FROM FICTION TOWARDS AN ARCHITECTURAL CRITIQUE

Post-Petropolis is a fairy tale that tells the story of the land. The story of conflicting natural and artificial landscapes; a speculative and theoretical proposal that explores today’s immense rate of consumption, our precipitous abuse of the landscape, and the planet’s scarce resources. The context is Alberta after the Oil Boom. What will we be doing, imagining and designing after this orgy of production and immorality? What should be done with all the industrial carcasses and disfigured land left behind once the industries have exhausted the land? Post-Petropolis questions whether it is possible to heal the colossal land scars caused by Oil Sand production with an architectural strategy that envisions the post-oil future of Alberta.

Toxic Tourism:

A land that once supported potato and dairy farms transformed into super-sized industrial oil sand factories pumping and dumping synthetic crude to the United States and since the oil bust in 2050. The landscape has transformed again into a monumental tourist destination for delirious and acidic experiences.

New Suburbia:

Suburbia is a mobile ground on the quest to establish a new region, with the ephemeral edifice. It is a territory of roads and monster trucks escaping the urban zone of the Petropolis. Parents have made these regions new ‘monster pastoral’ countryside on wheels.

Neon City:

Neon City is a self-reflecting territory made of an intricate maze – a network of oil and gas refineries, a new land where illegal consumption is authorized. This senseless territory offers a hidden feast of drugs, sex, and fantasy, within an infinite network of pipes, storage tanks, and spiral stairs. Here, visitors experience the disconnected autonomous moment of time being at the mercy of Great White North. In this New Alberta, the economy of survival is found in prostitution. Carbon lust is also a platform for a Dionysian bacchanalia of surplus.

Yellow Shrine:

Yellow Shrine relies on the strong foreign worker program to build the wonderful shrines and keep the spirit of the gods and goddesses alive through the collection of offerings and holy sacrifices. Worshippers offer Jars of dirt as indulgence. This new territory of the religious ground is a key element in providing good fortune and spiritual support for all. The Yellow Shrines establish a new religious journey that brings hope and faith to New Alberta.

The Little Duck Holocaust:

Necropolis is a dark and wet territory made up of a complex accumulation and compression of various types of carcasses. Body parts collide in an entropically generated landscape, creating a territory that can be ravished from multiple points of view. Abandoned skeletons built up over years resemble the prehistoric leftovers of an ignorant civilization. Yet this new territory is the most visited in Alberta, mostly due to the lavish art of taxidermy. Necropolis can be best described as a mass burial territory exhibited in vitrines.

In Search of Sad Oil:

The most fascinating aspect of sad oil in New Alberta, this voluntary isolation, is that it transforms an idyllic toxic land into an extraordinary theater of ephemeral anxiety. This new ground becomes an unfertile terrain a landscape of extreme experimentations, thus proposing a new ecology of hope and life in a heavily polluted gluten-free carcinogenic land. Here, only time offers stability, an escape from the anxiety of uncertainty.

Homogeneous Territory:

Built out of expandable space frame structures that keep the region intact from any sudden economic shift, the scale and pace of the Homogeneous Territory and the refreshed economical guidelines challenge the notion of permanence as a basic state of any province. These ephemeral landscapes of pop-up industries persistently increase and provoke the notion of “The City” as a permanent entity. The Homogenous Territory offers a new theory of social and economic principles with tentative expiration dates and a return to pre-planned obsolescence.

Transient Westland Territories:

Transient Wetland Territories are infused with carbon to feed microbes in the tailing ponds, which in turn break down hydrocarbons and boost the fine sand settlement process. This is a madly innovative solution to enhance the removal of fine particulates from the tailing ponds. TWTs are the only hope to reclaim what was once called land. Once the TWTs set sail, the shallow vegetation on the surface of the floating basin provides enough area and nutrition to support various species of birds and mammals. This Archilocus is the new Alberta tourist destination to rival the Rocky Mountain range.

New alliance Territory:

By 2055, the New Alliance territory had been effectively transformed into a state of disuse. The oil industries CAT walks is now populated with facades that represent various political parties that have cleansed the contaminated landscape of the oil and gas industries from 2016.  The lucrative political campaign process of remediation is exhibited by the department of factual certainty as a symphony of facades that has re-mediated and transformed the landscape into a performance of truth, reality and personality contest. The parties’ banners and flags move in unison to broadcast their presence in the field and reach out to their constituency for support.

Pedagogic Territory:

This territory is a unique educational region, rich in diversity, collaboration, and scholarship through design. Here, students explore today’s most creative design approaches, with an international faculty prominent across the field. The architecture faculty de-schools each and every student and provides them with a range of design investigations, expands their knowledge, and confronts them with challenges of the contemporary built environment. Upon graduation, they will be exported overseas to international markets. Alberta’s only means of survival were the Chicago Boys and their new economic theory of tutelage.

Bureau of Reclamation:

Here in Fort McVegan, all that is left over is converted to feed cows in various stations across the region. Cows are employed for casual strolls in hä-häs. Fresh manure produced by cows is sent to nearby digestion chambers to produce biogas that fuels the city and connects every BBQ restaurant with a biogas piping system. This new territory can coexist with living spaces, promoting a return to the Deutscher Werkbund model of 19th century Germany, henceforth promoting the Homo Faber movement with the agricultural city’ as the result, a genuinely mixed-use fruitful place with an identity.

Post-script

To conclude this phantasmagoria (Petropolis) - though fictional - is appropriate and relevant. It promotes a powerful and frightening spirit in Alberta. Post Petropolis is an Imaginarium for Alberta’s landscape and oil economy where the fictional narrative is used to explore, discover and invent unique realities within which new ecologies of hope are sited.

This thesis is not arguing for or against sustainable living; rather what this research has uncovered is how difficult it is to take any responsibility. Taking responsibility is not easy, no doubt. The research here aims to reach a different constituency, not just the general public. Returning to Newton’s Third Law, we can now experience first-hand some serious reaction to some very poor planning actions that designers, planners, and governments have been making for centuries.

Again, this research does not intend to provide an architectural solution per se, but rather proposes a sincere discussion and aims to inform and invite the authorities at all levels to take responsibility. Not just the authorities, all of us, designers, citizens, politicians, professors. If we want to change we must act, otherwise, all Eco-green awareness is pointless. What do we want to save in Alberta and why?

POST-PETROPOLIS RECOGNIZES THAT ANY POSSIBLE FUTURE PROPOSAL, IMAGINARY OR REAL WILL BE ON SACRED INDIGENOUS LAND, SPECIFICALLY THE TERRITORY OF THE MÉTIS PEOPLE. POST-PETROPOLIS ACKNOWLEDGES THE CONTINUAL DISPLACEMENT OF NATIVE PEOPLE BY THE CONSTITUTION ACT AND IS COMMITTED TO WORKING TO UNDO THE ONGOING EFFECTS OF THIS COLONIAL HERITAGE.

From Micro Apartment to Macro Consciousness

Fantastical expectations of smaller dwellings!

Content:

A . Human Construct: Perishable Money

B . Corpus Corporatum

C . Our Common Wealth Trust

D . Finders Keepers. Losers Lose.

This submission aims to focus light onto a systemic blind spot regarding housing. The authors naively, and respectfully, protest the premise of the question posed as contributing to the problem by supporting the perpetuation of a systemic materialistic strategy - superficial to the actual problem. Geometry and material, while relevant, are minor factors in a housing crisis. Immediate major factors are money and labour. As money is e mbodied human labour, the causal factor of a housing crisis is our precepts of money. How do architects fix money?

With imagination, reason, and honesty, we uncover 3 fundamental natures of human activity: cultural, legal, and economic. One leads the 3 in dynamic coexisting balance. We intuitively feel an unbalanced tension in these natures. 3 elements of the ‘dynamic coexisting tension’ archetype are: authority, responsibility, accountability (ARA). While individual specialists have final authority over their actions, they must defend a transparent independence and commit to account for the basic needs of all 3 coexisting natures.

With new filtered awareness, a “housing crisis” can be understood as the economic nature presuming dominion over cultural and legal natures by asserting inappropriate authority (ARA) over a cultural-first activity with the help of a weak, subservient, legal nature. The only effective way to correct imbalanced ARA is to consciously redress the imbalance as opposed to seek the opposite to achieve balance: adjust our precept of Nature’s actual concept. In this case, our economic nature needs to coexist with other natures vs. dominate them, to the detriment of all. That is closer to our, true, natural, social order: balanced coexistence.

Beyond superficial symptomological discourse, a sincere consideration of subservient legal constraints, reveals the cultural and economic issues that are seen as a housing crisis. This manifesto proposes to correct the misdiagnosis of a housing crisis. How small, how clever must housing be to resolve the need for profit? What is the true cost of distilling a human right to housing? Can we imagine sustainable actions to stem the massive economic hemorrhage imposed on Canadians, imposed on each other?

A. Human Construct: Perishable Money

A.1 Healthy Economic Life Force

As humanity evolves on its continuum, the contemporary majority of our community becomes increasingly more aware of realities unknown to previous generations: Our precepts become more complete. We innately know it is best to resolve the cause, not the symptoms, of our issues. This requires conscious, honest, effort.

Financial sector regulation and inflation are current aspects of a housing game. Let us ask how: ‘do I want to play this game’, not ‘what are the rules to this insane game’. Especially, when the rules favour the house winning! Are we able to imagine a saner, truly humane, game where everyone can win?

With conscious awareness of what money actually means to us, we will realize its real abstract value is our life’s energies that it embodies. During this new deliberation, we may pass by other social questions that can also be resolved. Architects know, all systems are integrated – they are, in reality, whether we acknowledge that fact or not.

Just as stagnate water is unhealthy to our natural bodies, hoarding money is unhealthy to our social body. Systemic hoarding appears to perpetuate many negative human behaviours.

Money is to economic life what water is to human life: indispensable when clean and fresh. Key to ‘fresh’ is a simple but unknowably beneficial cycle of flowing. The current, disproportionately gargantuan, reservoirs of money held in private accounts are festering our economic life. The content of the reservoirs originates in communal human activity. Perpetual movement through the economic activities is what keeps money “clean and fresh” – healthy for all - including the hoarders!

With the current state of our monetary evolution, it seems easy enough to establish simple ratios related to paper money’s value. Even easier to implement ‘aging money’ principles in our virtual systems. No one should fear their own reservoir will run dry because all their current needs can be resolved with fresh, clean, flowing money – in perpetuity. Or, at least, until our next precept improvement. Our goal should be exponential economic sustainability in support of human will (culture) – not artificially driven by government (legal) – symbiotic balance is the real challenge.

A.2 Work Less is More

Our collective pandemic responses illustrate our capacity for actions in a very practical sense. We (government) can take, previously unfathomable, actions to suit our reality in short order. Change is possible.

Beyond our own personal benefits of shorter working weeks, the immediate impact of reducing individuals’ working week is the immediate creation of more jobs (actual, training, management). This creates more, happy, people. It is an economic-sphere solution to a cultural-sphere problem: personal health as espoused by the many calls for attention to ‘mental health’. This is also an investment in long-term health care cost mitigation, which serves the economic nature in the future.

In concert with other adjustments mentioned herein, this long-term benefit outweighs all short-term costs. More workers means more money flowing with exponential market development potential.

A.3 Money: Tool for Humanity

The healthy flow and access to both money and water is essential for their respective ecosystems. The more activity (cyclical flow) we ”allow” to happen, the more our activity integrates with the ecosystem’s perpetual sustainability. All uses are part of the flow. It is in our interest to keep the quality as healthy as possible by discouraging festering pools or reservoirs and encouraging streamlined flows.

2020 emergency measures prove that most Canadians support supporting each other - for the collective good that our federation is, or simply personal preservation. Why not learn from our challenges? Do away with some bureaucratic-heavy economic support programs, in favour of one simple program: a living wage tied to our collective performance (GDP). As we all ‘do better’, we ensure our collective basic flow of money. Want more from your community? Do more for your community.

Need it? Use it | Spend it! Thank you. | Don’t need it. Return it.

This could simply be administered annually through slight modifications to the Income Tax Act - a process proven functional during the pandemic. Let us inform our expectations of each other (terms and conditions) by implementing, assessing and adjusting rather than abstracting reasons to do nothing.

If we all expect each other to live as a diverse and sustainable social group (garden), restricting the flow of money (water) to the point of negative impact on any individual, hurts our collective endeavour: sustainable human evolution within actual natural context. Current management strategies have developed an unsustainable economic plot: the majority of water is being hoarded and concentrated to a miniscule part of our garden.

Within established guidelines, each individual is free to flow the money to others, ensuring economic health which includes housing – as a free choice, not a prescribed cell in a honeycomb of lies.

B. Corpus Corporatum

B.1 Relative Contribution Ratios

There are many examples of corporations choosing to administer their affairs with sustainable economic strategies. Our existing laws, governing mandatory corporate articles, can simply be amended to mandate ranges for maximum compensation ratios, between highest and lowest paid human beings - no loopholes. Tying corporate money flow to relative ratios ensures equity. This is similar to fixing leaking water treatment plant pipes - other than the person collecting, and hoarding, the leaking water, who thinks that leaks are a good thing? Our system can evolve for all our benefit, let it flow in a healthy way. No one is left wanting in an equitable system. This, again, ensures more money for infrastructure of all types.

B.2 Responsibility: Human | Corporate

Did you know that our constitution’s preamble essentially establishes that: ‘Citizens’ consciousness retains power over the state’ and that, through legislation, corporate bodies are given a right beyond human bodies - ever-lasting life? It then stands as reasonable that these in-corporated bodies also have unique expectations to keep a healthy tension between their responsibilities, accountability, and authority (the living trifecta of healthy human activity) beyond our fragile human bodies. By definition, corporate bodies are beyond-human under the law. Corporate bodies support many human lives and may enjoy privileges forever. There are, and can be more, conditions. Which Body serves whom?

Since Article 2 of our constitution grants us all the freedom to practice idleness, or take stances opposite reason and science, or take action to support healthy human activity, we must presume our love for each other as a baseline. Educate, foster, and encourage a call to action vs. a right to idleness and destruction. Beyond legal words, understand your Article 2:

Citizens shall support the evolution of morality, respect each

other with empathy and freely assemble peacefully.

Citizens, in this case, legally includes human and corporate bodies, with the latter enjoying the additional features of supporting many humans and perpetual existence.

Changing our outlook is more difficult, but faster, than changing our written words, it seems.

Why should human bodies be asked to support the needs of corporate bodies, in priority, beyond the greater good? Simple, yet major, changes can be brought to redress ARA balance to re-order our priorities, aligned to stated values, articles and intent. Lower corporate taxes equates to a few Citizens ‘skimming off the top’ of the communal pot. Are 1:2 or 1:3 ratios not enough to satisfy their needs?

B.3 Time vs. Service

Combining a healthy flow of money and prices including whole life-cycle costs, provides a healthier balance to economic relationships. Price becomes relative. Unsustainable government (legal) subsidies of economic sectors are not required. Subsidies cannot be removed without first making changes to ensure ‘survival’ to benefit our community. If everyone has a healthy amount of money, we can all afford to pay the correct value of products and services, like design fees and taxes. When our economic activities are healthy, transparency is a natural reflex. There is no motivation to outmanoeuver each other, human or corporate. Enterprising becomes associative, active, engaged.

Equitable monetizing naturally balances an economic system, similar to equitable actions in natural ecosystems. Unnatural interventions are the cause of systemic imbalance.

Equitable payment for services rendered, including abstract ideas, becomes normalized when money also flows equitably throughout the economic system of human activities. How to equitably monetize this submission’s precept (impact), flowing through us from others’ previous struggles to capture the broader concept? Should price compensate our time or our needs? Equitably, we need to resolve our needs (past, current, future). Time is not ours to sell.

B.4 Entrepreneurship vs. Community.

Without too much prejudice toward the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Royal Charter precedent, can we agree that summarily granting land, to an in-corporated body, directed by extended family members, in perpetuity, is not a precedent aligned with our current collective goodwill? Centuries later, can citizens imagine some corrective adjustments to a Corporations Act? We will address ‘land’ later.

Emergency measures highlight the power of our citizens’ consciousness over collective morality: empathically respecting each other. We can certainly see that we collectively struggle with this empathy concept. The salient point we have made to ourselves is that major social changes can be made over a few days within existing legal framework. It is possible.

Given that existing copyright/intellectual property protections exist for an author’s life plus 50 years, beyond the details, we can be inspired to understand variations of this 300-year precedent as an original entrepreneur’s legal protection and encouragement of productive activity. Reward risk as thanks for benefit. As business activities, in service of wider human benefit, align with our common values, we can understand a precedent where the original founder of this body-corporate have special standing. Surveying lessons learned over the last 400 years, there is no supporting precedent for special legal treatment of antecedent corporate leadership (nepotism). There are now many precedents for supporting corporations as ‘too-big-to-fail’. All citizens’ well being relies on many corporations, every day. This surely satisfies the “important” qualification. Why not focus ‘baseline’ regulations on a moral “too-important-to-fail”?

Just as the value of money is a collective abstraction we agree on. Corporate value is literally created with real human activity - a collective community activity - not only the founder’s. Wages are but a small benefit of this collective interaction. Over time, corporate direction attracts the best qualified humans for the task. It is a trifecta of the original entrepreneur, employees and clients that cultivated both corporate and community value. It is a symbiotic relationship. It disturbs a system’s balance when corporate directorship is passed over in inheritance to family. Upon the founder’s passing, there can be a process for the transition of direction accounting for the public-benefit of a corporation continuing its life in service of the community. This process does not preclude family but simply integrates an accountability of competence responding to the actual symbiotic conditions.

The legal founding goal of a corporation is never to simply make money, the goal is a human activity. Money serves the activity. There is no need to protect the abstract value of money in perpetuity. The founder’s family and friends are also citizens, with their own destinies, and subject to our collective support. Inheritance is not a human right. The indirect risk of incompetence and impact of business closure is the community’s to resolve. Basic risk management dictates reasonable action to mitigate risk. There are many precedents supporting ‘greater good’ interventions.

Reward entrepreneurship | Support growth | Protect community.

B.5 Transfusions vs. Infarctions

Before death, it is unthinkable to remove all the living forces from a body, we actually consider it a great crime. As money is the abstract embodiment of human forces, it should be a crime against the community to remove large amounts of money from its integrated corporations. There is however a sustainable amount of forces that can be extracted without adversely affecting the body in the longer term. Before the passing of a corporate founder but upon their wish to give up the directorship of the corporation, it would be possible for the citizens’ collective consciousness (government) to establish a transparent process (corporations act article) to assess and sustainably extract a percentage of increase in value to benefit the founding corporate director(s) where the corporation has integrated community value – ensuring a sustainable symbiotic relationship for the future health of the community.

An ethical “too-important-to-fail” solution aligned to our Article 2, would ensure fair consideration of founding director(s) while not threatening public benefit (jobs, wages, services, tax revenues). Stability in urban planning underpins many facets of social and housing challenges.

C Our Common Wealth Trust

C.1 Guiding Premise

Excluding ‘why’, we are literally born out of, and onto the Earth. When we understand that Article 2 enshrines a bond or a ‘duty-to-care’, not simply a ‘right to selective ignorance’, human and corporate actions can adjust laws to be in the service of healthy symbiotic relationships. Abstract rights to manage Nature are absurd. The natural world exists beyond humans, despite us. Citizens’ consciousness (government) has a responsibility to coexist within the reality of Nature’s bountiful limitations. Laws that protect do not inversely transform into rights to exploit.

In Canada, less than 0.0004% of the world’s citizens claim dominion over 2% of the Earth’s landmass. Conditions in Canada are appropriate for practical change, potentially worthy of imitation by all of Earth’s citizens. With open-hearts and imaginations, all Canadians could set aside their right to idleness for a duty-to-care. We can be world leaders in developing laws, infrastructure and technologies aligned with natural forces.

Urban and rural development must be resolved as part of a whole.

C.2 Land: Holistic Benefits | Costs

Is “Land Ownership” a right, privilege, or responsibility? Can we find agreement on “land” and “ownership”? When a majority of Canadians agree that: “Our land” is valued at $0, it is Priceless, we will be able to simply: Enjoy it for free. | Reward improvements. | Pay for land use.

“The Crown” is a legal construct for “Our Community”, accountable to Canadians. It can act, directed by the majority of citizens, to benefit all citizens’ well being, which includes a healthy natural environment.

“Land Benefit”

Where Earth forces are leveraged:

Agriculture: Tax for exploitive effects of mainstream practices and credit for rejuvenating effects biodynamic practices.

Water: Tax for damages / regulation / oversight of negative impacts and credit for rehabilitation of aquifers and water quality.

Energy: Heat... Wind... Currents... Magnetic

“Land Improvement”

Includes all unnatural human interventions, from water pumps to power dams to cottages and high rises. The capital costs need to include a life cycle bond as well as the costs of returning the land value back to $0, back to Priceless! These bonds have value, may be amortized over periods of time but can never be liquidated until the land balance is resolved to $0 by the current ‘owner’. Essentially, “improvements” are all temporary, reversible, human impacts. Corporate bonds? Municipal bonds? Rural residential bonds? Lower bonds for lesser impacts.

“Land Trust”

Where no private corporation choose to render required activities, Trusts can be established to execute activities required by the collective to process natural elements (not resources) such as sustainable energy - For-Public-Benefit. Expertise and jobs may re-allocate themselves in the short-term. In the long-term, healthy balance will evolve. Legal constraints exists, only human will is required in this context.

“Land Exploitation”

Irreversible modifications for human benefit (Anthropocene). The Citizen’s Consciousness, Earth’s Stewards, demand relative restitution for counterbalancing activities supporting regulation, oversight, research, and development in sustainable alternatives. The true cost of the Anthropocene is the simple solution to resolving the contemporary logic that proposes “1=0”. The reality is that “1=1” and all costs must be resolved in service of balance within the Whole. Where exploiters cannot resolve costs, activities must wind up responsibly as dictated by a true life-cycle cost. If it’s not sustainable, why sustain it? Short term impact shocks are absorbed by other implemented measures, noted herein.

“Land Stewardship”

Once mastered by a critical mass, Stewardship becomes an exportable skill with patent-able technologies - a valuable resource for a future built on dynamic symbiotic relationships. There is a substantial wealth of knowledge, on this topic, within Canada – if we wish to inform ourselves authentically.

Canadians could be world-leaders in the most important field of human activity - ever: healing our planet + rehabilitating our Self.

D. Finders keepers. Losers lose.

D.1 Tax Idleness. Credit Investment.

“The State” is the citizen’s collective other than you. You are entitled to returns on your efforts. Credit tangible real estate investments as they ensure the flow of money in our communities. Where the community (others around you) develops land and infrastructure, why should you reap incidental benefits? Real estate, and land use, is not a game of chance.

100% Tax on Real Capital Gains

The State should tax all capital gains not generated by the owner as part of a healthy, perpetual, flow of money. Artificial inflation of property values is generated by the community’s activities, not by the owner’s investments. Reward investments. Motivate constructive activities in support of healthy money flowing. If you simply sit on land (field or parking), while the rest of ‘us’ generate value (develop) around you, why should you have any claim to added profits? Those who develop land benefit proportionally. ‘Sitting on land’ has a crippling effect to constructive urban planning and developing social | cultural infrastructure | tax revenues. Activates private money vs. state funds (drains reservoirs). It is key to our healthy social life: collective infrastructure and money in service of collective human activity. Idleness blocks others’ opportunity to contribute to our community.

Conflict of interest declaration: architects and engineers will benefit from related private-sector-financed infrastructure boom – but not as much as every one of our communities!

In conclusion, financial regulations and inflation are symptoms of our economic nature’s rules not being holistically integrated into cultural and legal natures. Elements of ‘coexisting tension’ between our economic, cultural and legal natures are: authority, responsibility, accountability (ARA). Our challenge is to attend to dynamic needs and tensions, demanding awareness, responsiveness and actions. This manifesto’s provocative ideas are relevant, and appropriate – stripping inexcusable marginal narratives that support inaction. This call for action is not arguing for, or against, a new Architecture design solution; rather we propose fundamental changes to resolve the causal factors of a housing crisis. These entail integrated participation of various constituencies. Toronto’s affordable housing challenge, representatively, may be caused by poor planning, poor design choices, poorly informed policies, and static legal framework appropriate to former, centuries-old, social conditions. Expecting change by repeating past actions is insanity. Otherwise, all contemporary iterative efforts (eco, green, modular, adaptable, expandable, future proof, parametric, affordable) in housing design are in vain.

In Collaboration with Luc Nugent.

The Gift Box - Hako

Gift from: Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism

To: The Ambassador of Japan to Canada, H. E. Kenjiro Monji

A Traveller's Guide to Sad Oil Territories

Adopted in 2006, The United Development Ordinance lays out useful rules for the physical development of property. Respecting designated zoning, forecasting but contesting accepted land use at times, Mirror in the Mirror (M/M) slowly re-introduces the understated vibrancy and optimism embedded in the remnants of a modernist project within Durham. Three Moves Towards (In)Finity crafts and shapes a built environment that both meets and challenges the goals of the Comprehensive Plan; economically, historically, socially and culturally.

Reawakened architecture must go both ways. In navigating contemporary issues on housing, land use, open space, and transportation we must not lose sight of the lost and the found. Embedded in what we too often discard in our living history, we might not be too surprised if our current heroic architecture is not embarrassing in 10 or 20 years. Not so here in Durham! Mirror in the Mirror is a development, like the music it echoes, that accumulates by subtle spatial and material moves.

Reveal

According to The Ministry of Public Interest in a Policy Report (2014) it is recommended that any new development and urban design project must allocate 55% of land used to public amenities and community functions. (In)Finity Reveal aims to address the ministry’s agenda by meeting the requirements of the brief towards housing whilst repurposing the enormous surface parking area

into a public park (even amenity centre). A landscape for those in the surrounding neighbourhood, for all. A new energy-efficient and eco-controlled green ramp park will allow external access to the double height open garden/infinity pool capping the top of the existing modernist building. Reveal opens the ground plane and extends to a slow roof incline, a space for local and unusual public functions, in all seasons.

Living Narratives

Based on recent studies produced by The Federal Bureau of Urban Displacement, strategic responses to the rapid development and evolution of Durham address the socio-economics of urban revitalization and inclusive community agency. Leading experts advised that at least 50% future residents should possess an oral history and living narrative. This allows a communal connection to new residents and the young, whilst expanding the site’s agency and civic connection to the immediate area and surrounding districts.  The vibrancy and diversity of the proposed project emerges from a mixed programming; the need to integrate local artists, galleries, workshop networks, cafeteria and other public gathering spaces. A variety of small to medium retail and social services will exist alongside a kindergarten/crèche and local community college for artisanal/vocational studies. Satellite links to North Carolina College and other institutes produces outreach networks.  Nursing and senior care also feature in the careful programming connecting to Duke and other universities.

Mirror in the Mirror

Established by The Department of True History, communities need delicate interventions to conserve their true oral and diverse histories. In order to save the city from itself, local communities must partake in the preservation and celebration of their past. Retrofitting is no longer an adequate term for the ambition of this program and project. The existing 1950s building is the main objective of (In)Finity and mirroring the existing modernist form provides more re-vitalised spaces for new functions and programs. The Mirror in the Mirror - from building to surface to reveal - establishes a new ground above the existing building; an incubator for new urban speculation. The other careful forms flip failure and fantasy until we respect the past for the present it has lost, and we respect the present for what the past always offered. Vibrant, diverse, creative on its own terms; running up that hill, unconditional and inviting.

In collaboration with Steven Schuhmann,

There is a 15,000-year-old ancestral, geological, and cultural legacy; it is absurd to settle for 150 years. This is an insult, an absolute atrocity towards the land, let alone a nation. Homogenous Territory is a provocative narrative response to conflicting natural and artificial landscapes. It is a speculative perspective that explores the disappearing recent past, and a bewildering future legacy: Alberta after the Oil Boom. Is this once national project coming unstuck? If so, how does today’s obscene consumption and precipitous abuse of the landscape re-define a province in flux? What about the nation? History’s passage is fragile here and coupled with the planet’s scarce resources, we now witness a geological tragedy. What do we pick up and what do we leave behind when the questions are destabilised by decisions and directions already steered by such spoliation? What can we imagine, re-evaluate, and design after this orgy of overproduction, consumption, and immorality? What do we do with all the carcasses and disfigured land left behind once the industries have exhausted their resource? What is the future for a place that has lost its original topography to Oil and Gas bulldozers? Who gets to hold the identity of the nation going forward?
This “rational” fairy tale tells the story of land when the land had more meaning, more history and readings than it has now. The Homogeneous Territory is a fantasy about history, memory, fiction, and the ephemeral, opened up by this ultimate site of conflict and contestation. This dystopian condition needs a new critique and challenge; for an absurd ecological assault that will re-purpose the exhausted lands and glorify the current irrational state of Alberta. The Homogeneous Territory draws out the contours of the possible and the impossible. It represents an attempt to heal the colossal land scars caused by Oil Sand production, by bewildering infrastructural solutions and ecological fantasies of a very real kind. This theoretical architectural fantasy dwells on fragments and clichés; the drawn world is not so much a drowned world as one marked by multiple displacements and lost personal histories. This imaginary narrative is a counter-factual proposal for the dynamic and fluxing fabric of Alberta. The Homogeneous Territory creates a new prehensile reality for the future legacy of Alberta; it questions belonging, even for the ducks. Sovereignty has to be re-imagined along with new flight paths.

A POST-FUTURE NARRATIVE

Saturday, July 2nd, 2017—there is no better moment to mark the end of Alberta’s Dirty Oil extraction, precisely
when Persia emerged from years of economic isolation, and the United States of America lifted crippling
sanctions in return for the country to comply with a deal to control its oil market. There has never been a
territorial reform at this scale since the Federal Cash Relief fund (2008). The Homogeneous Territory of Alberta
intends to re-think a future memory and re-build new contours on the terra-formed boreal forest of Northern
Alberta; the first territory built as an active force after economic austerity.
As post-capital movements rise in the West following Brexit and the triumph of Donald Trump—and as
Alberta’s landscape becomes ever more loathsome—a shift to homogenization seems inevitable. National
feeling struggles here. The lucrative political campaign processes of remediation in exhibit by the Department
of Factual Certainty as a symphony of facades that has re-modelled and transformed the landscape into a
performance of truth, reality, and personality contests. As the citizens and visitors experience the disconnected
autonomous moment of time by celebrating the 150 anniversary of The Great White North, a new territory is
rising; the economy of survival is here and the parties’ banners and flags move in unison to broadcast their
presence in the region and reach out to their constituency for support. Post-capital has finally provided a
solution, a new economic reform for The Homogeneous Territory.
Built out of expandable space frame structures that keep the region intact from any sudden economical shift,
the scale and pace of the Homogeneous Territory and the refreshed economical guidelines challenge the
notion of permanence as a basic state of any province. These ephemeral landscapes of pop-up industries
persistently increase and provoke the notion of “The City” as a permanent but bewildering entity. Malleable,
memory never quite succeeds to structure such urban ideology.
The growing attention paid to the economic crisis and ecological issues has re-appeared within Alberta’s
new landscape by harnessing the anxiety and occupying the recent emergence of corporate efficiency as a
supermodel for land reformation. Homogeneous Territory thrashes out a malleable organization platform set
within a range of active forces and elements that simultaneously support its continuity. This paradox is not
beyond us. The structure of the new territory is around one sovereign purpose. It functions as a central force
that not only defines its philosophy and complexity but also determines essential characteristics, such as the life
cycle of each corporation and its entire labour force, its material composition, and the place it occupies in the
cultural context of Alberta in which it grows and operates.

As an extreme case of an ephemeral economy, the Homogeneous Territory of Alberta demystifies a distilled narrative surrounding the development of one province in time. Even the future has a legacy we can never catch up with. Homogeneous Territory acknowledges the urgency to re-examine accepted permanent solutions as the only mode for the formulation of corporate efficiency. Into this, we slip a new delineation of space and time, drawn to stunning and accurate imperfections. This posits new protocols that are perpetually reformulating, re-adapting, and re-projecting in an iterative search for a temporary economy of survival that reacts to a permanent state of crisis. Thus, the Homogeneous Territory offers a new set of social and economic principles with tentative expiry dates and a return to pre-planned obsolescence.
As a parallel manifesto to the Homogeneous Territory, The Yellow Shrines have enabled Alberta to experience a never-before-seen architecture of wonderful monumental pyramids. The Yellow Shrines keep the spirit of the gods and goddesses alive through the collection of offerings and holy sacrifices; worshippers offer jars of clean dirt as indulgences hoping one day to remediate the lost land with their sacrifices. Thanks to the Foreign Workers Program, this platform provides prosperity and sets a precedent for a new religious ground. Yellow Shrines are the key element in providing good fortune and spiritual support for all.
Homogeneous Territory is the solution to the sad oil in Alberta where voluntary isolation and estranged national feelings transform an idyllic toxic land into an extraordinary theatre of ephemeral anxiety. This new ground becomes an unfertile terrain, a landscape of extreme experimentation, adulation, and, dare we utter it, a new ecology of hope and life in a heavily polluted gluten-free carcinogenic land; here, only time offers stability, a celebratory escape and crushing re-inventions distancing us from the anxiety of uncertainty. A vision that intervenes in its own aching causality crushed by the machines that can super-size our minds. A vision that intervenes in Canada itself? LWPSP&W—this new ecology of hope provides a chance to Live, Work, Play, See, Participate, and Worship.

http://www.thesitemagazine.com/competition/

Beautiful narrative of the cycles of growth and decline associated with resource extraction. The project points to several contradictions of contemporary society. – Neeraj Bhatia


The project poses an important question for Alberta after the oil boom: “What is the future of this place that has lost its original topography to oil and gas bulldozers?”

For new future narratives, the author considers not only the recent past, but looks at Alberta as a land with many histories and readings. The author takes the “basic needs” of forming a new Alberta—live, work, play, see, participate, and worship—and presents them in a series of drawings that each express a narrative. The activities and program become more important than the physical territory, suggesting a clear approach towards the problem. The dystopian image of Alberta’s legacy is visually appealing, but has the potential to be presented in a more extreme condition. - Dagnija Smilga

This exhibition was supported by funding from the Canada Council for the Arts and regular partners, including ArtsEverywhere. Special thanks to Critical Distance for their support in facilitating this exhibition.

Weeping Walls and Shopping Malls

Imagine that, in order to build a city, murders were always necessary. There are victims, heroes, martyrs, scapegoats and many others voluntary and involuntary deaths (agonies or terminal-illness) – even the unborn victims of violence have been codified by law. As for the murderers we should appeal to a meticulous analysis of the general category of culpable homicide: serial killing, first degree murder, second degree murder, voluntary and involuntary manslaughter, justifiable homicide, felony, infanticide; all of which have differing degrees of causation, (pre)meditation and intentionality. As for the accomplices, the conspirators, the different kinds of witnesses, the indifferent absentminded observers, the passive contemplators ... how can we possibly identify these?

(The role of victim, murderer and accomplice can easily

be exchanged).

If we consider as victims of building, also animals, literal scapegoats and all the involuntary killing of animated beings, vegetal life, microorganisms and “unanimated” matter, then the list would become vertiginous.

There are Perfect (un-culpable) Murderers, so there must also be perfect victims and perfect survivors. No trace must be left, all guilt avoided. The state of being a perfect surviving victim is ideal for those who want to practice innocence. The art of building is the art of switching into being a perfect murderer, victim and survivor according to what the situation demands.

If grief counts for anything, then someone has to mourn for the victims and to plan the celebrations, to come to terms with the murderers and to deal with the accomplices. How to ignore all this seems to be our main preoccupation. This is the Architecture of Oblivion and Forgetting.

Forgiveness has an ambiguous existence: it comes and

goes, and it never turns out to be fair. Is there a “genuine

forgiveness” that does not involve “the forgetting” of the events? This would be a different way of signifying the “debt to the dead”. Without forgetting, memory would be paralyzed – a future with a paralyzed memory (different dissimulations of hysteria?).

So we have to ask forgiveness from the victims. Not in the sense that once we have been forgiven, we can forget about them! No, we have constantly to remember that we have been forgiven and will be forgiven again. We have to make sure that the pattern will recur every time we want it to recur – “…now I feel a bit guilty so I will be forgiven, then I will be forgiven too much and I should feel guilty...”. Once the memory (mourning) is reenacted periodically, forgiveness will be granted. We simply have to make sure that this on and off has a rhythm. This is valid for us, the survivors, those who have to come to terms with the victims that were sacrificed in order to make the space of the city available to us. And the resentment of the murderers? Is it sincere? Well, we might say, that’s their problem. Not exactly, however, because the victims ask for justice if not for revenge. The vendetta of the victims of building is chasing us. “Building is the tomb of architecture”. If so, “who” is buried there?

The corpse of architecture is its void.

“MORTACCI TUA!” Very popular Italian slang from the Roman folklore to vilify all the dead ancestors of the person to whom it is addressed.

“Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation”

Alain De Botton, The Architecture of Happiness.

The territory where the city and any building exist is certainly that which has first been violated.

When we stare at the persistent overbuilding of our contemporary cities we are often reminded of all that

once was, and must again be, irreparably lost because

of this desire and necessity to build.

There is grief not only for the city (the ideal city that has been dissimulated by the real one) but in the city. Grief for building and in the act of building. Grief for all the destruction and violence that the act of building implies.

The city is an overarching manifestation of building. An excessive manifestation. Too much and yet not enough. There are many contemporary  paradigmatic  cases of architectural murders, dead or dying cities and condemned buildings.

Think of a vertiginous paradoxical list...like: The Dead City of Linfen, The Ghost City of Ordos, All the Empty Apartments of Vancouver, Dubai, Hong Kong, Rome...give to each place as a suspension point; All the Empty Offices Which Rent Empty Apartments (the documents, the folders, the storages where emptiness is registered), All the Vacancies (places that vacate like phantoms in no-places), Decommissioned Plants and Factories, Temporary Abandoned Apartments, Places Inside Apartments that Remains Empty for an Un-measurable Lapse of Time, Empty Train Stations at Night, Un-built Stuff, Un-born Buildings, Un-wanted Spaces, Abandoned Rooms, Uninhabitable Interstices, Ruins in All Their Forms, Weekend Houses at Working Seasons, Abandoned Post-Massacre Places...what is the most abandoned place you can think of?...How long does it take to make a space condemned to oblivion? Which places give you the most profound sense of discomfort and sense of abandonment? For example: SAMCOR Abattoirs, Slaughterhouse and other state projects by Francisco Salamone  in Argentina, Hamilton Steel Mills, Montreal Silos Chernobyl, Pripyat Amusement Park, Abandoned Wonderland in Chenzhuang, Packard Plant Detroit, Wheeling-Pit Steel Mill in Ohio...the infinity of the list, the exhausting power of a taxonomy of places embalmed in their suspension, a definitive fulfillment of the listing of all the possible empty empty spaces...like the opposite, the antinomy, the oxymoron of “An Attempt to Exhaust a Parisian Place”: an exhaustive attempt to erase a Parisian place by means of absences. Erasing the erasures. I think now of a place like the stain of blood on the Bluebeard Key: the more you try to erase it the more it becomes manifest.

Building for the sake of building is      so overarching and ubiquitous now, that it is no longer comprehensible. It is outnumbering our comprehension. And by outnumbering it, it also relieves us from the necessity of mourning. What does it mean if four and a half trillions of square meters of abandoned buildings exists in the world now? It means nothing because it is too much. It is too much and yet not enough. But enough to lose any sense. An infinitely exceeding quantifiable extension, has perverted and distorted the territory for the manifestation of building. The quantitative shift has subverted the panorama, has reverted the perspective where building make sense: now, yes, we can stare at the evoked outrageously unlimited labyrinth that has no ‘outside’. Yet this is not enough. The more I build the more I lose the sense of building. Indeed what is the sense of building if no one knows how to dwell or inhabit all that which gets built? The answer is in the question: the outnumbering infinite quantitative increment (artificially supported by statistical intangible logics) is functional to making you lose sight of the sense. It perfectly fits this purpose.

Time will never be enough to inhabit all these spaces. Time is their debris. I lose the sense of building and the reason why there should be one particular place worth inhabiting (dwelling). We want at any cost to make the city become an absolute object, an absolutely prevaricating object so that I must assume its being as such, as it is: an undeniable, un-falsifiable evidence; a truism.

The grief has to cope with the vertigo of the dead, the vertigo of the “debts to the dead”. The vertigo of the outnumbering is a stratagem to forget. When the debt becomes so immense to be inestimable then no one has to worry about paying it back and moreover those who have contracted it are totally dispensed from it! Now it’s a creditors’ problem. “Sorry planet, no way we can stop it! Now it’s your problem!”. The meta-architect can eventually hospitalize it all.

Since that which is lost, destroyed, violated and killed is now outweighing the imagination, this immenseness means I cannot feel any appropriate compassion for its lack of scale. Grief is transmogrified into the celebration commemoration for this inevitable loss. A big commemorative party.

Indeed, this surreal condition where no one dies creates the desire for death at any cost. But the surrealistic condition where everything dies also creates a desire for life at any cost. Life now, as much as we can live it! There will inevitably be an apocalypse but the problem is not what we are doing after it, but while we wait for it. There is now a vast army of responsible architects who express a profound and, we must assume, sincere sense of grief for the loss that building implies. We could name it “radical grief”. There are moments of responsible consciousness; denunciation, remediation and mourning, atonement through revitalization, decontamination, and other forms of exorcism.

A Vertiginous Deteriorating List (in disorder of appearance): Sustainable Designers for the Future (SDF), Symbiosis Heroes for the Anthropocene (SHA), Need Leed Planet Earth (NLPE), Building Green Innocence Companions (BGIC), Omni-comprehensive Sustainability of All (OcoSA), Biomimicry Warriors for Architecture Camouflage (BWAC), Green Activists for Gray Concreteness (GAGC), Innocent Green Builders Holy Architects Inc. (IGB), Green Guerrillas Apostles (GGA), Eco Friendly Asbestos Companions (EFAC), Save Earth / Do Nothing (SE/DN), LEED Monks (LEEDM), Global Warming Cooling Building Demonstrators (GWCBD), Garbage Islands Dwellers for the Future of Humanity (GIDFH), Green Globe Practitioners (GGP), Build Green Protocollers (BGP), Build Gaia Future Manifesting (BGFM), Star System Exterminators (SSE), Save the Planet / Kill an Architect Movement (SPKAM), Survivalist Zombies for the Peace of Architecture (SZPA), Total Peace Total Beauty Builders for Tomorrow (TPTBBT), Yoga Builders for the Peace of the Senses (YBPS), Global Health Movements for Pure Building (GHMPB), Mortar Alive Forever (MAF), Plastering the Future with Love (PFL), Mother Earth Companions (MEC), Cool Global Warming Hyperspace-Building (CGWHB), Green Buddha Stone Risers (GBSR), The Planet Defender (PD), Walls Of Peace Builders (WOPB), Scavengers for the Building of Humanity (SBH), Reclaiming Waste Heroes of the Up-cycling of the Forgotten Debris (HUFD), Consumer Leftover Recyclers (CLR), No-Name Architects & No Wage Martyrs for the Humanity of Good Building (NNANWMHGB), Ethical Builders Against All (EBAA), We Want It Clean Architecture Movement (WWICAM), Gluten Free Environments Risers (GFER), Vegan Architecture Ensemble (VAE), Second Hand Architecture for Responsibility (SHAR), Garbage Survivors Eden (GSE), Paradise Without Buildings (PWB), Martyrs of Green Forever Vegan Construction Inc. (MGFVCI), Hey Hey I Have Saved the World Today Architecture Inc (HHISWTAI), Low Calories Building Raising (LCBR), Carbon Fossil Killers Construction Inc. (CFKCI), Jesus Loves Green Builders (JLGB), Google Know Everything Sustainable (GKES), Emissions Free Total Building (EFTB), Carbon Neutral Angels of Angles (CNAA), Net Zero Energy Building for the Spirit (NZBS) , Green Off-gassing Suppressors Association (GOGSA), Sustainable Algorithms for Un-building the Future (SAUbF), Parametric Parasites for Healing Spaces (PPHS), Organic Architects (OA), Pesticides Suckers Material Fabrication (PSMF), Anti Electric Radiation Walls Heroes  (AERWH),  Feng  Shui Façade Ventilators (FGFV), Gluten-free Building Material Consultants (GBMC), Rigid Design Institute for Flexibility (RDIF), Resilient Affordable Housing for the Responsible 1% who Donate for the Environment (AHR1DE), Low Profile Meta Architecture (LPMA), Solar Power Yoga Mat Flooring (SPYMF) Global Warm Build Cool (GWBC), Net Zero Global Warming Awareness (NZGWA), Non GMO By-product Building Matter (NgmoBBM), Ego-Systems Busters for the Joy of Overbuilding (ESBJO), Façade Therapy Fundamentalists (FTF), Spills Absorbers Footprints Annihilators (SAFA)...(To be completed)

Architects are full of surprises. Those who have created the problems can now fix them.

When we title all the spoiling that we are witnessing as “beautiful destruction” we anesthetize the evidence with a sort of mournful pride.

Look at all that we could do! We could really destroy it all now if we wanted to! Why not then try to destroy it and see how we can manage the destruction? Many fiction stories are centered on this. A global destruction and the cunning Daedalic intelligence of who will work out a new survival.

The well-educated architects indulge diligently in front of their weeping walls before “driving” irresistibly toward their shopping malls. (fig. 5)

The overexposed sacrificial victim appears as that which has been irreparably lost and cannot be revived. Collateral effects have always been out of control. They can be glorious weapons of mass distraction. (fig. 6)

Necropolis: Memorial for the Ducks who Died for a Beautiful Destruction.

The Necropolis is the story of conflicting natural and artificial landscapes, a counter-factual proposal for the dynamic and fluxing fabric of the Oil Sand industry in Alberta, Canada. It is a speculative and theoretical proposal that explores our precipitous abuse of the landscape, and the sincere grief in the form of cheeky satire for the loss of scarce resources. The proposal is an Imaginarium for Alberta’s landscape and oil economy where fictional  narrative is used to explore, discover and invent unique realities with new ecologies of hope. It is a speculative perspective that explores the disappearing recent past, and a bewildering state of grief. Necropolis intends to tells the story of land when the land had more meaning, more history, and readings than it has now. It represents an attempt to

heal the colossal land scars caused by Oil production, by bewildering infrastructural solutions and ecological fantasies of a very real kind. Thistheoreticalarchitectural fantasy dwells on fragments and clichés; the drawn world is not so much a drowned world as one marked by multiple displacements and lost personal histories. Necropolis creates a new prehensile reality for the future legacy of martyrdom, and the sacrifices that were never regarded. This phantasmagoria (Necropolis) is a provocative narrative response to that which we have lost; and an ode to 1600 naïve little ducks that sacrificed their lives. It denounces belonging. Even for the ducks, grief has to be re-imagined along with new flight paths for martyrdoms. Necropolis is a dark, wet territory made up of a complex accumulation and compression of various types of carcasses. Body parts collide in an entropically generated landscape, creating a territory that can be ravished from multiple points of view. Abandoned skeletons built up over years resemble the prehistoric leftovers of an ignorant civilization. Yet this new territory is the most visited in Alberta, due to the lavish art of taxidermy. Necropolis can be best described as a mass burial territory exhibited in vitrines.

A. N.

There is another recurring act of martyrdom (victimage mechanism) in the doubling and the splitting of the identities of the designers of cities who are always required to leave something out (precluded/forecluded) from their matter of concern and from their mirror image.

Thecitydesignerisnotresponsiblefortheconsequences of the design because the responsibilities are only limited to the efficiency of the action. The consequences must be left out from any other matter of concern. No one must question the reason for so many victims, murders and complicity. This is not our job.

Are we still asked to sacrifice the most precious thing for the glory of our city and, if so, what is it and who has the task to mourn it?

Marcus Curtius is a mythological young Roman who jumped on his horse, fully armed, into an infernal ditch to save the whole city of Rome from being sucked into that hole.

All  capable  words  which  once  again  bring     tears

Unwanted gifts in this journey to nothing.

Roger Connah

Our crocodile tears on counterfactuals like the quarries, extraction sites, oceanic and stratospheric garbage dumps, spoiled territories and paradoxical recycling systems are the masquerade. They are the panorama to dissuade us from the quest for piety, the necessity for mourning an impossible number of victims. In the immense vastness of this built space, the time left to mourn is not enough.

Careful where you sneeze, you could wipe-out the dinosaurs.

The idea that the voluntary sacrifice of a hero (like The Matrix’s Neo – but, definitive, without sequels, please!) had saved the city from a destiny of complete erasure, raises many interesting issues. Maybe the city wanted to die. Has the city been made eternal against its will? And is this eternity its “great beauty”? A hero has saved it from its inexorable liquefaction. Forever. Notwithstanding all the horrors that have taken place, all the wounds that have been inflicted to prove its vulnerability, the city will last ad aeternum. A benediction or a curse?

From the perspective of a possible “death with interruptions” is there a place where we can take the city to die?

All  capable  words  which  once  again  bring     tears

Unwanted gifts in this journey to nothing.

Roger Connah

Our crocodile tears on counterfactuals like the quarries, extraction sites, oceanic and stratospheric garbage dumps, spoiled territories and paradoxical recycling systems are the masquerade. They are the panorama to dissuade us from the quest for piety, the necessity for mourning an impossible number of victims. In the immense vastness of this built space, the time left to mourn is not enough.

Careful where you sneeze, you could wipe-out the dinosaurs.

In Collaboration with Claudio Sgarbi.

Claudio Sgarbi, Dottore in Architettura (IUAV), Master and Ph.D. (University of Pennsylvania), practicing Architect and Adjunct Research Professor (Carleton University); lecturing in several universities in Europe and North America. Major fields of research, writing, and publication: image and the role of the architect; building technologies; architectural theory and history.

Wailing walls and cathedrals of consumption

Pareti piangenti e centri commerciali

We believe design is not necessarily about problem-solving, but an apparatus that provides numerous opportunities for speculation and exploration of unknowns. The proposal is an imaginarium for Ottawa’s urban landscape and where a fictional domestic narrative is used to explore, discover and invent unique realities to promote landscapes of heritage. Here the domestic speculation suggests an exasperating aspiration to find order in the current chaotic orgy of production, consumption, and immortality. Our manifesto, juxtapose objects as it is usually perceived with a new design vocabulary/attributes with which we hope to explore a new prehensile reality for the future legacy of Canada.           

Teamwork with http://www.schuhmann.ca/index.htmlSteven Schuhmann, 2017. 

RIGENERARE CORVIALE is an international design competition announced by ATER ROMA – Azienda Territoriale per l’Edilizia Residenziale del Comune di Roma (Territorial Housing Company of the Municipality of Rome) – sponsored and financed by Regione Lazio.
The objective is to acquire solutions and proposals which, in a comparison open to the international world of architecture, are of reference in the definition of the general guidelines on the subjects of urban regeneration which reopen a reflection on the public city by putting together the subjects of the physical and social city.

ABSTRACT
Vale la pena ripensare a questo monumento, cercare quello che ha da offrirci. Ripensarlo significa dedicargli tempo. Cercare di conoscerlo invece di giudicarlo. Capire quale potrebbe essere la sua voce, la voce di un mostro che canta.
Il nostro scopo fondamentale è dare un nuovo terreno al Corviale, per comprendere la sua “rigenerazione” creando stanze comuni dentro al suo grande corpo, tanti e diversi nuovi elementi che mantengano il luogo sempre vitale.
Le nuove opere vengono intraprese con lo spirito della “Corvialità” che è partecipazione “dal di dentro”.
Le FASI sono flessibili e parallele.
Il progetto promuove alcune idee chiare e forti ma si mantiene completamente aperto alla discussione con tutte le figure coinvolte.

Hybrid studio design intends to promote the idea of an all-in-one workstations that celebrates materials and methods of fabrication. This handcrafted workstation strikes to appreciate the existing studio environment and create a careful balance between research and design space. An all-in-one workstation will provide all the student’s needs and works as an organizational element in the studio. It can be combined with other existing tables and respond to the shifting needs in the studio environment.

Teamwork with Daniel Chapotchkine, Matthew Mckenna and Arron Griffioen Design and Fabrication, 2012
...in studio he explored
craft, detail design and drawing board
the architecture ego that he adored...

Water into Wine:

soliloquies, sonnets & selfies

This production marks the 4th year of collaboration between Sarah McVie’s Drama Workshop - English Department and Yvan Cazabon’s Theatre Production Workshop - Architecture. Based on the Hero (ine)’s Journey the 1st instalment of Soliloquies, Sonnets & Selfies sets a narrative of corporate ascension and a quest for social justice. It is hoped that this collaborative experiment will become increasingly refined, inspired by the trail-blazing journey undertaken in this Part 1: Water into Wine. In this first undertaking, students from different disciplines bring their excellent and contemporary ideas while contributing to the scripting, design and performance of a unique and memorable piece of theatre.

CAST&CREW

Cass Clearmount: Wynter Trueman

Crystal Clearmount: Caitlin Borthwick

Dani/Test Subject #1: Micaela Krawczuk 

Milly/Test Subject #5: Megan Douglas 

Fancy/Test Subject #6: Annie Gong

Trudy: Shukri Ahmed

Maddie: Jess Lambert

Harold: Austin Forsyth

Mark/Assistant #1: Matt Venner 

Eugene/Assistant #2: James Raynard

Gutarist: Borris Kourtev

Poster: Sabrina Shen / Audrey Caron

Instractors: Yvan Cazabon / Sarah McVie

https://youtu.be/iwabSgCrr4k

ARCS 5106 Graduate Studio aims at the design of a culturally significant built work set within a prominent urban site or natural landscape. Th e project addresses critical architectural questions – the cultural and social significance of space-making; the uses of technology; the relevance of existing site conditions or the creation of new ones; and the practical and philosophical discourses on the contemporary built environment – to shape an thoughtful and well-designed resolution of program and tectonic expression.

This map is a graphic laboratory for speculations on spatial experience and recollection of memories. It highlight a journey through personal memories and experiences. In this laboratory Cabo Espichel exist in a temporarily state of recollection. There is always missing pieces of experiences or irrelevant fragments of memories. Perhaps this is a momentarily autonomous laboratory where it is possible to experience past, present and space.

The National Art Center Collective Memory Archive
Our memories of the city are only fragments of real concrete places, they are rather recorded places rendered immaterial by our thought and emotions, virtual images recollecting an original which can never again concretely exist. 
The NAC Collective Memory Archive explores this idea by suggesting a “depository of experiences” as an addition to the National Arts Centre. The addition, which also serves as a grand new entrance to the center, collects and stores unaltered memories of events from visitors which others can access through a series of virtual –reality immersive environments. These events reconstruct fragmented experiences (Some for public, some for private use).  Experiences are collected from visitors to the NAC in specially designed extraction rooms. Digitally stored in underground servers, each memory and experience adds to the growing collective public memory of the NAC. The project forms part of a growing network of collective memory archives spread across the city and the country. People use these new spaces to actively participate in and are reminded of their shared memory, common joys and fears, nostalgia, and the various values that make up their heterogeneous identity and culture.

Exploration of architecture as critique. As the last studio of the Undergraduate program and a threshold to the graduate program, it seeks to bring together the complexity of an urban-
scale design project with the theoretical underpinnings of critical reflection. This Studio will take a very particular approach to critique exploring the overarching theme of carnival. Carnival as less the periodic festivity or parade than the temporary disregard for social hierarchies, the inversion of structures, parody with vocation, and
a reminder that no authority knows no contradiction. 

Exhibition of studio work at AXENÉO7 in Gatineau, QC. The  installations were part of a term-long teamwork exploration of architecture as critique based on the concept of the carnivalesque. Selected NAC Posters, Photographed and enlarged for reproduction. The installation entices the viewer experience every position of the site at once, the viewer is a performer. The layering of different stages of events and architecture helps to break down the setting and limit the viewer only by time not space. a non transitional event.

Brutalist architecture
You walk from Queen or Elgin,
#HashtagPossibilitiesareendless.
“rarely does the eye light on a thing”
“the eye does not see things but the images of things that mean other things”
“when it has recognized that thing as the sign of another thing:”
“Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy”
“he lives, continually subject to an envy”
the print on the wall marks the passage of Kim’s Convenience
“I wonder what an artist is?”
“ the man who makes a journey”
does not yet know the place
“Wonder what the place will be like”
#HashtagPossibilitiesareendless.
once he takes the leap of faith inside
“If a building has no signboard or figure, its very form and position... indicate its function:”
That place, bunker, cinema, theater, army base.
all the rest are concert panels and brutal textures
Cathedrals were built of marble,
“but you can’t see the walls anymore”
“they’re covered with all kinds of things,”
“This is human crap, and it’s fine.”
finally the journey leads to the underground red carpet
portraits indicates the VIP passage
“a sign! That something who knows what? “
“other signs of what is forbidden”
who would ever
journey leads to the dark
behind the kiosk, maybe it’s close maybe not
your gaze scans the place
“We’ll be able to surround people with sound, light and action”
journey to theatre
ceiling and walls says everything you must think
while you think you are observing
“you are only recording”
memories, images. merely spectacle
“We can move up, down, horizontally, diagonally.”
emotional journey of performance begins
“the ability to integrate them into the very life blood of the community’s activity”
journey through opera
this is different he said
“My wife and I walked out of the opera house at Lincoln Center”
an operatic journey of the city
“what line separates the inside from outside”
“I realized I had to free myself from the images”
Only then I can see what he wished I would see
“The National Arts Centre is a centre for the performing arts”
“The same modernization that removed time from the voyage
also removed from it the reality of space.”
“This is a return to the street theatre of the middle ages.”
I know I must not go down but I did
I saw the labyrinth, more portraits of VIPs
#HashtagPossibilitiesareendless.
“seeing comes before words.”
I know before I can speak
His eyes establish ‘me’ in his surrounding space
“The natural basis of time, the concrete experience of its passage, becomes human and
social...”
He can never settle the relationship between what he sees and what he knows
“We have nothing of our own except time, which even the homeless can experience”
As time goes, He moved along the red walls
When he least expect it he saw the back of his world
He saw the shadow of the shadows
“Could you build projection bays .... under the floor?”
possible
“I can’t find a director who would be interested”
“Everything I see and do assumes meaning in a mental space”
“Perhaps the stage exists only in the shadow of our lowered eyelids”
#HashtagPossibilitiesareendless.
“I would like to be able to open great spaces under people,
have them sit on air, have space fall all around them, or close in on them.”
To open, eyes
To, open eyes
#HashtagPossibilitiesareendless.
Society of the spectacle
Ways of Seeing
The Urgency of Change
Invisible Cities
An Interview with Fred Lebensold
by Richard Schechner

“Nothing” primarily aims to bring a new dynamism to its site, and to interrupt the formal order of the city.
The initial study started with the idea of the “unknown”, or the “in-between.” It set out to discover the “undefined” domain between open and closed, light and dark, and real and unreal.
The concept developed as a continuous impulse throughout the design, and it has manifested as a series of layers/ skins / mediums, which lead to a completely indefinable space. The unknown can be understood as a metaphor for the city life. The ambiguity of city and the others, also known as the “public,” becomes the question. 
What is public and what is private? 
How can a public institution / library address current programmatic principles of a public library with respect to the formal or informal fabric of Ottawa’s orthodox grid?
The Gateway Studio program requirements have been re-purposed to challenge the ways in which occupants and visitors occupy space, particularly through the illusion of order. As a result, they can reinvent themselves and the ways in which they perceive space. 
The multi-functional polyvalent wall on Slater St attempts to alter the experience of waiting for the bus.
The walls do not act as clear separations between the inside and outside. Instead, they serve as temporary boundaries of the in-between, or the buffer between city and the library’s interior.
What is going to happen as one enters the building?
Fragments of narratives are simultaneously presented to the visitor as they enter, ascend, and descend through the building. All events and fragments are connected visually, or with a direct physical connection to the unknown space / ABS space.
“Nothing” is the point of view. The observer can be the vanishing point in a reverse perspective. The visual connection of space and fragmented stories was inspired by the adjacency program created in response to the Gateway Studio program requirements. 
The fragmented narratives are held together by a visual connection with the unknown central space. In order to express the potential of the unknown, a temporary experimental farm is proposed. 
As if the building is not there……..

245 Dalhaus responds to the need for increased density on Dalhousie street. The new elevated residential apartments over the retail leaves the ground level for commercial use and allows the building to have a set-back for a more generous sidewalk. A friendly entrance off of Dalhousie gives presence to the residence and provides a comfortable way to the new raised residential ground plane. 
This new ground plane is extended into a garden where it forms a green buffer between the building and  the neighboring  block towards the east. Access galleries with light wells that  provides light, fresh air and moderate the temperature of galleries. The galleries are enveloped by a glass-block structure allowing the galleries to act as an extension to the living spaces  which bring pleasant spatial experiences to the housing complex.

Teamwork with Stephanie Murphy, Dwelling layouts, 2013
...all night long that’s all he has, 
drawing plans
and all its jazz...

Digital Marketing

This project was a design build installation at HUB Ottawa located on 71 Bank St. Hub Ottawa is one of several non-profit co-operative organizations located in major cities throughout the world. This global network of organizations is focused on community engagement initiatives and relationships that address social and environmental challenges. The project is inspired by the parallels between the underlying themes of the research and those of the global and local HUB initiative.  The project was developed along with the Structural Morphology Workshop which was inspired by global commonalities, connections, and their expressions through human cultural artifacts. Envisioned as an integrative network and support structure, the installation would be in resonance would the open concept and inclusiveness of its environment. As a woven structure would bands of birch plywood as the generative cellular unit, the interwoven network reflects its material capabilities and properties while simultaneously responding and adapting to its setting. The modulating patterns, with their configurations and inter-connected parts are envisioned as metaphors for the HUB’s collective social initiatives and their equivalent parallels within the multicultural diversity of the Canadian setting. 

Teamwork with Crossing Workshop Group and Manuel Baez, Hub Ottawa, 2013
...non-profit engagement, 
a resonant currents excellent,
twisting turning arrangement,
collective Architectural achievement...

Urban Spectacle aims to enhance the Park on Elgin St. on the east of The Museum of Nature. The lack of aesthetic and dullness of the landscape deprives people from using the park; hence, making the park unusable. To induce the ritual of walking, the existing pathway will be transformed into a more enjoyable trail by  providing elegant lighting and continuous seating that can accommodate all. The outdoor kite-like veil that stretches from the north to the south of the park will cover the entire pathway and will bring a memorable walking experience for the public.

Teamwork with Alex Martínez De Velasco drawing, 2013
...urban participation
individual intoxication, 
with subtle subluxation
a fairly cohesive graphic illustration...

This project is an extensive investigation of Vincent Floderer’s work (Crimp). Following the geometric models and spaces, The Pavilion  introduced a new way of looking at Origami folds. Folds add structure and make spaces. By means of a strange simplicity these folds reveal new forms and spaces that contain hidden order and obvious disorder. 

Reveal aims to enhance the public experience. The design bring  a new excitement to the curling club facilities by providing more spaces for the members and staff. Inaddition Reveal establishes an identity for the curling club and would generate potential business opportunities. The building houses the New 6 sheet curling club, retail and commercial office spaces under one roof. All functions are integrated yet separated by a continuous dynamic path that reveals access and develops a relationship between public, private and nature.  Design strategies allow the building to reveal the Lion’s park and all three programs to stand out. This new exciting architecture will generate revenue, reveal identity and enhance public access with respect to the existing community design development plans.

Teamwork with Shaghayegh Poursalimi, The new community, 2013
...business ideal
curling’s appeal,
this structural steel
makes community  reveal...

Multiangular Steel Joint

This project encompasses the creation of a proprietary joint system for a proposed addition of one additional level to the “German-Chinese House” as exhibited at Shanghai’s Expo 2010.

The continued use of metal as inspired by German technology originally used in the “German-Chinese House” is left exposed as both a statement of the capabilities of virtual modelling in addition to the necessary visual aesthetic as described by the artist in the initial conception of the structure.

Outlined in the following report is the exploration of logistic issues addressed while attempting to join laminated wood members to one another through the use of steel; what is ultimately achieved is a joint capable of withstanding the sheer weight of the compound-mitred structural frame which supports the additional floor and roofing system.

Due to the complexity of the compound mitred wood frame members, the creation of a multi-angular steel joint was necessary in order to connect the additional members to the existing ones. The image below describes the “butterfly” joint as conceptualised by our team, ultimately created with ¼” steel. 

Earth no longer sustains human life. Overcrowding and congestion plagues cities.  Humankind must become a multi-planetary species. Citizens of Montreal have volunteered by the thousands to brave a new colony on Mars. It will be prepared ahead of time by robots and drones. The first mass-launch occurs in the spring of 2063. History will call it “The Great Migration”.Humanity looks in awe and marvels at the achievement. The Earth’s population begins to enjoy a new era of peace and prosperity. This armada of spaceships traveling to Mars embarks on a one-way nine month journey. Those leaving will never return. Life aboard the ships is sophisticated and smart. Material and personnel are easily exchanged between the vessels. There is time to socialize and acclimate to the new surroundings. The first baby born in space is celebrated universally as an epochal moment in humanity’s evolution. New Colonies must be created.  The Montreal Star Corporation brings the Old World to the New. Montreal’s Underground City is transported to the surface of Mars. With it, Mars Base Alpha arises. The Rich soil of the Martian planet is too valuable to cover with mega-structures. The old Underground City is now elevated on piers. Massive machines exploit the mineral surface, turning Mars dust into building materials.  Mont Royal is 3D-printed from the soil as a token of home. Earth-sick human visit friends and family on Earth via robotic avatars.  More cities begin the journey space ward. Life on Mars… is like life in Montreal… but with a view.

Teamwork with Race D’Atri, David King, Daniel Nedecki  and Marcus Poon  Transmutation Charrett, 2013
...pure art and architecture
from montreal to mars we seek departure
android’s 3D infrastructure...

First Place Winner of Sea Container Design Competition

In collaboration with Michelle McKenna, Rachel Hart, Peter Akiki and Paul Daniel

Sea Container Design built in Iqaluit, Nunavut in the summer of 2016.

The Sea Container Design Competition was a 2-day event, providing an opportunity for architecture and engineering students in the Ottawa area to come together to design an innovative complex made from retrofitted sea containers.

The design for the Enactus Sea Cans Competition was one meant to foster growth, community engagement, and self-sufficiency in the extreme environments of Canada's north. A design which was efficient and aesthetically enriching was to be combined with a diverse program which at its core would provide residential, entrepreneurial, and agricultural opportunities for local residents. The proposed design encourages modularity and growth, providing endless configurations and programmatic solutions for the developing population of Iqaluit.