Zoo Architecture

Architecture's Bi-Annual Event

I was in Venice last week and it was great.

Winners of the Animal Architecture Awards

Bat Cloud is a project bringing awareness and public visibility to bats and their critical role in our ecosystem. Installed in Tifft Nature Preserve, a park-like wooded setting developed on a former landfill in the industrial zone of Buffalo New York, BAT CLOUD is a hanging canopy of vessels that is designed and constructed to support bat habitation. From afar, the piece appears like a shimmering cloud, hovering in the trees. Closer up, viewers from below would be able to see plants hanging from each vessel. At dusk, onlookers can catch sight of bats emerging from the habitation vessels.

For more: http://www.animalarchitecture.org/urban-animal-award-winners/

Beyond Nationalism: Honorable Medals and Infographic Olympiads

In the earliest modern Olympics humans excelling in the arts also received gold, silver and bronze medals.

When the International Olympic Committee (IOC) was founded in 1894 with the French Baron Pierre de Coubertin's hopes that men should be educated both physically and intellectually (competing in sports not wars), the arts were part of the games too. Five artistic competitions were introduced and architecture, literature, music, painting, and sculpture oeuvres inspired by sports would combat for gold. After 1954 this event fizzled, replaced by the slightly less competitive cultural olympiads.

The 8-Bit Games!

Anyways, I agree with Coubertin: I like critical minds more than I like nationalism, so it's nice to see all the creations that have emerged from thinking about sportive prouesses not just as physical competitions but as signs of global realities that should be challenged. For instance Gustavo Sousa has come up with these simple infographics using the Olympic flag's five rings to illustrate data from each of the five continents - from Coca Cola sales, to total populations and CO2 emissions per capita. And the Guardian reported on a team from Imperial College and the Royal Statistical Society determining in real-time the actual amounts of medals won for each country in relationship to GDP or population... so for instance while China may have officially won 24 medals, in relation to its GDP it has a petty 0,95, and while Columbia has 2, according to the study it has won an honorable 4,59.

And all the rest...

Bienvenue/Welcome

I collaborated with Ming Lin and Didi Ohri on the latest edition of their anthropoartistique interventions on Montreal's foodscape: the Bienvenue/Welcome placemats. Come join the launch of the set de table tonight at the Nouveau Palais on Bernard. There will be food presented on thoughtful stuff and beats by DJ CadenceWeapon.

... And in an perfect concidence of sorts the CCA is having its own montreal food event this same afternoon: "A taste for Montréal" goes on from 4 to 9 pm in collaboration with spacingmontreal and avenue 8, and people from the SAT's foodLab and Toqué.

Curating Questions and the Multi-Narrations of Health/City

I went to the Power Coorperation Fellows' talk at the CCA last Thursday, where the three young architects presented their collaborative curatorial project entitled Health/City. Since the beginning of the summer they have been conjunctionally working on ways to present their topic without supporting a thesis in relation to health in cities directly but rather advocate a version of urban health history that, like history in general, is however you perceive it.

It is with this in mind that they chose 100 health related images from the CCA's collection: the low-brow magazine cover from last month with the eco-friendly building, air conditioning industry catalogues from the 1950s, 19th century slum maps, passages from novels discussing military asphyxiation... With this initial (mostly visual) base they mapped out the various thematic passageways between items (such as the 17th c. plague doctor can be linked to a slum map through the theme of epidemics, but also to a toilet bowl through smell). The point here is that this cluster of links and images form a multi-narrative understanding history. While the website isn't up yet, the fellows are planning on putting this network of information online by the end of the month - the website would let the visitor/browser create/curate his or her own version of health history by deciding which images to link with one another. 

I enjoyed the talk. I enjoyed the talk because it wasn't a self-congratulatory architect's attempt at philosophy but rather a real try at asking questions about the nature of curating, collecting and knowledge and coming up up with a tangible platform as an answer. Some audience members suggested that the lack of curatorial structure could be disorienting for users or let the project fall flat; others also pleasantly name dropped architects for extra useful images. I think both of these thoughts wouldn't have crossed people's mind if the project hadn't been qualified as a CCA project. Indeed in a way this project's quality and flaw are the same: from the talk it seems that it is more of an exercise in curating and anthropology than an architectural thesis materialized through a curated space. This is obviously totally great by me, and exceptional really because for a discipline - curating - that prides itself for creativity, depth and original-thought, interdisciplinary perspectives and multi-medium exhibitions remain ridiculously too few and avant-gardiste. 

Basically it's very exciting to see the CCA promoting such initiatives, and I'm looking forward to seeing Health/City online to get a better grasp of my version of urban health history. 

La Main Ouverte

source: http://www.onsitereview.ca/

Jean-Louis Cohen: L'Architecture durant la deuxième guerre mondiale

Je suis allée au Centre Canadien d'Architecture écouter Jean-Louis Cohen parler des changements que l'effort et les effets de la deuxième guerre mondial ont eu sur l'évolution de l'architecture. Période oubliée des livres alors qu'il y regorge les innovations matérielles, politiques et esthétiques, caractéristiques des villes, usines, quartiers et bâtiments imaginés et construits durant le reste du siècle.

Cohen tisse des liens entre, entre autres, le plan formaliste des années 30 et le plan des baraques d'Auschwitz, les débats politiques qui se cachent derrière l'implantation du bunker individuel versus collectif en Grand-Bretagne (campagne commencée dès 1924!), le rôle des professionnels d'Hollywood dans la reproduction méticuleuse des villages allemands et des préfabriqués japonais dans le cadre de test pour l'amélioration dévastatrice des bombes alliés et le développement remarquable du faux, du préfabriqué, de l'artificiel et du camouflage pour tromper l'adversaire du ciel.

Enfin toujours avec autant de justesse Cohen soulève le rôle de la responsabilité et de l'éthique: si tout a du être dessiné durant les années crescendo de la guerre - des plans d'usines pour les camps de concentration à ceux fabriquants des bombes à Los Angeles - qui était là pour les faire? Il y avait de tout, évidemment, de la lâcheté attendue, de la cruauté pure, de la naïveté facile, de l'instinct de survie...

Une conférance remarquable! (La conférance accompagne l'expo Architecture en Uniforme qui a pour commissaire Jean-Louis Cohen)

Images: La Bête est Morte bande dessinée par Calvo publiée chez Gallimard et une équipe de camoufleurs au travail à Fort Belvoir, Virginie, illustration dans Robert P. Breckenridge, Modern Camouflage: The New Science of Protective Concealmen, 1942 (prise du site du CCA).

The Smartest Thing - People Watching

This is an amazing 1979 ethnography (by William H. Whyte) with (pre-cellular phone) footage of urban spaces, aka it's a team that spent months people-watching and deconstructing social behavior to think of ways to build 'better' cities. It includes a bird lady, the art of chair ownership, girl watchers, people mimicking people and the power-dynamics of food.