on site12: local architecture in a global world

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o| on ontari rk | hamilt r british columbia yo w e n lls uve niagara fa england | vanco o chile | n | valpairis a | londo rt ia e n a lb a m iova ro calgary otia | cra lumbia | p nova sc british co cheticam quĂŠbec | merrit ke sherbroo

20045 :: local architecture in a global world

Dirty Magic Proposed by: Hal Ingberg (Hicham El-Fakir) Summary: The Dirty Magic installation occupies the edge of a sidewalk on a part of the Esso service station property at the corner of Mont-Royal Avenue and Boyer Street. It incorporates two telephone booths and an incongruous pine tree. In appearance, this unusual assembly is fundamentally “invisible�, residing in a space somewhere between pathos and unintended humour. Dirty Magic wraps up the grouping in an ambiguous membrane of gold glass with a metallic beehive motif. Our perceptual understanding of the installation will be constantly shifting, shaped by the play of natural light.

publisher The association for non-profit architectural fieldwork [Alberta] editor Stephanie White

issue 12 winter 2004/5

design + production Black Dog Running

contributors Johan Bass Katherine Bourke Jean-Franรงois Brosseau Anthony Butler Julian Haladyn Miriam Jordan Kerr Lammie

Florian Maurer John McMinn Peter Osborne Graham Owen Marco Polo David Vera Lois Weinthal

printer Emerson Clarke Printing Corporation Calgary Alberta comments, ideas, proposals editor@onsitereview.ca www.onsitereview.ca

published with the assistance of the Canada Council Grants to Literary and Art Magazines

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Public machines Ivan Hernandez Quintela everything that throws or is thrown is by principle a weapon Deleuze and Guattari Taking Deleuze and Guattariís definition of a weapon, Is an architectural project a potential weapon?

Can the construction of architecture become a projectile thrown towards the State machinery?

Is the current state machinery the condition of Globalization?

Ludens, a design studio working in Mexico City, is currently interested in generating architectural interventions that might act as weapons against forces that limit, control, or attempt to define the correct use of public spaces.

We are convinced that public space must be heterogeneous, informal, flexible and open.

Thus, we are in a constant search for illegal, informal, or highly individualized uses and appropriations of public space. We believe behind these ìmisuses,î lies a direct critic from the users towards existing conditions of the public space generated by architects who consider themselves specialists.

However, the architect does not necessarily have the absolute knowledge of what is correct or necessary. It is possible to think that to generate more successful public spaces, a collaboration between users and architects must take place.

Therefore, we generate structures inspired by these public misuses as a way to counterattack several conditions we associate with the formal, the globalized, the universal.

We are interested in improvised architecture, vandalic architecture,informal architecture.

Machine 1 : Exchange of information A structure waiting for information A space that is constructed as it is used. The information hanged become its contour.

A meeting point where people can search for or leave information, ìlooking for, for sale, in search forî, and excuse to talk to the person standing next to you Machine 2 : Piece of shade A hanging umbrella in a street corner.

A piede of shade while one waits for thelight to turn green

Machine 3 : inhabitable boxes Apparently left-over packaging boxes With the capacity to be used as informal furniture

Ivan Hernandez Quintela is principal of Ludens, an architectural studio in Mexico City

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local architecture | in a global world

on site review 12: local architecture in a global world contents florian maurer

graham owen

2 Ivan Hernandez Quintela | Public Machines 4 Roger Mullin, Ted Cavanagh, Richard Kroeker | le Theatre Petit Circle, Cheticamp, Nova Scotia 8 Florian Maurer | Ethos Open Hands, Craiova, Romania

tony butler

12 Dave Vera | Valparaiso, Chile 14 Lois Weinthal | Berlin renovated lois weinthal

peter osborne

marco polo

17 Kerr Lammie | Niagara International Airport, Niagara Falls, New York 20 Anthony Butler | Context in Hamilton, Ontario 24 Jean-Franรงois Brosseau | St Vincente-de-Paul and the Bioteck Development Centre, Sherbrooke, Quebec

dave vera

roger mullin, ted cavanagh, richard kroeker jean-franรงois brosseau

30 Marco Polo, John McMinn | Nicola Valley Institute of Technology, Merrit, BC 36 BDKI | TransAlta Tropical Africa Pavilion, Calgary Alberta

john bass

john mcminn

40 Peter Osborne | Tropical Asia Pavilion, Calgary Alberta 43 Miriam Jordan, Julian Haladyn | Teahouses 46 Graham Owen | Architecture + Globalisation 50 Katherine Bourke | Looking North 52 John Bass | Massive Change

katherine bourke kerr lammie

julian haladyn and miriam jordan

stephanie white

Le Theatre petit circle Le Troisième Congrès mondial acadien Cheticamp Nova Scotia

roger mul l in

Roger Mullin, Ted Cavanagh, Richard Kroeker

Setting: Any place where amazing winds blow, the local people give them a name. In Cheticamp, Nova Scotia the springtime southeasters are called Suettes. As often as five times a month the winds in Cheticamp reach speeds of 200 kilometers an hour. They speed down off the plateau and whip across the old playground behind the school. All shingles in the town are battened down, double nailed and tightly overlapped. Trucks with semi-trailers stop traveling on the roads.

The town of Cheticamp in Nova Scotia was officially founded by Acadians returning a generation after their 1755 expulsion by the British. Their deportation to Louisiana and other French colonies is described by Longfellow in his epic poem Evangeline. In Cheticamp, stories are told of Acadians avoiding deportation by living in the valley out of sight of the British Navy — land left unsettled by the British because of the wind. Over time the French-speaking community has developed a fishing economy and a way of dealing with the windy landscape.

In 2004, the town hosted Le Troisième Congrès mondial acadien celebrating 400 years of European settlement in Canada. Festivities were organized in support of one hundred family reunions throughout the province. In Cheticamp, the church and the adjacent school contain three indoor spaces suitable for festival performances. Organizers added some temporary outdoor sites. and talked optimistically of a permanent summer theatre camp in the old playground behind the school.

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Every July, instructors in our school guide students through a short design/build project. In 2004, a group of three instructors combined forces to construct a permanent building — an outdoor children’s theatre suitable for the festival and the future theatre camp. On day one we had a surrealistic derelict playground on a twelve foot high plateau behind the school, two thousand dollars and twentyseven of us ready to design, build and raise money for the theatre. On day fifteen we had a theatre designed, built and nearly paid for.

roger mul l in

Dalhousie University School of Architecture ARCH 4002.08 B6 Freelab Summer Term 2004

Facts: Le Theatre petit circle is dedicated to the memory of Colin Gash, one of its designers and builders.

Overall dimensions: 180 seats, 12 foot by 20 foot stage, overall length 75 feet, overall width 30 feet.

Walls: 16 foot vertical ribs laminated one by fours on wood blocking, diagonal one-bythree spruce each side screwed to ribs, rock infill for ballast.

Floor: smooth gravel six inches deep.

Stage: one-by-four floor deck on one-by-tens with suspended rock infill.

Seats: recycled bleachers and new lumber.

Other: Playground slide doubles as entry. Long axis oriented southeast to head into prevailing winds.

Local wharves were constructed with wood cribs containing rock ballast. This cultural reinforcement persuaded us to build using rock-ballasted wooden cribwork for the walls and to create a permanent theatre with minimal wind resistance.

student builders: Velma Anelo Derek Brennan Kingman Brewster Katrin Desjardins Colin Gash Lynden Giles Alexander Graf Deana Hall

Kagiso Jobe Keemanao Kekobilwe Mark Lee Etienne Lemay Zihuan Lin Colin Merriam Benno Rottlaender Weronika Rybacka Michelle Sparks Michael Thicke Christine Thornton Robert Toth Keith Tufts Mareike Wellers Vincent Yen sponsers: Canada Wood Council Cheticamp Credit Union Cheticamp Co-op

Discussion: We started on day one with no predetermined design and presented a number of options to the local school and theatre group. Based on their feedback we developed two strategies — a theatre that could be disassembled and hinged down for winter storage or a permanent theatre that was ‘transparent to the wind’ heavy enough yet perforated to reduce the extreme wind load.

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This method of design development surprised the students. Studio projects had not prepared them to elaborate options for the client nor to develop a number of design strategies in parallel. By day five, the students no longer suspected that there was a secret design prepared in advance by the instructors, and more importantly, they realized that the developing designs would be considered in terms of building performance evaluated by experiment and experience. From that point forward, the students became designerbuilders sorting out details and working on sub-projects nested within the developing design framework.

This framework evolved based on a set of pragmatic and aesthetic considerations. For example, it was important to ballast the structure; so mass was added low, suspended from the structure but not touching the ground.

In another example, the siting of the theatre was a subject of some debate. Explorations of the slide revealed a huge concrete foundation — plans to bring the slide to the theatre were discarded in favour of keeping the slide where it was and the theatre was located around it.

The rain that filled the excavation became a way of levelling it. The crib work became its own scaffolding. The curvature in plan was based on the maximum the 1 x 3s would tolerate — luckily they were still fairly green.

The amazingly short ten-day building period generated real excitement in the community and strength of purpose in the architect/ builders. There is a sense of ownership by all. These indications of its success are based in the architecture, but also based in the fact that it’s a children’s theatre, located in a unique French-speaking town and part of a very significant festival. The theatre people are impressed by the acoustics and the way the building tempers the climate. They already planning night time musical shows and imagining various lighting effects. Many qualities of the theatre resulted from design decisions that synchronized the immediacy of construction, the mediation of climate and the reflection of local culture.

ro ger mul l i n

The theatre awaits its first full-blown Suette, constantly heading to the northeast, traveling towards its second summer season. We will be up in Cheticamp next spring to repair the leaks and make it shipshape for the next theatre crew.

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roger mul l in

Roger Mullin teaches design and construction at Dalhousie University, School of Architecture, and is concerned with material investigation and material culture through modes of design-build and architectural representation.

Ted Cavanagh teaches studio and history at Dalhousie and publishes on the history and sustainability of wood construction.

Richard Kroeker’s work and teaching at Dalhousie focuses on tectonic issues and their relationship with natural and cultural contexts.

Alden Neufeld graduated from Dalhousie University School of Architecture in 2004.

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Imagine standing in the centre of a small triangular plot in a city built of grey, crumbling concrete.

You are staring into a hole in the ground filled with black water. A three storey adobe-like brick wall of a neighbouring building is overhanging the property line about two feet. You are anxiously eying the masonry anchors that keep it from toppling over. It is winter and the brambles clinging to it offer no foliage to cover the generous helping of candy wrappers on the ground.

Lack of housing leads to the unregulated construction of these dwellings on the perimeter of the cities. This woman, her two children and her husband live in this 2.5x2.5m dwelling without water or sanitation.

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“I don’t think so!” I said, to my client’s question whether this was a good property on which to build the headquarters for their social work in Romania. This is how my relationship with Ethos Open Hands began, a privately funded Swiss Christian aid organization. Craiova, a city of close to a million in the flatlands of the Danube, west of Bucharest, was the site of diverse industries which all failed when the blessings of the market economy arrived 14 years ago. It has not recovered since and now combines the poverty of a typical Third World country with the ecological debt and depressing ambience of a decaying industrial city.

Ethos Open Hands does not believe the illusion that developing countries could ever attain the wealth of consumer goods and access to energy of the G-7 countries. On the contrary, once poor countries wake up and refuse to play the game as providers of cheap labour and resources, it will be the wealthy countries that will have to re-think their ways.

Hence Ethos Open Hand’s strategy is to teach self reliance through neighbourly networking, and self esteem through accepting responsibility and meaningful work. They do not cooperate with governmental organizations that will have us believe that a new aluminum smelter or assembly plant for Daimler Chrysler will solve more problems than they create. Instead, their projects are at the scale of growing food, bicycle repair and sales, construction and education.

A Romanian Experience another side of globalization?

Florian Maurer

The mission house, Casa Ethos, before and after the renovation. The second hand windows in the new third storey come from an old hotel in Basel/Switzerland. Unfortunately the construction crew cut down the beautiful mature trees before we had a chance to intervene.

People’s immediate and urgent needs must be taken care of first, thus the first project I was involved with was the construction of the Mission House — a commercial bakery and kitchen for their soup kitchen and meals-onwheels programs, a kindergarten, and the offices of the organisation. True to the goal of self reliance, a restaurant and bakery shop generates revenues to support their work and to teach business sense. The building was a conversion of an existing masonry structure in a central location. The existing roof of ultra-thin and sagging acacia-wood rafters was taken off, seismic upgrading was carried out, and a new third storey with roof terrace was added. It was planned as a Canadian wood frame structure because of the limited bearing capacity of the underlying structure, but we soon encountered cultural resistance.

Romanian authorities did not have provisions for wooden buildings, the population knew wooden buildings only from their slums, if at all, and the Swiss client thought 2x6s were just too thin to be used in buildings. The need for the building was urgent and there was no time to embark on a slow education on|site 12

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process, so we ended up with a structure in more traditional Swiss/German carpentry techniques.

Another reason for promoting Canadian timber framing has to do with self reliance: the communist era concrete and masonry structures require a high degree of social organization and large investments for machinery, cranes, vehicles, mixing plants.

No wonder the former Eastern Bloc countries are now littered with large unfinished structures! In Canada, someone with a Skil saw, a few other tools and a pick-up truck cannot only help themselves, but even be an entrepreneur: a radical step from the big brother culture of communist times!

Note the crane as a concession to European timber framing techniques

So, our next project was designed as a demonstration and teaching project in stick framing. It is a housing development of 30 units in duplexes and triplexes at the periphery of Craiova. The units are large three- and four-bedroom houses for families that volunteer to foster street children. The problem of street children in Romania is not only a function of poverty, but also a direct result of the unsustainable economies of massive construction in the new market economy. In the resulting extreme housing shortage, families of six very often live in apartments consisting of a living room/ kitchen and one bedroom. It is easy to see why children just can’t bear this situation once they reach an age of ten or so, and leave.

In this project, the units are simple boxes with shed roofs not only to stretch the private donors’ funds, but also to make the teaching environment easier to understand. Funds saved on the lack of complexities were diverted to amenities: large rooms, balconies, generous glazing and sun shading devices of local acacia wood. The balconies are not accessible from the east-facing bedrooms upstairs, but from the single loaded corridor on the west side with views over the city. It was our feeling that a balcony better serves as a meeting place than as an appendage to a bedroom.

Steering a 30 unit housing development in wood framing through a bureaucracy that doesn’t trust wood and is still dominated by former communist functionaries took us three years and countless modifications, but our patience was rewarded in the end and the development is now under construction.

Some concessions to cultural preconceptions still had to be made: —studs are 60x160 mm, because the Swiss consider 2x6s (38x140 mm) unfit for walls.

That goes for partitions, too.

—the wall elements are fabricated on an assembly platform and placed by crane, because the Swiss construction manager does not trust the precision that can be achieved by nailing walls together on the spot.

—all units have a full concrete basement, even though Romanian codes do not allow gas- or oil-fired appliances below grade. A house just isn’t a house without a basement in these parts of the world.

However, we’ve come a long way and for our next project, a home for disabled and elderly persons, we have already done away with the basement. Maybe I can even nail a wall together on the spot, if I get the opportunity

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to be on site when framing starts! Romania is a country with large timber resources and we are convinced that developing them for construction and manufacture of value-added products would bring benefit to the country.

We hope that our projects can contribute to this goal.

With globalization I first think of massive corporations abusing the disappearance of economic barriers by moving to countries with doubtful labour- and environmental standards, creating economic difficulties at home, dragging everyone down to the lowest common standards. ‘Globalization’ has created many enemies.

In architecture it expresses itself in luxury resorts in Saudi Arabia and through cities’ vying for attention by having star architects designing flamboyant civic buildings.

Architecture follows humanity’s drifting apart into a vast majority lacking the bare necessities, and a handful of demigods who will soon be able to genetically insure themselves against the afflictions of mortals — disease, stupidity, ugliness and depresssion.

The rich countries have better things to export than greed. We have learned to be practical, self reliant, thrifty and optimistic.

There is a place for architects on that side of globalization, too.

An axonometric view of the proposed home for disabled and elderly persons, Strada Bucura.

The simple buildings avoid an institutional ambience and share details with the housing development to streamline construction.

conceptual sketches for a K-12 school which will complete the development Strada Bucura.

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How are we to enrich our creative powers? Not by subscribing to architectural reviews, but by undertaking voyages of discovery into the inexhaustible realm of Nature! — Open your eyes, burst the straight-jacket of professional discussions! Devote yourself so wholeheartedly to studying the meaning of things that architecture spontaneously becomes an inevitable consequence.

- Le Corbusier

I traveled to Chile two years ago to live and work as part of a school term for four reasons. One: because I was born there and had always wanted to visit family and travel the country. Two: because I was genuinely interested in the culture and knew if I came to a better understanding of it that I’d have a better understanding of myself. Three: because I had seen some examples of tremendous design coming from the country and wanted to know more. Four: because my thesis term was arriving and I wanted to have it influenced by what I learned in Chile.

What I encountered was like nothing I had ever experienced before in my life! I found work in a government architectural office, in the city of ValparaÌso, making enough money to pay for my cab fare to and from work each day. This did not matter since I had plenty of family willing to feed and provide shelter. In the office I focused entirely on social housing and learned a great deal of how their system works in providing the basic necessities to people. Initially, this was the driving influence for my thesis but, as in most cases, thoughts change. The real influence became the city itself.

I have an uncle who is an engineering professor at the Technical University of Federico Santa Maria, a spectacular neo-gothic campus protected by the UN. He took me through the campus and around a few bends until we got to the school of architecture. The entry was homogenous with the rest of the campus but things changed the further into the building we went. I was amazed to find an open steel truss like space extending out into the city! I had to stop but only for a second since my uncle was taking me to meet the director of the school, Roberto Barria. He was delighted to tell me that his school was designed by Oliver Lang and Cynthia Wilson of Lang Wilson Practice in Architecture Culture (LWPAC) from Vancouver. I was even more astounded!

Here I thought I was entering a country full of rich culture and a passion for good design and one of my first examples comes from Canada. The school itself had embraced computers and used them extensively as a tool for information gathering and architectural communications.

On my way out I decided to let my uncle go ahead so I could walk around the building and look at the detailing. I interrupted one of the critiques in the main event space between a group of Chileans and a visiting class of Norwegians.

I lived one block up the street from a second school of architecture. This one was part of the University of ValparaÌso and is somewhat infamous for its teaching philosophy and style. The initial quote by Le Corbusier at the beginning of this paper describes this quite well. I visited

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Chile

Dave Vera

the school periodically and had a chance to chat with a professor who told me that no school in the world is like theirs. Why? Because they have the students go out and draw the city over and over again until they understand it. They design spaces for people. I can still hear him telling me this and is the reason that I now draw people in all of my drawings at work. Here they say we don’t need to draw people in an elevation because it is implied. Is it? Is it possible a new meaning could arise if our designs were populated? This school’s humanistic approach to design is directly influenced by poetry. The city has inspired poets for centuries so it is a relevant factor to consider in a design.

ValparaÌso robbed me and subjected me to its domain, to its foolishness: ValparaÌso is a heap, a bunch of crazy houses.

- Pablo Neruda These two schools each demonstrated the impact of architecture by the city. The first is a bold, almost crazy move, through use of computer design, to help enlighten groups of growing minds. The second is a passive human scale approach of discovery in which meaning is attained through the act of letting go. I find both vital.

For my thesis I chose to combine these two trains of thought: technology and poetry. The search was for a building that reacts to and is influenced by its distinctive place. The use of computers was intentional. An extension of the MIT Media Lab was proposed for South America to be situated at the end of the Valparaiso’s main axis. Why? Because I know that Chile has embraced the new technological frontier. The Media Lab has extensions in both India and Ireland with a logical move being another creation in Chile. Working with government, industry and the university the lab asks the questions of technology in a place. The building is placed at the end of Avenue Argentina to reunite the street with the water in a poetic way. The building is a metaphor of the sea with the Humbolt Current that runs up the coast of Chile providing more than enough background and inspiration. During the six months I was in Chile I didn’t choose a site or idea for the thesis. It was only after I had walked up and down the streets for months taking pictures and just enjoying the city that I could make a good decision for my next step. With the help of computers I continued to learn from my home in Canada.

I am glad that I was subjected to ValparaÌso for that short time. It will be a huge influence as I start my career here in Canada. Is this the new globalization? One place influencing another place? Let’s hope so. In my case I feel the term globalization is blurred; I am both a Canadian and a Chilean. If there is an architecture for each of these countries, to which am I bound?

Again, I go to Le Corbusier when he states a devotion to the study of the meaning of things. If you are in a place and study it well, good architecture will always be a consequence.

Ann M. Pendleton-Jullian, The Road That Is Not a Road: and the Open City, Ritoque, Chile (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996), 53.

Pablo Neruda, ValparaÌso: Where the Imagination Lives On (ValparaÌso: City Hall of ValparaÌso, 2002), 2.

David Vera holds a Master of Architecture degree from Dalhousie University and is currently interning at the Calgary office of Kasian Architecture Interior Design Ltd.

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figure 1. Alexanderplatz: 1986 and 2003

Berlin: a renovation of postcards Lois Weinthal Vintage postcards carry a sense of nostalgia as they capture moments from another time. This project begins with a collection of vintage postcards from the former East Berlin that are merged with current views of the cityscape as it is seen today under western influence.

The 1961 construction and 1989 demolition of the Berlin Wall acts as the time frame for the postcards in this project, capturing East Berlin before the fall of communism in the Eastern Bloc. They also frame other clues to the larger political and economic realm of the German Democratic Republic under Soviet sector influence, seen in its monuments, political markers, building typologies, advertisements and clothing. These images are re-inserted into panoramic views revealing the contrast of the former east with the current migration of western capitalism.

figure 2. Bode Museum on the Museum Island 14

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figure 4. Schรถnhauser Allee: 1970 and 2003 These images act as a double exposure converging two eras in one location, with the contrast of details that have either changed or remained static. Most recently, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the diffusion of western ideology and capitalism have changed the cityscape of the former East Berlin, while retaining buildings from both pre- and post-World War II eras. Renovations, demolitions and re-building reveal the disappearance of East German markers, including mass-produced concrete housing, empty lots, monuments of leaders, Trabant cars, beige and brown and political symbols. New appearances include

glass buildings, western commerce such as Starbucks, advertising, new automobiles and construction sites.

The postcards chosen to generate these images are located throughout central Berlin with an emphasis on Alexanderplatz, a socialist node in East Berlin, which was rebuilt after World War II (fig. 1). This socialist-designed plaza was meant to stand in contrast to the classical node of the Museum Island with its cathedral, museums and Humboldt University (figs. 2 and 3). The desire of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) to establish a

new modern city centre was partly due to the continued tension between East and West Berlin, which acted as a microcosm to the larger realm of tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The tension between east and west Berlin still exists, but for different reasons.

The fall of the Berlin Wall brought increased taxation to the west in order to rebuild the east. Simultaneously, easterners began to migrate to the west. This westward migration has resulted in abandoned factories, housing and increased unemployment throughout the east.

figure 3. Humboldt University: 1964 and 2004 on|site 12

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figure 5. Strausberger Platz: 1969 and 2003

The postcards highlight areas of East Berlin that promoted a positive image of the east during the Cold War. These areas were in the spotlight as the Berlin Wall fell and capitalism moved eastward. One such location is seen in a 1970 postcard of Schönhauser Allee, an S-bahn transit stop in the former East Berlin (fig. 4). It was not far from here that demonstrations for reform in the GDR took place, followed shortly by the first East Berlin couple to walk through the opening of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989. This postcard documents the types of apartments built in the east after World War II, and reveals a subtle layer of information in the the image on the stamp and its price, reflecting the differences between two economic and political regimes divided by one wall.

Since unification, the once gray and dismal streetscapes in the original city fabric of East Berlin such as Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg, are giving way to scaffolding and brightly painted facades. As the residents of the former east acclimate to a new political and economic system, architecture mediates between the old and new, between the previous places made by the occupants in their memories and the imposition of a new space transformed by the change in political systems.

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A view to the Fernsehturm — the East German television tower as seen from Strausberger Platz, acts a focal point along Karl-Marx-Allee (fig. 5). This grand boulevard, which began construction in 1951, was known as Germany’s first socialist street, providing apartments for its citizens.1 These apartment buildings were East Germany’s first attempt to provide mass housing. As construction continued, the cost exceeded the budget; consequently this building type was discontinued and replaced by a massproduced type called Plattenbau. A few blocks north of Strausberger Platz, is the Platz der Vereinten Nationen (United Nations Square) formerly called Leninplatz. Postcards of the original Lenin statue that stood in front of a series of Plattenbau housing structures can now be found at flea markets. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the monument to Lenin was removed.2 In its place now stand boulders from different countries referencing a new international relationship. This act of erasing the former socialist regime through the removal of monuments can also be seen in Wolfgang Becker’s 2003 film, Good Bye Lenin!.

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Traces of Berlin’s political history are evident in the facades, courtyards and interiors of its architecture. The quiet markings on these buildings are so commonplace for its occupants, yet as a visitor, these markings overwhelm with a sense of history — war-marked façades, the names of former East Berlin businesses. There are cranes across the skyline and scaffolding across façades —everything in Berlin is changing as people live within the process.

This project will find an end but the city will continue to change.

Ladd, Brian. The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997, (186) 2 ibid. 197 1

Lois Weinthal is an Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture at The University of Texas at Austin. She teaches architecture and interior design and continues to explore the space of interiors through peripheral disciplines. This project was supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the DAAD.

Ottawa International Airport, terminal building interior

On the Borders Kerr Lammie

al l i mag es s tan tec a rc hi t ec ts

Often borders are thought of as passive objects, or matter of factly just edges.

However a border exerts an active influence. —Jane Jacobs

Airports are borders to our countries and cities. The architecture of airports therefore can be representative of an entrance or portal to a certain place, the beginning and the end of journeys. The conception of airport terminals buildings has changed as their governance models devolved from federal to municipal and private entities, and with that change a greater civic dimension and a focus on self sustainability was added to the airport terminal. This in turn has the airport exerting a more active influence on the cities they serve.

Architectural expression through any applied methodology engages and informs place through a specific dialogue. The act of enclosing place provides a boundary condition, an edge, which gathers and focuses that narrative into generative ideas or forms that can be explored and defined through architectural exploration. A prescriptive method cannot capture and redistribute the nature of a specific dialogue from one place to another. Rather, a philosophical stance on place must be defined to guide research on its development. This approach as it relates to airports is based on the particulars of each city or country as opposed to the specifics of the physical site. Airport sites are usually chosen for their aerodrome capabilities, and as such are located on reasonably flat sites physically removed from their source of inspiration; the city. Their own context is neglected in favor of the functional requirements of the aircraft and their movements, leaving the terminal to become a vertical impertinence within a horizontal plane. An immediate lack of context mixed with notional civic ambition is the usual starting point for most terminal projects.

Ottawa International Airport, waterfall

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The geographical, geological, cultural, and historical nature of a country or a city can be engaged or disengaged to extract a narrative that combines the adventures of flight with the specifics of place. Removed from the city and to some degree its site the airport is on the border of place and imagination, often be regarded as non-places, abstracted by the excitement and anxiety of flight and travel, and by the limited amount of time spent in the airport itself.

Regina International Airport, rendering of sundial Edmonton International Airport, structural derrick

Interior architecture furthers the ideas expressed in the form and structure of the building, through a series design elements or focus areas. Departing and arrivals processes expose travellers to memorable spaces: in Vancouver the Haida Gwaii statue, in Ottawa the three-story water fall. It is through the expressive use of specific building materials that the narrative of place is accentuated and reiterated.

Though the boundaries of these airports are remote from the city, the edges of the two may eventually intertwine, as they do in larger metropolitan centers. Airports which encapsulate an idea of the city are subsumed by the city itself, becoming part of the layered construction that constitutes the urban fabric. When this occurs additional pressures such as residential concerns, intermodal connections, and commercial interests increase and interact more fully with airport terminals. To abdicate place as an idea and experience altogether excludes airports from acting as a remote representative of the city it serves, and eventually to represent the city from within its borders.

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The idea of creating place here on the borders is about slowing that process down and embodying elements that speak to, of or about that place. In Niagara Falls, New York the form of the roof was generated from a series of vignette models of the falls, the movement and nature of water, and the act of bridging the falls and nations. The client team was clear on a ‘gateway’ vision based on the falls for the terminal. The design team initially looked for other ideas of regional inspiration; the two streams of thought converging in a building with its roots in the geology of the region. The stratification of rock under two flowing roofs express the basic condition of the Niagara river and gorge, the combination of which creates one of the seven wonders of the world.

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To incorporate an idea or sense of place in no way constitutes a resolution that will necessarily make that connection meaningful nor is it the only way to address the architectural challenges of airport terminal buildings.

It does though provide a way to engage airports in a meaningful architectural discourse about life on the border.

Niagara Falls International Airport model, view from the south, above.

Kerr Lammie is an associate at Stantec Architecture, Vancouver, British Columbia. He has been known to work for lattes.

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al l i mag es s tan tec a rc hi t ec ts

View from the south-east, below

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The Case for Contextualism Anthony Butler

right: Cataract Power Company, c1896. Northeast of the Hamilton General Hospital. West elevation looking south.

far right: Hamilton General Hospital, 1991; Anthony Butler Architect Inc.: architect for design development, documentation, and contract administration.

Detail of south elevation of nursing wing; recessed masonry infill where windows are not required; chamfered top of foundation wall is raised to second floor level, to accommodate gentle rise in grade along south side of building.

Like most Ontario communities, my own city, Hamilton, has a strong tradition of masonry construction. Stone, originally quarried from the Niagara Escarpment which runs through the length of the city, was the material of choice for important public buildings and for many fine houses. Good quality local clay was also readily available, making brick the dominant building material for other types of buildings, including the rich heritage of early industrial structures. Many of these still survive; their strong presence throughout the older parts of the city establishes the defining quality of the cityscape and has had a significant influence on my own practice.

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The brick masonry construction of early industrial structures in Hamilton reflects the simple functional requirements for exterior walls enclosing a post and beam internal structure. Load-bearing masonry piers, aligned with interior wood or cast iron columns, are expressed externally; thinner membrane wall panels provide lateral support to the piers. The outer face of the foundation walls is flush with the piers and capped between piers with a number of weathering courses of chamfered solid bricks, like inverted corbelling, at the transition to the recessed infill panels. The infill usually

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incorporates window openings; when windows are not needed, slightly recessed masonry panels are inserted in the openings to maintain the regular rhythm. Masonry corbels at the top of the building support the thicker construction of the parapet and are frequently decorated by crenellations.

The special brick shapes found in 19th and early 20th century masonry buildings were easy to make when each brick was individually moulded by hand prior to firing. Bricks produced today using modern technology are extruded and cannot reproduce hand-

The older buildings found in Canadian cities and towns possess rich architectural qualities in form, materials and details, characteristics which architects would do well to study. Many Canadian architects recognize this and design new buildings which exhibit a respectful, contemporary response to the strong vernacular qualities of the local environment.

Directly opposed to this view is globalisation, which is overwhelming the special sense of place found in most Canadian communities.

Globalisation is most disturbing when international ‘star’ architects are imported to design major buildings, but its effect is probably more pervasive in the everyday adoption by lazy architects of design ideas copied from other parts of the world.

Too often, the star architect is selected for a trade-mark style, transplanted inappropriately into a Canadian setting, where its shock value is expected to create the buzz that the client seeks. Is this the kind of arrogant intrusion that our communities really need? Are we so insecure in our own design abilities that we should acquiesce in the face of clients who, seduced by the glamour of the latest architectural fashion, believe that a dramatic new building, however wrong for its setting, will automatically enhance their status?

Canada doesn’t need this kind of showpiece architecture, particularly when we have so many creative architects whose excellent contemporary work makes skilful use of regional materials and complements local vernacular and traditions. moulded shapes; furthermore, they are penetrated by the vertical holes required by the extrusion process. Special shapes can still be obtained, but it is difficult to justify the expense of importing all the brick for a major public building to obtain a small percentage of custom shapes. We devised the technique of trimming off one corner of the clay as it extrudes from the press to make a chamfered corner; the chamfers are laid uppermost in soldier or rowlock courses, recalling the character of the earlier brick masonry buildings.

We first used this detail in the exterior design for the Hamilton-Wentworth Police Administration Building, located in central Hamilton, in an area where major industrial enterprises once occupied entire city blocks.

Masonry piers define the structural grid.

Courses of chamfered bricks at the top of masonry spandrels between the piers form sills below the windows; where windows are not required, the openings are filled in with recessed masonry panels. The chamfered courses at the top of the parapet walls will become the typical window sill detail, if completion of the top floor of the building ever becomes necessary.

The replacement of the Hamilton General Hospital provided an even more challenging opportunity to explore masonry detailing reflective of nearby 19th century industrial architecture. The hospital first opened on its site in 1882, in what was already becoming the heavily industrialized part of the city.

The site area available to us for the new building was severely restricted by the need to maintain existing hospital facilities in operation throughout construction. This forced us to locate the 14m high main (south) elevation of the first three storeys, plus the on|site 12

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Hamilton General Hospital, 1991. above: detail of south elevation of three-storey section; recessed masonry infill where windows are not required. right: south elevation of eight-storey nursing wing.

end of an eight-storey nursing wing, right at the property line, for a total length along the sidewalk of 120m. Such a placement was commonplace for industrial buildings, of course, so the decision to recall the characteristics of those buildings was logical, since their common design elements are particularly appropriate for elevations which are normally observed from an acute angle.

For this project, the masonry panels between brick piers are recessed, in the same manner as in the early industrial buildings; the top of 22

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the foundation wall is chamfered inwards to meet the face of the recessed panels; evenlyspaced window openings are fitted with windows, or infilled with masonry where they are not needed (this was particularly useful when designing elevations to floors with different plans having widely divergent window requirements); the top of the wall is chamfered out again, creating a positive termination at the parapet and framing the recessed masonry panels. The resulting elevations have not met with uniform approval from the community (who were

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probably unaware of the siting constraints we faced). The elevations have a strong presence along the street, however, with a subtlety of detail which the alert observer can learn to appreciate, particularly when the family resemblance with the sturdy local masonry tradition of the 150 year-old buildings around the site is recognized.

Hamilton-Wentworth Police Administration Building, 1975; Anthony Butler Architect Inc. above: closeup of typical bay; chamfered courses at top of parapet will become window sill if third floor is added. above right: detail at top of parapet; special 90x90x190mm double-chamfered soldier bricks used at corner.

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Jean-François Brosseau

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Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, Sherbrooke, Quebec new entrance

Cimaise in partnership with Jubinville & Mailhot.

A city symbol on the east side of the St-François river in Sherbrooke, the 1902 Saint-Vincent-de-Paul hospital closed its doors in 1997. The recent recycling of the building relocated and now houses various health sector organisations such as a permanent care institution of 225 beds, the physical re-adaptation centre of the Eastern Township Region and regional social health services.

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Since its original construction, many expansions and transformations were performed in a haphazard manner, often trying to imitate the architecture of the past, and scarring the original building.

Our goal was to allow our new expansion to establish itself in a genesis of contemporary architecture on that site.

The chaotic circulation around the perimeter of the complex was reorganised by moving the main entrance and allowing the new volumes to express themselves.

The contemporary language used allows for a better understanding of the buildings

local architecture | in a global world

al l images s tĂŠphane lemire | c imais e arc hitec tes

two projects by Cimaise

and establishes another era of evolution in the history of the centre in an honest and authentic manner.

Characteristics: -Major building recycling project; -Complex multifunctional program; -Successful integration in an urban setting;

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hydrotherapy pool An integral part of the St-Vincent-de-Paul renovation project is the therapeutic basin used by the Eastern Township Re-adaptation Centre. It was built on the old hospital multistory carpark. Leftover spaces have become a park.

acts as a reflecting pond in the interior spaces.

Geometrically patterned windows and the layout itself recall a playfulness long forgotten that helps in the general atmosphere and treatment of the patients.

Located between the wings of the original hospital building, the pool takes the role of a park pavilion, with a roof that tilts up, open to a view of the city. This maximises the natural light within its spaces — this flood of daylight

The use of masonry, similar to the surrounding buildings, and the introduction of new building materials such as zinc and architectural blocks help create a definitely clear contemporary language in a more

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resolute setting. This intervention marks the era of the construction period.

Characteristics: -Technical complexity of the therapeutic basin; -Successful integration into a diverse urban setting; -Originality of the design.

Q:why is it important to Cimaise to use this very beautiful contemporary architecture to mark this era, given that we have just had 20 years of polite contextualism. What is it that you see in your region, or in Quebec, that tells you that it is important to make that break now?

A: Because of its French origins and being a French speaking minority located at the border of the US, I think Quebec is very open to the world, particularly Montreal, a cosmopolitan city with a strong european sensibility. It’s a way to preserve our identity while becoming a citizen of the world. Architecture follows this trend, which is why there is a lot of neomodernist architecture directly inspired from what’s done in Europe is being built in Quebec right now, mainly in Montreal.

But there is a big difference between Montreal and the other cities of Quebec...even with Quebec City. Again, the muli-ethnical culture found in Montreal is quite unique and the density of population there is much higher than in the rest of the province: there’s a lot more people there open and willing to new ways of doing. These factors give more possibilities for experimentation in that city.

Sherbrooke is about 160 kilometres east of Montreal, in the Eastern Townships. It takes about an hour and a half to travel by car between the two cities — very close neighbours, but two very different personalities. Sherbrooke is much closer to the conservative spirit of the northeastern states of the US than to the openness found in Montreal. This can be easily seen in the recent architecture built in Sherbrooke: bad traditional New England or Victorian style imitations. There is a strong nostalgia for the past and a kind of political correctness that rejects contemporary

references. It’s a city that lives in its architectural past. A lot of it is probably the result of the ignorance of architectural culture, this subject being absent from popular interests and cultural teachings found in schools—a major problem present in all of Quebec. Architecture is the ‘enfant pauvre’ of cultural education. And what is there to say when we know that culture is often discarded as an unimportant accessory and is certainly not a priority of the education system. I’m not sure about the rest of Canada, but I suspect that we are not alone in this situation.

We at CIMAISE believe that we have to react to this. Call it ideal or illusion, but we think that as architects we can change things — we cannot be indifferent, which is why we always try to introduce contemporary architecture in what we do. It’s a way of saying what we are today as a society and

of showing what is possible and where architecture is at the begining of the 21st century. It’s opening the cultural boundaries of our city to what’s taking place in the rest of the world. And it’s contributing, we hope, to the architectural education of the people, whether by publicly talking and explaining contemporary architecture or in debate when one of our buildings is the talk of the town because of it’s difference.

It is not an easy task and we are deceived often, but as architects who respect our profession and what we studied for, we couldn’t do anything else. And when we are succesful in our attempts to produce good contemporary architecture without too much compromise, we are proud and think that all the efforts for that little step forward was worth it in the end.

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Biotechnology Development Centre of Sherbrooke (BCDS) The Biotechnology Development Centre of Sherbrooke (BCDS) is dedicated to private research in the biotechnology field. The centre acts as an incubator for small, developing. research business (spin-off) as well as established biotechnology companies that are at the stage of commercializing their

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production. Built in the Biotechnological Park near the University of Sherbrooke Hospital Centre, the BCDS is a versatile and adaptable building that can accommodate different research groups. Every unit can house administrative spaces and laboratories.

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Special services and ventilation systems meet all the requirements of a level 2 biological confinement laboratory. An animal research laboratory meeting the requirements of the Canadian Animal Protection Agency has also been planned.

The architectural simplicity of the volumes establishes a rational and contemporary image of high technology. The horizontal lines and the generous glazing identifies the masses and insure a balance between the volumes and the voids.

This project won the first prize in the design competition of the Steel Cladding Contractor’s Association of Quebec (AERMQ) in 2004 for the excellence

of its design and the quality of the construction.

Characteristics: -Project realized in a “fast-track” mode over a 15 month period (plans and construction); -Complex systems that are well integrated into the architectural concept; -Flexible and adaptable spaces.

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Regional Responses to Sustainable Architecture in Canada John McMinn and Marco Polo

This broader, culturally linked understanding of sustainable architecture would naturally involve a regional dimension, where fundamental design strategies must be closely attuned to local climatic, microclimatic and geological conditions if they are to perform effectively. These strategies include consideration of building orientation, location and nature of fenestration and viability of alternative energy sources (solar collection, wind generation, ground source heating). Locally available materials and regional construction practices that take advantage of local labour skills are also effective strategies for reducing the ecological footprint of construction projects. These strategies have always been staples of vernacular traditions, especially in Canada, where harsh climate, geographic isolation of settlements and limited access to technology demanded the development of vernacular responses, in both aboriginal and early settler architecture, very carefully attuned to local conditions.

design that reaches beyond its traditional energy-efficient confines. Frampton argues for an architecture resistant to an overwhelming global and technological culture that threatens local place-identity.

‘Critical Regionalism necessarily involves a more directly dialectical relationship with nature than the more abstract, formal traditions of modern avant-garde architecture allow.’

A contemporary architectural response, that is sustainably appropriate to its context on a variety of levels, would be linked with local traditions of the material culture of the region. This would lead to not only greener but also more meaningful architecture — an architecture that adopts strategies of sustainability related to local climatic and geographic conditions, cultural practices and mores, and also participates in a broader critical discourse by engaging sustainability not only as technique or method, but as a cultural paradigm.

Nicola Valley Institute of Technology, Merritt, B.C Busby + Associates Architects

The cultural argument for architectural sustainability is usefully informed by a critical re-reading of Kenneth Frampton’s 1982 essay “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance”.

In particular, section 5 of the essay, “Culture Versus Nature: Topography, Context, Climate, Light and Tectonic Form” raises the possibility of a discourse on sustainable

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B us by + A ss o c i ate s

To date, the practice of sustainable architecture has largely been understood as an issue of technology and energy performance.

Increasingly, it has evolved as a manifestation of attempts to harness a variety of natural processes (daylighting, ventilation, gravity flow, etc.). However, for sustainable architecture to fully take hold and bear fruit, it must be understood within the context of cultural sustainability, reflective of the practices and mores of local populations.

Though important, the goal of energy efficiency is too limited a model of sustainability to capture the public imagination, a critical component of fostering a culture of sustainability as a broader public imperative.

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Bu s by + A s s oc i a tes

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Viewed through this lens, the Nicola Valley Institute of Technology offers a compelling case study in to the possibilities of an approach to sustainable architecture drawing inspiration from regional and local conditions and populations. Located on a forested, south-facing slope on the outskirts of Merritt, in the interior of British Columbia, this new 4,500 m2 post-secondary institute has been recognized not only for its green merits, but has also received prestigious design awards, including the Architectural Institute of B.C.’s Lieutenant-Governor’s Award and a Governor General’s Medal for Architecture.

Climatically, the Nicola Valley experiences hot dry summers and moderately cold winters, which led local aboriginal people to devise two highly pragmatic forms of shelter; the teepee, a simple and efficient ventilation structure that promoted cooling by convection, and in winter, the pit house, an earth-sheltered structure built with a southern orientation to maximize solar heat gains and which relied on thermal mass to minimize heat loss. Without resorting to overt formal references, NVIT uses environmental principles drawn from each of these earlier models: the principles of the tepee are embodied in a two-storey atrium that rises up to a glazed roof lantern with operable windows for natural ventilation; the precedent of the pit house is reflected in the building’s embedding in the landscape.

Using these principles as a basis for design, state-of-the-art energy modeling techniques were used to develop a fully integrated environmental system with advanced controls to optimize performance.

Wood is used sparingly to emphasize its structural and visual qualities, and its value as a natural resource: glue-laminated Douglas fir columns support concrete floor slabs, with cast steel capitals and bases transferring loads. The primary building envelope consists of a faceted modular wood frame rainscreen wall, clad horizontally with Alaskan yellow cedar which, left untreated, will age to a silver grey and blend with the landscape and surrounding vegetation. Operable tilt-and-turn windows provide natural ventilation and are shaded by adjustable wooden louvres.

NVIT is distinguished from other recent work for First Nations clients in B.C. where the architecture has drawn heavily on traditional building forms and techniques. The approach taken at NVIT draws on the cultural context for intrinsic cultural values rather than symbols and metaphors, addressing the broader implications of the aboriginal relationship to nature. NVIT demonstrates how First Nations clients can express their cultural identity not through the sentimental replication of traditional formal typology, but by espousing the principles of green building in a contemporary re-interpretation of the imperative of environmental stewardship.

B us by + A s s oc i at es

The design team consulted with aboriginal elders from five local bands to address the needs of a modern academic institution while acknowledging the significant features of the site and the heritage and culture of the native students. A combination of environmental and cultural considerations influenced the site design, construction process, material strategies and the selection of systems for water and energy conservation. One manifestation of this is that the building orientation seeks to satisfy both cultural and climatic concerns, addressing the cardinal directions and locating the main entrance so that it faces the morning sun to

the east, following aboriginal tradition. In response to the sloping site, the building is embedded in the ground at its north end and emerges to become a three-storey structure at its south end.

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B us by + A s s oc iates

This is part of a longer paper given at ‘Other Shades of Green’, ACSA Regional Conference, Vancouver BC October 14-17, 2004.

John McMinn is Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Waterloo. He is a graduate of McGill University and the Architectural Association and is a recipient of the Canada Council Prix de Rome in Architecture.

Marco Polo is Assistant Professor in the Department of Architectural Science at Ryerson University. He is a graduate of the School of Architecture at the University of British Columbia, a registered architect and former editor of Canadian Architect magazine.

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TransAlta Tropical Africa Pavilions, Calgary Zoo BKDI Architects, Calgary Alberta

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A recent addition to the Calgary Zoo is a collection of African pavilions. Canted curtain walls slice into what looks like a mud-plastered base, tall dolmens shine like beacons in the winter dusk.

It rains inside the gorilla pavilion, a school of tilapia cleans the hippo pool, an aircraft hanger door opens onto a plain of zebras — altogether an exotic experience in a Canadian winter.

On Site sat down with Peter Burgener, Rick Chow, Bill Mitchell, Kevin Pierson and Ross Roy at Burgener Kilpatrick Design International (BDKI Architects) to discuss the implications of this kind of eccentric architecture and whether or not such projects influence mainstream architecture. This is a distillation, more or less, of what was said.

On Site: If this kind of architecture can be done for a zoo, on an island in the Bow River, why can’t it be done for schools and office buildings on MacLeod Trail?

‘This project caught the interest and stirred the imagination of everyone involved— in our [BDKI’s] office and also on site. At the two family days during construction 760 people showed up although there were only 110 people working on the site at that time. You don’t often think of a steelworker who wants to come back to work on the weekend to show his family what he’s working on.’

BDKI: It is because the Calgary Zoo, important as it is to Calgary and to Canadian zoos in general, is not a mainstream building on a highly visible site that it has to be extraordinary to get public attention.

This was central to the program: the Africa pavilions have raised the status of the Calgary Zoo to the top 10% in Canada.

Destination Africa has increased revenues by millions of dollars, contributing to the zoo’s wide outreach program in threatened environments around the world.

The project balanced theming, a fundamental component of the program, with the provision of a great experience.

Rather than starting with a building and constructing exhibits within it, we show environments with animals, plants, insects, birds and climate. The zoo developed a powerful storyline based on exploration narratives, African villages and safaris, and the architecture wrapped the narrative. It was designed from the inside out.

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All decisions stem from this: the canted walls are an organic expression of the tree canopy. Eventually, in about ten years, the trees will be mature and eighty feet high.

To discourage undergrowth there isn’t a lot of light flooding the ground level. Light is strongest at the top where the canopy will shade the open glade below.

These buildings are designed from lighting loads, not aesthetics. The light changes as it goes up from sandblasted and etched glass, to clear glass, to Kalwall. Then there is handling the snow as it slides off the Kalwall roofs, requiring ice dams which also act as railings. The roofs drain into a central cistern which feeds an interior and exterior irrigation system. Mechanical systems are critical. There is an extremely high, tropical humidity level inside the pavilions requiring massive return air ducts and an extensive waste water system. Much of the mechanical equipment is hidden in the theatre of the African theme — a tree in the gorilla pavilion is a duct, a full scale baobob tree in the Savannah pavilion is an office and mechanical plant.

Another programming layer is the animals themselves: different primates — monkeys, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans, react differently to the same situation. They are quite capable of taking things apart, hiding pieces, or smashing them, or reconstructing them in a new way. They aren’t passive occupants, it is the viewing public that are the passive users.

The building was designed before LEED certification was widespread — it is very close but isn’t LEED certified.

On Site: Is this kind of exceptional architecture the way that zoos are going? When I spoke to Brian Keating (the director of the outreach program) about the propriety of zoos, I was overwhelmed with a barrage of material about captive breeding programs replenishing wild populations, species conservation, training resource people in the field, keeper exchanges — not a lot about exhibitions.

BDKI: Zoos are destinations and these pavilions are a destination within the zoo, meant to immerse visitors in a total experience. The African Pavilions show a village with a school, huts, a large shed successfully used as a conference centre.

The program is varied, and the spaces inside these buildings are huge. The Gorilla Pavilion has a one-acre footprint, a 120’

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skylight, and interior spaces up to 8 storeys high. Yet, the precinct of associated uses is made up of smaller buildings that reduces scale on the outside. The corner tower on the Gorilla pavilion is the fulcrum in the master plan, which we also did. It floods the inside with light and is a beacon for the whole zoo.

On Site: Has this project with its complex details and unconventional forms influenced other work you do?

BDKI: No. We aren’t interested in developing a BDKI brand, each project is different.

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opposite: the exterior of the Gorilla House, interior below this page: above the rain forest part of the Gorilla House, below, the savannah. right: the Gorilla House with mechanical plant huts in the foreground.

‘In the Savannah building, left, to give visitors the feel of being on the African veld with a mix of species, we [BDKI] used aircraft hanger technology to open up the whole side of the building, expanding the vista and bringing the outside into the exhibit. This image unfortunately was taken in the winter with the big hangar doors closed.’

There is much to be thought of here. Is theming, where garbage cans are disguised as tea chests and where Kenya is rammed next to the Congo and somehow the Great Zimbabwe edges in between them, excuseable if it funds a hippo sanctuary in Ghana, the only safe hippopotamus environment left? In this Africa there is no HIV/ AIDS, no war, no famine. It is an image of a mythical Africa that privileges animals.

The survival of these animals is threatened, for extremely complex reasons, in real Africa. Brian Keating says that the best zoo is the nightmare of the future.

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Art Vandelay: Tropical Asia in Calgary and golfing in Wenzhou, China

—What does he do? ­—He’s an importer.

—Just imports? No exports?

—He’s an importer-exporter. Okay?

Elaine and George in ‘The Cadillac’, Seinfeld

Peter Osborne We, as architects, are used to importing and exporting; visiting, viewing, learning and recreating is an entrenched tradition. We send people on traveling fellowships and make personal pilgrimages in hopes of gleaning some lesson about architecture that we can take home with us. Likewise we work hard to spread the gospel, sharing our ideas, our buildings and our building traditions with each other.

However, importing and exporting is no longer just encouraged by our peers. Clients are increasingly looking for global architects to import or export architecture.

What were once personal acts of discovery are now commissioned.

In March of 2004, in China with Graham Edmunds Cartier Architects of Calgary helping present a master plan for a golf course resort, I was exporting architecture. The project is located in two valleys on the outskirts of the industrial city of Wenzhou in Zhejiang province where everything from sunglasses to gas powered scooters are manufactured. Wenzhou is booming and like many cities in China it has an emerging middle class. It is here where the golf course takes shape — two resort hotels, 1500 vacation houses,

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a water park, service towns, and three 18-hole golf courses. The Chinese client specifically requested Canadian architects to (re)create Canadian architecture in China. With this new kind of exporting, architects no longer just apply the lessons they have learned; they export meaning. The China project exports a ‘Canadian way of life’ with our wide-open spaces, our love of nature and the possibility for a middle class.

While in China I was also researching Asian architecture for the design of the

new elephant pavilion at the Calgary Zoo — I was importing architecture. The Tropical Asia project reflects the Zoo’s new strategy of displaying animals according to location rather than by species. There are now pods within the Zoo that reflect specific locations in the world, a shift reflected in the new elephant pavilion. The existing Large Mammal Building once held African giraffes and hippopotamuses who were moved to the African-only exhibit leaving the Asian elephants behind.

OS: What is Asian about this project?

I have been asked that question many times about just how Asian is my Tropical Asia pavilion.

The Asian influences are in the wood materials and the traditional post and beam construction of the box elements. The massing and juxtaposition of forms and materials reflects some of the more contemporary conditions; over crowding, old vs new, and traditional vs modern. The African pavilion are more big ‘boxes’ that have then been themed. This pavilion has very little theming — the forms can be interpreted as programmatic elements and finishes are left raw (wood, concrete, metal). There are only limited areas within the elephant exhibit space that has been left for theming.

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im ag es a nd dr aw in gs : G ra ha m E d mund s C a r t i er

The theme driven exhibit strategy lends itself to this new kind of importation of meaning and association. The Zoo not only uses architecture to create interesting, animal-stimulating environments that reflect their lost nature, it is making peoplestimulating attractions that transport the viewer to an artificial nature. The Zoo uses regional- or vernacularassociated architecture to generate relationships with real places in the world. The meaning associated with the architecture creates the spectacle that assists the transportation. The animals reinforce the spectacle, which reinforces the architecture in an endless vice versa.

Both the China project and Tropical Asia represent a new kind of import and export of architectural ideas. Global clients demand architecture that can transform and transport a location through its inherent meanings and associations. Architecture is being used to create spectacle and transform both location and visitor. As the world becomes smaller and geography breaks down architecture is being used to (re) create new worlds within the real one.

Peter Osborne is a graduate of Dalhousie University and is currently an intern architect at Graham Edmunds Cartier.

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Teahouse | space of cultural exchange Miriam Jordan and Julian Haladyn

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Underlying our tea ceremony is space, without boundaries, for social exchange. The teahouse creates a ritualized space within which cultural and social exchange may occur, outside ordinary life — it is this separateness that makes the space and the exchanges that occur within it special. Ellen Dissanayake observes that [ritual and art] are fashioned with the intent to affect individuals emotionally - to bring their feelings into awareness, to display them. A large part of of the compelling nature of rituals and art is that they are deliberately nonordinary.1 A realm of the extraordinary is embodied in the physical structure of the teahouse itself.

The architecture that bounds this remarkable space removes the bounds of the outside world, resulting in an increased openness on the part of participants in our tea ceremonies.

To talk about the response of participants is to talk about the teahouses themselves.

Much of our tea ceremony is derived from the sixteenth century Japanese tea master Sen no Rikyu. What we were most impressed by

was Rikyu’s use of everyday materials, which he made special through the act of selecting them and the spontaneity of form in performing the tea ceremony. Rikyu’s decisions made the tea ceremony, which at the time was still heavily steeped in Chinese tea tradition, thoroughly Japanese, thereby contextualizing 44

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it in his time: he made it speak to him. Drawing upon this tradition of hybridity which has its beginning in the dawning age of globalization, we have developed a tea ceremony that speaks to us in our time in the ebb and flow of cultural exchange occurring at a global level.

As with Rikyu, our teahouses are made from ordinary, contemporary materials. They are the language through which the architecture of the teahouse is spoken and therefore must be relevant to the reality of participants using the space.

Our teahouses move away from the Japanese influence towards our own tea ceremony. Our first teahouse, Canvas Teahouse (2000), a five foot raw canvas and copper pipe cube, interprets a traditional Japanese teahouse (a similar adaptation was created for European audiences by Shigeru Uchida titled Tea Houses). The experience of Canvas Teahouse was one of privacy, people were reluctant to enter the space because the freeplay of social exchange was hindered by the private nature of the materials. In a deliberate attempt to circumvent this response the next teahouse, Coroplast Teahouses (2001), used a contemporary commercial sign material. The space of these teahouses was compressed to create a childlike environment, inviting play and the natural social exchanges that accompany play. People jumped in and out of these structures — the feel was of a holiday, where the ordinariness of the world is kept at bay by playful structures.

From the simple Japanese influenced cube we literally opened up the space in Teahouse in a Box (2002). An unopened square opens up to reveal a 9’ x 3’ x 4’ tea space made of pine, chipboard, vinyl, aluminum and burlap. One long, late night a group drunkenly drank tea and debated our material choices, concluding that the material mix mirrored a contemporary reality; the melange is what we encounter in our everyday lives. This teahouse encouraged dialogue because of the openness of the structure, leading us to collapse the structure of the teahouse altogether, creating Tea Garden (2003), an architectural base with four stools which infers space. This has been our most successful teahouse, bridging the cultural traditions of Japanese and North American aesthetics, translating the space into a hybrid experience.

Issue of cultural appropriation and hybridity can be thorny, but what is culture for other than to be used and lived? This contradicts the old notion that culture exists in a pure form, that this pure form is the sole possession of any one group. In our opinion culture is the

product of the ebb and flow of communication between peoples. This is echoed by Homi K. Bhabha— hierarchical claims to the inherent originality or ‘purity’ of cultures are untenable.2 The hybridity of Tea Garden made it simultaneously new and familiar, encouraging conversations among the participants not possible without the breakdown of cultural boundaries. The inferred architectural structure of Tea Garden, embodies a space of free dialogue which is the nature of cultural hybridity.

Cultural hybridity, far from watering down ‘superior’ cultural forms, acts to strengthen and invigorate all cultures. Cultures that have stubbornly tried, or been forced, to remain pure undermine their very existence by hindering the natural inclination of cultures to dialogue. Our new teahouse, Longteahouse (below), is a hybrid blend of Japanese, North American and Haudenosaunee culture (what Iroquois people call ourselves). One of the main influences here is the Haudenosaunee Longhouse which gives all people the equal opportunity to speak freely and be heard. We brush up against different people and different cultures on a daily basis, this is part of who we are and it is impossible not to respond to it: this dialogue is the nature of our tea ceremony.

1 Ellen Dissanayake. Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why. New York: Freepress, 1999, p.

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2 Homi K. Bhaba. ‘The Commitment to Theory’ The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001, p. 2396.

Miriam Jordan and Julian Haladyn are interdisciplinary artists and writers in Peterborough Ontario.

In 1997 they studied traditional Korean painting under master Lee Young-Hwan in Ichon, South Korea.

Miriam, a Mohawk artist, has a BA(Honors) in English and a BA(Honors) Visual Arts, Julian a BFA(Honors) all from the University of Western Ontario.

Both are currently pursuing an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from Goddard College in Vermont. Julian is also studying for his MA in Culture, Politics and Theory at Trent University.

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Architecture and Globalisation | five years on Graham Owen In an earlier contribution to this journal [OnSite2, 1999] I outlined a number of ways of understanding globalisation and its effects upon architectural culture and practice. The difference between working internationally and globalisation bears reiteration: globalisation weakens national programs, initiatives and boundaries.

Globalisation established a new ethos, one in which the tenets of neoliberalism reign supreme: tenets that include, as Elizabeth Martinez and Arnoldo Garcia2 have observed, the rule of the market, the cutting of public expenditure for social services and safety nets, deregulation, privatisation and the elimination of the concept of the public good, or community, replacing it with ‘individual responsibility’.

By now these have become so familiar as to seem, to many, incontestable: natural, Darwinian truths eternal (apart from the brief aberrations of twentieth-century social democracy). All of them have had effects on architecture, altering not only opportunities to build but also attitudes within architectural employment and education.

Since 1999, inevitably, there have been changes on the scene.

*9/11 With the attack on the World Trade Center and the justification it provided for a condition of perpetual war, neoliberal calls for the reduction of government were joined by an irreconcilable increase in state surveillance and control (as evidenced in the successors to Total Information Awareness, and similar programs in North America, Western Europe and elsewhere). The

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debate over whether globalisation, though it weakens the boundaries of other nationstates, is in fact synonymous with US imperialism has been given a new twist in the context of Bush-era pre-emptive war.

Observations that (partly as a consequence) we have the paradoxical convergence of China and the United States in terms of the market economy, totalitarianism and corruption are also gaining attention.

*the bursting of the ‘new economy’ bubble The appearance of cracks in the idea of the free market as an all-encompassing social paradigm has given rise to mistrust, but without adequate replacement models.

Widespread alleged or proven corporate criminality (WorldCom, Arthur Andersen, Enron, Adelphia, Nortel, CP, Parmalat, Hollinger, etc., etc.), has led to a crisis of faith roughly analogous to that in the Catholic church. Until very recent years, architects who have sought to make their creativity broadly and quickly visible have had little choice but to work for capital. And in the last decade, global entrepreneurial capital itself came to be widely understood as inherently virtuous, creative — even radical, capable of solving hitherto intractable social problems through the power of the market in the hands of the ingenious. But the breathless mythologies of Wired and Fast Company magazines ran up against the realities of inflated profits and worthless pension plans. Their way of thinking outside the box has taken on a new meaning for us. And architecture did not go untouched by this: at the 2001 Guggenheim exhibition in New York, Frank Gehry, Architect, a sponsor’s tribute ran as follows:

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The uniqueness of Frank Gehry’s work is the blending of the functional with the artistic to create an innovative product. This is a quality [we] relate to every day as we question traditional business assumptions and embrace innovative solutions. We are pleased to help showcase Frank Gehry’s genius.

The writer was Jeffrey Skilling, former Enron President and CEO, and the sentiment, ultimately, rather unflattering to one of North America’s leading practitioners.

*active opposition to globalisation— the rediscovery of the local What have sometimes appeared as revivals of the spirit of 1960s volunteerism (recalling the Peace Corps, for example) have been conducted both internationally and closer to home in recent years. The former serve, perhaps tacitly, as rebuttals to superpower unilateralism in the international arena; the latter often take as their touchstone the work of Sam Mockbee’s Rural Studio.

This work deserves our admiration and respect, but it runs two risks. First, it risks legitimating the call, favoured among neoliberal Western regimes, for volunteerism and faith-based initiatives as a means of relieving the state of obligations to the disadvantaged. This leads in turn to legitimation of the upward reconcentration of wealth expedited by tax reform that favours the uppermost income brackets. Second, localised pro bono work in architecture risks being construed or co-opted within architectural media machines as therapeutic or confessional forms of practice for the profession as a

whole; practices that expiate guilt for, and therefore inadvertently provide continuing legitimacy for, celebrity trend-surfing and spectacular politically acquiescent practice such as Koolhaas’ Central Chinese Television (CCTV) project. Thus the virtues of this resistance work can be spun as if by in-house parliamentary ethics advisors: ‘Forgive me father, for I have appeared on the cover of El Croquis’; ‘I forgive you, my son; publish five ecological remediation and self-build projects’. A discerning and independent architectural criticism is vital if the achievements of ethically motivated design work are to sustain their own critical charge, and their advocacy of alternative directions for the investment of expertise.

*expiation as global growth industry Here I take my cue from the telling insights of Hal Foster.3 As he suggests, the conflation of spectacle and expiation of globalised trauma occurs in the work of Empathists-sans-Frontières such as Daniel Libeskind. What has been particularly fascinating, though, about the installation of his global trauma-brand franchises in Toronto and New York is Libeskind’s insistence on his local credentials in each case: an echt Torontonian from the 1970s (‘It is a kind of personal homecoming for me’4) — although astute observers may have noted the conspicuous absence of Libeskind’s Toronto experience from his published bios until the ROM came calling; and, almost immediately thereafter, a bornand-bred New Yorker, a living embodiment of the American Dream, one of Liberty’s ‘tired and homeless’ risen to I-feel-yourpain stardom, the Dr. Phil of architecture.

Graham Owen is Associate Professor of Architecture at Tulane University.

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For the global celebrity practitioner, when it comes to local cred, brand labels are, it seems, interchangeable.

*the question of a Canadian architecture Can the local re-expand to the scale of the nation? Local practices based on material culture would experience difficulty doing so, since at the national scale in Canada they would re-encounter industrialised cross-border networks of distribution and product development. The regional cannot by definition be national in terms of scale, and regions, being defined by local climatic, ecological, material, or cultural conditions, often cross arbitrary national borders. The focus in recent years on cities as economic engines, as city-states, offers another lens with which to view this question — cities as localised concentrations with global reach — but the difficulty here is that consumption and images of status, so easily made apparently indispensable components of urban life, are also so easily globalised.

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In addition, we should note the critique of economic localisation made by George Monbiot, in his remarkable and beautifully written book The Age of Consent5. The inconsistencies, contradictions and injustices that Monbiot observes in proposals to deploy localisation as an antidote to globalisation in the economic realm find their counterparts in the cultural realm as well.

Determinations of what could constitute Canadian national identity today and tomorrow have been pursued, with varying degrees of rigour and success, by activists, journalists, pollsters, public intellectuals and social critics such as Michael Adams (Fire and Ice), Maude Barlow, Tony Clarke (Silent Coup), Stephen Clarkson (Uncle Sam and Us), Mel Hurtig (The Vanishing Country), John Ralston Saul and Jeffrey Simpson (StarSpangled Canadians).

Meanwhile, as these authors have enlarged the debate, the rebranding of Canadian architectural culture by some as North America’s Scandinavian Design Reborn has proven to have its own risks.

Work in this idiom exhibits impressive craftsmanship and tectonic refinement; but in developed countries the craft object has become a luxury commodity.6 From some perspectives, this initiative can appearbe a highly successful niche-marketing exercise, purveying the impressive craftsmanship and tectonic refinement of high-end custom country houses to those who, by virtue of wealth reconcentration, are able to appreciate it (‘Money creates taste’, as one of Jenny Holzer’s Truisms once put it; and that taste, once embodied as cultural capital, justifies concentrated wealth). One more effective litmus test, then, of whether a Canadian architecture can be re-envisioned has to do with whether architecture can once again be seen as a valid locus for public investment on a broad scale. At the level of world trade organisations, multilateral agreements on the provision of

services construe the full public funding of utilities, health care, education and the like as unfair subsidy and a constraint on trade. But the pitfalls of so-called PublicPrivate Partnerships for the provision of public facilities, such as hospitals, have become evident in western Europe, and more recently in the misgivings expressed by hitherto gung-ho provincial architects’ associations in Canada. George Monbiot, in Captive State7, documents how United Kingdom Private Finance Initiatives, created ostensibly to provide new and renovated health care facilities more cheaply and efficiently, would in fact reduce the number of beds, staff and hospitals, as well as access to care itself, if they were to provide the profits to attract private investors.

If PPP can be understood as a Trojan Horse for the wholesale privatisation of health care, then architects face an unenviable predicament: the better their work, the more effectively they serve to gift-wrap the horse. Similarly, the provision of university buildings through corporate partnerships (for example, at the University of Toronto) was one of the steps towards the expansion of the corporate university, and the legitimisation of business as the dominant ethos on campus. The greater the aesthetic achievement of these projects, the more effectively they create legitimacy for the privatisation of public education.

And the presentation of these buildings as exemplifying a Canadian architecture, perhaps by their subtle, sensitive and Aaltoesque use of regional materials, serves primarily to present them instead as a ‘Canadian’ architecture, as branded design in spite of themselves.

If those who have written cogent critiques of globalisation cast doubt on the benefits of the ubiquity of the corporate ethos, there is nonetheless evidence in architecture of a backlash to the backlash, suggesting the resurgence among a younger generation of a Koolhaasian ‘pragmatism’. Actual Scandinavian designers, from whose

younger representatives one might expect better, appear to be busy surfing the waves of globalisation more directly, assisted by the globally ubiquitous Bruce Mau. As Christopher Hume reported of the recent Toronto [September 2004 at Harbourfront] exhibition SuperDanish8, one practice proposed reducing Denmark’s proportion of land in agricultural use from its current 66 percent to 20, using this smaller area to produce food and pharmaceuticals through genetically modified crops. The reader, one hopes, while aware of the limitations of the journalistic summary, hardly needs to be reminded of the controversy over GMOs. Another practice proposes factorybuilt housing to be shipped from Denmark all over the world. ‘Building would be focussed and economic,’ Hume dutifully notes, ‘Using local materials and culture is inefficient and only slows things down’.

More circumspectly, though, he observes that the young practices’ ‘basic assumption — and it’s enough to cause some pause — is that design can solve the world’s problems. Forget politics, culture and economics; think instead of redesigning the planet, from Nature up.’

Global design Monsanto-style (or as one cynical observer put it, Maunsanto) continues, in the hands of some surfers, hiply oblivious to the weightier considerations of ethics and social justice.

Graham Owen, ‘Architecture on the Crest of the Wave’, OnSite 2, Fall 1999 — Winter 2000.

2 Elizabeth Martinez and Arnoldo Garcia,’What is ‘Neo-Liberalism? A brief definition for activists’, www.corporatewatch.org 3 See his essays published in The London Review of Books, Harvard Design Magazine (Spring-Summer 2004) and his book Design and Crime (Verso, 2002).

4 Daniel Libeskind, ‘In defence of the ‘Wow!’’, The Globe and Mail, March 14, 2002, R1 — R3.

5 George Monbiot, The Age of Consent (Flamingo, 2003).

6 See Graham Owen, ‘Tectonic Craftsmanship’, Canadian Architect, April 1995.

7 George Monbiot, Captive State (Pan, 2001).

8 Christopher Hume, ‘Super Danish’, Toronto Star, September 23, 2004.

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Graham Owen is Associate Professor of Architecture at Tulane University.

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the airplanes, they’re north— Katherine Bourke

2004 Since coming to London I’ve been thinking about the number of meanings for North. Is it something to do with the North side of the river? Is it split by East and West? Is North the location of the Swiss Tower? Is direction no longer relevant whilst walking? Is North the place up there from down here where the black and white birds soar slowly? Is to be Northern to be elsewhere and beyond?

Location and direction. It is difficult to separate my experience of London, a new location, from an awareness of location and direction, from North and South. North refers to both a particular direction in relation to location, and to places and ideas synonymous with the phrase. Coming from Canada, a country identified with North, I have become aware my fixation with its meaning in London.

In Canada, North is associated with location, direction and identity; Canada is North of the United States, it is Northern as a geographic location and as a concept about Canadian identity.

Location, in my observations of London, is a notorious topic of conversation. ‘Hiya, I’m at Tate, where are you?’ Unless you’re about to meet up with the person on the other end of the phone I find the relevance of location and desire to be located puzzling. What happened to the beautiful anonymity of the mobile phone? I’ve resisted mobile phone use because I haven’t wished to be reachable at all times living in London; I desired some time and space to be not found, not known, lost in the city and even to myself. Whilst enjoying an anonymous private space within a public place, I don’t wish to reveal my location —‘I’m mobile, in transit, neither here nor there’.

Despite my anonymity, I too feel a need to locate myself in London and I’m fascinated by stories of location: one south Londoner describes a constant longing to be a real Londoner again— in the North. She dreams of living in her northeast London flat, on the tube line. Is North a psychological reaction to the flow and speed of transit in London? I know my three months in Stretham Hill last year stirred up an incredible envy for those on the tube and a ridiculous fear of buses due to falling asleep, missing my stop and ending up lost late at night.

Another North Londoner describes Hackney as more central and accessible to the action as opposed to New Cross all the way down Old Kent Road. Is the action in the North? In a city as diverse and made up of many villages as London, there are as many versions of location and direction, centre and action as there are Londoners. South London feels like a retreat, a place to observe the North in its absence.

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In the South, on the hill in Greenwich park and from my fifth storey window in New Cross, my vista offers Canary Wharf flashing on a clear day, a sea of brick and trees, and London in the distance. Does this mean London is the North? No matter which direction I look or am looking from I tend to think of London as distant, something that is over there, North or South, East or West. A sense of London, this incomprehensible mass that is the city, is permanently elsewhere.

Sitting in Deptford Memorial Park on Lewisham Way down the road from New Cross (already location-challenged by numerous place names) eyelevel reveals the blue sky, airplanes and birds. The airplanes move slowly and hypnotically — my gaze follows their path across the sky. The airplanes, they glide. The birds dance and sing. Sometime loners, sometimes a crowd— these birds and airplanes lift my glance north of a ground location. I notice, observe, transfixed. In this space of bird watching time flows differently — I can’t help but think I’ve slipped into somewhere else. I look around to see if anyone else notices these gliding signs.

Direction. Walking North. Whether a wander or a destination walk, I lose my sense of location. Direction and location seem less relevant whilst moving. Time, space, and identity collapse into an in-between space.

We seldom look at our surroundings. Streets and buildings, even those considered major monuments, are in everyday life little more than backgrounds for introverted thought, passages through which our bodies pass— in this sense cities are felt rather than seen, moved through rather than visually taken in.

Anthony Vidler ‘Dead End Street, Warped Space’ Art Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture. MIT, 2002

My sense of being North has become an in-between space; North is looking up at the birds and airplanes — separate from the location on the ground; North is the distant never ending London to the north, an idea, a phenomenon, not a location. To be North walking to London is to enter another dimension with the birds and airplanes. The towering argyle sock of the Swiss Tower floats in and out of vision/existence triggered by the floating airplanes, a distraction simultaneously dislocating and reminding me of the here and now.

Katherine Bourke is a Canadian photographer currently living in Berlin.

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John Bass In 1968 the Belgian conceptualist Marcel Broodthaers assembled eagle-depicting artifacts for his fictive Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, Section XIXe siècle. In Broodthaers’ museum, gallant sculpted or painted eagles from European museums were displayed adjacent to eagles decorating utilitarian objects like bottle caps and notebooks, or eagles giving authority to flags. Broodthaers employed an arbitrary organizational scheme intended to negate the assumed meaning of eagle, thereby obliging the viewer to see the ideological impulses that figured in the use of the eagle as a sign. Broodthaers’ project works because of its simple principle of editing out everything that is not an eagle, including the origins of the eagle artifacts. It is a principle that reveals how the selection and organization of an exhibit’s material furnishes an orienting context to the viewer.

Designer Bruce Mau, curator of Massive Change: the Future of Global Design currently at the Vancouver Art Gallery, offers no such principle. Similar to many of Mau’s book design projects, the overflowing material in Massive Change is an experience of breadth, and not of depth. Although the show is organized as a series of eleven design economies, the uneven presentation of the various economies suggests that the objective of exhibiting a lot of material is not a virtue in and of itself. For instance, why is a critical theme expressed in some areas of the exhibit, for example in the Urban Economies and Material Economies sections, but not in others? Why are surveillance and scanning technologies presented in a value neutral way? In the Military Economies section, one is given a very ambiguous assessment: are we to conclude that ‘spin-ons’ from commercial product design to military applications are either just fine or just a fact of life?

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modification technologies deserve as rigorous an examination as the history of computer input devices or a day’s flights between New York and London? Surely, he and his co-curators at the VAG must have an opinion. Do these remain unexpressed because the undertaking of giving the unwieldy material some kind of thematic and visual order supplanted the work of selective editing?

The task of organizing Massive Change must have been a daunting one, and there are many inventive methods used to thematically and visually organize the show. One moves through this show often engaged and sometimes bedazzled, and leaves it least slightly winded, hoping that something was learned in there. I think most thoughtful people will come away from the show thinking the show interesting but full of contradictions, and less thoughtful people will leave stimulated by the cool bits and pieces, unburdened by any requirement to understand them in relation to the structures that produce them.

One could make the argument that the task of illuminating has been the historical mission of the museum, and that Mau and the Vancouver Art Gallery, which is Vancouver’s de facto museum of modern art, have produced an experience we normally associate with a trade fair rather than a museum.

And so what is the hidden sign of Massive Change? The designer’s soft machine lies just behind the designed surface of the show, one that is never revealed although it is intrinsic to each of the design economies Mau presents to us. There is no material describing the commodification of the Information Economy because that material is the show itself. In all things marketing, from selling credit cards to selling exhibits, what was once a commercial art

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is increasingly a precise science, made possible by armies of data miners and the growing saturation of product they place in the various micro-spatial economies.

Mau’s curatorial omission, conscious or not, of the methods of commodifying and designing information belies his plan for a kind of neutral inclusivity. Soaked through and through, the exhibit is the watery gleam of the designers’ micro-spatial economy, and while the exhibit’s image appears transparent it is in fact entirely opaque. It is the mirror of reification, of presenting an idea in the guise of designed objects, a process Broodthaers knew well and that Mau apparently chose to ignore.

Mau and the VAG curators optimistically imply that designers are producing a better world through design. The belief in the ability of design culture to guide a benign technology is not new and was called into question long ago. Perhaps Mau isn’t aware of Ulrich Beck’s argument that capitalist democracies need to engage in ‘reflexive modernism’, the process through which we might begin to make choices about how we define our reliance and constraints placed on technologies. Engaging in such a process is critical, requires clarity, and is neither pessimistic nor naïve.

John Bass joined the University of British Columbia School of Architecture faculty in fall 2002. He was previously a design critic at Harvard Design School and adjunct associate professor at California College of Arts and Crafts.

Bass is the organizer and coordinator of the Delta National Park Travel Guide, a multi-disciplinary research and design project for the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta in California. A part of this work has recently been published in GAM01 – Tourism and Landscape, published by the Technical University of Graz, Austria.

DESIGN MUSEUM, SHAD THAMES, LONDON SE1 2YD TICKETS: £6.00 Adults; Concessions £4.00; Family Ticket £16.00 OPENING TIMES: 10.00-17.45; Last admission 17.15 PUBLIC INFORMATION: 0870 833 9955 ONLINE: www.designmuseum.org

UNDER A TENNER - What is good design?

3 December 2004 to 27 February 2005 What is good design? Is it about styling? Function? Sensuality? Innovation?

Sustainability? Inclusivity? Something that makes us laugh? The Design Museum has invited fourteen people each with a particular perspective on design from different parts of the world to choose ten examples of what they believe is “good design”. The catch is that nothing can cost more than £10.

From a biodegradable cardboard toilet and Brazilian flip-flop, to a classic Bic biro and Masterlock padlock, their choices will be exhibited at the Design Museum in Under A Tenner from 3 December 2004 to 27 February 2005.

The result will offer fascinating insights into the different contributions that design makes to life today and into the design thinking of such people as: J Mays, head of global design at the Ford Motor Company; the acclaimed furniture designer Ron Arad; Cameron Sinclair, co-founder of Architecture for Humanity, which designs emergency housing for disaster zones; and Murray Moss who, as the owner of Moss, runs New York’s chicest design store.

Among the other collectors choosing ten examples of inexpensive “good design” are Foreign Office Architects and the product designers Naoto Fukusawa in Japan and Hella Jongerius in the Netherlands. The graphic designers Stefan Sagmeister in the US and Experimental Jetset of the Netherlands are participating in the project: as are Geoff Kirk, chief design engineer of Rolls-Royce, and the design commentator Wayne Hemingway in the UK; and the Brazilian furniture designers, the Campana brothers.

As well as selecting ten objects costing less than £10 each for the exhibition, the Under A Tenner collectors will explain why they consider their choices to exemplify “good design”. The public will be invited to join in the debate by commenting on the collectors’ choices and suggesting which examples of “good design” they think should be added to the Under A Tenner project.

To learn more about the designers featured at the Design Museum, visit the Design at the Design Museum research archive on our website at www.designmuseum.org For media enquiries contact media@designmuseum.org, for education enquiries education@designmuseum.org and general enquiries info@designmuseum.org

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Canada $7.50 Mexico 50MXN USA $9US Australia $9AUD UK £3.50 Europe 5

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