48 minute read
CANADA AT VENICE
PBSI CANADA IN VENICE
CANADIAN ARCHITECTS LEAD THREE EXHIBITIONS AT THE VENICE BIENNALE, TACKLING THE THEME: HOW WILL WE LIVE TOGETHER?
ABOVE Grove, by Philip Beesley and Living Architecture Systems Group, is an immersive installation that includes a cloud of liquid-filled glass vessels hovering above a pool-like projection of a film by Warren du Preez and Nick Thornton Jones. TEXT Natalia Woldarsky Meneses
A year late and amid pandemic restrictions, the 17th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia opened this summer. The opening brought a muted version of the regular fanfare, and the exhibition’s theme—“How Will We Live Together?”—tackles a correspondingly serious set of questions.
Canadian architects and designers have taken up the enormous task of responding to this prompt, in several different ways. Canada’s official entry to the Biennale, Imposter Cities, was commissioned by the Canada Council for the Arts and co-curated by McGill professor David Theodore and Montreal-based firm T B A / Thomas Balaban Architect. In addition, Canada also has a presence in the Central Pavilion, with the
project Contested Circumpolar: Domestic Territories, developed by Torontobased Lateral Office with Arctic Design Group. The Arsenale is graced with Grove, a large-scale installation by Toronto’s Philip Beesley with Living Architecture Systems Group.
This year’s selections did not go unscathed by the effects of the pandemic, and many exhibitors found ways to rethink and reformulate their exhibitions. Impostor Cities developed a hybrid exhibition that offers an outdoors-only experience in Venice, paired with a contentrich online site. Both versions describe Canadian cities that stand in for well-known international destinations in film and television. It exposes a quirky aspect of the country’s architectural identity— Canadian structures are remarkably good at “faking it,” representing places other than themselves.
While travel restriction have made it difficult for visitors to attend the Biennale, those that make it here will immediately spot the iconic Canadian pavilion. It’s usually hidden between trees and dwarfed by its
OPPOSITE TOP The undulating canopy of Grove is formed by luminous, lace-like elements. OPPOSITE BOTTOM In the accompanying film, Grove Candle, a child-like being emerges from a series of intricate geometries inspired by Beesley’s forms. ABOVE As part of the Central Pavilion, an exhibition by Lateral Office and Arctic Design Group explores domestic life in the world’s eight nations that have land claims in the Arctic. RIGHT A maquette representing each nation sits atop an information-rich podium, supplemented by wall graphics that further explore the complications of life in the far North.
neoclassical neighbours at the Giardini grounds, but this year, the building has been partially wrapped in a lively shade of green, emphasizing its unique form.
The green fabric allows for the use of chroma technology to create an augmented reality experience. A smartphone aimed at the building activates an Instagram filter, which transforms the building into a range of Canadian landmarks from the curatorial team’s film library. With Venice as its backdrop, the visitor can catch a glimpse of Arthur Erickson’s Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, BC, or Louise Bourgeois’ Maman, a looming sculpture of a giant spider that sits outside Moshe Safdie’s National Art Gallery in Ottawa. The building itself becomes an impostor—an experience that is singular to each visitor in Venice, but also global once it is shared on social media platforms.
The Giardini’s main building, the Central Pavilion, houses installations directly chosen by the Biennale’s guest curator; this year, Lebanese architect Hashim Sarkis. By focusing on the global commons, Sarkis critically examines the political boundaries and economic interests that shape architecture.
As part of the Central Pavilion, Sarkis invited Lateral Office to build upon their research on Nunavut, originally presented at the 14th Architecture Biennale in 2014. Created with Arctic Design Group, the exhibition Contested Circumpolar: Domestic Territories expands Lateral Office’s earlier research to encompass the global Arctic. The installation presents maquettes of domestic life representing the eight nations that have land
GIORGIO LAZZARO
LEFT TO RIGHT The exhibition Imposter Cities involved wrapping the Canadian Pavilion in a green screen used for film shoots. When viewed through a smartphone, the green screen is overlaid with a film montage of movie clips, showcasing the frequency with which Canadian architecture stands in for other places in the world onscreen.
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claims in the Arctic: Canada, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the United States. While the Arctic is home to many Indigenous groups, the region is shaped by territorial claims, resource extraction, climate change and political interests that have strongly influenced the way in which people live, including their domestic spaces.
Arranged in a circular manner, eight plinths are wrapped in maps that reveal geographical data and local flora and fauna, alongside particularities of northern life such as open dumps, refineries, and geopolitical markers like DEW radar stations. The plinths are each topped with a detailed house model, exposing the intimacies of domestic life: from slippers on the floor to freshly slaughtered meat on the kitchen table. The housing samples vary in size and form, with mechanical systems on view in some, and others purposefully modelled to reflect the level of disrepair of local housing stock.
Alongside the models, the walls of the exhibition space are lined with further explanatory graphics. These describe specific aspects of Arctic life, such as communication limitations in the north, which is largely reliant on dial-up or weak satellite connections at extremely high costs. Residents of the Arctic must also contend with pollution from mineral extraction sites and refineries, challenges with waste management, an array of transportation systems adapted to seasonal change, and the tradeoffs between sometimes-hazardous local food practices and costly imported food.
The nations of the circumpolar Arctic share a common territory, but the exhibition makes it clear that each is also distinct, having been molded from specific political and economic influences.
Turning to the Arsenale space, Grove, an installation by Philip Beesley and Living Architecture Systems Group, offers a much larger narrative frame of reference—examining metaphysical questions of how we live, dwell, and die.
Nestled next to exhibitions on molecular and bee architecture, Grove hovers over visitors as an interlaced canopy of intricate, lightweight meshwork and droplet spires. It’s a multi-sensory island, with an entanglement of air, water and light coupled with sound totems that breathe life into the surroundings. At the centre of this delicate space, the film Grove Cradle, by Warren du Preez and Nick Thornton Jones, is projected onto the floor. Images of water, ice formations, snow, and a child-like being appear, moving through cycles of light and darkness. The sound—both from the film and the pillar speakers—draws visitors further into the space.
The installation suggests a new world where architecture collaborates with plants and animals, has no national boundaries, and is constantly shared and inclusive. The form of this new world takes inspiration from natural structures—cloudscapes and snowflakes, water and plants— to create buildings that are both rigid and sensitive to their environment, as evoked by Grove’s lace-like canopy.
At varying scales, responding to the question of how we will live together is a task that involves study and reflection on how we live now. It’s a daunting endeavour—not only for curators presenting work in Venice, but for all architects, designers and builders. How do we live, apart and together? How should we live? How can we remedy the errors of our architectural pasts, and envision something new together? Send Message
FICTION ALL THE WAY DOWN
Impostor Cities, Canada’s pavilion at the 2021 Venice Biennale Architettura, exists (as do a number of other pavilions this year) as much on screen as on the ground. Its interior shuttered, the physical pavilion can only be enjoyed from outside, mediated through augmented reality (AR). A more complete presentation of its content resides online at impostorcities.com. It’s a form of presentation that suits its subject: how Canadian cities stand in for other places onscreen.
Canadian cities that “imposture” in this way are taking part in what has been called the “Frankenstein space” of cinema. In one of the video interviews flitting around the Impostor Cities website, production designer Paul Austerberry describes one such space he created for The Shape of Water. The story’s Orpheum Theatre is named for a historic Baltimore venue, and cobbled together from the exterior of Toronto’s Massey Hall, a temporary cinema marquee, the interior of the Elgin Theatre, and another interior constructed on a sound stage. Every two years, Venice itself might be seen as a Frankenstein space too, as installations representing architectural cultures from around the world coalesce to form the Biennale.
The theme of the Biennale this year is “How Will We Live Together?” Impostor Cities references that question in its own terms:
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Send Message Send Message
“The world we live in together is the global generic city we experience together onscreen,” says co-curator David Theodore. It’s a provocative statement, and one that matters for architecture. As actor and filmmaker Sook Yin Lee points out in her own interview on the website: “Architects like to think that buildings are highly specific to their site and use. Not true!” Ouch. We have to admit our job often involves assembling off-the-shelf components, following universal codes and standards. Are we really creating generic, fake spaces that could just as well be somewhere else? Artist and writer Douglas Coupland offers one answer: “In Canada, you could almost say that the measure of success of any piece of architecture is how badly movies want to make it look like the States. It’s pretty much that simple, I think.”
Or maybe not. As we explore impostorcities.com, we thankfully encounter a number of other “takes” on the relationship between film and architecture. The site includes dozens of interviews with prominent filmmakers from across the country—writers, directors, producers, location scouts, art directors, and production designers. The voices of this chorus are interspersed with film and television clips shot in Canada, as it stands in for other places. As we click through, the scenes disappear and reappear, at times aligning so that we see, for example, Simon Fraser University or Roy Thompson Hall as it appears in four different films. Other sequences show us a Venice visitor using the AR app to watch film clips “on” the outside of the pavilion’s green-screen shroud, designed by co-curators Thomas Balaban and Jennifer Thorogood of T B A. Yet others take us virtually inside the closed pavilion; on its facsimile walls, we can see “projected” film excerpts. If fundraising is successful (the site includes a merch page to this end), the scaffolding and green screen may go on a cross-Canada tour—a kind of mobile impostor of the Venice pavilion. That would also be an opportunity to see several supercuts of film sequences which will never be seen in public otherwise.
For now, all we have is the array of shifting images that fill the website’s nine-square grid (which happens to be the pattern underlying several historical and mythical cities). Inspired sound design by Randolph Jordan and Florian Grond overlays audio from the films and ambient sound from key real-world architectural sites. Rather than cut from its surroundings like the moving images, the audio creates a context: disrupting, connecting, and punctuating the film clips, not unlike the role sound plays in film. The website’s matrix becomes a non-linear, recombinant labyrinth of ever-changing images and sounds. (As a result of all these shenanigans, the site consumes a huge amount of bandwidth, so watch at your own risk if your adult child is playing Path of Exile 2 on the same internet connection.)
It all seems designed to stop us just short of reaching a conclusion. What is an “impostor,” really? Quebecois film-maker Luc Bourdon points out, poignantly, the weakness inherent in this role: “How can we have a strong identity when we are always looking at the identity of another as our own?” Director David Cronenberg, on the other hand, speaks proudly of Toronto’s ability to “imposture itself”—posing as not just another city, but as other versions of Toronto. X-Men Art Director Tamara Deverall tells us how Toronto’s laneways, playing the role of the back streets of New York, have distorted the way the world sees Manhattan—which is not, in fact, a city of alleys. Indeed, filmmaker
ABOVE The rich content of the exhibition—including a chorus of interviews, film clips, and on-site segments—is accessible through its interactive website, at impostercities.com.
and writer Marcel Jean describes film as “un très beau mensonge”— “a very beautiful lie.” Perhaps a lie that tells the truth? Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers (director of The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open) observes that many young filmmakers today—she makes the case that they tend to be women—present spaces that are in no way generic, or clean, or geared toward a market.
At first glance, the exhibition seems to prioritize filming locations in Toronto, Vancouver or Montreal. But significant, if smaller, film industries elsewhere also make an appearance, making use of equally significant architectural and landscape heritages. One representative from these small centres is Guy Maddin, who, it has to be said, has never made a film in which Winnipeg stood in for anything other than, as Maddin puts it, a “mythologized” version of itself. (At times, I had to feel sorry for cities like Vancouver for the paucity of films in which they get to play themselves.) Echoing Marcel Jean, Maddin points out that the curation of the lies you tell about yourself is more revealing than any confession would be.
These contradictory takes on imposture and authenticity suggest a common ground between film and architecture. As project co-curator David Theodore has put it: “One of the powers of architecture is its power as fiction. It’s not like the architecture that we live in doesn’t also participate in storytelling and making imaginative worlds. It does. You’re using a fictional world to talk about another fictional story. That’s where it really gets interesting. It’s about imagining what the imagination can imagine. It’s fiction all the way down.”
If architecture, like the X-Men (a favourite of the exhibition) has “powers,” Impostor Cities exhibits an underlying respect for them. Evan Webber, art director of The Handmaid’s Tale, underlines this in his interview: “The greatest architecture has the greatest power to mutate and to reinforce its idea on you, without you really being that aware of it.” So filmmakers come under the thrall of architecture, even as they play with it. Webber actually studied architecture, at Waterloo, before starting his career at KPMB, on the Governor General’s award-winning Kitchener City Hall. He maintained his licence until recently, and in an interview for this review, underlined what film and architecture share: “They both take enormous and arduous planning and require immense efforts toward collaboration. Conjuring their final result is always an enormous leap of faith as well as a huge personal expenditure of one’s creative energy.” And Austerberry, who won an Academy Award for his production design of The Shape of Water, credits his architectural training at Carleton for encouraging him “to think outside the norms of what architecture was … [it] certainly helps with what I do now in film design.”
In the end, Impostor Cities refuses to answer the question of how we will live together. Who could? Its strength is in its openness to diverse interpretations. Unlike many pavilions, this one does not give us an ideology. Instead, it presents an emergent phenomenon, and encourages us to be intrigued—not just as we view these shifting images, but as we move into the future. It’s a conversation, and a way of conversing, appropriate to a Frankenstein space. And a tribute to the intelligence, inventiveness, and rhetorical skill of the curatorial and design team.
COURTESY OF GEORGE BAIRD FONDS, UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY TLTL
PUNDIT OF THE PUBLIC
REVIEW Trevor Boddy
A NEW BOOK OF ESSAYS CELEBRATING THE WORK OF GEORGE BAIRD DOUBLES AS AN ACCOUNT OF THE CLIMATE OF ARCHITECTURAL IDEAS IN EUROPE AND NORTH AMERICA FROM THE 1960S TO THE PRESENT.
When academic stallions are sent out to pasture, the last thing some are saddled with is a festschrift. These are collections of laudatory essays from colleagues and former students. While appreciated by their subjects, these books are often of limited impact and import, and—like most end-of-career gifts—wind up on display on office shelves.
What University of Toronto Daniels School professor Roberto Damiani has created is not a token festschrift in honour of his colleague George Baird, but something much more interesting, original and enduring. The Architect and the Public: On George Baird’s Contribution to Architecture is nothing less than a comprehensive account of the climate of architectural ideas at all stages of Baird’s career, from when he obtained his B. Arch. from the University of Toronto in 1962 right up to the present. Contributing essays and interviews to the book are international beacons like Kenneth Frampton, Joan Ockman, Michael Hays, Mark Baraness and Peter Eisenman, plus such leading lights of Canadian architectural culture as Bruce Kuwabara, Louis Martin, John van Nostrand, Hans Ibelings and Adrian Blackwell. Because of the range of these contributors and the depth of their ideas, this book is essential to understanding the life and work of the most important architectural thinker Canada has ever produced.
Since most of his career was devoted to writing and teaching architecture, and less to the design of buildings, it is a sign of just how inclusive Canada’s architectural culture has become that George Baird was awarded the RAIC’s Gold Medal in 2010. In similar fashion, the RIBA awarded its 2014 Royal Gold Medal to scholar-critic Joseph Rykwert, although it is impossible to imagine the AIA ever awarding its own Gold Medal to Peter Eisenman or Michael Sorkin. Many of Damiani’s contributors note that Rykwert is actually one of Baird’s key mentors, despite never having formally been his teacher or editor.
London Versus New York As a Toronto architecture undergraduate, Baird travelled to Finland on a 1959 exchange, sparking an interest in Alvar Aalto that led to a book on his work eleven years later. Baird met Rykwert after he moved to London in 1964 to pursue doctoral studies under Robert Maxwell at the Bartlett School, his intended subject being “The use of semiological concepts in architectural theory.” With not just semiology but the first waves of other French and Frankfurt School cultural theories in the air, Beatles-era London was a much richer milieu than Toronto or Helsinki, so Baird’s interests in art, literature, film, cuisine and music expanded while there. Frequent sparring partner Reyner Banham was down the hall at the Bartlett, and nearly all the other critics and theorists who would dominate English-language architectural writing for decades were publishing or teaching in London at that time: Charles Jencks, Colin Rowe, Alan Colquhoun, Kenneth Frampton and others. With the decline of the British economy and support for academe, within a decade, every one of them was teaching in the United States.
Baird sat in on some of Rykwert’s Essex seminars (where Daniel Libeskind and Alberto Pérez-Gómez were students somewhat later); Rykwert forged links for the Canadian to start teaching and publishing in London. As one of the first architectural theorists to dabble in semiotic theory, a major legacy for Baird was his 1967 Roland Barthes-inspired essay “‘La Dimension Amoureuse’ in Architecture,” which was revised to become an anchor essay in the ambitious anthology he and Charles Jencks edited in 1969, entitled Meaning in Architecture.
LEFT TO RIGHT George Baird (front), his friend and classmate Ted Teshima (centre), and an unidentified person during employment in Toronto, 1959; George Baird (centre) en route to Finland in summer 1959; Front and back cover of the first edition of Meaning in Architecture, edited by Charles Jencks and George Baird, 1969.
Louis Martin provides a lucid and highly readable exposition of the provenance and ideas of each of the essays in Meaning in Architecture, which included all the critics mentioned above, plus Aldo van Eyck and Christian Norberg-Schultz. (Damiani’s introduction to The Architect and the Public, plus the essays by Martin, Joseph Bedford, Joan Ockman and Adrian Blackwell, are all superb examples of critical scholarship, providing a foundation for the book’s other chapters, and doing much to clarify the complex theory debates of the 1960s and 70s.) In a simple but breakthrough move for presenting architectural commentary, Jencks and Baird’s Meaning in Architecture reserved space on its pages for contributors to publish comments along the margins of their peers’ essays—shells within shells of ideas, at a time when new theories churned and recombined. Damiani employs a version of this editorial device in his own book, cross-referencing the convergence and divergence of ideas from different writers by tagging links, using little arrows followed by suggestions: “see Blackwell, Frampton, Kuwabara,” for example.
Meaning in Architecture had an immediate impact on both sides of the Atlantic. Peter Eisenman recounts in his sometimes evasive 2017 interview with Damiani that “It was an important book, one of the most important at that time […] a knockout.” Prior to the London debates and their expansion to New York’s Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (founded by Peter Eisenman in 1967 after he completed his own studies at Cambridge), architectural theory had been dominated by the shallow appropriation of ideas imported from the physical or social sciences—what Denise Scott Brown skewers as “Physics Envy.” But semiotics would not come to dominate architectural thought, and Baird abandoned most of its analytic techniques almost immediately; Jencks followed suit a decade or so later.
A key turning point was Peter Eisenman’s tough review of the book in Architectural Forum in 1970, where he proposed that Baird and Jencks confused semiotics with semantics. Louis Martin’s summary of Meaning in Architecture from today’s perspective is that it consists of “Theoretical fragments from structural anthropology, semiology, semiotics, and English literary criticism […] an unfocused chorus of voices, which postponed the promised theoretical synthesis.” With this, Martin implies that “theoretical synthesis” is a desired or inevitable goal, but Baird’s subsequent career shows his diminished interest in the abstract construction of thought systems. He decided not to seek a “theoretical synthesis,” but instead immersed himself in teaching, practice, urban advocacy, and the focused criticism of buildings. This may have been the best decision Baird ever made.
When I was an undergrad studying film history and production in the early 70s, Meaning in Architecture was my own introduction to architectural theory—semiotics had become the intellectual fad of the moment for film theorists, and I wondered how it all applied to design. Later, when I was an architecture student working for Edmonton firms, some Toronto colleagues introduced me to Baird. He went on to become an editorial and academic mentor to me. As a student, I wrote essays on John Lyle, as well as on the Edmonton City Hall Competition (to which Baird had submitted a conceptually seductive design), for two of the only three issues ever produced of the Toronto journal Trace, which Baird co-founded.
Toronto, GSD, Toronto Despite his early success teaching and writing in London, Baird returned to Toronto at the end of the 1960s. He had been offered an appointment at the University of Toronto, and also judged that practice would be more of a possibility in Canada than in an England in decline. Given the ever-shifting landscape of architectural theory then, Damiani proposes that there were also intellectual reasons why Baird returned: “In Toronto, he could take advantage of a certain distance from both the European and American urban crises, and nurture an optimistic vision of the future of public space.” Baird’s innate optimism is noted by nearly half of the contributors to the book.
BRUCE KUWABARA
LEFT Joost Bakker, George Baird, Barry Sampson, and John van Nostrand, photographed in Toronto in June 1972. RIGHT Cover of the report On Building Downtown, prepared for the City of Toronto Planning Board in 1974.
Coupled with this was a new interest in phenomenology sparked by Rykwert, and an increasing immersion in the ideas of political philosopher Hannah Arendt—in particular, her 1958 book The Human Condition. Baird was one of the first writers to apply her ideas to architecture, and especially urbanism. Within several years of arriving back in Toronto, Baird appeared on stage with Arendt at a symposium about her philosophy at York University. Although he commenced writing at that time about how Arendt’s political philosophy could inform conceptions of public space and community, the book consolidating his interpretations—The Space of Appearance—would not appear for nearly two decades.
Settling in at 230 College Street, Baird at first became a close associate of architecture school director Peter Pragnell, also newly arrived from Britain. By the mid-1970s, the two had split, raising tensions all around, but the ensuing debates and clashes over curriculum and ideas ultimately enriched the education of their students. In 1972, Baird engaged four of those students to renovate the premises on Britain Street that he shared with publisher James Lorimer. Thus is born one of the mythic hinge points of Canadian architectural culture—Bruce Kuwabara, John van Nostrand, Barry Sampson and Joost Bakker, all at the business ends of paint rollers, renovating the building.
Along with helping on modest design commissions for house additions and a church renovation, soon they and others became collaborators on two of Baird’s most widely respected and influential works. The ground-breaking studies commissioned by the City of Toronto— On Building Downtown and Built-Form Analysis—were the most creative and intellectually rich urban design publications Canada had seen. This is a key theme of the lively and gracious interview Damiani conducts with Bruce Kuwabara, who argues that “Our studies, especially Built-Form Analysis, [showed] that property values could be maintained and that a mixed-use core did not imply less density. Considering that these fundamental objectives have shaped Toronto’s growth over the last forty years, I feel that our studies had an important impact.”
John van Nostrand and Marc Baraness make much the same point in their contributions to The Architect and the Public. Hans Ibelings and Andrew Choptiany assert that “On Building Downtown was a direct and practical application of phenomenological and structuralist concepts in the form of guidelines for densifying Toronto’s downtown core.” Comparing Baird’s work to that of Rem Koolhaas, with whom Baird sparred after The Space of Appearance appeared, they state: “[Baird’s] work is essentially Torontonian […] He has made significant contributions to the field of architectural theory, but it is in his role as a disseminator that he has had the most influence.”
Indeed, the essays and interviews contributed by Baird’s Toronto cohort are the spiritual core of the book, linking Baird’s theoretical interests with his commitment to practice, along with a fascination with urban fabric and the social success of Toronto. Adrian Blackwell offers a finely written survey of Baird’s evolving intellectual passions, from semiotics to post-structuralist theory, plus his reactions to the writings of Robert Venturi and Hannah Arendt. He highlights the importance of Baird’s studies of urban housing typologies and the morphology of the city, as Baird focused ever more on the urban lot as the key unit of understanding how neighbourhoods agglomerate and cities grow. Blackwell proposes that “Baird’s most powerful discovery has been [recognizing the importance of the] intertwined apparatus of public space and private property to architectural and urban theory.”
Having set things in motion, but frustrated by the climate in practice—in the architecture school, and in post urban-reform movement Toronto generally—by the mid-80s Baird took up visiting appointments at American Ivy League schools. He moved to Harvard to teach fulltime from 1993 to 1996, consolidating his global reputation as a teacher and critic of architecture. Happily for Canadian architectural culture, he subsequently retuned to become Dean at what later become known as the Daniels School of Architecture, Landscape, and Design.
The 25 years since Baird returned to Toronto are ones when he perhaps most enjoyed the fruits of his labours. His book on Arendt was well-received, if thought by some to have missed its moment (Eisenman opined to me that it was two decades too late for the influence it deserved); it was followed by books on street photography and the collection Writings on Architecture and the City. In 2012, the Daniels School convened a symposium on Baird and his work, and most of the essays collected in Damiani’s The Architect and the Public began as presentations there.
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ABOVE Cover of George Baird’s The Space of Appearance, 1995.
Conclusion: Theory, Practice and Criticism Because it spans both sides of the Atlantic through a half-century of architectural culture, it might be anticipated that a book like The Architect and the Public would reveal some unexpected larger patterns. A sentiment shared by many of its contributors is that there has been a rise and fall in the estimation of theory by architects, and that things are now at a low ebb, with some referring to a “Theory Age” in the past tense. In his conversation with Daniels ex-Dean Richard Sommer, Baird agrees that it is almost impossible to combine practice with scholarship in architecture schools today. “Theory fatigue had set in,” Baird proposes, and recent years have seen “the gradual displacement of theory from engagement with buildings.”
Harvard GSD’s Michael Hays describes himself as being part of “The Theory Generation.” The same would apply to most of The Architect and the Public’s contributors. In his interview with Damiani, Hays notes how current students “who previously would have studied advanced theory, now spend their time with tech. As a result, a few generations of design students have passed through school with very little teaching or support with regard to critical theory.” Good news for the writers in the book, he notes there is increasing interest in the history of theory, if not its contemporary creation. Consequently, this collection may quickly become one of the best books available summarizing the arguments of the last half century, showing how architectural theories evolved, grew and died—all focused through the lens of Baird’s career. Like many others in the book, Hays thinks Baird’s continuing connection to practice and urbanism has vitalized his theory: “The influence of theory pervades architectural education, even where theory itself is denied. George Baird can claim to have been one of the few to usher in this new imbrication of design research and a kind of ‘theory-in-the-making.’” Hays concludes that “Baird is more aptly described as a highly literary and philosophical architecture critic and commentator, rather than a theorist.”
The Architect and the Public is the product of meticulous scholarship by Damiani and his academic colleagues. The book includes a timeline, detailed bibliography and footnotes plenteous enough in length and linkages to inform a full doctoral seminar. Baird is also more the packrat than I ever knew. Seemingly every piece of paper that ever sat on his desk now has a permanent home for scholars to peruse at Calgary’s Canadian Architectural Archive. Taking advantage of this hoard, Damiani’s book is illustrated with dozens of pages reproducing Baird’s studio and seminar outline handouts, posters for talks at prestigious universities, and a colour folio featuring book covers and snapshots of the Toronto architect with students and colleagues, even steaming across the Atlantic to Helsinki in 1959. The book covers the range and substance of Baird’s professional life, ideas, and achievements in stunning detail.
This makes the book’s one gap all the more obvious, and baffling. The Architect and the Public contains no illustration—and almost no mention—of any completed building produced by Baird’s architectural practice, be it his original sole proprietorship, his partnership with Barry Sampson, or its most recent version when they were joined by Jon Neuert. Why? Baird was always frank that he was never the hottest pencil in the firm, but his name was on the door for a half century. Sampson often spoke to me of Baird’s importance as an in-house critic and sounding board as designs evolved at their firm. As this book was in the works for nearly a decade, I am disappointed that there was no essay commissioned from Sampson while he lived, and barely a mention of his passing. One of the essential architectural arts is criticism, which is equally crucial for design studio reviews, the give-and-take of producing buildings, and writing for books and journals. Do theorists underestimate criticism, after belittling it as mere application, shifting into a critical mode of their own?
I am quite proud to claim George Baird as an architecture critic who applied his judgment and intellect to understanding buildings, and who catalyzed public spaces of equity and consequence. I would go on to propose that criticism remains much more important to architects than theory, from which it so obviously draws. Baird’s role in practice, in devising urban design rules for Toronto, in his studio and in classroom teaching, and especially in his writing (where nearly every essay links to a specific constructed building or public space, the kind of connection rarely made by theorists of his era) is much more that of the critic than the theorist. Even lining up the contributors to Meaning in Architecture was more the act of a critic-curator than a systems-spawning theorist, and ditto for the unusually inclusive lecture series and academic conferences Baird organized—not to mention the salon-like dinners he and his food writer wife Elizabeth have often hosted. He is responsible for more friendships and convergences of ideas than any architect ever to call Canada home. There is an art to such linkages, and George Baird is a maestro.
I have to disagree with Peter Eisenman. Baird’s magnum opus, The Space of Appearance, was not too late when it was published in 1995. Given the intense current needs of cities and citizens, it may have actually arrived too early. More so than any time in the past few decades, architecture is overdue for an engagement with politics. Baird’s application of Arendt’s ideas on equity and public space is an ever-optimistic way forward, his real contribution to architecture. With many of us losing access to all that is public during pandemic lockdowns, there has never been a stronger market for focused thinking on how to shape a new urban sensibility. After a half century hovering in the wings of world architecture, and true to his on-the-stage and off-thestage career, George Baird may be about to make a re-Appearance.
The Architect and the Public: On George Baird’s Contribution to Architecture is published by Quodlibet, Rome (2019).
Vancouver-based architecture critic Trevor Boddy contributes the anchor essay “Enclaves of Invention” to the monograph D’Arcy Jones Architects, forthcoming from Dalhousie Architectural Press. He was co-curator of the 2014 “Critical Junctures” global gathering of architecture critics at London’s V&A Museum, which included George Baird.
NOW OPEN FOR ENTRIES
CANADIAN ARCHITECT INVITES ARCHITECTS AND PHOTOGRAPHERS TO ENTER THE 2021 AWARDS OF EXCELLENCE
Deadline: September 16th, 2021 Architecture project entry fee: $175 * Architectural photo entry fee: $75 *
Since 1967, our annual national awards program recognizes the architectural excellence of projects in the design and construction phases.
Submissions will be accepted in PDF format, up to 12 pages with dimensions no greater than 11” x 17”. Total file size is not to exceed 25MB. There is also the option to submit a video up to two minutes in length. This year, we are also presenting the fourth edition of the Canadian Architect Photo Awards of Excellence, open to professional and amateur architectural photographers.
Winners of the architectural project and architectural photo competitions will be published in a special issue of Canadian Architect in December 2021.
For more details and to submit your entry, visit: www.canadianarchitect.com/awards
TEXT Kim Petrin, Livia Balone, and Lyla Peter
CONFRONTING EDMONTON’S PAST, FOR A MORE EQUITABLE FUTURE.
This past year and a half, the pandemic revealed racial and social equity shortcomings in our cities. Anxieties and fears around virus transmission were expressed as racial stigmas, with negative perceptions of people of colour, and the avoidance of ethnic enclaves like Chinatowns. Public health orders to physically distance or isolate at home were difficult for many to follow—especially for those living in precarious housing conditions, working on the frontlines to stock our grocery shelves, or caring for our loved ones in hospitals and seniors’ homes. Already overcrowded homeless shelters quickly became more taxed, with many of their clients unable to safely space themselves. Depending on where they lived, many individuals found it challenging to access basic amenities like groceries and healthcare.
Insurgence seeped into our city streets, homes, hearts, and minds, with protests and social movements calling for rapid action and solidarity. In the AED and planning sphere, we saw new conversations emerge on the role of public policy in shaping cities. How do the practices of planners, engineers, architects, and other designers contribute to exacerbating—or reducing—inequality? How have the biases of designers led to uneven outcomes for marginalized and disadvantaged communities? The lived experiences of both the “haves” and “have nots” came into sharp focus across our civic landscape.
“It starts with us.” Throughout this past year, conversations on these topics with City of Edmonton staffers led us to reflect on how we might hear and heed the voices of underrepresented people in the planning of our city. How might our policies, programs, and services adapt and evolve to support greater equity outcomes? Colleagues across city departments shared a desire to place themselves in the “shoes of others”; to educate themselves; and to acknowledge how their work can unfairly impact others. One individual noted: “Equity is a fundamental part of our jobs. We can’t select out of this work.” They saw the path towards city-wide equity as long and winding—yet the destination within reach. The work would be challenging, though not impossible.
Towards inclusion and compassion In the City’s Urban Planning and Economy department, our attention focused first on Edmonton’s City Plan, a municipal development plan that articulates land use, growth patterns, and transportation and mobility systems. We asked: “How will we create a healthy, urban, and climate-resilient city of two million people?” Municipal documents like Edmonton’s City Plan invite big-picture thinking on questions like: How do we welcome more homes and people into our neighbourhoods? How do we make our spaces and places accessible to people of all backgrounds, races, ages, and abilities?
Updating the document with an equity lens has resulted in a plan that envisions 50 percent of new housing added through infill city-wide; two million new urban trees; the elimination of chronic and episodic homelessness; walkable and bikeable mixed-use communities, and more. We aspire to create an Edmonton that can serve those here today, and support and nurture those who come after us.
OPPOSITE The Blatchford West District Community Hub envisions an open, inclusive, and accessible town square filled with amenities, services, restaurants and cafés—the kind of vibrancy that a revised zoning bylaw hopes to further encourage. ABOVE The City also hopes to encourage adaptive reuse projects, such as Hodgson Schilf Evans Architects’ recent renovation of the historic Brighton Block into a mixed-use office and retail development.
Edmonton’s City Plan imagines a greener, efficient, connected, competitive, coordinated city. Its overarching priorities are to improve equity, end poverty, eliminate racism, and make clear progress towards Truth and Reconciliation. Throughout its pages, the City Plan makes the case for equity.
Considering equity can help to ensure that spaces and places are accessible and open for everyone; to provide housing that is diverse and affordable; to connect people with meaningful services and amenities; to welcome and embrace multiple people and perspectives; and to foster a spirit of collaboration and co-creation. Considering equity can help to support those who are isolated or marginalized; to ensure everyone feels safe, secure, and welcome; to support movement and mobility; and to ensure we thoughtfully respond to the impacts of climate change.
The City Plan and the Zoning Bylaw Moving beyond the aspirational City Plan, there are multiple tools that need to be leveraged to confront inequity. One of the more impactful tools is our city’s Zoning Bylaw. This is because zoning is everywhere—from our parks and playgrounds, to garden suites and the downtown core. The purpose of zoning is to determine what can be built where. It sets the rules for where new buildings should go, what types of buildings they can be, and what types of businesses and activities can happen on a property.
Confronting our past Since the early 20th century, communities have used zoning to organize land use and minimize conflicts between different activities, in order to protect public health, safety, and the welfare of citizens and the environment. But zoning has sometimes been used to separate more than just land uses—it has also been used to segregate people and disconnect them from places, practices, and production. Whether intentionally or not, zoning rules have led to disproportionate impacts for some segments of the population. For this reason, zoning has a dual legacy: of both promoting the public good and of causing exclusion.
Edmonton’s first set of land use regulations were introduced in 1933. Premised on a western view of land management, Zoning Bylaw 26 resulted in the displacement of many First Nations, Inuit, and Métis people, including the Enoch and the Papaschase. The most recognizable content from Zoning Bylaw 26 that is still present today is the city’s “Zone A” Metropolitan Recreation Zone, which encompasses the North Saskatchewan River valley and tributaries. Retaining “Zone A” is symbolic of what was—and still is—important to the city, to its identity, and to its people. But there remain many other relic regulations that do not reflect the Edmonton of today or tomorrow.
Adapting our present Since 2016, Edmonton has been undertaking a comprehensive reappraisal of its Zoning Bylaw, focusing on whether regulations were creating avoidable, but disproportionate negative impacts. A series of amendments were undertaken. Sometimes these were shaped by precedents in other cities, but in several cases, Edmonton was shaping practice, too. Many of our changes are firsts in Canada.
ABOVE Designed by Patkau Architects with Group2 Architecture, the Capilano Library exemplifies the City’s active support of award-winning architecture that contributes to community life. OPPOSITE The City is seeking to prompt discussion and reflection on Indigenous peoples through projects such as (ÎNÎW) River Lot 11∞ Edmonton’s Indigenous Art Park, which features permanent artworks by Canadian Indigenous artists.
For example, in 2018, an amendment to the bylaw made semi-detached and duplex housing permissible in Single Detached Residential Zones (RF1), as well as allowing basement and garden suites to coexist as additional dwellings in the same lot. Across North America, restrictive Single Detached Residential Zones have acted as deterrents to housing diversity, choice, and affordability, by only allowing stand-alone homes in large sections of cities. This has meant that low- to mediumdensity housing forms—which often fit in well in these neighbourhoods and allow for people of different social-economic groups to share amenities—have been uncommon in these zones. This has led to a concentration of affordable and supportive housing in other sections of the city— resulting, over time, in a spatial segregation of people based on income, age, gender, race, and ability.
Through a simple yet powerful zoning change, many types of housing are now an as-of right in Edmonton. The importance of diverse housing to welcome a diverse demographic of people was emphasized by this change—which was unanimously approved by Edmonton’s City Council.
In 2020, Edmonton removed parking minimums city-wide. The requirement that all buildings come with a certain number of parking spaces was introduced decades ago, when car ownership was considered a norm. But parking supply had often become a financial constraint for developers, inadvertently leading to unaffordable housing for the end user. An overabundance of parking can also lead to an unwalkable built environment.
The new change allows homeowners, businesses and the development industry to decide how much on-site parking to provide on their properties, based on the particular lifestyle of residents, their activities, and the building’s operations.
That same year, the City of Edmonton’s administration brought forward an amendment to increase Edmonton’s current supply of supportive housing options, in order to allow for more supportive living across the city. Previously, shelter operations and supportive housing were permitted in very few zones across the city, preventing entire segments of the population from accessing housing in more established neighbourhoods. Introducing a new definition of “supportive housing” in the Bylaw creates the opportunity to locate supportive housing more widely across the city.
The urgency and rationale for these changes was strengthened through the contributions of architects, politicians, residents, builders, and community organizations, who enlivened the debate and called for change. Their inspired ideas have given us a preview of how the city will be improved with medium-density housing, carbon-neutral design, culturally sensitive supportive housing, the adaptive reuse of heritage buildings, and mixed-use developments. Edmontonians have stretched our imaginations of what is possible, demonstrating what can be done to make our cities more vibrant, healthy, connected, and inclusive.
Imagining our future Renewing Edmonton’s Zoning Bylaw provides an opportunity to re-draft the substance of regulations. But it also presents an opportunity to draft regulations in ways that are easier to understand and interpret, enabling more people to engage with zoning and use it to the benefit of their communities.
To support this work, the City has created a Gender-based Analysis Plus (GBA+) and Equity Toolkit. This has been helping the Zoning Bylaw team in considering the social impacts of policies and regulations, and in taking thoughtful action to create inclusive, welcoming urban spaces and
places. The barriers and inequities connected to zoning are cumulative and wide-sweeping, and the team recognizes that institutional change takes time. The GBA+ and Equity Toolkit provides a place to start, in beginning to identify how individual actions can have an impact.
As University of Alberta planning professor Dr. Sandeep Agrawal notes, “humanely developing inclusive cities depends on legal guarantees and on their judicial enforcement, and [on] planners’ commitment to incorporating them into their practice.” This work has begun to reshape our thinking, and has enhanced our ability to write regulations that support more equitable outcomes. It is also being embraced throughout many other areas within the City of Edmonton.
The City is also advancing equity through District Planning, a multiyear project to establish communities throughout the city that can access their daily needs locally. Edmontonians are expressing a strong desire for a greater mix of local housing options, schools, recreation opportunities, amenities and transportation options. District Planning envisions communities that are as diverse as the people who live in them, and which foster a sense of belonging for all those who call Edmonton home.
“Advancing equity will be challenging, but not impossible.” Shaping an inclusive, compassionate and equitable city is a collaborative effort. Yet, some voices in city-building processes have traditionally been heard more loudly than others. Many individuals have felt excluded from these discussions; participating in them has felt like a privilege afforded to those with more resources, time, ability, and income.
Inspired by the phrase “nothing about us, without us,” we actively sought the voices of community members throughout 2020. They shared their lived experiences, their aspirations for their communities, and their perspectives on how to address equity in our natural and built environments. Explicit attention was given to ensuring that people from Black, Indigenous, racialized, underrepresented, and marginalized communities were invited to participate—those who have been historically left out of zoning considerations, and are disproportionately impacted by them.
These residents emphasized how our built environments, our planning processes, and our communication and engagement methods must be inclusive, diverse, and support belonging. They identified how vulnerable and marginalized people are negatively impacted by a lack of accessibility; a limited supply of affordable and diverse housing; and few resources for community economic development. They spoke about how greater priority needed to be placed on safety, amenities, and services. They shared how they wanted their communities to be walkable, bikeable, and have better transit, along with wider sidewalks and lower traffic speeds. Here are some of the comments and questions they shared with us:
“There is a perception that poor people live in duplexes, and that they will bring down property values. This works against intergenerational or multigenerational families.”
“If a newcomer was looking to start a small business, what should the Zoning Bylaw tell them?”
“Communities shouldn’t be allowed to voice who they don’t want in their community.”
“Why do we have to prove that we’re good neighbours?”
“How can you accomplish your daily needs if they are far from where you live?”
So how do we move forward—together?
As Kamala Todd, a Métis-Cree mother, community planner, and the City of Vancouver’s first Indigenous Arts and Culture Planner, eloquently wrote in Plan Canada:
Who gets to be the author of the city? Dreaming the city, upholding the charter, inscribing the stories. Who claims to be the founder, builder, caretaker?
We need to help people see themselves in our city—throughout the pages of our plans, policies, and programs. We need to hear their stories, we need to amplify their voices, and we need to make our planning efforts more accessible and approachable. This work will be challenging, uncomfortable, and ambiguous—all the more important for us to be relentless in the pursuit of equity.
Kim Petrin is the Branch Manager for Development Services at the City of Edmonton, which steers strategic growth and private sector investment through zoning, subdivision, servicing agreements, permitting, licensing, inspections and compliance.
Livia Balone is the Director of the Zoning Bylaw Renewal Initiative. Livia joined the City of Edmonton in 2008, previously working for the City of Saskatoon, planning consultants and various non-profit organizations, such as Community Futures, which provides small-business services to people living in rural communities.
Lyla Peter is the Director of Development and Zoning Services at the City of Edmonton. She is fascinated by how people, geographies, politics and culture shape our communities, which has led her to work in small and big cities across Canada, the United States, and the UK.
FOREST OF THE MIND
TEXT Elsa Lam
FARROW PARTNERS ARCHITECTS DESIGNS A CANOPY-LIKE SCHOOL ATRIUM THAT TAPS INTO INSIGHTS GAINED FROM NEUROSCIENCE.
ABOVE An intricate structure, based on fractal patterns, is designed to appeal to the human brain’s attunement to complexity.
“When children come into contact with nature, they reveal their strength,” wrote Maria Montessori in her treatise on children’s education, The Discovery of the Child. That guiding idea is at work in architect Tye Farrow’s new addition for the Toronto Montessori School, an independent school in Richmond Hill, north of downtown.
Farrow added a bow-shaped building to the front of the campus for preschool-to-grade-six students, framing a new courtyard learning garden studded with birch trees. Facing the parking lot, there’s a second garden, generously sized for caregivers and families to socialize after drop-off and pick-up. He worked with landscape architect John Quinn, who designed the gardens with native perennials, and used mounded forms that create a sense of shelter and enclosure.
But it’s inside, rather than outside, that Farrow’s interest in nature truly takes form. How can architecture go beyond the biophilic approach of using single elements like living walls, he asks, to engage the “experience and memory of mood, natural shapes, forms, and light?”
It’s a question that he’s been pursuing intuitively through architecture for decades, and more recently, through academic research. Last year, Farrow completed a Master of Neuroscience Applied to Architecture Design from the University of Venice IUAV, making him the first Canadian to obtain this degree. “We are living in what has been described as the ‘golden age’ of neuroscience research,” says Farrow, “which is leading to innovative ideas about how to live a fulfilling and healthful life, and the role our built environments play in this equation.”
Some of the insights he’s garnered are about why young brains thrive when kids are in natural environments. It turns out that neurons light up when we encounter the fractal patterns that are abundant in the natural world. Our brains are also stimulated in situations of “positive ambiguity”— places that are visually coherent, but that also have sufficient variety that we need to make sense of things.
In the showcase atrium of the school, Farrow put these principles to the test. The fractal-inspired structure alludes to the branches of a tree, with a purposefully complex combination of circular arches and triangular brise-soleil elements. The building’s radial plan gives the wood-beamed roof a slight asymmetry as it moves through the curve. Similarly, you enter the atrium under a line of skylights, set off from the central axis. Mirrors are placed above the fireplace and doors leading to administrative areas, bending the space further. “It’s about playing with perception in subtle ways that you may not perceive consciously,” says Farrow.
The intent of these manoeuvres is to create a space that intuitively feels good—a kind of interior counterpart to the Japanese practice of shirin-yoku, or forest bathing. Under the atrium’s canopy, students test the aerodynamics of paper airplanes, parents share news over morning coffee, and the community convenes in all-school assemblies.
All of the atrium’s structural elements are in wood, with steel connections concealed. Large green triangles, set above the courtyard-side openings, also allude to trees—and to the geometric shapes favoured in Montessori toys—but the space doesn’t pander to children. It has a sophisticated, peaceful feel that is a balm to brains of all ages.
CANADIAN ARCHITECT SEP21
EDUCATIONAL SPACES
