Museum of the City - Philip Vandermey (Instructor

Project

The Museum of the City is a radically flexible exhibition machine for understanding the city. It is more closely related to a cultural center than a museum; rather than a backwards-looking repository for historical objects, it is a forum for the invention of the culture of tomorrow. The Museum of the City combines a small semi-permanent and frequently rotating exhibition with a larger space for temporary and / or traveling content. It is a significant public space in the city, a space for public and semi-public events, and provides all of the infrastructure and service spaces necessary for supporting these activities. Each student team created a detailed program interpretation on an assigned brief with a total area of 2500m2.

Site

The project is located in a transition area at the west edge of the city center of Calgary between the central business district, a residential neighborhood, and a cultural and park campus on the south bank of the Bow River. The project site is bounded by the Kerby LRT station to the south, 11 Street SW to the west, the lane to the north, and a residential building to the east (The Hat at 1116 7 Avenue SW). The site is approximately 91.6 meters wide east to west and 37.6 meters deep north to south.

APPROACH

Urban Realism

Architecturally, we are interested in normalcy and replication over innovation, anonymous and global contemporary urbanism rather than regional impulses, and a totality of design that allows the capacity to interrogate political, economic, and social models in addition to architectural ones.

This architecture is less concerned with form and ideology than with the shaping of extant forces, logics, and technologies of our metropolitan condition. It manages the city as it is, and responds to real inputs and conditions rather than ignoring or denying them with a focus on something new, different, and external.

Urban reality is ugly, not beautiful; chaotic, not visually rational. We inhabit the Non-places of Marc Augé - we are in them but we do not experience them. The contemporary city is a montage rather than an innovation. Our projects will visually simulate the present while programmatically envisioning a utopian vision of a better world.

Heterotopia

Modernity is characterized by differentiation. The Museum of the City is a radical container, and a neutral, contingent structure tailored to create ongoing internal contestation, contamination, and infinite programmatic instability. The neutrality of the system will create the laws that will allow for unlimited interior and exterior freedom. Rather than a stand-alone object, the Museum of Truth will engage its neighbors, invite them in, and encounter them in the spaces in-between.

Mirror / Amplifier

We test architecture’s capacity to interact with and transform hidden or embedded shaping forces. Projects in this studio are projective of an optimistic future - a proposal - while simultaneously unmasking an existing condition, reflecting it, and in perhaps even amplifying it. The mirror does not entirely disappear into its context, it is political in its dissidence and antagonism while appropriating themes towards strong formal and cultural reaction.

MuseuM of the City

MUSEUM OF EXTRACTION

MUSEUM OF EXTRACTION