Among the exhibition highlights this coming fall at the CCA (Canadian Centre for Architecture) is Imperfect Health, which premieres on October 25th, 2011 and will be on view until April 1st, 2012.
Imperfect Health, the latest in a series of thematic investigations produced by the CCA, examines how architects, urban and landscape designers are critically responding to society’s increasing concern with health issues. Presented in the main galleries of the CCA, the exhibition is curated by Giovanna Borasi, CCA Curator of Contemporary Architecture and Mirko Zardini, CCA Director and Chief Curator. More information on the events after the break.
Other exhibitions include:
Miniature Modernism: Points of View, from 22 September 2011 to 8 January 2012 This will be exploring the encounter between photography and architectural model making from the documentation of study models to hyper-realist photomontages.
Starting From… People, from 6 October to 22 January 2012 This event questions the use of people within architectural representations as a means of conveying different atmospheres, concepts and ambitions.
James Frazer Stirling: Notes from the Archive, from 1 October 2011 to 15 January 2102 This is an exhibition produced by the CCA and the Yale Centre for British Art, which makes its way to the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart from Tate Britain, London.
The CCA will also deliver a dynamic program of public events, including public lectures and the annual Mellon Lecture series; the fourth edition of URGENCY, the popular Learning From… lecture series and a sequence of Expert Conversations as part of the Imperfect Health exhibition.
Film, as a medium, features in other programming this fall including; Si vis pacem para bellum (?) a two-date collaboration with the National Film Board of Canada, Montreal’s first ever Bring Your Own Beamer event, and The City Erased produced as part of Montreal’s Journées de la Culture.
Feature Exhibitions:
Imperfect Health 26 October 2011 – 1 April 2012 Main Galleries, CCA
Imperfect Health explores how today’s urban environment challenges city residents, who are experiencing a measurable increase in new health concerns. It is now believed that factors like pollution, pollen and food production, combined with new lifestyle issues such as decreasing physical activity and rising stress levels are behind a boom in once rare complications including allergies, asthma and obesity. In recent years, such health concerns have encouraged a rethinking of urban strategies and architectural approaches, in hopes of countering such ominous health trends.
The exhibition seeks an understanding of the contemporary relationship between architecture, the city and people’s health. As health becomes a central focus of political debate, Imperfect Health raises questions: whether architects, urban designers and landscape architects are seeking to craft a new moral and political agenda out of such concerns; whether health issues are becoming a new raison d’être, a way to justify and apply corrective measures like increasing pedestrian access, devising alternative traffic strategies, using stairs to fight obesity, and rehabilitating polluted areas as a way to reduce rates of asthma, allergies or cancer; whether new architectural types are mirroring the specialized needs of medicine as real solutions for complex health issues, often rooted in socioeconomic and work-related stressors; and finally if such solutions are motivated by real medical necessity?
The exhibition is the latest in a series of thematic investigations produced by the CCA that has included: the award-winning Sense of the City; Actions; 1973: Sorry Out of Gas; Some Ideas on Living in London and Toyko by Stephen Taylor and Ryue Nishizawa; Speed Limits; Other Space Odysseys and Journeys.
Modernism in Miniature: Points of View 22 September 2011 – 8 January 2012 Octagonal Gallery, CCA
Modernism in Miniature: Points of View, an exhibition curated by Davide Deriu, Senior Lecturer in architecture at the University of Westminster, London, explores the encounter between photography and model-making in the period between c.1920-1960. Focusing on model photography as a distinctive genre, the exhibition suggests that the so-called ‘model boom’ was inextricably bound up with the explosion of modern mass media. Channelled by the illustrated press, miniatures reached out to a wide public and in some cases, acquired a cult status that has endured to this day.
By revisiting a widespread yet often neglected imagery, the exhibition provokes questions about the relationship between media in architectural culture and the specific impact of photography on the perception of miniature.
Starting From… People 6 October 2011 – 22 January 2012 Hall Cases, CCA
Dwellers, visitors, users: citizens. For centuries, groups, social gatherings and individuals have been represented in architectural drawings and illustrations as a way of conveying different atmospheres, concepts and ambitions.
The Starting From… series explores current publications on architecture and highlights materials in the CCA Collection. Past editions have focused on a variety of themes, including books by the photographer Lee Friedlander, unusual approaches to travel, the colour pink in architecture, and bubbles.
CCA Touring Exhibition:
James Frazer Stirling: Notes from the Archive Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart: 14 October 2011 – 15 January 2012 CCA: Spring, 2012
The Yale Center for British Art and the CCA have co-produced the first ever exhibition of the archive of British architect, Yale School of Architecture professor, and Pritzker Prize laureate James Stirling (1924 – 1992). Notes from the Archive, curated by Anthony Vidler, Dean and Professor of The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union, features more than three hundred original architectural drawings, models and photographs drawn from the James Stirling/Michael Wilford fonds at the CCA. Together the works reveal Stirling’s wide ranging approach to architectural composition and language, as well as the fundamental importance of historical and modernist architecture to his work.
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated publication authored by Anthony Vidler. The book interprets the James Stirling/Michael Wilford fonds at the CCA as a living document of Stirling’s attempts to broaden the language of Modernism, while remaining faithful to his twin precepts of ”accommodation” and “association”. The publication is published by the Yale Centre for British Art and the CCA, in association with Yale University Press.
CCA Public Programs – Lectures, Debates and Colloquia
2011 Mellon Lecture Series 13 October and 20 October 2011. Free admission. Paul Desmarais Theatre, CCA
With the generous support of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the CCA welcomes two Mellon Senior Fellows and renowned figures: Michael Webb, a member of the seminal British architectural group, Archigram and Guido Beltramini, Executive Director of the Andrea Palladio International Study Center in Vicenza, Italy.
The CCA Mellon Foundation Senior Fellowship Program was established in 2001 to encourage advanced research in architectural history and thought. The program is intended for scholars and architects conducting research at a postdoctoral or more advanced level. It aims to support critical work that can bridge the reflective and productive activities in architecture, understood in its broadest sense, and is based on the conviction that scholarly work bears social responsibility.
Both events take place at 6pm in the CCA’s Paul Desmarais Theatre. Admission is free.
URGENCY (4th edition) 17 November 2011. Free admission. Paul Desmarais Theatre, CCA
URGENCY, a free public conversation, continues this fall with a dialogue between internationally renowned architects Jean-Philippe Vassal and Giancarlo Mazzanti.
Moderated by the CCA’s Director and Chief Curator, Mirko Zardini, URGENCY aims to present issues of vital importance in contemporary architectural practice and reflects the CCA’s ongoing exploration of critical issues facing architecture and contemporary society. This year Vassal and Mazzanti will scrutinize the work of ‘the lecturer’, who is often capable of addressing social implications and extremely sophisticated architectural research that is producing space and buildings of massive and diffused impacts. The panel will examine collective housing interventions and renovations such as that of Lacaton-Vassal in France or the numerous public schools and kindergartens of Mazzanti Arquitectos in Colombia.
This is the fourth presentation of URGENCY, the latest in a series that has included Rem Koolhaas and Peter Eisenman (2007), Greg Lynn and Yung Ho Chang (2008) and Adam Caruso and Brigitte Shim (2009).
The presentation will take place on 17 November at 7 pm in the Paul Desmarais Theatre. Admission is free.
Learning From… The Middle East Paul Desmarais Theatre, CCA. Free admission.
Nasser Rabbat – 15 September (Cairo) Yasser Elsheshtawy – 29 September (Dubai) Noura Al-Sayeh – 6 October (Bahrain)
This fall’s CCA lecture series Learning From…, will explore the resonating wave of Arab revolutions that first struck in Tunisia earlier this year and has created new contexts that define not only different political agendas and power structures, but also radically novel engagements between place and society.
In past years, the Arab world has generated some of the most articulated and sometimes extreme scenarios, where new tendencies in urban design and architecture have been embedded within economical, political and historical discourses. In a moment where consolidated political orders are subject to change, these three lectures will highlight the effervescent geopolitical context and will analyse the intricacies between the appropriation of the political discourse by citizens and the physical contingencies of three different locations: Cairo, Dubai, and Bahrain.
The presentations will take place on Thursday evenings at 7 pm in the Paul Desmarais Theatre. Admission is free.
James Stirling Memorial Lectures on the City 20 October 2011, New York. Center for Architecture / AIA New York Chapter
Following his successful lecture at the CCA last fall and at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) this May, Professor Gerry Frug’s winning proposal “The Architecture of Governance” will be presented at the Center for Architecture, New York.
In his lecture, Frug will share his analysis on the problems facing the organization of cities around the world and will attempt to describe the design of the governance system in a way that makes it recognizable to architects and other designers.
The bi-annual James Stirling Memorial Lectures on the City competition was launched in 2003 to inaugurate a unique forum for the advancement of new critical perspectives on the role of urban design and urban architecture in the development of cities worldwide. In previous years, winners have included Robert Mangurian and Mary-Ann Ray (2008-2009), Eyal Weizman (2006-2007) and Teddy Cruz (2004-2005) each of whom successfully navigated a competitive screening process.
The presentation will take place at 6 pm at the Center for Architecture, 536 La Guardia Place, NY, NY 10012
Public Programs – Student and Family Activities:
Si vis pacem para bellum (?) Thursday 1 and 8 September, 7 pm. Free admission. Shaughnessy House, CCA.
If you wish for peace, prepare for war (Si vis pacem para bellum). The film screenings produced by the NFB survey the contradictions at play in the militarized involvement of the international community in the peacekeeping processes. Part of On the Natural History of Destruction series produced by the CCA.
The presentation will take place at 7 pm in the Paul Desmarais Theatre. Admission is free.
Bring Your Own Beamer Saturday 10 September, 7 pm. Free Admission. Paul Desmarais Theatre, CCA
Bring Your Own Beamer is an evening of portable projections by selected digital artists who will use the CCA building to imagine a future of collaborative information surfaces. This will be Montreal’s first BYOB.
The presentation will take place on 10 September at 7 pm in the Shaughnessy House. Admission is free.
The City Erased Sunday 2 October. Free Admission. Paul Desmarais Theatre, CCA
Produced in celebration of Journées de la Culture, the CCA will present a collection of movies on disappearing cultures and decaying cities.
The presentation will take place on 2 October from noon to 5 pm in the Paul Desmarais Theatre. Admission is free.
CCA Inter-University Charrette 2011 10-13 November 2011 Paul Desmarais Theatre, CCA
The Interuniversity Charette in architecture, urban planning, design and landscape architecture is an annual competition, held under the auspices of the CCA and Montréal-area universities (Université de Montréal, UQÀM and McGill University), in partnership with other Canadian universities. Now in its 17th edition, the Charette challenges students and interns by inviting them to reflect on issues and problems in contemporary architecture.
The launch of the Charette will take place on 10 November at 7 pm.
