3 In a recent essay by Dorrian on paper-making from hemp as described in ‘The Praise of Hemp-Seed’ by the Jacobean poet John Taylor, he discusses how paper was a fluid amalgam of the discarded materials of society from high to low, democratised by the mashing of these fibres, floating them in water which then drains away, leaving a sheet of the unrecognisable ‘Linnen of some Countesse or some Queen’, Mix’d with the rags of some baud, theefe, or whore’. Taylor thinks of the afterlife of such materials; ghosts that persist in the very sheets of paper used to write both revolutionary manifestos and biblical texts — subversion inherent in the very process of making. www.drawingmatter.org/sets/drawing-week/liquid-paper/
Knowing Ottawa as we do, Metis’s folding of the city’s patchwork of urban experiments throughout its 200-year built history subverts the hierarchies of State over City, Victorian Gothic over Bytown Indifferent, buildings as monuments over early twentieth century planning grids and late twentieth century zoning. Nothing is distinct anymore, rather it is indecipherably mixed. Remove hierarchies of importance and fabric loosens, tears, becomes shoddy and can be re-woven. 3 It is the re-weaving of any city that is so difficult: every project we do is hemmed in by history and tradition, covenants, by-laws and restrictions, within which we produce architectural objects that struggle to wrest relevance from an implacable site plan. Here, fragments – the edge of a building, Chateau Laurier perhaps, might occur in drawing next to a wall of a suburban Superstore, or a corner of an Edwardina apartment on Metcalfe, or a slice of Victoria Island, part of the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe people. I’m being overly literal here to make a point: Metis’s drawing processes mash everything into fibres, as happens with paper-making, which become fluid in their distress and settle in new configurations. Channels of this new material are let into the existing city, slicing through the competition site where they develop their materiality into program. A section is formed, a plan is made, spaces are found. How to give one ‘cultural and governmental’ complex an urban genealogy that means something? How to talk about this city, this place, this country, in one small, bureaucratically-chosen site and program? Micro-urbanism makes no large plans, rather it assembles fragmentary connections and folds them onto the site. Metis projects approach the mathematically-based complexity of Ottoman architecture. At the same time, the work articulates a desire for narratives as organising principles for a micro-urbanism that gives meaning to every site, every building, every street corner that sit in a larger, historic and physical context. Micro-urban democratisation, access and complexity are an antidote to the rigidity of macro-urban zoning. It is little wonder that Metis’s most seductive projects occur in ancient cities, already complex and historically accessible: Cabinet of the City starts by superimposing the Nolli Plan onto a satellite-scanned present slice of Rome. Ottawa was a much harder task. Calvino’s Invisible Cities had to come to the rescue. opposite page: On The Surface, an exhibition of Metis work. this page: Ottawa, strips and texts; model of the resultant architecture.
courtesy of Metis
on site review 36: our material future
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