our material future stephanie white
In this issue, eleven essays are divided into three categories: the drawing of things , whereby no matter what the need or desire is for more change, more analysis or more interpretation, drawing is the vehicle. The second category is micro-urbanism , where the city – how to make it, how to change it, how to use it, is the subject. The third category is material memory , three essays on very specific material entities, as unlike each other as can be. I’ll start with this one.
material memory The more uncertain the times, it seems the more certainty comes to dominate a political and social discourse that sits alongside a swiftly changing technological, industrial and corporate reality. The past is another country, as it always was, and while many long for that prelapsarian place, they spend much of their present intertwined with the smart technology that organises their day to day existence. The past, often an appalling struggle, is now carefully curated to read like an aspiration. Alexa tells jokes that were hoary in the fifties, while she locks the doors at night. David Murray’s description of The Queen Elizabeth II Planetarium, its origin story, its decline and its present restoration raises such issues. A mid-century modern building of local building skills, modest budget and dressed as a space ship, it housed an extremely sophisticated projector that replicated the night sky in more detail than one could ever see. Its dome, a trope for the sublime since Boullée, is also the dome of heaven, in play since the Renaissance. Its terrazzo, mosaics and ceramic tiles are more suited to the Mediterranean of Galileo than Edmonton’s climate, and its magical, near-transparent curtain wall anchoring the edge of a concrete cantilevered roof was not quite resistant enough to freeze-thaw cycles. The ethereal grounded in the earthly. Murray stresses that nostalgia alone does not justify restoration: this is a building for children and the child in us, thus valuable for its ambition: science is something that must be introduced early and forever listened to. Lejla Odobasic Novo’s visit to the Rivesaltes museum in France, placed in a derelict 80-year old transit camp for refugees and displaced persons, is just as demonstrative an architecture as Edmonton’s 60-year old planetarium placed in a le Nôtre-inspired park celebrating the British monarchy. Rivesaltes pulls the dread and uncertainty of a camp for the stateless and reifies it; the planetarium tries to float away from its placid setting. Both speak about a future where things are different, where tears are wiped from their eyes, and there is no more fear. Rivesaltes is a monolith pressed into the ground; it does not float. It too must be listened to. Materials contain cultural memory and future aspirations. Rivesaltes sinks its concrete into the ground from whence it came. The Planetarium optimistically deployed materials that indicated the future freedoms in the public imagination of the early 1960s. Robert McKaye and Stoyan Barakov’s WA/VE is of a different order – the making of building systems out of discarded materials. WA/VE points paper magazines that once carried potent cultural messaging on their pages towards their intrinsic paper-ness. As they found, materials can be stubborn. One can draw what you think they should do, but they can rebel. Materials are not just there to do our bidding.
this page: Queen Elizabeth II Planetarium opening announcement in the Edmonton Journal, 1960 Rivesaltes Museum: path to the past which runs beside the museum of the present WA/VE cells made from suggestively interleaved magazines facing page: the regional impact of the forestry industry in Ontario With Words as Their Actions, Ottawa FUTUREFORMS studio, working on Murmur Wall Let it Rain Tianguis furniture sourced from local catalogues in Mexico City Jerusalem 2018 - Haredi man warning his community of stores that sell impure cellular devices Hong Kong, Add Oil!
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on site review 36: our material future
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