News

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.

Chin proposed ways that a hotel and a spa might use the excess heat from the power plant's discharged waters so that manatees and human beings might lounge side by side within the industrial site. It seems a decent alternative to the space and energy wasted by the power plant to pre-cool its discharge water in large tailing ponds to avoid emptying boiling water into the ocean. Chin is currently working for the Toronto landscape architecture firm GH3, where she recently helped to design its mesmerizing renderings for the June Callwood Park competition in downtown Toronto. (The winner will be announced in January.)

The Great Pacific Garbage Vortex

Michael Barton, University of British Columbia

Before completing his master of architecture degree at UBC, Barton, 38, had already lived in several countries and enjoyed various professions, such as desktop designer, actor, director and translator of plays. For his thesis, he dug into the disturbing reality of the billions of tonnes of plastic that float in the Pacific Ocean. Because of the convergence of ocean currents, the plastic has merged to become a gyre twice the size of Texas.

Barton was initially at a loss as to how architecture might confront the problem. Support from his thesis adviser, Vancouver architect Patricia Patkau (whose firm won two of the professional prizes among the 2008 Canadian Architect Awards of Excellence), gave Barton the confidence to pursue the issue of plastic in the Pacific. He met with marine biologists, Greenpeace and engineers. “The conventional thinking is that it's just too big to deal with,” says Barton. “But that shouldn't stop us from speculating. I'm alarmed by how little speculative work there is. We have a responsibility as architects to create more ambitious visions.”

Wanting to stimulate discussion, Barton created a series of highly cinematic renderings of seductive tropical islands constructed entirely of recovered plastic. The advantage is that human beings could live on top of the plastic they were responsible for initially consuming. How perfect is that!

A memorial for Japanese Canadians interned during the Second World War

Kevin James, Dalhousie University

Partially inspired by his travels in Japan, James wanted to address one of the darker moments in Canada's history with his design, which is intended as a memorial for Japanese Canadians interned at the Tashme camp in Hope, British Columbia. The memorial uses existing grain silos in Hope to demarcate the entrance, then unfolds as a series of cuts into the flood plain. Visitors are drawn into a sunken courtyard and, beyond, an interpretative pavilion. Cherry trees mark the dimensions of the tar-paper shacks where Japanese families lived during the Second World War.

James, 33, rejected the idea of representing his ideas through photorealism. Instead, he drew his thesis project by hand with only some photo-collaged elements. “It gave me more time to contemplate what you were doing in the moment, rather than relying entirely on the computer where everything can be erased immediately,” he says. “I wanted to get away from contemporary fashion in architecture.”

Watercycle – or, how to poetically recycle snow in Montreal

Marie-Gil Blanchette, McGill University

Not long ago, the City of Montreal would dump tons of snow, complete with salt and debris, directly into the St. Lawrence River. Many other ways of eliminating the snow have been put in place since 1999, but Blanchette, inspired by the urban-infrastructure work being done in the architecture office where she had worked as a student in Lausanne, Switzerland, wanted to show a way to recycle snow into usable grey water.

The site is Montreal's decommissioned Craig Pumping Station on Notre-Dame Street, next to the Jacques-Cartier bridge, where the 25-year-old Blanchette proposes a park animated by fountains, basins and irrigated gardens, all fed by grey water recycled from snow. Visitors are welcomed to the pumping station, expanded to include exhibition space, an auditorium and a footbridge overlooking the small mountains of snow and the fountains below.