on site 16 : architecture and new stuff

on site

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AT WO R K

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R E V I E W

16

architecture and new stuff

$9

display until may 2007

OCTOBER 29 TO DECEMBER 31, 2006

Safety Gear for Small Animals, Bill Burns, Director Curated by Annette Hurtig, Doryphore Curatorial Collective Media sponsor Off-Centre Magazine

Linda Walton: Evanescence: Barnes Lake in Decline JANUARY 21 TO MARCH 18, 2007

Cities of Canada. The Seagram Collection Produced and travelled by the McCord Museum, Montreal Made possible through the generosity of The Seagram Company Ltd.

Werner Braun: The Heritage Kamloops Collection APRIL 1 TO MAY 13, 2007

Jimmie Durham: New Urk Curated by Candice Hopkins and Rob Stockton Co-organized by Reg Vardy Gallery, The University of Sunderland, and the Walter Phillips Gallery, The Banff Centre

www.kag.bc.ca 101 - 465 Victoria Street Kamloops, British Columbia V2C 3H8 (250) 377-2400

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on|site issue 16 fall 2006

contributors Eduardo Aquino Steven Chodoriwsky Clinton Cuddington Joey Giamo Ron Goodfellow Margaret Graham Ron Kato Laura Knap Florian Maurer Stephen Pope Chad Russill Karen Shanski Elizabeth Shotton Lois Weinthal Stephanie White Antonio Zedda

call for articles:

On Site 17, Spring 2007.

Architecture and water on water, in water, under water drowning in water, having no water rain, drought, ice, erosion water systems, water recycling oceans, lakes, rivers swamps, creeks, ponds recreation, transport, views water rights, sovereignty rising sea levels, melting glaciers swimming, fishing, boating, diving clean water, salty water clear water, dirty water bottled water, treated water water.

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superkĂźl: issue 16 p17

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on|site issue 16 fall 2006

contents antonio zedda and jack kobayashi

clinton cuddington

4 Kobayashi + Zedda. Northern Journal.

Whitehorse Yukon 6 Stephen Pope. Taking the temperature of green building practice today 8 Ron Kato. Larry McFarland Architects’ Gulf Island Natural Park Reserve Operations Centre, Sidney BC 14 Steve Chodoriwsky and Laura Knap. Grand House Student Co-op., Cambridge Ontario

steve chodoriwsky lois weinthal

17 Margaret Graham. Superkül home/office.

Toronto Ontario 20 Clinton Cuddington. 1908 Wolfe Street, Vancouver BC 22 Elizabeth Shotton. Doherty House by Tomas de Paor, County Derry, Northern Ireland 26 Ron Goodfellow and Chad Russill.

Goodfellow Architects’ Blackfoot Crossing Interpretive Centre, Siksika Nation, Alberta 32 Florian Maurer. Kindergarten Feldgatterweg. Lana/BZ Italy

superkül

36 Lois Weinthal. Flyspace — interdisciplinary fashions at work 39 MOCA Los Angeles. Skin + Bones. Parallel practices in fashion and architecture

joey giamo

ron kato

40 Eduardo Aquino and Karen Shanski. spmb_projects’ Table of Contents, Winnipeg Manitoba 44 Joey Giamo. Breaking ground in Vancouver BC 48 Stephanie White. Arte Povera

stephen pope

stephanie white florian maurer spmb_projects

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Canada Council Prix de Rome press release — Kobayashi + Zedda partners Jack Kobayashi and Antonio Zedda will visit the circumpolar regions of the north including Iceland, Greenland, Russia, Norway and Finland; areas of the world that share common features like the boreal forest, extreme sun paths, harsh climates and Aboriginal cultures. They believe that northern architects use innovative yet basic technologies to produce ambitious and original site-specific buildings. They will travel to each country twice, in order to compare winter and summer conditions.

The firm has recently become recognized throughout Canada and the circumpolar region as a leader in First Nations and sustainable architecture. They represented Canada at the International Green Building Challenge (Mayo Replacement School) and received a Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia Medal in Architecture (Teslin Tlingit Heritage Centre). Their web site is www.kza.yk.ca.

prix du nord | Kobayashi + Zedda Whitehorse, Yukon onsite: your practice in the Yukon is so locally rooted, something that many architects would worry might keep them from being in the ‘world’, however, you are increasingly known in Canada and across the circumpolar region. What is your obligation to your local community?

Kobayashi + Zedda: we have been busy building up our base. We now have 6 full time staff in the office and have started a construction company to build our own buildings in the community. We want to broaden the spectrum of an architect’s role in the community. I love the fact that we have two salaried journeymen carpenters on staff and one apprentice along with a bunch of architectural interns.

It would be great to do an On Site issue on why we should build as well as design. I have learned so much about the street: legal (dealing with solicitors and litigators and understanding the difference), financial (scraping together $2 million in financing by putting everything you own on the line) and just the reality of building. We are becoming better architects because of it and I think most people here really appreciate the hands on effort to change the built environment...albeit one building at a time.

We are still trying to figure out what it all means to practice architecture. g

facing: some recent projects— top: Latitude 60 Live/Work Lofts. Three storey mixed-use development. Completed in 2003. Four two-storey lofts over ground floor commercial space (dentist’s office).

below: New Cambodia. Three storey mixed-use development. Completed in 2005. 11 residential units (1 to 3 bedrooms) and 3 ground floor commercial units (offices, yoga studio, massage therapist).

Journal entry, September 01, 2006 Jack and I have spent the last few hours trying to figure out how we might both find the time to leave Whitehorse, two operating companies,14 employees in need of guidance and way too much work to complete.

We have come to the realization that in order to be considered as a potential recipient of the Prix de Rome, a firm needs to complete a substantial body of work. By the time a firm has (completed enough built work), they are in the midst of their busy careers...with little free time to travel around the world, and in this case, twice!

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on|site issue 16

kob a ya s hi + z ed d a

fall 2006

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onsite: so Stephen, what is new in green building these days?

Stephen Pope: It’s a frustrating

In 2002 the David Suzuki Foundation published their ‘Kyoto and Beyond’ paper by Ralph Torrie & Associates.

It claimed that all the technologies required to meet the target were available. The paper referenced a federal government research program in which I was involved — the C-2000 Program for Advance Commercial Buildings. The claim is true, and groups like the Mountain Equipment Co-op now regularly build high performance facilities on marketbased budgets. The grim reality is that the architectural and engineering professions are either so technology blind (architects) or commodity focused (engineers) that very little real design ever gets done.

The evolution of the architectural press from professional journals to popular journals to the shelterporn that is so widespread on the news stands and TV hasn’t yet produced a more intelligent design audience, just more churn for the fashion industry. The general public does not seem to be any more enabled to demand a new or better product than it ever has been.

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s hep p a rd + a s s oci a t es

time for the new in the green building world. The shortsightedness of closing programs like Energuide for Houses (probably the most widely used ‘made in Canada’ energy efficiency program) and the fact that Environmental Builidng News now has a Then and Now column looking back over 10 years that clearly shows the miserably small amount of progress that has been made as green goes mainstream, are both signals that the deeper messages about good design and ‘taking only what you need’ are still too obscure for most.

The difference in design process between how things are done now, and how they could be done properly is very slight. But the attitudes are very, very different. Trade in starchitects, and the frustrated (and undeserved) sense of entitlement that exists in many Canadian architects suggests that the majority of architects are not going to get onto the positive side of the ledger for a long while yet.

I have to admit that I have ended up reading more and more business books as it becomes clearer that the way to move the sustainable design agenda forward is to be clearer about how people organize themselves to procure buildings. In the complementary sense, we as architects also need to be clearer about how we organize ourselves to deliver buildings. I am currently involved with a high performance project that is being developed in a manner that looks very similar to the kinds of offices I worked in as an intern architect in the late 1980s.

Following the money that generates decisions about buildings has to start at a much higher level than the client budget presented to the prime consultant. The interpretation of the asset value of a building by a pension fund has a greater influence on how design is implemented than even the calculations of organizational effectiveness undertaken by an owner/occupier/operator. We have to have life-cycle information about buildings down cold, and be able to explain same to the proverbial six-year old.

Green designers need to get closer to the business value discussions. Happily, this is not just a benefit for green designers — it is desired for all designers. Having a business relationship with a client is where architects can really deliver value and reduce liability.

Getting Green a temperature check Stephen Pope

In addition to reviewing the kinds of mid-1990s discussions of how one establishes an architectural practice that can concentrate on full value, we need to look also at what parts of practice are commodities, and then deliver those commodities in a smarter way. Some are afraid of India and China in this regard but I am much less concerned, as there is always a significantly local kind of knowledge that needs to be brought to bear if the whole project flow is going to be efficient.

I am suggesting that there needs to be a renewed effort to automate much of what is done for production of the construction documents. Improved 3D design tools (when are we going to figure out that AutoDesk bought REVIT for a good reason and dump the old stuff !) including the use of rapid prototyping tools need to be brought forward. Better information management and linked information flows between all aspects of design must be present if the designer is going to have good project control. An example of information flows can be simply recording design areas on spread sheets. A list of building assemblies and their components is a feature of budgeting and cost control, energy performance analysis, embodied effects calculations, maintenance scheduling, and construction materials procurement.

Designers (architects and engineers included) currently do not do a good job of extracting the most value from the information produced in the process of design. Timely information handling at the design stage makes a lot of detailed building performance analysis much less time consuming.

Better information management makes green design much more obvious, not to mention easier.

A change in production methods and an embrace of the reality that construction documents are commodities needs to be supported by changes to our business arrangements and contracts.

The old RAIC Document 6 fee breakdown of 25% design, 50% construction documents, 5% bidding and award, and 20% site review and management, needs to be totally reconfigured. I have heard of an AIA proposal that proposes an adjustment of the fee distribution to recognise a front loaded design process. It is necessary to gut the value of construction documents and add the proportion of the fee to the design and design development stages. ‘Design’ then, needs to be expanded to explicitly identify a whole range of predesign features that clients often don’t realize they need. Participation in budget setting is one obvious point.

Many initial budgets are set on too little information, and working out the real one during design can delay the project significantly, in addition to souring a relationship between the owner and the designers. Even a very engaged client often has knowledge gaps that put parts of the information flow that represents a project out of sequence.

The issue of sequence is huge! It is also explicitly recognised in integrated, or green, design processes. Recognising information gaps or sequence issues is a huge opportunity for architects to deliver better value to clients and move up the time line in the decision chain.

onsite: very nice Stephen. thank you. g

Stephen Pope is an architect licensed in Ontario and a researcher on high performance building technologies and design process at the Sustainable Buildings and Communities group of the CANMET Energy Technology Centre, part of Natural Resources Canada. http://www.sbc.nrcan.gc.ca

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How it’s done Operations Centre Gulf Islands National Park Reserve Sidney BC Larry McFarland Architects Ron Kato

With this project Parks Canada demonstrates its leadership role as the environmental steward of Canada’s national heritage and wilderness sites, leading to a LEED® Canada New Construction Platinum rating by the Canada Green Building Council (CaGBC). This is the first building to be given a Platinum rating in Canada, and the first Canadian government facility to follow through with Public Works and Government Services Canada’s commitment to LEED® Gold or higher for its new buildings.

la rr y m c f a rla nd a rc hi te c ts

There is now a built project in Canada which demonstrates how to drastically reduce the consumption of energy and water, how to provide an exceptional indoor environment, how to build using a significant amount of local and recycled materials and how to interact intimately with the site itself. This project does not incorporate any emerging or prototypical technologies, rather it uses only off-the-shelf products, proven technology and local design and construction resources.

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An important factor which we believe has contributed to the success of this project is the relationship between the design team and Parks Canada. Our normal design process encourages active participation by our clients and consultants in visioning and planning workshops. Three distinct project-specific visions were developed for the Operations Centre: Environment: to minimise the environmental footprint of the building, an issue particularly relevant for sensitive ecosystems such as those found on the islands in this national park, and to create a project demonstrating Parks Canada’s leadership in environmental stewardship.

Functionality: to re-invent Parks Canada’s way of working to function in a more integrated manner. It saw a work place which would foster communication and where interdisciplinary teams would be able to freely interact.

Architecture: to design a building evocative of the Gulf Islands, with green systems and the natural resources found on site (water from rain, energy from the sun and heat from the ocean) fully integrated within the architectural expression of the building.

Program, site and project vision, the dedication of Parks Canada staff to uphold their environmental stewardship mandate, and the design team’s enthusiasm and collective experience, have all come together in a manner surpassing the team’s expectations.

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a quiet September 22 2006, on a wharf in Sidney BC, with the federal Minister of Natural Resources and the president of the Canada Green Building Council present, the new Operations Centre for the Gulf Islands National Park was opened.

The Gulf Islands National Park Reserve was established in 2003 to protect the ecological integrity of a representative portion of the Strait of Georgia Lowlands natural region. It is the first new national park reserve of the twenty-first century and includes 35 square kilometres of land and intertidal area, spread over 15 islands, numerous islets and reefs and approximately 26 square kilometres of marine areas. The Gulf Islands lie under the rainshadow of the mountains of Vancouver Island and the Olympic Peninsula — a beautiful climate of warm, dry summers and mild winters that rarely see snow.

The site is a land base close to the islands. The waterfront lot in the nearby town of Sidney on Vancouver Island is narrow, with an existing house and garden kept to preserve the neighbourhood streetscape.

The lowest level, which supports marine operations, is oriented to the waterfront. The upper two floors accommodate adminstration and resource management personnel in a mix of offices and open plan areas.

The main floor has a small interpretive area in the front lobby and a large boardroom for public functions and meetings.

The open floors are planned around a central atrium lit by north-facing clerestory windows, and the depth of the building allows all work spaces to be next to windows. Each façade responds to its orientation, with sunshades on the south and east to protect the interior from glare and direct sun; strip-windows on the north provide indirect light and expansive views over the water towards the islands.

In keeping with the sustainable objectives of the project, interior finishes are minimal — concrete floors are left exposed (except within workstations and offices) as are the exposed steel deck, concrete slab ceilings and the Douglas Fir glulams. The exterior wall assembly, engineered to minimize air leakage and heat losses, has been detailed with materials able to resist the marine environment.

The natural resources available at the site — the ocean, sunlight and the abundant rainfall have all been incorporated into the building and the building systems. Although water, sanitary, storm, natural gas and electricity are available at the lot line, sustainable design features have resulted in a significant reduction in the level of dependence on these municipal services and utilities.

la rr y m c f a rla n d a rc hi te c ts

The building’s slightly inclined roof echoes the rock ledges of Gulf Islands shorelines. Exposed structure in the atrium visually connects

the floors; tilted glulam posts and beams link the atrium to its sloping roofs. Mass concrete shear walls resist the considerable seismic loads in this area, glulam columns and beams support combined axial and bending loads, and minimal steel members support axial tensile/compressive loads.

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Water: Rainwater, collected off the roofs in a 30,000 litre underground storage tank, is used for dual flush toilets and marina wash water needs in the marine operations area. Surplus rainwater passes through a sediment trap and hydrocarbon separator before being discharged into the ocean. There is no connection to the municipal storm water system and it is expected that over 108,000 litres of rainwater will be harvested and used annually. By using rainwater to flush toilets, the volume of municipally treated potable water used for the conveyance of sanitary waste has been reduced by 98%. The capacity of the rainwater storage tank is expected to be sufficient except for a few weeks of the year in July.

What potable water is used within the new facility will be reduced by over 60% through the use of low flow water-conserving faucets and showers.

New planting is drought resistant and will not require irrigation once established.

Heat: The building does not have a natural gas connection: all heating and hot water needs are supplied by an ocean based geothermal system.

Pumped in sea water passes through a heat exchanger. A series of heat pumps coupled with a system of plastic pipes embedded in the concrete floors is used to provide radiant heat, cooling and hot water. This system is the main reason why the operations centre is considered the most energy efficient project in the country. The building envelope and cladding system are specifically designed to save energy by minimising thermal bridging and controlling air leakage. All occupied rooms are equipped with multiple controls designed to allow occupants to have a high level of control over their indoor environment, including individual lighting controls, controls for both temperature and fresh air, and operable windows.

Air: The open plan layout and the atrium encourage natural ventilation. All offices and workstations are located beside openable windows; motorised ventilation louvres at roof level and at each floor open automatically when the building system senses that the outdoor air temperature and conditions are appropriate.

Carbon dioxide sensors are linked to the ventilation system. When an increased level of CO2 is detected in a room, the building control system provides fresh air to the affected room.

Light: Sunlight is converted directly to electricity by photovoltaic panels installed on the roof, providing 20% of the building’s total energy needs.

The system is connected directly to BC Hydro so that ‘net metering’ is possible.

Lighting fixtures use energy efficient direct/indirect fluorescent lights; when next to windows they have photo-sensors to adjust artificial light levels automatically and occupancy sensors to turn off lights when rooms are empty.

Exterior sunshades, installed over south and east facing windows, are designed to limit the amount of direct sunshine which can penetrate the window and to help prevent the building interior from overheating. At the same time, the building has been planned so that all workstations and offices have operable windows and an abundance of natural light.

Exterior lights shine downwards preventing light trespass across property lines.

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top level

middle

lowest level

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lar ry m a c f a rla n d a rc hit e c ts

l a rry m c f arl a nd a rchi t ect s

Construction process: The contractor’s Waste Management plan minimised waste from construction materials. The disposal of all waste material generated has been tracked throughout the construction process — approximately 85% of waste has been diverted from landfill.

Strict erosion and sedimentation control measures were followed throughout the construction process. Prevention of damage to the existing shoreline and marine habitat was an absolute priority for Parks Canada. During construction, storm water was prevented from running offsite into the ocean. Silt-laden water resulting from construction activity was contained against the shore by a marine silt fence, a floating boom with a weighted curtain below to catch the silt.

A minor amount of contaminated material was discovered on the site and removed in accordance with federal standards and procedures.

During construction, an Indoor Air Quality Management Plan was developed to give guidelines to the contractor on acceptable construction procedures such as ensuring that ventilation system components were kept clean and materials were protected from the weather.

After construction was completed, the building was flushed out to help remove contaminants in the air.

Materials and Resources: There has been an emphatic use of local and regional materials, including concrete floors and walls, glulam columns and beams, wood framing for all walls and partitions, Western Red Cedar siding and Douglas fir decking.

Another criterion in the selection of products to be used was their recycled content: the percentage of recycled material exceeds 30% of total material costs. Materials used with recycled content include fly ash, which replaces some of the cement in the concrete, steel (varies from 25-95%), thermal insulation (9-40%), millwork panel products (80%), carpet tile (35%), aluminum frames (60%) and gypsum wall board (17%).

Interior finishes and materials, including furniture, were chosen based on low VOC emission levels, durability and cost. The facility manager has developed a policy which allows only the use of green housekeeping products and procedures.

Emissions: The energy consumption for the new building is expected to be 75% less than a Model National Energy Code Reference building. A computer simulation of the building systems’ energy use was used in the design process. This level of performance will result in a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 32.3 tonnes annually.

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l a r r y mcfa r l a nd a rchi t ect s

Owner Project Manager Prime Consultant, Architect and LEED Consultant

Parks Canada Public Works and Government Services Canada Larry McFarland Architects Ltd: Larry McFarland, Ron Kato (Project Architect), Carrie Gratland, Susanne Hunter, Penny Martyn, Dean Shwedyk Structural Engineer CWMM Consulting Engineers Mechanical Engineer Stantec Consulting Inc./Willie Perez Engineer of Record Electrical Engineer Robert Freundlich & Associates Ltd. Energy Engineer EnerSys Analytics Inc Landscape Architect Phillips Farevaag Smallenberg Civil Engineer 1st Team Engineering Ltd. Cost Consultant James Bush & Associates Ltd. Commissioning Agent BC Buildings Corporation Environmental Adviser Public Works & Government Services Canada

Contaminated Sites Environmental Services Building Science Professional Read Jones Christoffersen Ltd General Contractor Ledcor Special Projects Ron Kato MAIBC LEEDÂŽ AP is a senior associate with Larry McFarland Architects Ltd. and is the project architect for the Operations Centre.

He has a passion for sustainable design and is the firm’s practice leader for sustainability. www.mcfarlandarchitects.com

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“The Grand House Student Co-operative is an incorporated, non-profit housing co-op, with the goal of demonstrating sensitive, aesthetic and environmental design, promoting innovative living and exploring both traditional and alternative construction methods.”

building home Grand House Student Co-op

Cambridge Ontario

Laura Knap and Steven Chodoriwsky

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n 2004 the School of Architecture at the University of Waterloo moved from the main Waterloo campus to vastly improved facilities on the banks of the Grand River. It sits in the middle of Cambridge, Ontario’s historic downtown, which was in desperate need of positive development. The school’s move has been both exciting and awkward, as students, faculty and local citizens come to terms with being neighbours. In these critical early years of relocation, Grand House forms a timely, unique and productive incision in the town.

In May 2004, four months before the architecture school’s reopening, incoming graduate student Chantal Cornu arrived in Cambridge looking for a place to live. A little early perhaps, but hers was not to be the typical, tedious search for temporary student accommodation. Armed with maps, phone numbers and

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a streak of blind ambition, she assumed the role of ambitious prospector. Her vision: to find land, and then to build a place in the Cambridge community for students to call home.

Two years later, with a strong cast of student members, the support of citizens, and generous grants and donations in tow, the Grand House Student Co-operative is now a visible local organisation on the brink of making a building.

From Cornu’s energetic first strides, a dedicated core of individuals have shared her goal to create quality, affordable student housing, driven by what it means to build responsibly.

From a diverse set of issues including community integration, environment, patterns of student life and economics, a set of clues

Model photos of the Grand House’s preliminary design, depicting terrain and orientation, site constraints, and massing concepts

has emerged. As a not-for-profit co-operative, the Grand House group is aligned with a long history of collaborative decisionmaking, mutual responsibility, and community involvement. It looked for feasible alternative energy systems and materials that are salvaged, renewable, durable and locally produced. Project design and execution is a process of skill-sharing, reaching out to local professionals and trades specialising in ecological construction methods. Not only can students gain practical building experience, but so too can community members offer time and expertise. A broad-reaching fundraising campaign was undertaken and the promotion of public awareness and involvement was placed at the fore.

groups of the local Cambridge community and the transplanted architectural community. If not for the convergence of these groups, Grand House would scarcely be possible. The timing could not be better: given the newness of the relationship between town and school, it is a friendship still saturated with idealism, possibility and wishes: that the city might develop as an adequate and friendly resource for the school community; that students might not just be seen as silent placeholders with pocketbooks, but as active, participating citizens Cambridge; that a school of architecture can indeed be a catalyst for grassroots urban renewal. The sheer existence of the Grand House presents the case that such wishes are not simply idealistic abstraction.

This is the most critical initiative of the project — forging some of the first student-initiated links between the seemingly disparate

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1

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1: View uphill from Ainslie Street 2 & 3: Hillside views towards Ainslie Street, the Grand River, and downtown Cambridge 4: View along Roseview Ave and downhill Underlay: Cross-section of the Grand House site

This student residence co-operative thus leads the first generation of bona fide architectural work directly attributable to the school’s arrival. The persistent architectural challenge is the site itself. Irregularly shaped, steeply sloped, and overrun by brush, debris and disuse, the site is nonetheless eligible for incentives because of its downtown core location. Once an impossibly steep road allowance, the site used to have a staircase connecting the residential neighbourhood at the top of the hill with the downtown that spilled below. Much to the neighbours’ relief and delight the public path up and down the site is in the plans. The property is a wholly original, perfect fit for the Grand House; it is an opportunity for innovative construction and a new idea for the downtown. The personality of the design arises out of the unique condition of its context: three large, conjoined structures with a series of platforms, terraces and a necessary tangle of staircases and ramps. The new residence will hover over the slope with a beautiful view of Cambridge’s river valley and downtown, the c School of Architecture.

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The Grand House has been short-listed as one of 20 finalists for the CMHC Net Zero Energy Healthy Housing competition. A multi-disciplinary design charette, early this fall, will aid in the selection of six winners who will receive grants of $50,000 to $100,000 toward project construction.

Laura Knap is a Master’s student at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture. While not gazing at the river which flows past the school, her nose is buried in books about landscapes and inbetweens.

Steven Chodoriwsky is a recent graduate from the University of Waterloo School of Architecture, a current intern at Levitt Goodman Architects in Toronto, and an upcoming Monbukagakusho scholarship recipient for research studies in Japan.

superkĂźl Margaret Graham

h

s up er k Ăź l

ome / office is our new livework base camp. Divided almost equally between home and office space, the project is in the first instance a purely pragmatic response to the problem of accommodating our differing but entwined live-work schedules. First a couple, then business partners, home / office is conceptually our version of a latter-day cottage industry – in which the sum of our individual efforts on both the home and the studio fronts is greater than that of its parts. before

after

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su pe r kü l

interior stair

In the second instance the project is about working within zoning regulations and urban densification. Because of the size of the studio, it wasn’t allowed in a residentially zoned area; the place best suited to our combined programme was a main street. Only landformimpeded to the south (by Lake Ontario) Toronto has always been able to easily spread out to the east, north and west. As a result, the height and density of many of these main streets - most of them a mix of residential and commercial uses – has changed little over the years.

However, recently some have been newly punctuated by new, mostly high-rise, condominium buildings. The city’s new official plan sees these mixed use areas as a weapon in the fight against costly sprawl.

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Long under-developed, the plan envisions main streets as the areas that will ‘absorb most of the anticipated increase in retail, office and service employment...in the coming decades, as well as much of the new housing.’

Not able to find a building at the right price that would accommodate the programme, we decided to build out our own, gutting, adding on to and rebuilding a two-storey building on a main street west of downtown. Part of a low-rent strip of mixed

su pe r kĂź l

left: backyard below: exterior materials

residential and commercial use buildings, it is adjacent to a rail corridor and lies on three public transit routes. It is a case-study site in a case-study neighborhood for pro-active city planning. The infill of areas like ours better knits them with adjacent neighborhoods, and builds a more coherent public realm based on multivalent use.

In the third instance, the project more formally moves the studio beyond architecture into the realm of development and construction; we designed it, and arranged its financing and construction. It tests an idea of programme and density that has increasing currency but is without many contemporary purposebuilt models. It is the kind of development that bridges a least a couple of urban gaps: low- to high-rise, work to home. If trends towards the decentralisation of the workplace continue, so will the number of workers living and working at home continue to rise. The city is seeing clearly in encouraging this kind of g development. It is a building type that we will build again.

Andre D’Elia and Meg Graham head up superkßl inc. architect, which Andre established in 2002.

Projects currently in the office include a school, several houses and a master plan. Meg, who joined the studio in 2005, also teaches in the M.Arch program at the University of Toronto. www.superkul.ca

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here are things in life that sometimes approach you from behind and hit with such a force that you are brought to a place clearly unanticipated.

During a six-year tour with Bing Thom Architects, a large Vancouver firm, I moved from an untested intern to a project architect on award winning projects. The trajectory of my career seemed to be clearly marked. The extra work necessary to design a modern house for my family in the off-hours seemed both manageable and a necessary development of my design sensibilities. The project quickly pulled me into a complicated eight-month process that fought for the place of modernism in a historic neighbourhood.

The plan: the purchase of a dilapidated post-1940 house of no significant heritage on an overgrown site would provide a blank slate on which to build a house that could improve the neighbourhood.

While continuing with the firm and using the consultants I had learned to work with on large institutional projects, I moved with a naïve confidence — I could easily bring this project to fruition. I met with City of Vancouver planners to discuss the project and was quickly faced with an ominous number of warnings culminating with the suggestion that I sell the property and find an area of the city where this type of design would be better suited and meet less resistance. I was ill-prepared in my architectural training to address such a thought.

I possess a bullish nature and, undeterred by the warnings, I went to the neighbourhood advisory panel clutching my drawings, model and skilled consulting team expecting to make short work in convincing the panel of the merits of the project. The first meeting adjourned with a number of the panel members feeling that this design had no place in Shaughnessy. Although the city’s primary concern was that I meet the official development plan requirements, in principle they would be unable to allow me to continue with the project without majority consensus of the committee.

Plan 2: I needed to build a process to convey the importance of this project.

I focussed on the design guidelines for the neighbourhood. While it was clear in my mind that I had addressed the issues in inventive ways, distilling the spirit of the intentions and recombining them with a contemporary voice, it was equally clear that many on the committee viewed the guidelines as a roadmap for appropriate styles. Others, including a majority of the AIBC architects and all of the city planners present, remained in support and in waiting. I needed clarification on the original drive behind the guidelines to reach a consensus.

The author of the original guideline document was not only still alive but also receiving visitors. Many Sunday mornings were spent in the living room of the gentle Abraham Rogatnick discussing what those intentions were and how they could be manifest in a project. Rogatnick, a UBC professor emeritus, had studied under Walter Gropius at Harvard. He all but gave up on Shaughnessy when he learned that his guidelines had been used to lock in a single style for the neighbourhood, however he wrote a letter of support and guidance that reminded the panel that principles define a neighbourhood not a style1.

1908 Wolfe, Vancouver BC

a house in resistant circumstances Clinton Cuddington

Armed with this, I successfully manoeuvered through the panel promising to use the existing materials of the neighbourhood in a contemporary way — it was the goal of the project to enhance the character and diversity of the area though a commitment to quality and uniqueness in design, honest use of materials, preservation of the landscape principles and exploration of green building principles on single-family homes.

This process could not have been better constructed for the shift from large scale architectural work to the world of residential development.

Although I had the cautious support of the city planning department, it was the initial roadblocks that forced me to cast aside the combative, adversarial constructs of my formal training and to involve others. From a place foreign to my professional experience I have entered this forum not as a slick architect looking to push through an idea but as a open voice asserting the importance of marking this moment in the history of a place.

This shift was also directed by the building climate in Vancouver. With such a labour shortage the realm of residential design has been impacted in the most negative way. As contractors navigate to the bigger projects there is little left for the general contractor to pick from and still maintain competitive pricing and availability. At the first sight of a fight the sub is quick to vanish. The success of this project is largely due to family backing, my newly learned, interactive disposition as an architect and the luck of finding an extraordinary contractor who finds the current ‘take it or leave it’ attitude of some subs deplorable. The contractor runs against this current and has pushed to create a well executed project for the love of good modern architecture. This has proven to be a vital ingredient to surviving this process on a tight budget.

I have now left the large firm to oversee construction as a sole proprietor architect. This was not the way I had originally planned it but it is turnc ing out well.

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“You [the advisory panel] should not have any qualms about introducing a rectilinear “modernist” design in the context of Shaughnessy. In my experience with the history of Shaughnessy, a variety of “styles” (I prefer the word designs) has always been characteristic of the area. The acceptable designs are harmonious, well-studied ones which add to the variety and richness of Shaughnessy”.

Clinton Cuddington has a Bachelor of Environmental Studies (Manitoba 1992) and an MArch (UBC 1997). He has worked for Bing Thom Architects, Busby Perkins + Will and now has a solo practice. csc@telus.net

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An Equivocal Presence the Doherty House

by Tomas de Paor Elizabeth Shotton

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b i l l y col fer

ittered in the tens of thousands across the Irish landscape, seemingly abandoned at random in farmers’ fields, are overgrown partially built figures of widely varying dimension known as faerie forts, or raths as the Irish would have it, ubiquitous and in obvious states of neglect.

Now understood as defensive fortifications dating from 400-1000 AD, this very ordinary construction acquired an affiliation with the faeries, referred to in Irish during the medieval period as the Tuatha dé Danaan, the people of the other world; an affiliation so enduring that it survives in contemporary Irish culture and compelling enough to ensure the continued presence of these artifacts. For though a handful of these structures have been excavated, rebuilt and preserved to be represented to the public and most tellingly the tourist population, the vast majority remain irrevocably entangled in the fabric of the common landscape pushing aside field boundaries, cultivation patterns and even road systems with their defiant presence [fig 1].

figure 1. a ringfort 1

These curious structures survive due to the mythology attached to them as equally as the mythology survives because of their resolute yet equivocal presence. Their equivocality seems key here as the tidied, re-presented versions of the ring fort, offered up comprehensively with fully developed and possibly more authoritative histories attached, have generally expunged any associations with the faerie myths. Only their less valued, less accessible kindred, neglected and overgrown, remain rooted in mythological association. The faerie myths are in truth a mutation of the much older Celtic lore of the dead, more properly associated with cairns, translated to the neglected and overgrown rath when their former use had fallen from common memory. It is a forgetfulness that enabled their presence to become sufficiently ambiguous to precipitate unlikely associations, to enable a more active imaginative engagement through conjecture. A process that likely saved both rath and historic religious beliefs from complete extinction and transformed the ordinary into the extraordinary.

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The interest of these forts is the capacity of ordinary artifacts to inspire such imaginative leaps of imagination through the process of association and, equally, the fluidity of connective tissue created between things past and things present. They are complex constructions indeed to achieve such feats, yet truly ordinary in both material and contextual terms. The contemporary interest in the ‘complexity of the ordinary’, a term coined by the Smithsons many years ago, is rife with contradictions as the ‘ordinary’ by its very nature is something we are deeply familiar with, part of a perceptual field firmly established, which enables us to overlook its particularity and poignancy. But these humble and neglected artifacts manage to achieve presence through a form of equivocation which demands resolution in our minds, leading to associations and speculations, no matter how seemingly fanciful.

Thus to speak of the ‘ordinary’ or the everyday, is to embroil oneself in a discussion of the nature of perception and understanding. For what we, as designers, contend with is not simply the physical reality of a place but equally the contextual field of associations and memories which can be evoked. The complex web of associations contained within our mental landscape influences how the physical world is experienced and the varied meanings this experience will have for each of us. How then to reveal the complexity of the place, or the ‘ordinary’ and familiar, to imbue particularity into the not very particular? One means is to extend its imaginative context, which is the range of associations one intuitively experiences when engaging with the object. But to achieve this one must forgo the desire for clarity or intelligibility that work against the expansion of the imaginative context.

t oma s d e p a or

Of interest to this discussion is the Doherty House of County Derry, Northern Ireland [fig2] which sits uneasily in its situation, being neither a companion to the typical Irish suburban development surrounding it nor strictly authoritative regarding a definite past by which to justify it.

figure 2. Doherty House

Like the photographic works of the artist William Doherty, for whom the house was built, where the ubiquitous is rendered visible through partial imagery or an unnatural over-saturation of colour or contrast, this place demands our attention in an effort to clarify this troubling uncertainty. Merleau Ponty describes attention as being part of the perceptual process, a focusing to achieve knowledge, or as he describes; to give rise to the knowledge-bringing event2. And thus it is that the ubiquitous and ordinary is rendered present to us, by virtue of the uncertainty of the equivocal which demands reconciliation with prior knowledge through an imaginative engagement.

The question then becomes — what precisely is it that makes this project so visually troubling as to demand engagement and reconciliation? References could be drawn, and likely are present in one’s perceptual horizon if one happens to be native-born Irish, regarding the historic lineage of the work. Standing defiantly apart from its suburban neighbours, askew from the rigour of road systems and plot lines, choosing instead land-form as its guiding geometry, the Doherty House establishes its prior presence, its prior right to this landscape eliciting associations with the mid-sized Irish country houses of the 17th and 18th century. These historic constructions, established under the influence of the Palladian ideal villa as perfectly rendered object within a field, remain coherent within the now denser contemporary developments precisely because of their anomalous positioning. Yet the Doherty House in County Derry is only now being completed by de Paor Architects, the newest addition to a developing suburb. One might be tempted to accuse de Paor of direct reference, but the truth has more interest. The design consciously makes use of the landscape itself for views to and from the house, rather than the road system laid down before the development of any of the surrounding buildings. The introduction of these new houses prior to the completion of its design forced the geometry of the Doherty House to shift subtly in its siting to reconstitute a clear view of landscape rather than allow the compromise of this initial governing principle.

And this is the first and most critical conclusion one can draw about this work. That despite its apparent reference of the traditional country house, it was not the adoption of form (as in Venturi’s work) that establishes the association but rather a similarity in the underlying principles which give rise to half-recalled memories.

The critical interest in this work is in how such a state is achieved, not through overgrown neglect and forgetfulness as was the case of our faerie forts, but through conscious design on the part of the architect, Tomas de Paor. Earlier thoughts on the subject by Venturi would suggest that the overt, or even covert, use of symbols latent with prior associations in an unconventional manner would achieve such a condition. Yet the work that resulted on the heels of Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, most especially the post-modern work, was less equivocal than it was contradictory, more didactic or even ironic rather than the evasions of the Doherty House. It is the quality of evasiveness that makes this work stand apart from associations to either this outdated architectural theory or any other clear reference that could provide a stability of meaning.

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toma s de pa or

In a like manner the design is predicated on a sincere faith of the pre-eminence of form over function, again a reference more closely aligned with Palladio’s singular and perfectly rendered object within a landscape, rather than the 18th century Irish country houses it evokes. These historic houses also drew on much the same ideology, resulting in constructions such as the striking Woodlands House, County Dublin with its perfect 42-foot square cubic form3 which is undoubtedly the reason for the apparent equivalence. However de Paor extends the thinking to a more extreme position beyond the obvious steadfast foursquare form with its Georgian scale apertures, to the replication of an identical façade in every orientation [fig3] thus denying the complexity of the plan within [fig4].

figure 3

to m as de p ao r

figure 4

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Even Ledwithstown House, County Longford5 which notionally adopts a similar facade strategy, ultimately allows both the functionality of the plan and stylistic concerns to undermine the logic, resulting in false apertures and an articulated entrance condition. de Paor succumbs to neither conceit and instead creates an object which both drives the organization of the plan into a subservient position and, in its disposition of façade elements and constancy of elevation which denies even the articulation of a common door, creates a figure which is irresolute in terms of both its frontality and its function. The object thus created develops an equivocal presence with its immediate context, revealing little of its logic to passersby and deflecting any simple interpretation.

figure 5

The Doherty House is neither a mimcry of old traditions, nor is it original if this word is understood to mean without a frame of reference. Hence its troubling character as it stands as a newly authoritative object within the contemporary field of a suburban condition. The architect de Paor, currently living in Dublin but native to the west counties of Ireland, states that his intentions were to ‘build a memory’, something recalled from his own youth, of the ubiquitous Irish country house. Recognizing that each was built with extraordinary specificity and character his intention was to spurn any actual reference by looking at none and thus to achieve the inherent truth of them all through the medium of half-recalled memory. His only specific reference comes not from Ireland but from America, through the image Christina painted by Andrew Wyeth, which sets a house in the background as a positioning or reference point in the landscape. An intention translated, in the case of the Doherty House, to a reference point in a landscape of memory and association.

Two apparently disparate examples yet both linked through their power to evoke unlikely associations, which inspire and engage the imagination of the viewer, to reveal truths regarding a wider context, both physical and imaginative. A context described by a landscape of memory, aided by a certain amount of forgetfulness, of associations and imaginative conjectures which are critical to an active engagement with the inherent complexity of the ordinary. g

to m a s d e p a or

Similarities to the traditional country house multiple as one looks closer, from the thickness of corners to the suppression of cornice detail (a particularly Irish trait) and to the improbable central location of the chimney stack and Georgian-scaled windows. All could find reference to any number of fine old houses to be found in Ireland.

And yet, there seems a simultaneous denial of all reference through the precise and explicitly contemporary detailing at each turn. The tautness of aluminum framed glazing to the plain grey render [fig5] in combination with unarticulated windows operating as doors, seem to deny even occupation, evoking instead more ruinous states and vacancy. Equally the overtly shallow roof profile which all but disappears as one approaches, and only achievable through modern roofing materials, contradicts any historic associations. All of which achieves a seemingly explicit and intentional undermining of direct historic association through modern construction methods.

1 Colfer, Billy. The Hook Peninsula, County Wexford. Cork: Cork University Press, 2005. ringfort image 2 Merleau-Ponty, M. Phenomenology of Perception. translated by Smith, London: Routledge Classics, 2002. p18 3 Craig, M. Classic Irish Houses of the Middle Size. Dublin: Ashfield Press, 1976. pp90-92 4 ibid. pp98-100 5 McCullough, N., Mulvin, V. A Lost Tradition. Dublin: Gandon Editions, 1987

Elizabeth Shotton currently teaches design and technology at the School of Architecture, University College Dublin in Ireland. Prior to moving to Dublin in 2002 she ran a private architectural practice in Vancouver and taught design at the University of BC. Publications include Peter Cardew: Ordinary Buildings, Issues of Gravity and an essay in Material Matters to be released by Routledge in December.

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Blackfoot Crossing Interpretive Centre Siksika Nation, Alberta Goodfellow Architects

Ron Goodfellow and Chad Russill

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hat does it take to do a crafted piece of architecture where every edge, every inscribed surface, and every mark on the landscape is under your vision and control? Well, the better part of 25 years, a collective and multigenerational client with a tremendous depth of culture, perseverance and, ultimately, a very modest fee relative to other projects of this complexity.

The client is the Siksika Nation, and at the beginning of the project, valuable information was gathered from elders such as the 98 year old Margaret Bad Boy, whose parents and grandparents hunted buffalo on the southern Alberta prairies. Others, such as Russell Wright, contributed the philosophical framework for the building by conveying the significance of the four seasons. He described the importance of the Societies and the evolution of Blackfoot culture from the Dog Days (summer) to the Horse Culture (fall), the Reserves and Residential Schools (winter) and onto modern times (spring). Former Chief Leo Pretty Young Man, Maggie Black Kettle, Floyd Royal, Walter Poor Eagle and many others contributed their wisdom and their stories of Siksika culture and history.

Out of this complex and massive volume of cultural information came a building that can only be described as a complete metaphor of Blackfoot culture.

The Siksika Nation (originally the Blackfoot Reserve) was established by Treaty Seven in 1877. The Reserve is over 70,000 acres and lies south of the Trans-Canada Highway along the Bow River, one hour east of Calgary.

About 2000 acres of land containing the largest intact riverine eco-system left on the western prairies was set aside for the interpretive centre. Not only a reserve from a prairie ecology perspective, this territory is also a five thousand-year old human landscape.

Blackfoot Crossing was one of the few safe places where early travellers could safely cross the fast-flowing Bow River. The natives called it Ridge Under Water because of a wide sandstone bench that washed out in a massive flood in 1912. Over the millennia, the site became an important

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crossroads and Crowfoot insisted that Treaty Seven be signed there because his people knew there was good hunting, plenty of grass and firewood and it had cultural significance for all four Blackfoot tribes.

An interpretive centre on First Nations land serves two purposes: one as a community and cultural centre, the other as a visitor centre where the ways and history of the Blackfoot people can be both exhibited and taught. The hope is that the centre will become economically self-sustaining, but even the famous Tyrrell Paleontological Museum in Drumheller with an average of 1000 visitors a day does not break even on entry receipts. Such centres must be supported by the Canadian and Provincial governments, for these buildings, dispersed across the whole country, not just in resource-rich Ottawa, are the foundation of our social and cultural history.

The Blackfoot Crossing Interpretive Centre is a compendium of Blackfoot iconography. The entire building design should be viewed as a reinterpretation of a vast range of Blackfoot culture, its sacred icons, and the everyday life of the Siksika people. With every design decision, whether on a site planning level, the building, or with an interior design detail, the building is a literal metaphor of traditional Blackfoot iconography.

After viewing a number of the more abstract design concepts presented to the Elders at one of the first design meetings, the late Margaret Bad Boy said, “We don’t want any funny teepees!” Clearly, to her and the Elders who instructed the design team, the building was to be an essential teaching tool that would salvage and re-instill the pride of the Nation’s youth in a proud tradition that stretches back thousands of years. Ann McMaster put it this way, “if we don’t start to make our culture interesting and relevant to our kids, then it will all be gone when our generation passes on”. This is a building of great meaning and significance to the Siksika; a collective medicine bundle of symbols and patterns.

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On the north side of the drive lane entry is a high hill that looks down on the centre’s flat teepee cover roof. It provides an opportunity to view some of the key features of the former vast prairie domain of the Blackfoot peoples. The approved concept called for a spoke-like design, similar to the medicine wheels that are found on high points throughout southern Alberta.

The spokes, marked by rocks, point to significant landscape features such as the old North Trail, the Crawling Valley hunting grounds, the Majorville medicine wheel, Writing-on-Stone, Chief Mountain and Waterton Lakes, where it is said that the Beaver dove down during the time of the great flood and brought up soil to create the earth (the origin of the Beaver Bundle).

Blackfoot Crossing and Treaty Flats can be seen over and beyond the interpretive centre’s roof.

Ancient burial grounds upriver, west of the site, can be seen in the distance.

goodfe llow a rch ite cts

A drive lane (originally a narrowing trail into which buffalo were herded) off Highway 842 follows a long, slow S-curve along a shallow coulee between two hills. Rows of stones in a V-shape directs you to the building: on the north side is a series of stone piles nicknamed ‘the women’ (women would hide behind them, ready to jump up and wave their robes to stampede buffalo to their death over a cliff or into a pound). The south side has a series of large buffalo rub rocks which can still be found on patches of unbroken prairie today. Offerings were placed on the rock to honour the buffalo that rubbed against them to relieve the itching of the insect bites that plagued them. Over time, these rocks became polished, shining with the oil in the woolly hides of hundreds of thousands of buffalo.

from top: drive lane landscape from the highway to the building, Floyd Royal at a buffalo rub, the roofscape of the interpretive centre, camp at Blackfoot Crossing at the time of the Sun Dance (ca. 1900)

The main entrance faces east, as does the traditional teepee, protected from the strong prevailing west winds of southern Alberta. A high straight wall on the south runs east-west, the directions of the rising and setting sun, and was named the Chief ’s Walk by now deceased and former Chief Leo Pretty Young Man. It commemorates the great hereditary pre-contact chiefs.

gl en bo w m u se u m n a- 10 9 4 -4

The building itself slowly reveals itself from the drive lane, floating on the western horizon.

On its roof seven Sacred Society teepees gather around a sun dance lodge — inspiring a sense of an encampment; at night when the teepees and Sundance Lodge are lit, they glow like lanterns made by ancient cooking fires.

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On the north side of the drive lane entry, a long sinuous stone wall undulates like the Bow River, representing time through the movement of running water. Allan Wolfleg named it the Wintercount Wall and it continues through and into the building in a bulkhead that leads to breathtaking views of Blackfoot Crossing. A low wall in front of the Wintercount Wall cordons off a space for an interpretive prairie garden filled with important native plants.

A coloured glass eagle feather fan over the front entry refers to the sacred eagle in Blackfoot religion. Bald eagles frequently fly over the building, a good omen for the future! Under the eagle feather canopy and through the front doors, one arrives under a skylit teepee that punctures the roof. This will be the location of a sculpture of Chief Crowfoot, Old Sun and One Gun who will welcome travellers from around the world to the Siksika Nation.

Walking westwards towards the view, a visitor may sense what the buffalo felt as they approached the escarpment of a Buffalo Jump.

Until now, like the herds of buffalo, one has no inkling of the dramatic drop that lies beneath.

Fortunately, a glass wall will keep the modern day tourist from the buffalo’s fate, but as former Chief Strater Crowfoot has said, “the tourist is the modern day buffalo for our people; he will help our economy grow and allow us to preserve our history”. g

An historic photograph of a teepee cover laid out on the ground as it was being painted, inspired the design of the roof form. The shape and surface of the Centre’s roof incorporate familiar Blackfoot symbols of white puffballs and the stone weights used to hold down teepee tent flaps in high winds. There are thousands of such teepee rings still to be seen all over Alberta on remnants of unbroken prairie where Blackfoot people once camped. The roof has three bands of colour, black at the base, tan in the centre and red at the top; colours also used on a large event teepee for the Centre. The black outer ring of the roof with the puffballs also has a traditional foothills motif, a series of rounded mounds. In Blackfoot tradition teepee designs come from visions, are owned by private individuals and cannot be used by others unless the design is transferred in a ceremony.

On the ground around the front of the Centre is a radial fan of V-shaped fieldstone splash pads which break the force of the water coming from roof scuppers. The V represents mountains,

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from top: plan of the entry, shadow from the eagle feather glass canopy at the entrance, entry sequence, Interpretive centre aerial, painted teepee hide cover — the original reference for the configuration of the building.

gle n bow mu se u m n a -9 1 9 -3 8 g l enb ow mus eum n a -2 3 7 -2 go o df el lo w arc h it ec ts

another symbol commonly used at the base of teepees. The extended scuppers complete the roof design by recalling the ceremonial headdresses used by Blackfoot Chiefs.

Teepee smoke flaps are echoed in the west facing patios off the main floor. Seven patio tables on each patio represent the seven stars of the Big Dipper, again part of many Blackfoot teepee designs.

The centre portion of the roof rises out of the main plane and represents the Sundance Lodge, a ceremonial structure used by men’s Societies in religious ceremonies during great summer gatherings. Warriors skewered their breast muscles and tied themselves to the Thunderer’s Roost at the apex of the lodge. Then, staring at the sun and blowing a goose bone whistle, they danced until they broke loose. This religious ceremony of sacrifice and worship was once outlawed by the Government of Canada. g

Surrounding the translucent skylight of the Sundance structure are seven teepee skylights representing the seven sacred Societies whose membership included the political, intellectual and warrior leadership of what was in effect the cultural brain trust and leadership of the Blackfoot people.

Tapered cottonwood poles used in original Sundance arbours have become huge structural steel poles, custom-fabricated in a highly technical, computer-generated process by Empire Steel of Edmonton. The technology to manufacture these poles was not available until recently and represents a significant element in the authenticity of the structure. The erection process involved Building Information Technology, or BIM, using extremely accurate computer-generated measurements to achieve the precise erection requirements of the structure.

Consequently, the steel structure went up rapidly and flawlessly.

The upper reaches of these tapered poles are supported by a series of bow string trusses which also provide lateral support for a westfacing curtain wall window looking out to the Bow River Valley, Blackfoot Crossing and the distant Treaty Flats.

The cantilevered exterior ends of the Sundance poles are supported by tapered steel travois, interlaced in a semicircular form as they would have been in centuries past to frame the Motokiks, or Buffalo Women’s Society Lodges. from top: rooof scuppers, Straight-up headdress and coup stick, Sun Dance lodge (1893), interpretive centre Sun Dance structure in steel, bow truss supporting the half-circle glazed wall facing west.

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The west, river side of the building incorporates a number of important cultural concepts. In an energy-saving reflective glass curtain wall, gold represents the earth and blue represents the sky. Looking up from the sunburst-patterned floor of the amphitheatre, you see a lattice of cantilevered Sundance poles and stacked Motokiks travois. The light poles around the amphitheatre are shaped like coup sticks, used by warriors who rode into battle without weapons to demonstrate their bravery.

The west-facing wings of the building are like a great hawk, settling down on the prairie. Precast walls blend seamlessly into the adjacent coulee hills on the escarpment. Throughout the building, the design uses prairie colours; the front is the colour of the native soil; the west, valley side matches dried prairie grasses in the fall.

The windows that punctuate the diamond patterned precast walls form two segmented arrows — the life force, a symbol used to commemorate the life-giving energy of the grasses that fed the animals, which in turn, gave the Siksika people life.

clockwise from top: life force diagrammed on the west face of the building, Mrs Tom Turned Up Nose with a horse travois (1880s), interlaced travois making the Mokotiks or Buffalo Society women’s lodge (1892), dancing in the interpretive centre amphitheatre, section through the auditorium, the Blackfoot night sky, the roof structure drawn from the form of the Mokotiks travois lodge.

The building was designed to accommodate conferences and meetings, and can be rented out for family gatherings and weddings without interfering with most tourist activities.

Three teepees behind the gift shop give the sense of being in an ancient camp. Not coincidentally, the teepees on the main level (in particular the Elders Lodge) are the dimensions of a Horse Days teepee, about 22’ in diameter. The smaller Dog Days teepee skylights on the roof are the dimensions of pre-horse teepees, when everything had to be carried by camp dogs or the people themselves. The much larger pole structures of the lower gallery represent today’s nation.

The finish on the teepees at the main floor level is a polished plaster, tooled to reflect the appearance of a scraped buffalo hide. They have

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g o o df e llo w a rch i te c ts

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all been stained the sacred yellow ochre used in ceremonies and still a common colour used by many teepee owners today. A red ochre polished plaster is used on the marquee panel between the entry doors to the Vision Quest theatre.

Through wood inlay, feather motif doors into the theatre, a dome ceiling with fiberoptic stars of the Wolf Trail (our Milky Way) glows above.

The Blackfoot peoples had their own stories and mythologies of the moon and stars. The night sky used in the theatre is the winter sky seen in January or early February, if you stepped outside on a clear winter night. The major constellations are brought to life by modern day storytellers. Wall sconces are based on medicine shields and the drums that accompany singers at Pow Wows. The symbolic colours of the Nation: yellow, green, blue and dark red, plus black and white are found in the Siksika emblem on the stage floor.

The interior colours of the lower gallery teepees represent the four seasons and the four phases of Blackfoot economic evolution: yellow for summer —the Dog Days and the origins of Blackfoot culture, red for the great fall hunts and the introduction of horse and guns —the Horse Days, blue for winter —the reservation period with the residential schools, and green for spring —the cultural renewal of today’s nation.

The four gigantic teepee bases whose 50’ long teepee poles are far from decorative are the primary supports for the main floor and roof of the building. Pounded 60’ into the lacustrine (prehistoric lakebed) soils of the escarpment, are a myriad of concrete pile foundations that will forever anchor the building onto the hillside. g

g ood fel l ow a rchi t ect s

The library on the southwest corner of the main level will be the repository of the Elders’ oral history, recorded stories, family histories and genealogy as a collection of books unfolds over the coming years. The radial light pattern over the library desk is a reflected plan view of a medicine wheel, and the multi-coloured layering on the south wall of the library recalls the fancy dresses favoured by the Pow Wow and Jingle Dress Dancers of the late 20th Century.

Two grand staircases to the left and right of the west facing glass curtain wall lead to the lower gallery, framing views of the valley. An outlook on the landing surveys the 20,000 ft2 of exhibit space below. The glass on the railings is supported by bow-shaped baluster, an obvious reference to the bows used to hunt buffalo and other game.

Design Team: Alksandra Ceklic David Harper Simon Lepage Leanne Ritter Chad Russill Lyle Sauter from top: Dog Days Teepee skylights on the roof, Horse Days teepees on the main floor, Future Days teepee bases on the lower level, section through the teepee construction.

Ron Goodfellow, wrote ‘An Historical and Ecological Study of Southern Alberta’ in 1969, the basis of the conceptual work for the Blackfoot Crossing Interpretive Centre, started in 1985. He is principal of Goodfellow Architects Ltd. in Calgary.

Chad Russill is a Montana State University graduate and currently an intern architect at Goodfellow Architecture Ltd.

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Kindergarten Feldgatterweg

Lana/BZ Italy Florian Maurer

fl or i a n ma urer

Alexander the Great freed Midas’ ox cart by cutting the Gordian Knot with his sword. Christopher Columbus showed Spanish nobles how to make an egg stand it on its tip by bashing it in (although some attribute this feat to Filippo Brunelleschi, a version that I as an architect naturally prefer). Swift, impatient action can be so rewarding! Indeed, it can be the only way out sometimes: when site constraints and client demands had defeated all our attempts at finding a disciplined, rectangular, ‘European’ form for our building, we grabbed the layout in despair, folded it like a harmonica, and thus made it work. This is the main point of our design.

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he Kindergarten Feldgatterweg lies at the outskirts of Lana, a small city in the bilingual Italian province of South Tyrol/Alto Adige, where mild climate, vineyards and mountain scenery used to atract tourists such as Empress Sissi and the Russian Czars. In exchange for increased density the developer of a new multi-housing development had to construct the kindergarten and turn it over to the municipality, and we were assigned a corner of his plot for it.

The building serves two distinct user groups which had to be functionally well separated, with their own entrances: - The kindergarten (Kiga) required a large multi purpose room doubling as entrance and gathering space, three group rooms, and three sleeping-/activity rooms upstairs from the group rooms and directly connected to them. Southern aspect and access to an outdoor playground was mandatory.

- The “Eltern Kind Zentrum” (Elki) serves a provincial program for pre-natal classes and adult education, and required a series of multi purpose rooms of different sizes. Their openness made them useful to create the the transparency and connection between street and inner couryard the client also wanted.

- Ancillary functions, kitchen, offices and counselling rooms are partly shared and complete the program. They could best be used to form a barrier between the kindergarten and the vehicle access to the interior of the housing development.

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Writing these words I find them a convincing rationale for the seemingly whimsicaI forms that were chosen. In fact, I would gladly be able to say that this is how we always intended to design the building, but you know that it is not so: we were pushed into it by external forces, by impatience, by emotions, by accident. When it was too late to turn back we picked up the pieces and ran with them. Working through the design new doors opened, new views appeared, new ideas emerged, rambling on aimlessly without much apparent logic, just like life itself.

In the end there was a building that I, and more importantly, the children, really like.

The experience of this project has reminded me that “the end never justifies the means”. That as long as we loose ourselves in the task, loosing sight of the end is no problem. I really needed that! g

client: Marktgemeind Lana / Comune di Lana Maria Hilf Strasse 5, I-39011 Lana/BZ, Italy architects: Florian Maurer Architect, Naramata, BC Dr. Arch Heinrich Zöschg, Lana/BZ, Italy structural engineer: Dr. Ing Stefan Ladurner, Merano/BZ, Italy mechanical and electrical engineer: Walter Malleier, Lana/BZ, Italy contractor: Empresa Edile Stampfer, Bolzano/BZ, Italy

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completion: 2005 gross floor area: 1,400 m2 construction cost: e 3 million

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goodfe llow a rch ite cts

We had played with these three blocks and many other ‘logical’ layouts until we could do no more, and had them all shot down by the client. Then we became impatient, remembered Alexander the Great, and the harmonica form of the building was born. Honestly, I am normally a more orderly, humdrum, rectangular kind of guy, but once the decision to risk such a dynamic building configuration was made, it was tempting to go the whole nine yards. The three main components were allowed to express themselves through different materials and detailing.

Walking around the building, minor shifts of viewpoint produce major changes in appearance. Odd angles in plan and elevation, structural elements of different materials, poking everywhere at random, highten the general sense of chaos and offer a welcome counterpoint to the rather uniform and regimented housing development surrounding the building. The children are shown an alternative to this world. They are encouraged to explore colour, form, texture, structure, and are confronted with living examples.

The beams, posts, balconies and handrails become masts, tackle, yardarms, decks of pirate ships.

f lo r ia n m au re r

Floria Maurer, MAIBC, LEED AP, divides his time between Naramata, BC and Lana, Italy.

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What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us. We live, true, we breathe, true: we walk, we open doors, we go down staircases, we sit at a table in order to eat, we lie down on a bed in order to sleep. How? Where? When? Why? Georges Perec, ‘Approaches to what?’ Espèces d’espaces (Paris: Galilée 1974). Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, ed. and trans. by John Sturrock (London: Penguin, 1997)

Flyspace | an interdisciplinary collaborative Lois Weinthal

g

eorges Perec draws together a number of physical and phenomenal elements in his quote that allows us to visualise how we occupy architecture. The elements he names are ordinary and found in the everyday, but he asks us to return to the point where we accept these elements without question, and to question them.

Mass-production of these objects is so commonplace that they take on unquestioned acceptance, as a result, the designer as unique author has given way to large company (viz. IKEA) mass-production. In Flyspace, interdisciplinary designers are brought together to design a number of familiar objects in a way that makes one aware of the origins of the type.

Adolf Loos believed in Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art); Le Corbusier, the objet-type (typical object). Both recognised that parts contribute to a complete architecture. This history informs design at every scale, whether it be clothing, furniture, architecture or details and colours. If we were to take inventory of things we use everyday, we would find that multiple design disciplines have played a role in their design and production. In terms of models, the work of Charles and Ray Eames bridged many design disciplines from architecture, industrial design and graphic design, to furniture and film. Their work was manufactured by a range of offices from IBM and Herman Miller to the United States Navy. Droog Design in the Netherlands look at everyday objects in the domestic realm and redesign them with a familiar but alternative agenda. Their members come from interior and industrial design, graphics, furniture, art, art direction, textiles, jewellery and media installations. The contemporary artist Andrea Zittel’s work also questions the conventional in familiar objects.

Related design disciplines — painting, sculpture, furniture, fashion and film, are also found to construct architectural space.

The interdisciplinary nature of the members of Flyspace1 (interior design, graphic design, industrial design and architecture) brings a broad range of tools, materials and history to our projects. Each project begins with the core group, in two teams, developing initial concepts and designs. As a project develops from design to fabrication, individual members are deployed to other projects in ways that take advantage of their particular skills . All the while, a dialogue continues between the teams on overall design concepts, material choices and construction giving coherence to Flyspace projects. While there is often agreement on fabrication processes, to keep the projects cohesive agreement on design processes requires parameters: here, to address the layers that immediately surround the body, clothing and furniture. where the body and its interaction to surfaces, actions and the shapes that receive it, creates resemblances of us. Clothing is a layer made to fit the body with alterations allowing for a better fit. Furniture is ergonomically designed to fit the body. Upholstery can be seen as the clothing of furniture, similar to clothing for our body. These observations are our starting point, with the freedom to reinterpret them through an interdisciplinary lens.

1 A flyspace is the space above a theatre stage hidden from the audience where multiple stage sets are ‘flown’ in and out. It is an area associated with interchangeability, containment, identity and anonymity. It is the closet to the stage, always preparing the stage to wear what is needed for that specific show.

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f ly sp ac e

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The two projects here are prototypes for a chair and a garment.

They share similar levels of mass-production, customisation and authorship, along with environmentally friendly materials. The Felt Plug Chair, uses bent plywood and industrial felt. Formwork to bend plywood allows the structural parts to be mass-produced. Holes are drilled into the back and seat area in a grid into which are set 1”x 1” felt plugs. The felt is sized so that the pressure of a person sitting allows each plug to adjust independently.

The garment also uses industrial felt. When authorship is ascribed to clothing, we see it in the form of a designer’s name or company tag sewn on the inside. Our questioning of this convention is the starting point. The pattern of a thumbprint, which contains a unique identity through its lines, is enlarged to become the pattern for a dress. When constructed, the pattern of the dress begins with the identity of the designer. Identity, the ‘name tag’, is integral to the garment.

Researching related disciplines allow us to free up the conventions that exist within our traditional design disciplines and to seek alternative views. In doing so, we have developed a discourse on design that does not isolate disciplines, but rather inter-references them within the context of two main parameters: a given set of environmentally friendly materials and familiar objects to be altered according to a new set of ideas.

fl ys p a ce

Flyspace opens up discussions that affect both the way that design is taught, the ways in which design professions collaborate and, along g the way, we have all become big fans of industrial felt!

FLYSPACE: Michelle Bayer Eric Benson Garrett Seaman Lois Weinthal Katherine Wooley Lois Weinthal teaches architecture and interior design at the University of Texas at Austin, exploring the space of interiors through peripheral disciplines. This project was supported by a research grant from the University of Texas at Austin.

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Skin + Bones

MY S tu dio

Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture MOCA Los Angeles November 19, 2006–March 5, 2007

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Skin + Bones features the work of Azzedine Alaïa, Hussein Chalayan, Comme des Garçons, Alber Elbaz for Lanvin, Tess Giberson, Yoshiki Hishimuna, Elena Manferdini, Martin Margiela, Alexander McQueen, Miyake Issey, Narciso Rodriguez, Ralph Rucci, Nanni Strada, Yeohlee Teng, Isabel Toledo, Olivier Theyskens for Rochas, Dries Van Noten, Viktor & Rolf, Junya Watanabe, Vivienne Westwood and Yohji Yamamoto. The architects include innovative practitioners—both established and emerging—who have had, or promise to have, an indelible impact on our built environment: Shigeru Ban, Preston Scott Cohen, Neil Denari/NMDA, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Winka Dubbeldam/Archi-Tectonics, Miralles Tagliabue/EMBT, Peter Eisenman, Foreign Office Architects, Future Systems, Gehry Partners, Zaha Hadid, Herzog + de Meuron, Toyo Ito, Jakob + MacFarlane, Greg Lynn FORM, Morphosis, Neutelings Riedijk, Jean Nouvel, Office dA, Rem Koolhaas/OMA, Kazuyo Sejima+Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA, Testa & Weiser, Bernard Tschumi, Wilkinson Eyre and J. Meejin Yoon.

Tod d E b er l e

Curator Brooke Hodge describes the origins of this exhibition: During the course of my research on Comme des Garçons I was fascinated not only by visual similarities between clothing and buildings, but also by how the garments could be more aptly described using architectural terminology. I was also impressed

by Kawakubo’s desire to create a total environment for her work—one that embraced not only the clothes but also the design of retail spaces, graphics, and furniture, much in the same way members of the Wiener Werkstatte or the Bauhaus strove to create a gesamtkunstwerk (synthesis of the arts). That fashion and architecture have a great deal in common may be surprising given the obvious differences between the two.

Fashion can often be ephemeral and superficial, and uses soft, fluid materials; whereas architecture is considered monumental and permanent, and uses strong, rigid materials. Regardless of differences in size, scale, and materials, the point of origin for both fashion design and architecture is the human body— both practices protect and shelter us, while providing a means to express our identities—whether personal, political, religious or g cultural.

S at o ru M i s him a

While a number of recent exhibitions have explored the relationship between art and fashion, less attention has been paid to the relationship between architecture and fashion, despite the increasing overlap in strategies and techniques shared by the two disciplines. Since the 1980s, a growing number of avant-garde fashion designers have approached garments as architectonic constructions, while architecture has embraced new forms and materials — developments due in part to technological advancements that have revolutionized both the design and construction of buildings and made techniques such as pleating, seaming, folding and draping part of the architectural vocabulary.

Garments of increasing conceptual sophistication and structural complexity have been seen on the runways and in the streets as buildings of unparalleled fluidity and innovation grace major urban centres around the world.

clockwise: J. Meejin Yoon. Möbius Dress, 2004.

Hussein Chalayan. Aeroplane Dress, Autumn/Winter 1999.

Frank Gehry. Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, California, 2003.

Shigeru Ban Architects. Curtain Wall House, Itabashi, Tokyo, Japan, 1995.

Foreign Office Architects. Yokohama International Port Terminal, 19952002.

H iro y u ki H i r ai

Skin + Bones takes its point of departure design from the beginning of the 1980s, a period marked by significant events and advances that contributed to formal and cultural shifts in both fashion and architecture. Japanese fashion designers Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons and Yohji Yamamoto first presented their work during the Paris ready-to-wear collections in April 1981. The oversized, often asymmetrical black clothing they presented featured intentional holes, tatters and unfinished edges, and as a result, challenged accepted ideas of fashion, femininity and beauty. The following year, architect Bernard Tschumi won the international competition to design Parc de la Villette in Paris. His project, and the resulting collaboration between architect Peter Eisenman and philosopher Jacques Derrida, introduced ideas of deconstruction to a much larger audience, and like the work of the Japanese designers, heralded bold new directions that changed the public’s perception of both buildings and clothes. In 1982 an exhibition, curated by Susan Sidlauskas at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology called Intimate Architecture: Contemporary Clothing Design, for the first time examined formal aspects of fashion from an architectural point of view.

Ch ris Moore

n exhibition devoted to the extensive and telling similarities between architecture and fashion design will be The Museum of Contemporary Art’s major winter show this year.

Skin + Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture is co-published by The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and Thames & Hudson. The book is edited by Brooke Hodge, MOCA curator of Architecture and Design, and Lisa Mark, director of Publications.

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Table of Contents Vimy Ridge Memorial Park Winnipeg, 2005-06 spmb_projects

Table of Contents was the response to a national competition sponsored by the Public Art program of the Winnipeg Arts Council.

Inspired by the existing park tables at Vimy Ridge Memorial Park, a table with sculptural proportions was programmed for multiple activities by diverse park users. To develop a situation where interaction is valued – the return of the public – we invited the neighbours of the park to contribute with memorialising words about community life.

LIVING HISTORY

COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT

Being involved with the arts can have a lasting and transforming effect on many aspects of people’s lives. This is true not just for individuals, but also for neighbourhoods, communities, regions and entire generations, whose sense of identity and purpose can be changed through art.

Art that is rooted in a “listening” self, that cultivates the intertwining of self and Other, suggests a flow-through experience which is not delimited by the self but extends into the community through modes of reciprocal empathy. The audience becomes an active component of the work and is part of the process.

Peter Hewitt, ‘Who will be transformed?’ Ambitions For the Arts, The Arts Council of England website, February 2002.

Monuments, including the ones in Vimy Ridge Park, commemorate heroic past moments. Even though Vimy Ridge represented a victory towards freedom and democracy, creating a hopeful path for generations to come, maybe, after these 88 years, we are on a historical threshold where the notion of celebration will also shift, promoting and celebrating peace and communication among people. Public art challenges the traditional notion of monument by reinventing public space, unfolding new modes of celebration, placing the public at the centre. Our notion of a living history addresses qualities of the present, to remember the present as it is lived, about and for the people that are alive and participating in the life of a community.

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Suzi Gablik, ‘Connective Aesthetics: Art After Individualism’, in Lacy, Suzanne (ed.). Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995

If the project is not about other heroes from other times but it is about the people, everyday heroes of the present, then it is about the people of Wolseley, the primary users of the park. The first character of public space is the public. For this project we have proposed an engagement strategy to create an opportunity for direct participation of the community. If public space is about the people, then the people should participate in the process.

stcejorp_bmps

PROCESS: PARTICIPATIVE DESIGN But a central objective of community-based site specificity is the creation of a work in which members of a community – as simultaneously viewer/spectator, audience, public, and referential subject – will see and recognized themselves in the work, not so much in the sense of being critically implicated but of being affirmatively pictured or validated.

Miwon Kwon, ‘One Place After Another’.

Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity.

London and Cambridge: MIT, 2002

The engagement strategy created a dialogue around the project, establishing a link between the people of Wolseley and the artists.

If there is something in common with all Wolseley neighbours it is language. Through language we establish relationships and build community. Words become the link between people, private and public, past and future. We invited the people of Wolseley to contribute WORDS to the project. Each household were asked to donate 5-word phrases that represented a sentiment about the place; a desire or a dream; or the memory of an event that took place in the neighbourhood. With all the collected phrases we composed a narrative, a story, a history of Wolseley – a landscape of language. on | site 16

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COMMUNITY TABLE The dinner table is the center for the teaching and practicing ...of conversation, consideration, tolerance, family feeling, and just about all the other accomplishments of society...

Judith Martin (Miss Manners)

Traditional monuments in public space have, for most of the time, glorified a moment or an individual. This glorification has lent the convention obelisk-like objects and statues: frontally presented, privileged siting, usually taller than the people, placed straight up, installed on a base. These overpowering features have unconsciously distanced the people and altered their interaction with public space.

We take an opposite position by inverting these features in order to bring the people to the project, and to develop a situation where interaction is valued – the return of the public. We considered the project to be horizontal, close to the ground, harmonious with the existing landscape, accessible and appealing to the most diverse

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activities. When getting together around the TABLE, participants engage physically, socially and emotionally as ideas, inspiration and a sense of community occur. A TABLE can make a family of strangers connect through sharing, talking, watching and listening. The unpredictable nature of what happens around a TABLE sets the stage for an event to occur – not prescribing the event, but allowing the community to establish it. The WORDS donated by the community, imprinted on the TABLE, make the people recognize themselves around the TABLE by being affirmatively pictured and validated. The TABLE and collection of WORDS become not the main subject but the canvas that creates the space of happening.

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SITE CONSIDERATIONS The designated site for this public art project plays an adjacent role to the whole park’s program. It moves away from the primary vocation as a playground for kids, as we see along Home Street, to a more isolated, quiet zone along Canora Street. The path network present on the site privileges the orientation north-south, servicing pedestrians moving in and out of the neighbourhood via Portage Avenue. This elongated disposition clarifies the vocation of the site as a passage.

The project preserves this function adding to a group of specific spaces along the proposed table to respond to the diverse set of activities that may take place. In this manner the project is responsive to the site by creating these spaces without restricting the existing uses. The table assumes the size of the community, carefully observed during the community consultation process. g

Eduardo Aquino and Karen Shanski make up spmb_projects. They practice art and architecture in SĂŁo Paulo, Brazil and Winnipeg, Manitoba.

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Breaking Ground | shifting city spaces Joey Giamo Infrastructural Expansion

Current construction activity in Vancouver is redefining spaces in the city as well as relationships between its inhabitants and visitors. The Canada Line is an extension to Vancouver’s rapid transit system, providing a north-south link from the downtown peninsula to central Richmond, with 16 new stations and connections to other existing lines, the SeaBus terminal at Waterfront Station and the Vancouver Airport.

The new City Centre Station will be located underneath Granville Street, between Robson and West Georgia streets.

One of the first blocks to be affected by the line’s construction, it is part of a major retail and club district, bound on one side by the monolithic Sears store and on the other sides by small retail buildings and office towers.

Site Observations

This block is being prepped for a very large hole to accommodate the underground station. As a result, traffic has been stopped and fixed street elements have been removed. As the construction crew excavates below grade, fencing has enclosed the portion of the site adjacent to the Sears building. The remainder of the block is open to pedestrians, prompting creative appropriation of public space.

Partially severed from the retail strip, the block’s role as an urban connector to adjacent blocks has been reduced.

Construction fencing along the Sears building has compressed the majority of pedestrian movement to the opposite side of the block, creating moments of intense density.

This density has also prompted alternative movement patterns as cyclists, skateboarders, rollerbladers, walkers and joggers now use the whole street with liberty, in an act of involuntary and temporary appropriation.

The loss of the trees has framed the block in a new and unexpected way, opening up vistas and exposing the road surface to direct light. It heightens attention to any remaining vertical elements, including the decapitated streetlights and smaller ornamental lights whose main role was to provide sidewalk lighting below the trees’ extended branches.

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jo e y gi am o

As part of the surface clearing, trees that lined the sidewalks’ edges have been cut down leaving behind neon orange spray painted stumps to deter potential pedestrian casualties. These stumps mark an absence of verticality – like a phantom limb – tracing the outline of what once was.

Appropriating Public Space

Unplanned appropriations are becoming scarce. Increasingly there is little in the Canadian urban context that promotes difference or interaction with the physical form of the public realm. In Vancouver, agitators have been replaced by adjudicators who build the city with expedient consistency. Through rigorous and decisive planning methods, the potential to re-conceive public space has almost expired.

The ubiquitous point tower’s exterior spaces (the singular typology currently filling any and all remaining tracts of land in downtown Vancouver) have left little room for public engagement or interpretation. Possible easements have been contained and marked (with varying degrees of discretion) as private property, resisting any activity other than those explicitly designed for and used by the paying residents.

Traditional examples of appropriation can be found in Vancouver — sidewalks are often re-adapted by Chinatown retailers, entrepreneurial street vendors and restaurateurs. But even these appropriations are mostly planned, under permit and limited to transactions of commodity or consumption. In this context, appropriation has become paradigmatic and privatized.

j o e y gi am o

To promote a rich urban culture there must be room for the unknown, the inconvenient and the impractical. There must be serendipitous moments where the city’s inhabitants are able to interact with physical form whose function or purpose is not deliberate and prescribed.

Construction and Chemical Composition

Like the handhelds, big GlowSticks are hollow translucent plastic tubes with ten inches of concrete in the base. Six feet high, an 18” diameter base, they weigh about ten pounds. Although awkward, they are relatively easy to handle since they are bottom heavy. This lightness allows for handling by a single person.

The translucent plastic tubes contain a mixture of chemical elements in a chemiluminescent reaction that emits light. When a hydrogen peroxide solution, phenyl oxalate ester solution and a fluorescent dye combine, new compounds are formed with a substantial release of energy. As this energy subsides, it is released as light. A range of dyes produce different colours.

In the handheld version the reaction is triggered when the plastic shell is bent, cracking an internal glass vial containing the hydrogen peroxide solution. Large GlowSticks arrive on site ‘pre-cracked.’ The tube is filled with phenyl oxalate ester and the dye. Hydrogen peroxide solution is added just before shipping to the site, triggering the reaction.

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jo ey g ia m o

GlowSticks

Influenced by closures and surface scraping in this downtown block, this proposal promotes a different kind of urban relationship. A field of GlowSticks, an overblown version of the handheld kind, intervenes in the construction project to add a new layer of difference, spectacle and event, promoting a sensorial experience unlike any other space in the city.

The GlowSticks not only soften the disruptive effects of the building of the station but provide new unexpected moments of social and cultural construction. The enclosed block presents an opportunity to test a different attitude in the public realm. The flat asphalt surface acts as its testing ground and allows a simple and peculiar object the opportunity to appropriate a substantial and prominent space through its multiplication.

GlowSticks’ programmatic opportunities

By moving the sticks, pedestrians can make private spaces of reprieve from the city, or they can weave through and around them in their own patterns. Retailers can use them as a buffer from the construction, and to mark their coffee shop patios and sidewalk vending.

Like orange construction barrels and cones, construction workers would use the GlowSticks as safety and hazard markers and to enclose the construction area. Arrangements could be continually reworked to accommodate construction, creating denser, purposeful arrangements, and new interpretive opportunities. The sticks’ lack of fixity promotes limitless opportunities for engagement. They can be dragged, picked up, knocked over, moved around and carried away. They are urban fixtures which refuse to be static. The GlowStick is an element with no singular purpose or program. Its lack of reasoning is precisely its point. It relies on the urban participant to give it its purpose. These gestures are engagements within the public realm that are largely nonexistent.

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jo e y gi a mo

Joey Giaimo is a recent graduate of the Masters program from the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University of British Columbia. He is currently practicing in Vancouver and is a member of SpaceAgency, a local group of artists, architects and writers making space for knowledge and discussion of architecture in the public realm.

The impact of the GlowSticks is unknown. Will they be used for violent means? Will they be taken away? Will the area’s club and bar patrons use them as a means to continue their festivities on the streets? Will they be ignored?

Paradoxically, their success will rely on bureaucratic support to create the serendipitous moments which the city craves and architects have been indicted of not supplying. The architectural response is that often the strictures imposed by bureaucracy are so prescriptive that there is little room for spontaneity. This GlowStick proposal presents the municipality with the opportunity to plan the unplanned, to insert this ‘serendipity’ on a slot of land that they both own and control.

The sticks glow brightly in daylight and warm temperatures. Evening temperatures cool the sticks, slow down the reaction and emit a softer glow. This night mode regenerates the GlowSticks and prepares them for the following day where, in daylit warmth they will resume their brightness. Even simply placing the sticks upon the block’s cleared surface allows them to perpetually metamorphise on their own. Although large sticks glow much longer than the small ones, their light will eventually diminish and be replaced with replenished sticks, producing different intensities throughout their duration on site.

Observation and speculative intervention questions how public space is understood, perceived and presented, and reveals how the structure of the city rigorously dictates the use of its spaces. The disruption of construction procedures and subsequent GlowStick intervention present opportunities for new and different adaptive spatial practices in a city in dire need of difference. c

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Arte | povera Stephanie White

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e come from a lumber producing country, yet the most moving statement about the relationship between trees and how they are fashioned into lumber comes from an Italian artist, Giuseppe Penone in his ongoing series Albero, started when he was 22 in 1969. The first time I saw one of his trees was in the National Gallery in Ottawa — a 12 x 12, about thirty feet long, leaning against a wall. Half the beam had been carefully stripped lengthwise, annular layer by layer, to show the young tree buried in the beam, with the beam’s knots teased back to show the branches that knots actually are. One understands this work in an instant; it shows how, whenever we can, we eliminate the connections and communications between nature and our constructed world. Fir beams are not exploited for their tree-ness, but for their relatively inexpensive strength and workability: tree qualities to be sure, but not the powerful experience of touching, in a wet, green forest, a tree.

A recent book in Phaidon’s Themes and Movements series is Arte Povera, a movement that developed in the late 1960s mainly in Italy.

These Themes and Movements are wonderful books that provide a descriptive overview, works by the artists involved, their original statements, voices and manifestos and critical texts on the work. It’s forty years on from the emergence of arte povera, long enough for widely scattered, often temporal work to be understood collectively.

Arte povera emerged as a response to the increasingly brittle and coded Cold War world that called up other responses such as the student riots in Paris in 1968, Vietnam War protests throughout the 1960s, the rise of the FLQ as a liberation force in the early 1970s — it was a rough and turbulent time.

To architects came the realisation that the supposedly clean aesthetics of modernism were semiologically compromised and appropriated by a barely suppressed militant capitalism. This same realisation by arte povera artists led to an art that purposely was not enriched with meaning or materials and where phenomenology was more interesting than commodity, while architecture plunged even more deeply into an arch sophistry of signs and symbols. Arte povera strove for clarity: Jannis Kounellis’ Untitled (12 horses), twelve horses tethered in a gallery for three days, was heroic, unsellable and completely present. Giovanni Anselmo tied granite blocks insecurely and precariously to walls high above viewer’s heads: a clear and graphic illustration of the phenomena of gravity. Richard Long made a path in a field by walking on it, Penone fleched wooden beams.

Art povera’s high end principles — ‘a work of art is an attitude become form’, ‘art is related to a quest for authenticity and truth’ — do not inform as much as this description by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev: ‘shared characteristics [of arte povera]: a reference to domesticity and habitat, a human scale, a layering of diverse cultural references, a rejection of coherent style and artistic signature, as well as the distinction between the literal and metphoric, real and virtual, natural and artificial, live and inert, through the transformation of the installation into a type of ‘poor theatre’ where nature and culture coincide’1.

We could do with more of this sort of thing in our brittle and coded world. g

1

Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn editor. Arte Povera.

London: Phaidon, 1999. p74 Stephanie White is the editor of On Site.

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on | site 16 in this issue —

g len bo w m us eum NA- 9 1 9 - 3 8

good fe l low

whitehorse yukon sidney bc vancouver bc twice cambridge ontario toronto ontario county derry n. ireland siksika alberta lana italy austin texas winnipeg manitoba eduardo aquino karen shanski lois weinthal joey giamo florian maurer ron goodfellow chad russill elizabeth shotton meg graham stephanie white steve chodoriwsky laura knap clinton cuddington ron kato stephen pope tony zedda

Blackfoot Crossing Interpretive Centre, Siksika Nation Goodfellow Architects p26 front cover: Table of Contents, Vimy Memorial Park, Winnipeg spmb_projects p40