architects talking
I just want to thank the Academy for not being mortally offended by the words 'women' and 'talking' so close together like that. –– Sarah Polley
A lovely piece for mid- week mid-month, by Francesca Vivenza, who has a painting about maps, and other things, on the cover of On Site review 42: Atlas, and a small, dislocating proposal on page 38, inside.
Suggested Reading: Hyang Cho, Ella Gonzales, Yam Lau, David Merritt, Nick Ostoff, Adam Swica, Francesca Vivenza. Christie Contemporary, Toronto. Feb 17- March 18, 2023.
Received a bulletin today via Brooklyn Rail that the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University in Philadelphia was having their year-end exhibition: first question: have I heard of Temple? yes, but not their architecture school, so I looked it up. Couldn’t find the architecture component in the exhibition, but did see that the Tyler School has about 90 faculty. Now clearly this includes both full and part time faculty, across both art and architecture but still, that’s a lot of bodies in the same place.
One forgets the sheer number of architecture programs in the USA, so many that they have their own journals: ASCA (American Schools and Colleges of Architecture) Journal and JAE, the Journal of Architectural Education. As Canadians we we can participate, and do, but I’m more interested in wider conversations across each national space and what this implies for the role of architecture in daily life.
Canada has 12 schools speaking to a population of 38 million; the US has 127 schools speaking to 332 million. And these don’t include all the associated college and technical school programs in architectural technology, engineering science and drafting (a further 550 programs in the US; 30 in Canada).
There is a density in the US we just don’t have here. And density means neighbours, with whom one speaks, shares a geography, a regional economy and environment. There is the possibility for conversation.
Toronto, our largest school, has about 100 part time and full time faculty, geographically close to Waterloo (80) and Toronto Metropolitan (52), Montreal and Laval share a space with together about 40 full and part time faculty, but think of the physical isolation of Uof M with 28, or Calgary with 22, Dalhousie with 18. How can we build any sort of meaningful conversation, outside southern Ontario and Montreal, with such small numbers?
***
This was the reason On Site review started, in 1999. I’d been on several Canada Council architecture program juries throughout the 1990s and was stunned by the interesting off-the-wall proposals coming from Canada’s regions which did not stand a snowball’s chance of a serious grant compared to the polished proposals that came out of Toronto and Montreal. Although the Canada Council was meant to be judging quality, it was actually judging vocabulary, presentation and connections, not unlike old-school architecture school juries. A proposal from, say, Winnipeg, on how cemeteries were laid out in the small towns of immigrant communities, was just not in the same league as an Eisenman acolyte from Toronto studying in New York. The unevenness of architectural discourse across Canada was astonishing, and more or less still is.
Because of this, On Site review wanted to address the atomisation of Canadian architectural discourse; it wanted to see what was happening in its far-flung regions. What we found, over its twenty-odd years, was that the far-flung regions weren’t that interested in what architects in other places were doing, nor did they see much value in telling us what they were doing themselves.
Oh well, c’est la vie in Canada.
We learned from the pandemic that isolation makes us surly and aggrieved. We forget how to be social beings. I’m beginning to think that architectural isolation of Canada has left us without any facility for enthusiastic discussion. Not talking here about the hardy individuals who do send On Site review wonderful articles, new work and research from the schools, but from the general run of everyday Canadian architectural communication.
I haven’t a solution; I’m doing what I do, in Calgary, in Canada. Our contributors and our readers however, are international. They address the climate crisis, not in general hand-wringing terms but with actual research projects. Practitioners, students and faculty alike address the processes of community building; they think, they propose, they study history, they contribute to whatever architectural conversation On Site review outlines for each issue. This is a general condition of positivity. Financial crises, distant wars, pandemics, social inequities – all these things play out in architecture and thank god some architects, artists, engineers and students of architecture are actively working with such things.
For the rest, we need immediate, intense conversations about how we are to get through the near future of environmental collapse, economic contraction and the political and social chaos that will follow. Do we have architectural tools to use? Can we learn anything about all of this from history? How can we be useful? It seems that the time for delicate conversations about place and space might be done for a bit. Might we, and our work, become more robust?