idea of cultural preservation, surrounding the role of architecture in our built-environment, can be applied to the use of architecture as a means of preserving Fogo Island’s traditions and community. While both the fishing culture and the Newfoundland landscape are themselves important aspects to the region’s character, the very architectural environment of Fogo’s small town is emblematic of the population’s lifestyle, local history, and iconic coastal image. The Scandinavian modernist principles articulated in “acceptera” that value and utilize regional land is thus reflected in Saunders’ studios. The Long Studio may not look like the traditional houses in the region, but its use of local resources in a wood slat frame conforms to vernacular Newfoundland structures.10 This equally applies to the peculiar forms of Saunders’ other studios in the project including the Squish Studio, the Tower Studio, and the Bridge Studio. All four of these structures were envisioned under a common goal of preserving the island’s cultural and economic integrity, while existing simultaneously as an aesthetically captivating collective of modern units.

Sienna MacArthur

Figure 1. Bent Rene´Synnevåg, Fogo Island Long Studio, 2010. © Bent Rene´Synnevåg. ArchDaily. http://www.archdaily.com/?p=95325

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Fig. 2 Bent Rene´Synnevåg, Fogo Island Long Studio [entrance], 2010. © Bent Rene´Synnevåg. ArchDaily. http://www.archdaily.com/?p=95325

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Alternatively, the vernacular qualities of northern material, technique, and landscape with which Saunders imbues his studios can collectively be considered a product of critical regional-ism. Negotiating between the universal advancements of rational modernism and the cultural roots of a nation, critical regionalism is an architectural practice that represents a cultural approach towards building place rather than space. Kenneth Frampton clearly distinguishes this from vernacular architecture as it is a more contemporary manifestation that explores various architectural languages within a specific geographical and cultural context.11 In the north-Atlantic environment of Fogo Island, Saunders uses a sympathetic language to express his commitment to Nordic modernism. His studios architecturally adopt a geographic significance through their structural form and material. They also adopt cultural significance through their participation in an active restoration of the island’s Newfoundland heritage. The Long Studio’s unique aesthetic interacts with the striking topography and climate of Newfoundland distinct from the dense, woodsy regions of mainland Canada. In this sense, it appropriates site-specific elements of critical regionalism. Despite the studio’s application of local climate control methods, it clearly exhibits a modern design that visually juxtaposes the island’s humble vernacular houses often built on a hall-and-parlour plan that incorporates a timber frame construction, wooden shingles and clapboards, picket fencing, a gable roof, and a brick chimney.12 The aesthetic of a regional structure cannot be evaluated solely in terms of its material authenticity, but must also be evaluated in terms of its contribution to the enviro-socio-cultural context in which it is integrated.

In describing the development of a critical self-consciousness in regionalist architecture, Frampton asserts that such buildings “may find [their] governing inspiration in such things as the range and quality of the local light, or in a tectonic derived from a peculiar structural mode, or in the topography of a given site.”13 Through its low horizontal form, monochrome surface, and floor to ceiling windows, the Long Studio presents an integrated image that performs a role in shaping the surrounding landscape and, consequently, ones perception of it. Instead of exposed wood surfaces, the painted black exterior and white interior of the studio mirror the flux of sunlight and darkness throughout the island’s seasonal cycle. Its flat roofline parallel to the ground beneath it contributes to its horizontality, minimizing its obtrusion. The sleek structure may seem visually incongruous within a vernacular context.

Yet within the framework of critical regionalism, its modern inclination signifies a progressive effort towards renewing the island’s socioeconomic circumstances, while still honouring traditional architectural customs. In response to the region’s recent demographic and economic changes, that have destabilized the seemingly immutable cultures of Fogo, the Long Studio and its neighbouring structures merge with the landscape as conscious reinforcements of a regenerated, cultivated regional identity. The integration of these studios in the landscape cannot be complete without the simultaneous presence of the visitor who can experience nature through visual immersion.15

1. Joseph Grima, “Architectural Archipelago,” Domus (2011): 49-50.

2. Robert Mellin, “Conservation in Tilting, Newfoundland: Rugged Landscape, Strong People, Fragile Architecture,” APT Bulletin 3, no. 2/3 (2006): 13.

3. Ibid., 14.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. “Fogo Island Long Studio / Saunders Architecture,” ArchDaily, 13 December 2010, accessed 23 November 2014, http://www.archdaily.com/?p=95325.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

9. Uno Ahrén, et al., eds., “Acceptera,” in Modern Swedish Design: Three Founding Texts (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2008), 281.

10. Rima Suqi, “Putting Artists in the Elements,” The New York Times, 28 October 2010.

11. Ibid.

12. Peter Ennals and Deryck Holdsworth, “Vernacular Architecture and the Cultural Landscape of the Maritime Prov-inces — A Reconnaissance,” Acadiensis 10, no. 2 (1981): 88-91.

13. Frampton, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance,” in Labour, Work and Architecture (New York: Phaidon Press Limited, 2002), 82.

14. Frampton, “Critical Regionalism: Modern Architecture and Cultural Identity,” in Modern Architecture, 4th ed. (London: Thames and Hudson, 2007), 315.

15. Ibid., 327.

The environmental idiosyncrasies of this Atlantic coastal region are the underlying force behind the human and cultural values of the small towns on Fogo Island, which is what Saunders attempts to physically recreate in his studio project. The Long Studio is the product of a mutual ideal that the architect and proponents of Fogo’s cultural heritage constructed in anticipation of a more prosperous and vital future for the region.

Aside from its cultural connotations, the studio viscerally moulds itself within the landscape but does not remain completely inconspicuous.

The simultaneous act of viewing and physically experiencing one’s natural surroundings is enabled through the unadorned, open ended, yet enclosed structure. Within a modern and regionalist con-text, the work ultimately encapsulates the simple creativity behind innovation in addition to situating itself alongside the striking appearance and arduous conditions of Fogo’s Newfoundland environment.

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The Rural Is An Interruption: No One Speaks

Enterprising on the economic and political changes that China has undergone in the last three decades, the built environment of China’s countryside has been designed to exert control over its inhabitants. Through ghostly and culturally lacking buildings built on low budgets where the individual identity has been surrendered. With the rise of modernity in urban centers — the rural landscape has been exiled. Despite being dotted with structures and symbols of China’s modern future, the landscape of the rural has become eerily borderless — bleeding back into the urban. Spatial and historical layers obscure features that once differentiated the past and present lives of its inhabitants.

The rural is an interruption. As national powers attempt to veil the imperfect past, the rural culture and environment resembles blotches on a mirror. Obstructing the desired reflection of a new political, social, and cultural order, that no amount of erasing can rid.

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Le Corbusier & The Return To Earth

On 14 June 1940, with the German invasion of northern France underway, Le Corbusier fled to Ozon, a small Pyrenees village, with his wife Yvonne and his cousin Pierre.1 It was there, in an abandoned farmhouse, that LC and Pierre Jeanneret drafted the designs for a series of log cabins called the Maisons “Murondins.”2 These designs, to which I henceforth refer simply as the “murondins,” as does LC, were never realized and have largely been neglected by scholars.3 A possible reason for this neglect is that the murondins appear, at first glance, to be anomalies in the architect’s oeuvre; adhering neither to his techno-utilitarian ambitions of the twenties and thirties, nor foreshadowing the humanist spiritualism which characterizes his later work.

As Michel Foucault writes in his essay, “What is an Author?” one of the primary qualities sought in exegesis is consistency, or at least, a traceable narrative of evolution.4 The problem, as with any teleological approach, is that the approach necessarily excludes any works which deviate from the constructed narrative of authorial evolution. However, in this paper, I argue that the murondins are not incongruous with LC’s other domestic projects,either philosophically, politically, or practically.

Specifically, I propose that the murondins were one logical conclusion of LC’s lifelong quest to invoke a lifestyle of almost monastic asceticism through a return to origins of architecture as responsive structure.

The Maisons Murondins were designed as modest temporary dwellings, based on a rectangular plan three meters wide by seven meters deep.

That said like LC’s other housing projects, such as the Maison Domino and the Maison Loucheur, the design could easily accommodate abutment and widening, for a variety of different purposes.5 Indeed, the version on which I focus — probably intended as a single family dwelling — is approximately eight and a half meters by seven meters, having been based on two cells plus an addition (fig. 1). One would enter the home into a small communal area, with a table and some shelves. Immediately to the left would be an integrated storage unit, doubling as a partition wall between the communal area and one of the sleeping nooks. Joining this first cell to the second one is a small corridor, providing access to the ventilated water closet, which features a basic, non-hydraulic toilet.6 Beyond the water closet lies the second cell, which serves as a dormitory for four people.

Reading the section and elevations, one sees that the dwelling rose to a maximum of 6.3m, and featured a disjointed pitched roof, to allow for illumination a clerestory.7 The clerestory, and windows in each room were essential for the provision of light in a dwelling which would presumably not have had electricity. LC notes in his 1942 book, Les Maisons “Murondins”, that industrial materials, like glass, had to be avoided. Therefore, it is unclear if he intended to employ a shutter system.

The rest of the murondins was also to be constructed using humble materials. Each unit was to be set on shallow, concrete foundations, filled with rammed earth, a technique which came to France via the Romans.8 The walls were also to be constructed using an earthen technology common to France: compressed earth blocks (CEBs)9 measuring twenty centimetres by forty centimetres by twenty centimetres.10 CEBs have long been considered to be the most versatile of earthen construction materials, partly because of their strength and also because of their manufacturing speed. Unlike mud bricks, which must cure for at least a week, CEBs can be used right out of the press.11 Finally, the roof was to be made of logs or bundled twigs, where sturdy 90

timber was scarce. These rafters would be covered in lattice, plaster and thatch.12

Although these materials and techniques seem crude and antiquated, compared with those of the burgeoning International Style,13 they were not uncommon.14 Edwin Lutyens, Adolf Loos, Hermann Muthesius, and even Frank Lloyd Wright all explored earthen construction in the thirties and forties.15 The primary reasons were that earth was cheap and readily available. However, Jean-Louis Cohen asserts that the use of “poor” materials was not a technical regression in the least. On the contrary the use of such materials demanded tremendous innovations to make them suitable.16 Many of these designs responded to longstanding housing shortages, and to destruction caused by bombardment during the Second World War.17 The problem was particularly acute in France, where poor urban planning and legislation leading up to the war, had caused the number of buildings in disrepair to skyrocket from 150,000 in 1911 to 2,800,000 in 1939.18 That crisis was only aggravated by the influx of refugees from Belgium and Holland, following the German invasions. The German invasion of France also exacerbated the situation; not only did France lose 403,000 buildings,19 but it was also forced to dedicate to its resources to the German war effort.20 The strength of the murondins was their practicality. LC envisioned a construction which could be completed by non-professional labour using materials found on a given site. Such materials included earth, sand, logs, branches, sod, et cetera. Indeed the name of the project derives from “mur” and “rondins” — that is, from “wall” and “round logs.”21 Thus, the murondins were not so different from the log cabins of the American frontier.22 C. A. Weslager writes that a functional log cabin could be built without nails, adhesive, or really any material other than logs. It also only required one tool: an axe, one of the oldest tools in human history.23 The builder simply used whatever straight trees were nearest his site, to create a rectangular plan. Bark and thatch was more accessible than shakes as roofing, and the cabin was wedged sealed with twigs or stone, and caulked with moss and clay, in a process called daubing.24 This entire process could be completed in a few days.25 The murondins had another similarity with the American log cabin: their mutual connectedness to their respective land and heritage. Although the log cabin developed from various rural vernacular traditions imported from across Europe, as a concept, it is as iconically American as the Stars and Stripes. The log cabin was a signifier of a truly humble, self sufficient lifestyle. Primitive dwellings in France were not like log cabins. In the first century BCE, Julius Caesar described the Gaulish shelters as temporary, straw-thatched huts.26 I have already noted the temporality and thatched quality of the murondins. The connectedness to the land, in a more concrete sense, was implied by the fact that the murondins were to be set in the countryside, like most other temporary accommodations of their era.27 The War-Time Guide Book for the Home, published in 1942, even stated, “It is obvious that we shall have to revise our system of individual specialisation and return to something like the self-reliant competence of our pioneer forefathers.”28 France had no pioneering heritage, but the leader of the Vichy regime, Marshal Pétain made a rhetorical call for a decentralization of power,29 and for return to the land.30 The latter was

Tom Collins

Figure 1. Plan and section of a Maison “Murondin”, author’s own drawing after Le Corbusier.

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to be achieved largely through the nationalistic championing of peasant culture, which implies a more ascetic existence.31 Indeed, while Pétain had a different ideology than LC, they shared many views on architecture and urbanism. That may be one of the reasons why LC dedicated Les Maisons “Murondins” to the Compagnons de France, a governmentsponsored, Scouts-like organization, designed to “save young men fifteen to twenty years old from the hazards of unemployment and the dangers of dissidence.”32 He not only believed they would be interested in a project that promoted an enterprising spirit, courage, inventiveness, and a sense of participation/involvement, but also that they would have the skills to help realize it.33 Finally, under the fascist Vichy regime, youth was seen as a metaphor and as a reality of national regeneration.34 Mary McLeod notes, in her PhD dissertation, “Urbanism and Utopia,” that Les Maisons “Murondins” was not the only text in which LC pedalled rural reconstruction. He also published “La Ferme radieuse, le centre cooperatif,” to appeal to Vichy’s government’s “official ennoblement of peasant life”.35 Agrarianism was favoured over urbanism, because the latter was seen as cosmopolitan and Jewish, which is to say that it was foreign, and not ideologically rooted in France.36 Although LC’s conservative sentiments may not have been as extreme as Pétain’s, they nevertheless bore some similarity. For example, LC also hated cities — particularly European ones — which is why he spent his life trying to change them.37 He saw the chaos of urban life as a return to nomadism, and developed his static, outward-looking, Cartesian units of early plans like the 1925 Plan Voisin to combat this degeneration of civilization. From an authoritarian perspective, nomadic people are much harder to control and are, therefore, a threat to the national self.38 Moreover, LC recognized that cities of his time were filthy and unfit for human habitation, describing them as “rotten,” “putrid,” “useless,” and “riddled with tuberculosis.”39 Hence why it was important that the buildings of the Plan Voisin, for example, be separated by huge expanses of no-less-ordered green space.

Of course, by 1940, LC had already been moving away from his machine aesthetic for about a decade, in favour of more organic forms.

There are different theories for this. Mark Antliff writes that LC was affected by the stock market crash, which exposed the vulnerability of industry.40 Jean-Louis Cohen notes that LC was greatly influenced by the writings of Nietzsche, such as the philosopher’s call for men to “[l] ive dangerously” on the fringes of civilization.41 Although both theories are plausible, it is Adolf Max Vogt who provides the best theoretical framework for the location of the murondins in LC’s oeuvre. In his book, Le Corbusier, the Noble Savage, Vogt states, among other things that LC’s early life was filled with theories on the purity of origins, mainly through the teachings of Rousseau and the study of recently discovered primitive Swiss lake dwellings. Although there are limits to the connections one can make between LC and Rousseau, the latter did heavily influence LC’s philosophy. For example, Rousseau was interested in the past, looking back not at what has been achieved, but at what has been corrupted and lost, due to governing institutions. This perspective parallels LC’s own, with regards to architecture.42 Indeed, Joseph Rykwert states that for LC, the first house was right because it was first; it’s construction was guided by reason alone, and not “shackled by artifice and distorted by prejudice.”43 LC had probably adopted this philosophy from the Abbé Laugier.44 In his renowned mideighteenth-century treaty, An Essay on Architecture, Laugier argued that all architecture had emerged from a primitive hut, which was perfectly functional in its simplicity. Indeed, he believed that only by returning to this simplicity and truth, and not by elaborating upon it, could architecture be truly beautiful.45 The primordial mystique of the hut, as essential dwelling, was further enforced on the young LC’s mountaineering excursions with his father, Edouard Jeanneret-Perret. From 1887-92, Edouard served as the president of the Swiss Alpine Club, for which he designed a number of alpine huts for the highest reaches of the mountains. Speaking in a 92

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manner that LC would adopt for his own writings, Edouard said of one hut: This shelter was constructed for those “who see nature in a state as the Creator fashioned it; for those who seek life in the rough who seek healthy and pure emotions without looking for any other rewards than an inner satisfaction.”46 Thus it is clear that from a young age, LC was instilled with the belief that an intimate connection with nature was the path to Rousseau’s noble savage — an essentially good figure.47 The murondins certainly encouraged such a connection with nature. However, the quasipioneering spirit which they invoked was beneficial to more than the atomic individual. Returning to early America, Weslager remarks that the tremendous hardship of log cabin, frontier living was very conducive to tightly knit communities of strong familial ties; these were essential for survival. The family was a “producing unit” and a consumer of its own products; it was self-sufficient, and based around rationality of space and purpose.48 The concept of a traditional French family was key to the Vichy government, because Pétain believed that the family would literally rejuvenate the nation.49 “Productivist ethics” had also been a key philosophy of Vichy’s Sorelian fascist predecessors, as a means of bolstering the industries of the nation and ensuring work for all members of society.50 It is here possible to draw some preliminary conclusions. Le Corbusier, whose politics are best described as opportunistic, marketed the Maisons Murondins to the Vichy government in the belief that the project would appeal to the government’s aims. Firstly, the murondins were a standardized, single family housing solution, which, however thwarted, was a priority of Vichy.51 Secondly, they were constructed using humble materials, and distinctly French construction techniques, thereby emphasizing a connection to the national soil.52 In a practical sense, the use of unprocessed materials was very economical and accommodated the dire shortage of more valuable ones like steel and concrete.53 As LC wrote, such materials also empowered youth through the development of technical and interpersonal skills.54 The decentralization which the murondins entailed was also strategic, in a war “punctuated by urban bombardment.”55 In his 1944 The New City, Ludwig Hilberseimer wrote that modern aerial warfare mandated “disurbanization and dispersal” because cities were too easily targeted.56 Furthermore, the rural program of the murondins would have agreed with Vichy’s reactionary position on the filth, nomadism and cosmopolitanism of the city. Finally, as I have suggested, the self-sufficient lifestyle prescribed by the murondins would have promoted the sort of strong, productive family units that Marshal Pétain believed would regenerate France.57 While it is, now, evident why LC marketed the murondins to Vichy and the Compagnons de France, his initial motivations for designing the dwellings remains uncertain. The final section of my paper answers this question.

As LC himself states in Les Maisons “Murondins”, he originally envisioned the murondins as temporary housing solutions for refugees and victims of urban bombardment.58 Specifically, LC ostensibly conceived the murondins in April of 1940 to accommodate the sudden influx of Dutch and Belgian refugees, and their burden on the French infrastructure.59 This was not the first time LC had concerned himself with emergency housing. The Dom-ino system was designed in 1915 for a similar purpose.60 I do not believe, however, that LC was interested in reconstructive efforts for their particular moral quality. Consider the following quotation, lifted from his 1940 book, L’Architecture et la Guerre: The shacks of wartime can be thought of as an inclined plane leading with ease and simplicity to social developments in the near future. These numberless sheds, in which users will conduct their first experiments, will be, in a word, the birth of function, the birth of life.61 Tom Collins

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That quotation, when taken in the context of LC’s lifelong interest in the purity of Laugier’s primitive hut, suggests that the murondins, though physically temporal, were to mark the beginning of a new, rational, and ascetic lifestyle for the citizens of the architect’s utopian vision of France. Indeed, while LC’s cousin, Pierre Jeanneret would go on to design emergency housing for the resistance forces,62 LC himself was interested in “[putting] the built environment on its true course” within Vichy.63 Thus, in a letter to Raoul Daultry, the minister for postwar reconstruction, he expressed that one benefit of the extensive destruction was the possibility for new and better planning and construction.64 As Stefan Couperus explains:

11. Rael, “Compressed Earth Blocks,” 159. See also Paul Jaquin and Charles Augarde, “Types of Earthen Construction,” in Earth Building: History, Science and Conservation (Watford: IHS BRE Press, 2012), 11. In this book, which is the first known scientific study of “unsaturated soil mechanics,” the authors argue that due to the high-pressure fabrication of CEBs, they require lower moisture content than other techniques. That said, where stabilizers like cement are added, increased moisture is needed to activate the bonding agents. The authors also state that stabilized blocks must also cure for about twenty-eight days before use.

Before the outbreak of the war, numerous policies, slum clearance programmes or infrastructural projects had not been entirely able to displace the poor, criminals, prostitutes, so-called imbeciles, and drunks to the city’s margins. In the eyes of many planners and local officials, bombs proved to be a blessing in disguise — they were the ultimate source of renewal. Bombs created the clean and crisp screens in urban space onto which the improved twentieth century was to be projected.65

15. Rael, “Introduction,” 11.

If there is one pervading theme in LC’s architecture it is that: new and better planning and construction capable of elevating the quality of life, and even, as Laugier believed, the mind.66 Incongruous, though the murondins may at first seem, betwixt the technocracy of the interwar years, and the humanist spiritualism of the reconstruction, they are ultimately no less representative of LC’s architectural and societal ambitions.

As something of an epilogue, LC’s Maisons Murondins were never executed. He was not alone in his frustration. Although many architects had begun devising cheap, quick-to-build solutions since the outbreak of war, few were ever implemented for lack of labour and materials.

Indeed, emergency housing for the increasing number of homeless was not a question that was ever adequately answered.67 1. I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to R.C.L., for taking time out of her busy schedule to reproduce Le Corbusier’s entire Les Maisons “Murondins” for my research. I quite simply could not have written this paper without her help.

2. Mary Caroline McLeod, “Urbanism and Utopia: Le Corbusier from Regional Syndicalism to Vichy,” 381, (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1985.)

3. In my research, I found only five references to the Maisons Murondins, outside the Fondation Le Corbusier, including two unpublished PhD dissertations. The extent of the references was usually cursory, little more than notation. To my knowledge, there are no in-depth analyses of the murondins.

4. Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 128.

5. Le Corbusier, Les Maisons “Murondins”, ed. Etienne Chiron (Paris: Clermont, 1942), 14.

6. To call this room a water closet is perhaps a misnomer, because there does not appear to be any plumbing. I use the term for lack of a better one.

7. The measurement of 6.3m varies between LC’s own drawings. The average ceiling height would nevertheless be around four meters, which is remarkably generous.

8. Ronald Rael, “Rammed Earth,” Earth Architecture (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009), 17. The author remarks that Lyon (formerly Gaul) is a city founded on rammed earth construction.

The technique can be a simple matter of moistening and compressing soil, but in some places it is a seriously specialized craft. Soil is chose by location, consistency, look, smell, and sometimes taste. Like concrete, materials including branches, blood, and lime are often added for enhanced stability and coherence. There is no universally agreed mixture, but the author suggests the following recipe as a commonly functional one: fifteen to eighteen percent clay, twenty-three percent coarse aggregate, thirty percent sand, and thirty-two percent silt. Aggregate must be varied in size to ensure good wall density. The moisture levels must also be fine tuned to maximize compacting. Like concrete, rammed earth uses form work to create its shape. The earth is added four to eight inches at a time a compressed to fifty percent of its un-compacted height, using a tamper. The tamper is usually a long wood or metal pole with a heavy, flat base attached. Although pneumatic hand tampers and industrialsized gasoline-powered tampers are now available, LC probably envisaged the physically strenuous manual process. It is less effective and durable, but all that would have been available.

9. Rael, “Compressed Earth Blocks,” 157. Compressed earth blocks were invented following the French Revolution, by François Cointeraux, as a durable but inexpensive housing material for the hardworking man. He developed a press in 1803, which he believed would glorify the nation through the elevation of construction. Soil mixture is varied, but the author states is is usually something like this: ten to thirty percent clay, fifteen to twenty-five percent silt, fifteen to thirty-five percent fine sand, fifteen to thirty-five percent coarse sand, and ten to seventy percent fine gravel. Coarse aggregates cannot be used because they hinder compaction and can damage the machine. Stabilizers, like hydrated lime or emulsified asphalt are also usually required to bond and increase compressive strength, because the blocks are only compressed once in the machine.

10. Le Corbusier, Les Maisons “Murondins”, 10. LC does not provide any units, but the crude scale of the drawing suggests centimetres.

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12. Le Corbusier, Les Maisons “Murondins”, 33.

13. Rael, “Introduction,” 15. Manufactures of modern materials have lobbied to prevent its use, and to devalue it, because its cheapness and availability runs contrary to capitalism. Rael would, therefore, prefer to interpret earthen architecture as proven and traditional.

14. Jaquin and Augarde, “History of Earth Building,” 21. In the modern West, earth construction became an expression of the common man in post-revolutionary France (and later Europe.) It declined in popularity with industrialization. Only after the First World War did figures like Clough William-Ellis, in England, bring it back to the table as a building option.

16. Jean-Louis Cohen, “Total Mobilization, from the Factory to the Kitchen,” in Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War (Paris: Canadian Centre for Architecture and Éditions Hazan, 2011), 66-67.

17. Rael, “Introduction,” 11-12.

18. Brian W. Newsome, “Crises of Housing and Urban Planning under the Second Empire and the Third Republic,” in French Urban Planning 1940-68: The Construction and Deconstruction of an Authoritarian System (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2009), 24-26.

19. Newsome, “Introduction,” 1.

20. Newsome, “Authoritarian Programs of Urban Planning under the Vichy Regime,” 41. The Vichy government, which had formed in the wake of the 1940 defeat, thought that by assisting the Germans, Germany would grant France sovereignty in New Europe. Germany never agreed to that arrangement, but Vichy France nevertheless provided Germany with economic, military and genocidal support. I do not wish to imply any sympathy for the Vichy government, but simply suggest that Germany would have taken France’s resources regardless of France’s consent.

21. Le Corbusier, Les Maisons “Murondins”, 7.

22. I do not mean to suggest that the murondins were log cabins, as such, but that they shared some material similarities.

23. C. A. Weslager, “Pioneers Go West,” in The Log Cabin in America: From Pioneer Days to the Present (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1969), 8-9.

24. Ibid., 14-15.

25. Ibid., 19.

26. Weslager, “Log Houses in Europe,” 86.

27. Cohen, “The Menace from the Air,” 157. See also pages 9 and 16 of Le Corbusier’s Les Maisons “Murondins”, on which he respectively presents a picturesque setting for the dwellings, and lays-out a possible settlement plan, complete with communal garden.

28. Cohen, “Total Mobilization,” 55.

29. Newsome, “Authoritarian Programs,” 42. The author clarifies that this was only rhetorical, because Pétain made sure to mainly employ technocrats and graduates of the grandes écoles who were direct supporters of his regime.

30. Cohen, “Total Mobilization,” 61.

31. Cécile Desprairies, “Vie Quotidienne,” L’Héritage de Vichy: Ces 100 mesures toujours en vigueur (Paris: Armand Colin, 2012), 42.

32. McLeod, “Le Corbusier,” 384.

33. Le Corbusier, Les Maisons “Murondins”, 3. Le Corbusier markets the plan as a series of dormitories and recreational facilities, which could double as accommodations for refugees.

34. Mark Antliff, “Machine Primitives: Philippe Lamour and the Fascist Cult of Youth,” in Avant-Garde Fascism: The Mobilization of Myth, Art, and Culture in France, 1909-1939 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 172.

35. McLeod, “Le Corbusier,” 383.

36. Antliff, “Machine Primitives,” 156-57.

37. Cohen, “Le Corbusier’s Nietzschean Metaphors,” in Nietzsche and “An Architecture of Our Minds, eds. Alexandre Kostka and Irving Wohlfarth (Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999), 322.

38. Antliff, “La Cité Française: Georges Valois, Le Corbusier and Fascist Theories of Architecture,” 144-45.

39. Le Corbusier, “Architecture or Revolution,” in Towards an Architecture, trans. John Goodman (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2007), 297.

40. Antliff, “Machine Primitives,” 157.

41. Cohen, “Nietzschean Metaphors,” 318. In a copy of Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science), given to him by Ozenfant, LC lingered over a passage concluding: “… we now need many preparatory courageous human beings who cannot very well leap out of nothing, any more than out of the sand and slime of present-day civilization and metropolitanism — human beings who know how to be silent, lonely, resolute and content and constant in invisible activities.” This passage is from the same chapter as the call to live dangerously, “Saint Januarius.”

42. Adolf Max Vogt, “Leading Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Sheep to Pasture,” in Le Corbusier, the Noble Savage: Toward an Archaeology of Modernism, trans. Radka Donnell (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1998), 143.

43. Joseph Rykwert, “Thinking and Doing,” in On Adam’s House in Paradise: The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1972), 13-15.

44. Although neither confirm the existence of Laugier’s famous essay in LC’s library, both Vogt and the translators of said essay express their sincere belief that an architect as well read as LC would almost certain have come across An Essay on Architecture. This belief is supported not only by the similarities

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observable in the philosophies of LC and Laugier, but by the fact that the former makes approving reference to the latter in “Mass Production Housing,” 89.

45. Marc-Antoine Laugier, “The General Principles of Architecture,” in An Essay on Architecture, trans.

Wolfgang and Anni Herrmann (Los Angeles: Hennessy & Ingalls, Inc., 1977), 13.

46. Vogt, “The Father, the School, and the Canton of Valais,” 318.

47. Vogt, “From the Fisherman’s Hut to the Palace: LC’s Architectural Analogy to Jean-Jacques Rousseau,” 158.

48. Weslager, “Pioneers Go West,” 21-2. Emphasis added.

49. McLeod, “Le Corbusier,” 383.

50. Antliff, “Cité Française,” 122.

51. Newsome, “Authoritarian Programs,” 42. Few construction projects went through, because of the shortage of building materials. Repairs were equally slow. Pervasive corruption within nearly impenetrable bureaucracy did not help.

52. Cohen, “Total Mobilization,” 62. Cohen writes that synthetic materials were used extensively in countries with less geographically-based ideologies than Vichy France, but the mandate remained the same: small and simple.

53. Newsome, “Authoritarian Programs,” 48. The problem was only aggravated by later allied bombings, which targeted industrial complexes — the places where such materials were refined and manufactured. In “The Menace from the Air,” 160, Cohen notes that Germany was the most affected.

Hence why France’s supplies were requisitioned. For example, in Germany, Hans Spiegel drew up plans for little twenty square-meter minimal dwellings, which were similar to the murondins. Spiegel’s dwellings were to assembled by the end users, and sustained by a kitchen garden. The project was never widely implemented, however, because of a lack of materials.

54. Le Corbusier, Les Maisons “Murondins”, 3-4.

55. Cohen, “Architects and Cities Go Off to War,” 37.

56. Cohen, “The Menace,” 161.

57. McLeod, “Le Corbusier,” 383.

58. Le Corbusier, Les Maisons “Murondins”, 7.

59. McLeod, “Le Corbusier,” 381.

60. Vogt, “Unexpected Illuminations,” 110.

61. Cohen, “Mobility and Prefabrication,” 251.

62. Cohen, “Recycling, Recalling, Forgetting,” 400.

63. McLeod, “Le Corbusier,” 382. Perhaps here is a good place to comment on LC’s perceived need to design such simple accommodations as the murondins. In “Urban Planning,” 28-29, Brian Newsome notes that in an effort to relieve the centre of Paris, the government began selling vacant suburban plots. However, the government did not regulate development of its suburbs, after selling the land. It did not even provide the basic amenities of water and sewers. Most people who moved to the suburbs were too poor to afford and architect, and many built shanties from discarded materials. The living conditions were imaginably poor, and it is likely that LC wished to avoid this. At the very least, it ran contrary to his idealized Rousseauian vision of man in a natural state.

64. Cohen, “Recycling, Recalling, Forgetting,” 396. LC never expressed these views publicly.

65. Stefan Couperus, “The Invisible Reconstruction: Displacing People, Emergency Housing and Promoting Decent Family in Rotterdam, Hamburg and Coventry,” in A Blessing in Disguise: War and Town Planning in Europe 1940-1945, eds. Jörn Düwel and Niels Gutschow, (Berlin: DOM Publishers, 2013), 69.

66. Laugier, “Introduction,” 8.

67. Couperus, “Invisible Reconstruction,” 71.

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