creative construct

Last week in Ottawa, The Creative Construct: Building for Culture and Creativity symposium brought together international participants to exchange ideas and practices on the development of cultural and creative spaces; cultural planning and investment strategies for cultural infrastructure and cultural districts; and collaborative approaches to enhancing the cultural vitality, creative potential, and competitiveness of cities and communities.

The Creative Construct: Building for Culture and Creativity international symposium was organized by the Centre of Expertise on Culture and Communities at Simon Fraser University in collaboration with the City of Ottawa and from April 28th to May 2nd encompassed a series of plenary talks, panels, cultural research salons, and tours. Results of the symposium will be posted on the project website: http://www.symposium2008.ca/e/index.html.

How creativity generates unique spaces and the challenges of maintaining artistic priorities in creative economies were recurring themes. In this panel moderated by Caroline Andrew, Kate Shaw (Melbourne University), Will Straw (McGill University), Alan Stanbridge (University of Toronto) and Scott Thomson (Association of Improvising Musicians, Toronto) addressed issues and possibilities related to informal and alternative spaces and uses.

virtual artists/virtual architecture

RMB City is an installation of "virtual city planning" created by Chinese artist Cao Fei, AKA China Tracy, in Second Life, a landscape that is a parody of contemporary Chinese culture - a giant panda swinging on a crane counterweighted by OMA's CCTV building, for instance, and a commentary on the intensive urban hyper-capitalist development taking place across China:

"RMB City will be the condensed incarnation of contemporary Chinese cities with most of their characteristics; a series of new Chinese fantasy realms that are highly self-contradictory, inter-permeative, laden with irony and suspicion, and extremely entertaining and pan-political. China's current obsession with land development in all its intensity will be extended to Second Life. A rough hybrid of communism, socialism and capitalism, RMB City will be realized in a globalized digital sphere combining overabundant symbols of Chinese reality with cursory imaginings of the country's future."



In true "post-post-" fashion, you can see the documentary of the opening for China Tracy Pavilion in Second Life from June 2007, created as part of her participation in the rl Venice Biennale.




An exhibition featuring the latest iteration of the RMB City project continues at Lombard-Freid Projects in NYC until April 5, 2008.

panel presentation

Representational Engagement with Urban Space: Responses to the National Gallery’s exhibition Art and Society

Saturday, March 8 @ 5:00 pm Kamloops Art Gallery

Representational Engagement with Urban Space has been conceived as a forum to consider the KAG’s feature exhibition Art and Society in Canada 1913-1950, organised and circulated by the National Gallery of Canada, in relation to contemporary art, urban development, and quality of life in Canadian cities. The ideals and legacies of socially engaged arts groups, the Group of Seven, the Social Realists, and Les Automatistes, are discussed by three diverse Canadian scholars and researchers with the Small Cities CURA: Shauna McCabe (Newfoundland/New Brunswick), Andrew Hunter (Ontario), and Bruce Baugh (British Columbia). Sponsored by the Small Cities Community-University Research Alliance, Thompson Rivers University, in collaboration with the Kamloops Art Gallery. Free admission.

visualising process: Ed Burtynsky on documenting Shim-Sutcliffe's Integral House

imagineacity - installation views:
introduction + Ed Burtynsky - Integral House site photograph
wall (l-r) Shim-Sutcliffe Architects - Integral House (Toronto) process drawings; Ed Burtynsky - Integral House site photography; MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple - Canadian High Commission, Dhaka, Bangladesh (process drawings)


imagineacity - installation views:
Shim-Sutcliffe Architects - Integral House (Toronto) process drawings;
Ed Burtynsky - Integral House site photography

The Integral House sits at the edge of a Toronto ravine, a residential project that re-imagines boundaries of public and private, cultural and natural, monumental and intimate. Commissioned by Dr. James Stewart, calculus scholar and musician, the structure was to be not only a personal dwelling, but also a social venue for music and performance. Addressing unique contextual factors, situating the house in relationship to the strangely urban condition of Toronto ravines, architects Brigitte Shim and Harold Sutcliffe infused architectural design with sculptural form to convey a sense of connection to the unique qualities of site. Moving beyond a model of architecture as a neutral grid or box, the geometry of the design is dominated by the curve as it descends into the ravine, manifest in details such as an undulating perimeter wall and reflecting pool at the base, reiterating the structure’s natural context.

A unique record of the demolition and construction process was produced by photographer Ed Burtynsky, who documented the evolution of the house. One of Canada's most respected photographers, Burtynsky is best known for his depictions of global industrial landscapes that examine nature transformed through industry, transposing the raw elements of mining, quarrying, manufacturing, shipping, oil production and recycling into highly expressive visions, seeking out sites that are rich in detail and scale yet open in their meaning.

Burtynsky was commissioned by Shim-Sutcliffe Architects to document the construction of the 18,000 square foot home on the Rosedale Valley ravine and to produce the architectural photography of the site development. Burtynsky offered insight into his visual approach to the architectural construction as an industrial site, in this CBC interview on site with Shelagh Rogers in 2005, going into year 2 of documentation of the project.

imagineacity

MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple, Canadian Chancery and Official Residence, Dhaka, Bangladesh, 2002-2005, parti sketch



Andrew King + Angela Silver, romalux/tantramar, 2003-2004/2007, two digital video projections

Artists + Architects: Vito Acconci / BGHJ Architects / Ed Burtynsky /
Chris Down /Andrew King + Angela Silver / Thorsten Knaub / MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple / Alison Norlen / PHB Group / Shim-Sutcliffe Architects

imagineacity

29 February to 30 March 2008
Owens Art Gallery, Mount Allison University
Sackville, New Brunswick

The soft city – a city made from a complex network of human relationships
and individual experiences…mapped out by its inhabitants… This is the city
as we imagine it. ~ Jonathan Raban, Soft City

imagineacity…a scribbled etch-a-sketch glowing with stretches of flowing freeways and clusters of neon symbols, commercial strips threading dense patches of pastel suburbs with downtowns and worn footpaths carving vague contours of remnant spaces, highrise corridors of echoing engines and whispering trails of passing conversation that continually rewrite concrete ley-lines marked by long-standing monuments and fleeting memorials.

Every city is a “collage city,” the phrase used by Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter in setting out their theory of urban aesthetics in the August 1975 issue of Architectural Review. Envisioning the city as a constellation of discontinuous fragments and multiple levels of urban reality constructed from disparate architectural elements, artifacts, and allusions, the idea picked up on earlier conceptions of urban space as infused by memory, perception, and experience, bringing them into the repertoire of architectural aesthetics.

imagineacity offers an accumulating archive of urban “charts,” artistic explorations of space that have reconceived these intangible elements of urban space, reworking concepts such as Walter Benjamin’s itineraries and convolutes, Guy Debord’s theory of the dérive, and Michel de Certeau’s spatial stories, to reveal the ways the connections between people and place are fluid, continually made and re-made. Artwork is interwoven with material from architectural design process – sketches, drawings, blueprints – reinforcing the imaginative and speculative texture
of within even the most durable architectural surfaces and built realities, compositions that map ideas onto space to offer a sense of the city as open and always emergent.

Thorsten Knaub, GPS Miró, 2007, urban intervention, data animation, GPS unit, custom programming

In the “collage city” constructed here, all architectures are permeable, at once material, cultural, and metaphorical. Each element re-imagines the bigger project of the city, and the way architecture shapes and historicises social experience. Weaving spectres of the built environment that emerge through the intersection of architecture and imagination, imagineacity draws attention beyond formal spaces to suggest the consistency of the city as at once real and intangible, material and fantastic, concrete and paper, planned and poetic.

Public reception & projection of student architecture proposals @ 7:30 pm, Friday March 28th, 2008

Curated by Shauna McCabe and presented by the Owens Art Gallery in conjunction with the Centre for Humanities and Arts Research in Transdisciplinary Space (CHARTS), Mount Allison University, with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Marjorie Young Bell Endowment Fund.

in process

Chris Down, laying out projection for urban warfare



Students talk with architect-artists Andrew King and Angela Silver about their new work.

This week, we are in installation mode for imagineacity, an exhibition that looks at the interface of artistic and architectural design processes at the Owens Art Gallery, Mount Allison University. On site are Andrew King and Angela Silver, Alison Norlen, and Chris Down. King and Silver have created a new work based on local urban elements to complement romalux, the digital video piece created in the context of their Prix de Rome prize residency in Rome in 2004. Alison Norlen is creating a new site-specific installation of drawings and wire maquettes that play with the idea of familiar and forgotten "useless architectures" in urban follies, and will workshop ideas with participants in the Architectures for Creativity seminar. Chris Down has been creating a wall-scale painted site-specific installation, urban warfare, based on an image of a table top model of a futuristic city for the game "WarHammer 40,000." Woven with these and other art works are a series of installations of architectural representation in the form of sketches, blueprints, and plans, suggesting the shared imagination of space that underlies both realms and the thoroughly social, cultural and ephemeral character of contemporary built and visual landscapes.

contemporary + built + environment: a public seminar

Andrew King + Angela Silver, Romalux, 2005, installation, Stride Gallery, Calgary

Michael Awad, Grand Canale, Venice, 2005, digital chromogenic print, edition of 8, 12 x 96 inches

Tuesday February 19 @ 7:30, Mount Allison University hosts a public seminar on contemporary engagements with the built environment, featuring presentations by artists/architects Michael Awad (Toronto) and Andrew King + Angela Silver (Calgary).

Moving architecture into broader investigations of public space, Awad, King and Silver have developed distinctive approaches to built environments and urban design/planning through projects that probe the dynamic intersections of art, architecture, and culture. Addressing their architectural and creative practices, the presentations and discussion will take place at the Owens Art Gallery on Tuesday, February 19 at 7:30 p.m. and everyone is welcome to attend.

This seminar is presented by the Centre for Canadian Studies as part of a mini-symposium addressing issues related to art, architecture, urban design and Aboriginal culture from February 18-21, 2008

The presenters:

MICHAEL AWAD is currently the chair of the board at the InterAccess New Media Art Centre in Toronto. A trained architect, Awad is well-known for his on-going artistic endeavours and academic research in the field of study "Aboriginal Urbanism." He examines the complex relationship between Aboriginal culture and modern urban design. An adjunct professor at the University of Toronto, Awad's research was recently endorsed by the Architectural Dean's Council to incorporate it into the curriculum of Canada's ten architectural schools. Awad's art practice in photography has also made him a known name in the art world. His photos are part of the Art Gallery of Ontario's permanent collection and he has been commissioned to produce work for the Pearson International Airport and the Department of External Affairs. Awad was also recently featured in the publication Canadian Art.

ANDREW KING and ANGELA SILVER's collaborative work has explored contemporary urbanism and the relationship of the body to the built landscape through multimedia architectural installations. An architect, author, critic, curator, and educator, King has been a recipient of both the Canada Council for the Arts Prix de Rome (2003-04) and an Award of Excellence from Canadian Architect, with work published in several national and international publications. He has held adjunct positions in Canada and in Europe and is currently a visiting lecturer in architecture at Carleton University. Silver is an interdisciplinary artist whose work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally. Her performative work has been presented recently in New York and at Toronto's Nuit Blanche in 2007.

While at Mount Allison, all three will also meet with students in several disciplines. Michael Awad will meet with students in Fine Arts, Geography, English, and Canadian Studies, while King and Silver will work with students in Fine Arts and Geography, and will involve interdisciplinary students in the Architectures for Creativity project in the development of new work they are creating in Sackville.

Michael Awad's visit to campus is sponsored by the Centre for Canadian Studies and the Department of Geography and Environment. Andrew King and Angela Silver's participation is sponsored by the Centre for Canadian Studies as well as the Centre for Humanities and Arts Research in Transdisciplinary Space.