Seemingly impossible, but true. Similar to the way the statement “Arnold Schwarzenegger is Governor of California” is true. The Canadian Pavilion at Expo 2010 in Shanghai is to be designed by Cirque du Soleil’s in-house designer. This is someone without architectural training or larger architectural insight beyond interior stage set design – and kitschy set design at that. Not surprisingly, the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada is underimpressed by this decision, and a multitude of others feel the same way. Just look at this thing! Read the whole Globe and Mail article here. This Harper Conservative government – which in its rightwingery, its bold, uninformed appropriation of responsibilities it is ill-equipped for, and its generally arbitrary approach to power is starting to look Sarah Palinish – doesn’t know anything about architecture, but it knows what it likes.Tra la! The design and arts sector in Canada is increasingly under siege by this type of government interference and stupidity, and it can either lie down and wait for its supplies to run out, or it can prepare for a big fight. From the Globe:
“A fully engaged architect might have referred in the design to the pavilion site located within an old industrial district on the Pudong side of the Huangpu River. But urban context matters not at all to creators of theatrics. Treating space as a stage set – one that comes with a VIP lounge affording views on the interior courtyard – is how the Cirque approaches architecture. That’s okay when you’re designing tents, but it’s hardly the way to communicate deep architectural insight.”
Vancouverism is, as Wikipedia defines it, an urban planning and architectural technique named (obviously) after the city that pioneered it. It is “characterized by mixed-use developments, typically with a medium-height, commercial base and narrow, high-rise residential towers to accommodate high populations and to preserve view corridors.” An exhibition by the same name opens tomorrow at a university space in Woodward’s, one of Vancouver’s newest mixed-use building projects. Created by architecture critic Trevor Boddy, Vancouverism has travelled to Paris and London and is now back in Vancouver for the Olympics. If you’re going to be in Vancouver, it’s worth taking a look, or you can visit the websites. View of a component of the exhibition at Canada House in London below:
Almost everyone in Canada knows this animation from the National Film Board of Canada. It’s by John Weldon, 1979, with music by The McGarrigle sisters. The NFB has always been a brilliant organization, and now they’re offering Canadian films and animations for free in their iPhone app. Watch this and The Big Snit on your phone. For free. Long live public arts funding in Canada.
Dear Stella Artois and iTunes,
There are 30-plus million of us Canadians. Did you think there was a chance that none of us would notice your commercial appropriation of one of our most popular non-commercial national symbols? Why not just put the Canadian flag in your campaign? Yes, we know, Burton Kramer’s 1974 logo for the CBC is a pretty excellent piece of typographic and geometric design, but you know what? There’s hardly a Canadian over the age of 12 who doesn’t recognize this object and harbour a fair amount of nostalgic affection for it, so maybe you will consider removing it from your advertising repertoire. Maybe go steal the NBC peacock or something.
Yours sincerely,
Canada.
Photo credits: CBC logo photos and video are via the Canadian Design Resource, and see the CDR’s article on the appropriation here. Even balder appropriation of the logo in the Stella ad’s designer’s own artwork here. iTunes photo by laurenlgmarch.
This blog is a long, meandering photo essay on design, both of objects and cities. More on its rationale and bias is below. To read about me, click here.
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To read about my book project on Vancouver's UN-Habitat Forum event of 1976 concerning sustainable urban settlements, click here. Few seem to know that Buckminster Fuller, Margaret Mead, Mother Teresa, Paolo Soleri and Maggie & Pierre Trudeau, along with many thousands of others, came to Vancouver in 1976 to talk about better, safer, fairer and more sustainable cities worldwide. In fact it was the founding conference of UN-Habitat, an agency that was subsequently built around a document called The Vancouver Declaration. My book is about what happened that year. It's a snapshot not just of Vancouver but of how cities around the world began to view themselves differently in the wake of the first oil crisis.
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This blog is a long, somewhat messy photo essay on design. I started it because I wanted to restore to a sense of history to design, if only for myself. History can be fugitive, particularly in the New World. Everything is so decontextualized in the current stream of commodities; don't even get me started on tumblr and pinterest.
As far as design goes, I prefer the modern and the ancient to the eras that lie in between. I've never really liked cathedrals; I find them garish and oppressive. I prefer the space-age, the futurist and the rustic, the utopian and the anti-utopian, the unstuffy and the unstaid, the green, the possibly-not-entirely-lost promise of the 1960s and 70s, the creative, the practical, the ingenious, the mixed, the unorthodox, and the way people actually live in real spaces. I am interested in bricolage, in making do, and in the way necessity mothers invention.
I like the sheer level of cultural borrowing evident in design, the actual impurity of design traditions long considered pure, and just generally the wild miscegenation of everything.
This is not to say that all mixing is good. I'm definitely not talking about the faux-historification of our cities, the demolition of our actual past followed by its replacement with a faux nineteenth-century 'originality'. That's when you get elements of the past and the future, combining to make something not quite as good as either.
Because design is never divorced from anything else, this long essay is also about urban planning, philosophy, art, political economy, architecture, sociology, geography, neurology, pyschology and anything else that pertains to design, which is everything.
The word "ouno" is a name in both Finnish and Japanese, my two favourite nations for design. Apropos of nothing, the word also contains the symbols for both zero and one, and it's the same right side up as upside down. My dad was a mathematician in love with puzzles, and that is maybe why those things please me so much.
This blog makes no attempt to avoid being nerdy or critical. There are plenty of nicey-nice design blogs out there and if that's what you're looking for, you will find many of those, and I wouldn't blame you for going there. I just think that without critique and complaint, the design of cities and dwellings in North America won't get any better. And it needs to get a lot better than it is—less creatively impoverished, more democratic and a lot more pleasurable. We do after all spend almost all of our lives in buildings and towns and cities and altered landscapes, all of which have a overwhelming impact on our conscious lives, our unconscious lives, our health, intelligence, creativity and our social interactions. These things affect us every moment of our lives whether we're aware of them or not. And not only do we need more humane spaces in which to live, we need—above all—to ensure affordable housing for all. Without this, all our interest in decor is just privileged fiddling while Rome (or insert your city here) burns. Housing is a human right. Public policy and regulation are the only ways to insure people are housed and can afford to live in the cities where they work. The market and private industry are not going to get us there.
We all need to fight the worsening property speculation! Dear Canada and the USA and beyond, quit letting developers run—and ruin—this show.
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