A tectonic shift has occurred in the Canadian Architect magazine's Awards of Excellence. For the first time since the 1968 launch of the national awards, the winning projects from the student competition are getting more recognition than those by Canada's professional architects. The number of student awards has been doubled, and, in addition, jury members were so impressed by the global reach of the winning work they recommended the student work be honoured at the front of the magazine rather than relegated to the back pages. The awards issue comes out next week.
The young architecture students of today design what and who they are. What they are is highly exposed to the world. Often, they're born in one country and raised in another. If they haven't already seen half the world on their own private pilgrimages to Switzerland or Japan, the global programs of their architecture schools ensure they spend serious time in Rome, Iran or New Orleans. They're Photoshop babies accustomed to pixilated, digitalized, high-definition images colliding on computer screens and to the visual frenzy of major cities. Since they were little, their eyes have feasted on the world's river of information; from Sesame Street to The O.C. to global crises only a click of the mouse away on their computer screens.
In these speculative works, the student winners deliver poetic excursions into architectural thinking, not designs likely to be built any time soon. What they imagine is quite different from the utopian visions of modern architects. Sixty years ago, the modernists wanted to dictate everything from hygienically improved kitchens to high-rise towers on vast plots of tidy lawn. Rather than eliminate the mess, the students of today would rather negotiate ways to contemplate the wreckage of the planet and, possibly, live with a hint of satire within the devastation.
The cynicism is palpable. It's not always clear the depth of the research or who the sources for the charts, maps and assertions cited might be. The text is occasionally mangled and words are often misspelled. What seduces immediately, however, are the exquisite images; placeless and ephemeral, they can be so cool and distant they practically blow ice into your face. The message is: We've wrecked the planet and, by the way, get over yourself.
In the award-winning thesis work by Toronto designer Vivian Chin, for example, humans are watching little penguins through enormous telescopes as they toddle across the fields of the Falkland Islands; the birds are too light to set off the land mines still hidden under the sand in the wake of the Falklands war. How sad! How delightful ! But, wait: Here is a platform, a strong architectural intervention, where you, too, can come and watch.
The 2008 Canadian Architect Awards were juried by Vancouver architect Bing Thom, Toronto architect Siamak Hariri and Christine Macy, newly appointed Dean of Dalhousie University's Faculty of Architecture and Planning. And now to the gutsy student award-winning projects:
How Animals and Human Beings might co-exist in industrial zones
Vivian Chin, University of Toronto
Chin's project deals with the potentially surreal collision of natural systems and human industry. Chin, 28, was born in Edmonton, grew up in Hong Kong and has worked for Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects in New York. At U of T, she was inspired by an article on “involuntary parks” by Bruce Sterling, which revealed ways that wildlife return to areas following a breakdown of human built systems. On the Web, she learned that Przewalski's horses (Asian wild horses) were multiplying in the Chernobyl exclusion zone and that cormorants were nesting on abandoned oil rigs in the Caspian Sea.
Working closely with her thesis adviser, Mason White, Chin focused on the Riviera Beach Power Station in West Palm Beach, Fla., where warm water being discharged back into the ocean was attracting pods of manatees and changing their usual patterns of migration. In fact, every winter, while ocean temperatures sink below 21 degrees Celsius, an estimated 200 manatees gather around the power plant's warm-water outfall.
