Uoai

STANISLAV JURKOVIĆ, VIS SANKRITHI, EVELINE LAM, MICHAEL MARZURKIEWICZ

TORONTO, ONTARIO

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1 A palette of elemental materials and bright colours is used to organize café, retail, and repair zones at Fix Coffee and Bikes in Toronto. 2 Archival photographs documenting the 1958 City Hall design competition were used to create an integrated artwork ringing the Nathan Phillip’s Square Bicycle Station. 3-4 House Withrow’s details include a shower daringly overlooking the stairwell, and a window well inset in the kitchen counter. 5 Set within an 1860s coach house, the House Studio strategically uses void spaces to introduce light to the groundfloor studio. The project was completed in collaboration with Piccaluga Design Inc. 6 Located on Toronto’s College Street, The Blue Room uses colour to suggest an interior space. The founding principals of Uoai (pronounced “wai” / “y” / “why”), Stanislav Jurković and Vis Sankrithi, met while teaching architecture design studio at Ryerson University. For five years, while running solo practices, they were frequent collaborators, so by 2019, it felt natural to formally come together as a duo.

Uoai is founded on a desire for approaching design without any preconceived notions attached to typology or program. Even the firm’s name—which doesn’t have a particular linguistic reference—points towards this goal.

To date, Jurković and Sankrithi have been able to run Toronto-based Uoai as a non-specialized studio. “By shifting scales, programs and strategies, the intent is to open up new opportunities and ply them forward. [It is] also to keep us interested and thinking in broader ways with each successive project,” says Jurković. Enjoying the challenge of operating on “uncomfortable grounds” has resulted in a body of work consisting of public art installations, private residences, a growing institutional and commercial portfolio, and even some small industrial design projects.

Uoai’s open-ended approach to design is also informed by the pair’s continued connection to academia. They believe teaching undergraduate students is one of the ways they’re able to “keep our energy alive,” says Jurković, continually “questioning our judgments and criticizing our normal assumptions.”

Jurković and Sankrithi’s interest in questioning spatial conventions is perhaps most evident in their public art projects, where they can test out ideas more freely. In their installation The Blue Room, the duo responds to Toronto’s “infinite grid and the inability to escape the street” in its urban fabric, says Jurković. Light projections, street furniture, and areas denoted by blue create a “room” within the street realm that criticizes “the lack of interiority in public space.”

Such ideas also inform the firm’s architectural designs. In their private residences, Uoai’s exploration of spatial contradictions frequently translates into the blurring of public and private distinctions. This is perhaps most evident in House Withrow, where a glass-enclosed shower is on prominent display above the main stair.

At the Nathan Phillips Square Bicycle Station, underneath Toronto City Hall, Uoai deftly layers spaces. The bicycle parking area is ringed by a series of glass and printed panels that showcase the 513 competition entries for the design of Toronto City Hall in 1958. This archival material contributes a historical and global reading of the site, literally placed at its foundations—a space that could have easily been left as a nondescript garage. “By superimposing a highly curated display of imagery onto infrastructural spaces, we explored the potential of setting the everyday utilitarian experience against the backdrop of a pivotal historic moment,” says Sankrithi.

Jurković and Sankrithi are currently collaborating with PMA Landscape Architects on The Dance, a public artwork in celebration of LGBTQ2S+ history at George Hislop Park in Toronto, and hope to extend their examination and questioning of spatial conditions to larger-scale institutional projects as they grow in their practice.

PROCURING CHANGE

TEXT Jake Nicholson

HOW CAN CURRENT RFP PROCESSES BE IMPROVED TO YIELD BETTER OUTCOMES—BOTH FOR ARCHITECTURE AND FOR ARCHITECTS?

When emerging architecture firms begin to scale up to larger projects, it often means plunging into the world of publicly posted Requests for Proposals (RFPs). These competitions are a requirement for organizations in the public sector, as a means of ensuring fairness and transparency on taxpayer-backed projects. They are also used by a broad range of client types to find architects for important buildings—hospitals, schools, civic centres, academic buildings, museums, and libraries— to name only a few.

For somebody looking through the list of interested firms for any significantly sized RFP, the globalized nature of architecture as a business becomes clear very quickly. Large firms from urban centres all over Canada are usually interested, and it is not uncommon to also see firms from the United States and overseas. No matter who you are, to participate in this process on multi-million-dollar budgeted projects likely means to compete with behemoths—firms staffed with hundreds of people, equipped with multi-person marketing teams and with portfolios that span the globe.

To say the workload these pursuits place on the industry is “burdensome” would be a serious understatement. The procurement phase for larger-scale projects is often a months-long, multi-phased affair. A qualifying round can see as many as 50 different firms submitting for the project: imagine a 20-page limit on qualifying submissions, and then imagine 1,000+ pages pouring onto a client’s desk at one minute before deadline. Weeks later, a smaller number of firms then pre-qualify for a more labour-intensive second round. Then there might be interviews. There could be travel involved at every step. The work involved for everybody is tremendous and it costs a lot of money. You may also be asked to provide services well outside of typical architectural scope.

If you choose to chase an RFP, the statistical likelihood is that you will lose. Lose early in the process, and you feel personally hurt that you did not make the cut. Lose late, and you may have spent thousands of dollars on a fruitless pursuit. Then there is the debrief process, where you may learn that the person evaluating submissions knows little about architecture and misunderstood something critical about your submission. The successful candidate goes on to design a building that stands as a monument to the time you failed. There is more than one of these monuments in your city. You may pass by a couple on your way to work.

The raw workload—all of it overhead—can prove prohibitive, especially for smaller firms. Yet despite all this genuine pain, the procurement process is an important means of access for designing some stellar projects and (critically) for meeting new clients.

Toon Dreessen is founder of Ottawa-based Architects DCA, a past president of the Ontario Association of Architects (OAA), and an outspoken advocate for changing procurement practices for architecture in Canada. He thinks that current procurement practices are “fundamentally broken.” “This is really a matter of public interest,” says Dreessen. “Unfair procurement processes harm small businesses, and their negative impact on the built environment lasts for generations. That’s something that the public needs to better understand.”

Dreessen has a long list of issues with procurement practices. Among them: he believes that they remove dialogue between clients and prospective architects that would improve projects, they inherently skew in favour of larger firms, they stifle innovation by keeping people from asking questions (lest they lose a competitive advantage), and they ultimately create a focus on low fees that has become so prevalent that it is damaging Canada’s architecture. Asked if there was one thing he feels it is important for procurement professionals to understand, he says: “Ultimately fees don’t matter. We spend too much time and effort arguing about fees, when we really need to be arguing about quality.“

Dreessen noted that most architecture firms in Ontario are small, with only one licensed architect. “These firms don’t participate in this public procurement process because they can’t. They can’t get their foot in the door […] They can’t win these big projects, and when I talk about big projects, I’m talking about a ten, fifteen, twenty-milliondollar project. That’s totally manageable by a small firm of five people.”

“That means that really big firms are the only ones left at the table, and they’re fighting to get even those relatively small projects, let alone the huge ones.”

Dreessen has argued for design competitions as a better approach, saying that they provide a place to foster innovation and for firms to stand on the strength of their ideas. They likewise offer a chance for even the losers to grow their portfolio. Dreessen has also advocated for more

LEFT Created as part of GEC Architecture’s bid to design the Jasper Place Transit Centre for the City of Edmonton, two analysis diagrams show the current infrastructural elements to be consolidated in the new centre, along with the anticipated circulation paths around the new building.

quality-based evaluation, as opposed to evaluation based on fee. He suggests that procurement needs to remain fair, while also making room for “conversation” between architect and client.

“If we agreed on fairness—and the concept of fairness—we wouldn’t have fee-based RFPs. We would agree on what a fair fee is, and we would agree on what a reasonable compensation is, and we wouldn’t leave it to a race to the bottom,” says Dreessen. “If all things are equal, it should be a meritocracy. It should be that the person who gets the job is the best qualified for it, or has the most creative solution in a competition format. That should be the deciding factor.”

Others in Canada have even gone so far as to implement a different approach to procurement for architectural services. The City of Edmonton stands out as a case study—not just because of their unique practices, but because of the design-minded politics that led them there. In 2005, Edmonton’s then-mayor Stephen Mandel famously said in a state-of-the-city address: “The time has passed when square boxes with minimal features and lame landscaping are acceptable. Our tolerance for crap is now zero.”

Since that time, Edmonton has become more and more qualityminded in how it evaluates architects submitting proposals to design City projects. It is also unique in having a City Architect on staff. For the past decade and a half, Carol Bélanger has worked to refine Edmonton’s procurement practices for architectural services. “At the time I started my position, we used to do ‘call-ups’, but these were by invitation only,” says Bélanger. “So, you would call up three firms or four firms, to be ‘competitive.’ It was limited by who you knew.”

Influenced by provincial trade agreements that required more projects to be put out for public bid—as well as by the publicly stated desire to do away with “crap”—the City changed how it evaluated architects submitting to design its larger projects. It eventually moved to a twophased submission and evaluation process. The first is a qualifying phase to create a shortlist of architects identified as being able to complete the work; the second phase consists of an RFP process for these pre-qualified candidates, as well as an interview for finalists. This process was designed to limit the raw work of proposal-writing on the industry at large, while still having an RFP process that focussed— in detail—on the project at hand.

“Once they know they are shortlisted, then we can put out the fullblown RFP,” says Bélanger, adding that the second phase of Edmonton’s RFP process includes the pre-qualified candidates’ vision for the project. “We ask for a vision. Not a design, but a vision: from an urban design point of view, how would you meet this context?”

Perhaps most importantly, Edmonton changed how they evaluated architectural fees. The fee component of their RFP process is rated as 10% of the overall scoring for the submission—very low compared to other governments and public agencies, who often rate fees at 30% or more of a total RFP score. Moreover, the City also works according to fee recommendations established by the province’s professional associations, the Alberta Association of Architects and the Consulting Architects of Alberta. This has the effect of making the expected fee for the project clear to all potential submitters from the outset, and already in-line with professional expectations for what is necessary to deliver good work.

“We’re not allowing firms to ‘buy’ the work with a low fee. But at the same time, being in a municipality, we’re still cognizant of having a limited budget. We’re not just going to pay exorbitant fees,” says Bélanger. “For the most part, unless somebody misunderstands something, we’ve always seen people get full marks on the core fee.”

What has followed from these changes? “The outcome has been nothing short of amazing,” says Bélanger. City of Edmonton projects have been celebrated with four RAIC Governor General’s Awards since 2018: achieved for Borden Park Natural Swimming Pool, The Real Time Control Building #3, Borden Park Pavilion (all by gh3*), and the South Haven Centre for Remembrance (by SHAPE Architecture with PECHET Studio and Group 2 Architects). Says Bélanger, “We’re not doing the work for awards, but the awards are a good indicator from a design excellence perspective.”

ABOVE Located at one of Edmonton’s busiest bus hubs, GEC’s finished Jasper Place Transit Centre includes a generous roof, shaped to welcome pedestrians and encourage consistent use of the facility.

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Residential Street 93 ST.

140 ST. NW WEST EDMONTON WEST EDMONTON

Massing Responds to Residential Context: stepdown massing towards the single family homes and provide appropriate buffers to exemplify neighbourliness. Building Facades Exemplify Design Excellence: WHYTE (82) AVE. appropriate treatment of facades and setbacks to respond to the existing street character. Utilize durable materials and articulated facade.

Massing Responds to Residential Context: stepdown massing towards the single family homes and provide appropriate buffers to exemplify neighbourliness. Laneway Building Facades Exemplify Design Excellence: appropriate treatment of facades and setbacks to respond to the existing street character. Utilize durable materials and articulated facade.

Massing Responds to Residential Context: WEST EDMONTON Step down massing towards the single family homes and provide appropriate buffers to exemplify neighbourliness. 93 ST. Building Facades Exemplify Design Excellence: Appropriate treatment of facades and setbacks to respond to the existing WHYTE (82) AVE. street character. Utilize durable materials and articulated facade.

Enhance Pedestrian Experience: provide generous setbacks with enhanced surface treatments, activated ground plane and native planting. Enhance Pedestrian Experience: provide generous setbacks with enhanced surface treatments, activated ground plane and native planting. Residential Street Arterial Road Enhance Pedestrian Experience: Provide generous setbacks with enhanced surface treatments, activated ground plane and native planting.

140 ST. NW

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137 AVE. NW

Celebrate Connection to Ravine: maintain existing pedestrian connections and contribute to enhancements of this use. KING EDWARD

137 AVE. NWKING EDWARD

93 ST. Celebrate Connection to Ravine: maintain existing pedestrian connections and contribute to Celebrate Connection to Ravine: Maintain existing pedestrian enhancements of this use. connections and contribute to enhancements of this use.

Massing Situated to be Sensitive to Residential

Context: move massing closer to Whyte Ave to create a continuous street wall, while providing better privacy for adjacent residents.

Massing Situated to be Sensitive to Residential Massing Situated to be Sensitive to Residential Context: Move Context: move massing closer to Whyte Ave to massing closer to Whyte Ave. to create a continuous street wall, create a continuous street wall, while providing better privacy for adjacent residents. while providing better privacy for adjacent residents.

137 AVE. NW WHYTE (82) AVE. 142 ST. NW137 AVE. NW

93 ST. WHYTE (82) AVE. 142 ST. NW

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N Public reception to the projects has also been positive, says Bélanger, noting that memberships to related civic organizations are up. The new buildings show up regularly on social media. It is even an issue which has been put on the ballot in Edmonton’s 2013 civic election: one mayoral candidate decried “Taj Mahal” rec centres, and garnered relatively little support. It turns out people liked design-forward civic buildings and saw the value in what the City was doing. Mandel and Bélanger both earn mention in the book Canadian Modern Architecture, 1967 to the present, with educator Graham Livesey writing that they sparked an “architectural renaissance” with their procurement practices, resulting in “a spectacular series of public projects, mainly by out-of-province firms.”

It is worth examining procurement carefully if an “architectural renaissance” that is also popular with the public can stem from changes to a city’s RFP practices.

There is a lot that RFPs determine before proposals are submitted. In the process of creating an RFP, potential clients of architects—often the staff of public agencies—determine criteria from the outset for who can bid on their projects. This entails making value judgements about what is important in designing the potential building, and what type of architect will be the best choice to design the project. Often, a culture of risk aversion creates a preference for firms who have done similar work in the past: much of the time, you can’t apply to design a building like a library if you haven’t already designed some pre-determined number of them. There is also the issue of how design teams are evaluated, and who does the evaluation. To what extent do client representatives understand architecture? To what extent should they?

Asked about issues with RFPs and procurement, the OAA responded with a written statement, including the following: “Among the most common issues are requirements that do not reflect a correct understanding of the Architect or Licensed Technologist OAA’s role, resulting in OAA members being expected to take on tasks that are the responsibility of others. The result might mean an architect finding themselves responsible for activities and outcomes they do not control,

Enhance Connection to the Park: the building ABOVE In site diagrams for several City of Edmonton supportive housing has the ability to interact with the park, providing benefit for residents and park users alike. projects, GEC Architects indicates initial thoughts about the potential for the buildings to connect to their surroundings. 137 AVE. NW Utilize Massing to Create Micro Climate: this site provides ample space for healing gardens 137 AVE. NW including the performance or responsibilities of the client, authorities that could also be utilized as a winter garden to celebrate Edmonton’s climate. having jurisdiction, or the contractor.” There are other important issues beyond sorting out who-does-what. Strengthen Existing Pedestrian Connections: there is an existing goat trail that leads to surrounding “This lack of understanding can also impact how to design an appropri-bus stops. These should remain and be enhanced ate evaluation tool / criteria for selecting the right professional for the where possible. particular project you may have.” The OAA’s statement also raised issues of RFPs that include work impossible to cover under mandatory professional insurance. The OAA advocates for Qualifications-Based Selection (QBS), which recommends that clients select the most qualified firm to design the work and negotiate a fee afterwards. The OAA website likens the process to a company hiring a new staff member first, and then negotiating their salary after. This approach differs from the City of Edmonton’s, but it is still a step outside of the norm for most public RFP requirements, which require a fee to be declared as part of the submission process. The matter of how—and when—architectural fees are decided has serious implications for how much the architect eventually gets paid. That, in turn, impacts the scope of service that an architect can reasonably deliver, while still surviving as a business. Every facet of procurement invites questions with complex answers, and the processes by which we buy something are intimately connected with the product we receive. In the case of architecture, the product being purchased carries long-term planning implications and large environmental impacts, and it informs the look and function of the buildings we use every day. It is critical for potential clients to take time for interrogation, education, and introspection in their approach. Jake Nicholson is a writer based in London, Ontario, with extensive experience working on proposals for architectural and engineering firms.

140 ST. NW 142 ST. NW Enhance Connection to the Park: the building has the ability to interact with the park, providing benefit for residents and park users alike. 137 AVE. NW Utilize Massing to Create Micro Climate: this site provides ample space for healing gardens 137 AVE. NW that could also be utilized as a winter garden to celebrate Edmonton’s climate. Strengthen Existing Pedestrian Connections: there is an existing goat trail that leads to surrounding bus stops. These should remain and be enhanced where possible.

140 ST. NW 142 ST. NW

MCARTHUR/WELLINGTON

Training to Clad it Right the First Time

Carpenters and Allied Workers Local 27, United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America, in conjunction with our contractor partners and field leaders, and with the assistance of the College of Carpenters, has developed a premier Exterior Cladding training program to provide real-world hands-on training to installers and industry professionals. This course was developed to address an increasing demand in the industry for skilled workers to install these products. This course will provide training to our broader membership on how to properly install various architectural panels/exterior cladding, including Insulated Metal Panels (IMPs) and Aluminum Composite Materials (ACMs), using the most up-to-date technologies and techniques. The six-day course will include a two-day certification course for Elevated Work Platforms and swing stages and a four-day course teaching the best practices for the installation of exterior cladding. For our inaugural session in March of 2021, four journeymen instructors were provided training on how to install exterior cladding, including IMPs and ACMs. The materials were generously donated by Riverside Group Ltd. These instructors will now travel to the Carpenters’ Union Training Centres across the province to ensure that each training centre will be teaching this course to UBCJA members. If you have any questions about this exciting course, please contact Paul Daly (Local 27 Coordinator) or Darren Sharpe (UBCJA Cladding Coordinator) at 905-652-4140.

222 Rowntree Dairy Rd Woodbridge, ON L4L 9T2 | T: 905-652-4140 | www.ubc27.ca

WARMING HUTS: A DECADE + OF ART AND ARCHITECTURE ON ICE

Edited by Lawrence Bird, Peter Hargraves and Sharon Wohl (Dalhousie Architectural Press, 2021) REVIEW Elsa Lam

In the winter of 1992, a skating trail opened on Winnipeg’s frozen Assiniboine River, lined with discarded Christmas trees. The cleared ice eventually expanded to include hockey rinks and curling sheets, and fifteen years later, the skating trail had grown to rival Ottawa’s Rideau Canal.

Around that time, a group of local architects came up with the idea of building a series of artistically designed shelters on the ice. Local firms 5468796, Sputnik, and 701 Architecture built huts alongside the skating trail the next winter. Nova Scotia architect Richard Kroeker also created a hut—and so did Antoine Predock, the architect for the Canadian Museum of Human Rights being constructed nearby.

Warming Huts would grow into an international design competition, attracting nearly 1,500 submissions to-date from around the world. The program has included invited contributions by the likes of the Patkaus, Frank Gehry, and Anish Kapoor alongside projects designed by local architecture students from the University of Manitoba. Each year, previous huts are re-installed when possible, making for a rich collection of wintertime pavilions that’s earned the city bucket-list status in the New York Times, Architectural Digest, and Fodor’s.

“Over the past ten years, the Warming Huts competition has encouraged millions of people to skate the River Trail and engage with art,” writes Peter Hargraves, one of the initial organizers of the initiative, and a co-editor of the new book Warming Huts: A Decade + of Art and Architecture on Ice. “The Warming Huts is now an integral part of [the] celebration of winter in the city.”

Anishnabek writer, scholar and activist Niigaan Sinclair opens the volume, commenting on the Indigenous significance of the Warming Huts’ site, a crossroads of trade, meeting and negotiation for over 6,000 years. Some of the installations—notably, invited contributions by Innu throat singer Tanya Tagaq and Métis architect Étienne Gaboury—refer to this deep history. But Sinclair sees untapped possibilities for future warming huts to connect more strongly to the Indigenous legacies of the site: “the resilience, the inclusivity, and the fact that thousands of nations and communities have been here for a very long time and created every part of the city around us.”

The area—now known as The Forks—was, in pre-colonial times, “one of the most important political spaces in North America,” says Cree

ABOVE Created for the 2011 edition of the Warming Huts festival, Patkau Architects’ Jellyfish pavilion was made by bending thin, flexible layers of plywood to their breaking point over a timber armature.

curator Kevin Brownlee. When Europeans arrived in the 17th century, comments architect Lawrence Bird, the country’s waterways continued to be a focus of development. The watery highways were critical for transporting beaver pelts, and later for moving people and goods. But with the arrival of the railway, new patterns of inhabitation came to dominate over the Prairies—a change most visible in the way that the Métis long-lot farms, oriented to the rivers, were replaced by a uniform grid to apportion land. “As Winnipeg moved into the 20th century, a cage of railway tracks, yards, and bridges was built around the Forks,” writes Bird. Eventually, as the construction of the 1968 Red River Floodway further tamed the Red and Assiniboine and residents moved to the suburbs, “the rivers became something you could ignore.”

The Warming Huts initiative is intertwined with a relatively recent reclamation of the Forks and an interest in the urban revitalization of downtown Winnipeg. Architectural professor Sharon Wohl notes how such projects, initiated in cities across North America in the mid-80s to mid-90s, have often been criticized for catering to an elite audience. The Forks is different, she writes: “Rather than providing exclusive amenities for the wealthy, the Forks’ management assures a continuous array of free events, and provides site amenities appealing to an inner-city youth population that is both at-risk and marginalized.” The Warming Huts are effective placemaking devices, adds planner Hazel Borys, “offering human-scaled civic anchors.” As architectural critic Lisa Rochon puts it, works such as the Warming Huts “reside as points of light in our vast urban galaxy.”

For several of the essayists, the most interesting of the Warming Huts are those that have alluded to larger political and social issues. Coinciding with the 2017 election of Donald Trump, the Dutch team Atelier ARI installed Open Border, a skate-through double-row of soft red plastic strips spanning the river. Cloud of Unintended Consequences, built by University of Manitoba architecture students in collaboration with artist Eleanor Bond in 2020, presents a troubling image: a floating mass made out of plastic waste. A taxonomy of over 1,000 competition entries, compiled at the end of the book, includes dozens of additional unbuilt pavilion designs tacking political, social, and environmental issues.

Can a set of architectural installations on Winnipeg’s frozen rivers make a difference, in the face of these issues? “While projects like the Warming Huts cannot solve such problems,” writes Sharon Wohl, “the building of inclusive spaces for dialogue within the framework of the city is an important step along the way.”

ABOVE Germany-based NAICE Architecture & Design’s Hoverbox (2019) floats on steel supports, camouflaged by clothing. OPPOSITE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP Open Border (2017) is Dutch firm Atelier ARI’s vision of a wall meant to be breached; Guy Maddin’s The Temple of Lost Things was created with Peter Hargraves and Luca Roncoroni; Nuzzles (2014) was created from foam noodles by Toronto-based RAW in collaboration with Kim Flynn.

RAW DESIGN GUY MADDIN

ANTOINE PROULX

OPEN SPACE

TEXT Matthew Hague

AN INSTALLATION IN GRAND MÉTIS, QUEBEC, CELEBRATES THE END OF LOCKDOWN MEASURES BY BLURRING THE BOUNDARIES BETWEEN INDOOR AND OUTDOOR SPACE.

ABOVE In one of five new installations at the 2021 International Garden Festival, the walls of a house burst open, unfolding to the ground.

Two days after the 2021 International Garden Festival at Quebec’s Jardins de Métis opened at the end of June, the entire province of Quebec was declared a green zone: the lowest level on the province’s Covid alert scale. The change came after Quebec had seen some of Canada’s toughest and longest lockdown measures, including 139 days of a nightly curfew that shuttered the province’s typically lively nightlife between 8 pm and 5 am.

It’s hard to imagine a more beautiful symbol for the beginning of reopening than one of the competition-winning installations that is part of this year’s Festival. Open Space is designed by three young, Quebec-based intern architects—Gabriel Lemelin, Francis Gaignard, Sandrine Gaulin, who work together under the name Legaga. Set within the Jardin de Métis’ spacious grounds, the walls of a small, potentially confining house are bursting apart and tilting toward the ground, not just blurring the boundary between indoor and outdoor space, but obliterating it.

“Since the beginning of Covid-19, our homes, normally places of intimacy and leisure, became associated with confinement, fear, sometimes even anguish,” explains Lemelin. “With our proposal, we wanted to instil a feeling of hope and joy. We took a small, 11-by-8-foot room and opened its walls to the surroundings. Suddenly, the whole domesticscape is transformed in a playground open to new interpretation and uses.”

The house, including a fireplace and a set of stairs surreally lying on their sides, are pigmented bright blue. The colour echoes one of the most iconic flowers at the Jardin de Métis— the Himalayan blue poppies that are difficult to grow outside of their original, east Asian habitat. It also underscores how special it can be to escape a long confinement. “By using a bright and saturated colour, we wanted to create a mental distance between the installation and all the other wooden decks that can be found outside,” says Lemelin. “Thus, the monochrome installation contrasts with the surrounding landscape, creating a magical strangeness.”

Beyond the finished product, the process of designing and building the installation was likewise influenced by the pandemic. “We were ourselves in lockdown when we designed Open Space,” says Lemelin. “Being constantly on a computer for work, social life and leisure made us want to take a step back from this virtual environment. Therefore, we worked almost exclusively in physical models.” The switch to the tactile helped the team think early on about the process of completing the construction on-site, in under a week, using standard dimension lumber. For that, Legaga engaged a group of volunteers. “There is something poetic about the whole design and construction process,” says Lemelin. “The room with the fallen walls actually permitted us to reunite with our friends, some of whom we hadn’t seen in a year-and-a-half due to the lockdown. It was just like when we could invite them into our own homes again.”