34writing

The Other Architect exhibition 28 October 2015 to 10 April 2016

For as long as architecture has been reduced to a service to society or an ‘industry’ whose ultimate goal is only to build, there have been others who imagine it instead as a field of intellectual research: energetic, critical, and radical. But how can we produce or maintain this position? In the history of architecture, especially since the 1960s, there has been a proliferation of experiments representing the work of architects who ventured to creatively and thoroughly rethink every aspect of the profession. Moved by a desire to contribute more substantially and more actively to the construction of a cultural agenda, they critically analyzed their roles and challenged the precepts and ultimate goals of the discipline. Together, their experiments point beyond what architecture is toward what architecture could be, or what it already is, if we would recognize it: not just a practice that inevitably brings about the construction of an artifact, but a way of thinking and observing the present and the society in which we operate; of identifying and asking questions while marking a new territory on which to act; of looking for or inventing suitable tools; and, finally, of responding generously and concisely. –Giovanna Borasi The Other Architect is also a book, edited by Giovanna Borasi with contributions by Florencia Alvarez, Pep Avilés, Greg Barton, Samuel Dodd, Isabelle Doucet, Ole W. Fischer, Anna Foppiano, Kim Förster, Owen Hatherley, Larissa Harris, Alison B. Hirsch, Douglas Moffat, Whitney Moon, Pierluigi Nicolin, Kayoko Ota, Panayiota Pyla, Angela Rui, Deane Simpson, Johanne Sloan, Molly Wright Steenson, Rebecca Taylor, and Mirko Zardini — a co-publication with Spector Books, Leipzig, designed by Jonathan Hares (Lausanne and London).

The Pidgeon Audio Visual kit “Technology Is the Answer But What Was the Question?” by Cedric Price. 1979. CCA © Pidgeon Digital/World Microfilms Publications An annotated outline of various ways to analyze a street. 18 September 1970. Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies fonds, CCA. Gift of Eisenman Architects © CCA, Montreal

Canadian Centre for Architecture 1920, rue Baile Montréal Québec H3H 2S6

www.cca.qc.ca

I have nothing to say, only to show.

ANGELA SILVER ECHOLALIAS

—Walter Benjamin

Echolalias evokes a matrix of ideas that Angela Silver has explored over the last fifteen years—artistic expression as both process and trace, performance and inscription, remembering and forgetting, and the permeable thresholds between these realms. Emerging from her ongoing investigation of technologies of communication, here the artist transforms the gallery over time using a hand-held typewriter ball, the slow methodical effort of mark-making recorded directly on walls with each hand strike on carbon paper, creating an evolving alphabetic palimpsest with its simultaneous accretion and erosion of letters in overlapping layers. While ‘echolalia’ itself refers to the repetition of spoken words, the accumulation of simple marks coalesces into an expansive lacework of symbols and signs imbued with a sense of stillness that underscores the poetics, as opposed to pragmatics, of communication. — Shauna McCabe excerpt, exhibition essay

February 12, 2016 - March 12, 2016

401 Richmond Street West, Suite 104 Toronto ON Canada M5V 3A8 416 504 8238 openstudio.on.ca

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