Experiencing Architecture at the NGC
Hello! Welcome to the blog for the History and Theory of Architecture program at Carleton. My name is Tristan Crawford, I’m in my third year of the HTA program and I’ll be updating the blog throughout the 2014 winter semester whenever a critical mass of relevant and reportable thoughts and experiences has accumulated in my mind. I will endeavor to keep you interested and entertained enough that your eyes reach the bottom of the page, where you will gain the benefit of a condensed list of upcoming events that will – if you are an architecture nerd like me – get you pretty excited.
First I wanted to talk a bit about Artists, Architects, and Artisans, a temporary exhibit at the National Gallery six years in the making by curator Charles Hill. For anyone interested in the integration of the arts that gained a particular energy in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th century (Art Nouveau, Deutsche Werkbund, Futurism) this exhibit may have come with the shocking revelation that something of that ilk was taking place in Canada at the same time. It did, at least, for me. The exhibit explored the period between 1890-1918 when painters, sculptors, graphic designers, photographers, architects, and urban planners directed their collective efforts toward generating a holistic cultural program for Canada. The products of these efforts are represented sequentially: artists’ clubs, mural painting, furniture, houses, monumental sculpture, posters and book covers, photography, hand-woven rugs, ceramics, civic buildings, urban planning schemes. A sense of Art-Nouveau detail and the ethical and formal dimensions of the Arts-and-Crafts movement augment the arbitrary Beaux-Arts foundation of the works. In this stylistic balancing act the works teeter on the edge of banality for lack of conviction. And yet there is a unique grace in the theme and execution of each work, sober and natural, inoffensive for its generosity and simplicity of spirit: quietly Canadian.
For me the most exciting part was the second last room containing projected plans of many major Canadian cities. Urban planning is something that has begun lately to pique my interest and here the original drawings of Thomas Mawson’s fantastical plan for the Calgary Civic Centre were really something to behold. For me, the plans had everything going for them. They were transparently over-ambitious, almost utopian, yet conceivably buildable and arrestingly beautiful. I resented that they hadn’t been built. But this is the perennial agony of the architect’s fascination with the utopian. Utopias simply don’t get built. Professor Coffman, the supervisor of our program and a magnanimously friendly and knowledgeable guy, made an interesting comment the other day, that the best thinker is not someone who cannot be refuted, but someone who is still around after they have been refuted. I think this is true about utopias as well. The overtly fanciful plans for our major cities, the mere existence of which I found surprising, were refuted in their abandonment. And yet they remain relevant in the aspirations that they communicate. This is where I found resonance with the exhibit. The works that Hill selected for the show are alive with an intention that outlives the moment of its genesis, animated by the collective efforts of their creators to establish their vision for our cultural identity. Unfortunately, the exhibit closes on February 17th. If I’ve managed to get you interested then I would encourage you to have a look at the incredibly comprehensive catalogue.
Also soon departing from (but eventually returning to) the NGC is Janet Cardiff’s Forty Part Motet, an audio installation in the reconstructed interior of the Rideau Chapel. The installation consists of forty speakers encircling the nave of the chapel, each of which plays a single, separately recorded voice and which together deliver the motet in the most comprehensive surround-sound experience going. Cardiff creates a space of sound, a space that changes shape as you move through it and as the composition progresses. I was reminded of a book that I think anyone interested in architecture should read: Steen Eiler Rasmussen’s Experiencing Architecture, a reflection on the ways that we can experience a building. The final chapter is called ‘Hearing Architecture’ and emphasizes the acoustic experience of space. This is something that, of course, we can’t really cover in any of our classes, where we experience buildings through photographs, drawings, and writings. But it is the case that a building is not only a visual and material space. It is also an acoustic space, a space with a shape that is defined by sound. To see in pictures the monumental vaulting of Notre Dame at Amiens is one thing, but to hear a hymn rise through the piers and wash against the vertiginous sweep of stone is another. The oversight of acoustic space in my own day to day experience of buildings is one that Cardiff’s installation brought into strong relief. And so I would say this: when you next take a moment to think about the architectural environment that you’re in, don’t just look at it. Listen to it. Think of yourself as being in dialogue with it. Move around in it and see how it responds. And when Cardiff’s Forty Part Motet returns to the NGC, go experience it.
Current and Upcoming Events
Three exhibitions are currently running at the CCA, including one on urban planning in Casablanca and Chandigarh.
An exhibit showing the watercolours and sketches of raging Arts and Crafts polemicist John Ruskin opens on February 14th at the NGC.
The Forum lecture series hosted by the Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism continues on February 17th at the NGC with a talk by Dorte Mandrup of Copenhagen-based Dorte Mandrup Arkitekter.
Julie Harris of Contentworks Inc. presents a lecture on the history and heritage of Old Ottawa South on February 19th at the Ottawa Public Library Auditorium.