Introduction to our material future

Stephanie White

In this issue, eleven essays are divided into three categories: the drawing of things, whereby no matter what the need or desire is for more change, more analysis or more interpretation, drawing is the vehicle. The second category is micro-urbanism, where the city – how to make it, how to change it, how to use it, is the subject. The third category is material memory, three essays on very specific material entities, as unlike each other as can be. I’ll start with this one.

material memory

The more uncertain the times, it seems the more certainty comes to dominate a political and social discourse that sits alongside a swiftly changing technological, industrial and corporate reality. The past is another country, as it always was, and while many long for that prelapsarian place, they spend much of their present intertwined with the smart technology that organises their day to day existence. The past, often an appalling struggle, is now carefully curated to read like an aspiration. Alexa tells jokes that were hoary in the fifties, while she locks the doors at night.

David Murray’s description of The Queen Elizabeth II Planetarium, its origin story, its decline and its present restoration raises such issues. A mid-century modern building of local building skills, modest budget and dressed as a space ship, it housed an extremely sophisticated projector that replicated the night sky in more detail than one could ever see. Its dome, a trope for the sublime since Boullée, is also the dome of heaven, in play since the Renaissance. Its terrazzo, mosaics and ceramic tiles are more suited to the Mediterranean of Galileo than Edmonton’s climate, and its magical, near-transparent curtain wall anchoring the edge of a concrete cantilevered roof was not quite resistant enough to freeze-thaw cycles. The ethereal grounded in the earthly. Murray stresses that nostalgia alone does not justify restoration: this is a building for children and the child in us, thus valuable for its ambition: science is something that must be introduced early and forever listened to.

advertisement for the opening of Edmonton's Planetarium, 1960

City of Edmonton Archives

Lejla Odobasic Novo’s visit to the Rivesaltes museum in France, placed in a derelict 80-year old transit camp for refugees and displaced persons, is just as demonstrative an architecture as Edmonton’s 60-year old planetarium placed in a le Nôtre-inspired park celebrating the British monarchy. Rivesaltes pulls the dread and uncertainty of a camp for the stateless and reifies it; the planetarium tries to float away from its placid setting. Both speak about a future where things are different, where tears are wiped from their eyes, and there is no more fear. Rivesaltes is a monolith pressed into the ground; it does not float. It too must be listened to. Materials contain cultural memory and future aspirations. Rivesaltes sinks its concrete into the ground from whence it came. The Planetarium optimistically deployed materials that indicated the future freedoms in the public imagination of the early 1960s.

Rivesaltes

Lejla Odobasic Novo

Robert McKaye and Stoyan Barakov’s WA/VE is of a different order – the making of building systems out of discarded materials. WA/VE points paper magazines that once carried potent cultural messaging on their pages towards their intrinsic paper-ness. As they found, materials can be stubborn. One can draw what you think they should do, but they can rebel. Materials are not just there to do our bidding. this page: Queen Elizabeth II Planetarium opening announcement in the Edmonton Journal, 1960 Rivesaltes Museum: path to the past which runs beside the museum of the present WA/VE cells made from suggestively interleaved magazines

WA/VE, detail

Robert McKaye and Stoyan Barakov

the drawing of things

Emily Bowerman’s drawings of semi-industrial conditions in and around the agricultural hinterland near Guelph, Ontario, bring some of the outlines of landscape urbanism to bear on the analysis of impacted landscapes. This is very much a drawing process, where history, statistics, geography, economics, land use and land fallow are laid graphically into a single drawing. Critical conjunctions that appear on the drawing would fail in text, or at least would be buried in words. Logocentricity does not necessarily clarify, often it obscures, diverts. There are connections between the Guelph drawing process and that of Metis, discussed in the essay on microurbanism. Connections are made, visually, that lead to connections of meaning. It is in the process of drawing that invention occurs. As with materials, drawing itself can be wilful: things happen on the page beyond one’s intellectual control.

Emily Bowerman

Lisa Rapoport and PLANT’s project, With Words As Their Actions, is a set of curved screens installed on an Ottawa subway platform that carry oral history texts about nineteenth-century Ottawa. This is text, the text is words, the words were spoken. Ephemeral speech, uttered before sound recording, becomes, ultimately, letters removed from large stainless steel sheets. Air blows through them. They can be touched. Like drawing, this too is a process of translation: an idea, a word, a thing is inscribed, becomes physical. Becomes material. Becomes stainless steel.

PLANT Architecture Ltd

Maya Przybylski and J Cameron Parkin’s work is specifically about software-embedded design, where data and algorithms are considered architectural elements of form and material assembly. Her drawing of Formworks’ 2018 Murmur Wall is a diagram of software connections made evident, and evidence that such connections have material and spatial consequences. How such consequences are evaluated depends on the computational literacy of architects, something that is increasingly generational. The practice of architecture is in the process of re-prioritising starting points. No longer the scribble on the back of an envelope made form, it starts with a complex array of conditions and connections.

FUTUREFORMS

Dom Cheng’s Let It Rain, the first piece in this issue, starts with the complex condition of anomie and finds a small object, the umbrella, and its capacity to open and close, bump into other umbrellas and to create a safe space beneath it, as a germinal builder of community. His project relies on common will, the need to connect, the desire for sociability. His drawings show how this might happen: a kit of parts, assembly, a product. Deceptively simple.

Dom Cheng

micro-urbanism

Three essays are in this section – Joseph Heathcott’s aerial view of Mexican markets, Joanne Lam’s registration of street memory and media-recorded protests in Hong Kong, and Maria Portnov and Jonathan Ventura’s resurrection of the value-oriented designer who walks streets so unloved that it demands a manifesto. No matter what global forces blow around the world, like climate change they eternally play out on local terrain. p 24