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archives and museums
I have long thought that architecture is a material archive of the social, political and cultural conditions of its making. Reading the built environment as an archive of embarrassingly naive impulse to shockingly cynical thought clearly comes out of all that textual work we laboured over in the 1990s. It still stands us in good stead. However, the magical archives of my memory are quite different: 1959: the old Provincial Museum in Victoria when it was at one end of that Victorian pile of granite that is the Parliament Buildings, where a stuffed albatross hung in the main staircase. We took down a bird skull we’d found on the beach below our house on Portage Inlet. An old fellow patiently pulled tray after tray of bird skulls out of a long wall of thin flat drawers so that two little kids could learn how to identify their little grebe skull. 1967: the UBC Anthropology Museum when it was in the north end of that ugly pile of granite that was the Main Library. You got to it through the Fine Arts Gallery, through a narrow door and into a vast, dark, completely magical cavern of totems, statues, lumber, fetishes, cabinets stacked in front of cabinets, tight pathways winding through what felt like an auctioneer’s storeroom. Nothing then was ever interpreted , there was no textual space between you and the thing; there was just you, generally ignorant, and the thing, generally mute. Marvellous. A coup de foudre .
the Katsu Kaishu musseum in Tokyo: the obsessive side of archives. see Steve Chodoriwsky’s article on page 40
contents
Farid Noufaily Neeraj Bhatia Farid Noufaily and Gregory M Perkins Michael Summerton Dominique Hurth + Ciarán Walsh Tonkao Panin Jordan Ellis Miriam Jordan + Julian Haladyn Matt Williams Gerald Forseth Joseph Masco Steve Chodoriwsky Gregory Beck Rubin + Conrad Dueck Jaclyn H Jones Jennifer VanderBurgh Matthew Woodruff
House of Reconciliation, Beirut, Lebanon Symbolic Public Form and the Library
this issue is dedicated to D. O. D.
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The Metropolitan Inforgraphic Centre, Mexico City Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park, Accra, Ghana Werkbundarchive Museum Der Dinge, Berlin Corrado Feroci’s Museum, Bangkok, Thailand Musée Rodin, Paris Theatre-Museu Dalí, Figueres, Spain The Fauves in Collioure, France Samarkand, Uzbekistan The Titan Missile Museum, Sahuarita, Arizona Katsu Kaishu Museum, Tokyo South Point Douglas, Winnipeg, Manitoba The Black World History Museum, St Louis Missouri Home Movies Measured Architecture, Vancouver Four Museums: New York, Kanazawa, Tokyo Speaking Surfaces: Dura-Europas, Florence, Foligno Glass Pavilion, Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio Ara Pacis Museum, Rome Museum Insel Hombroich, Neuss, Germany Museum Millenial Exhibition Strategies The Irving House, New Westminster, BC Fort Macleod, Alberta The Design Exchange, Toronto Anchor Archive Zine Library, Halifax, Nova Scotia Cinema Skarpa, Warsaw Real Jardim Botânico, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Books Qana, Lebanon
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Dwayne Smyth Mark Baechler Dru McKeown Peter Osborne Aisling O’Connor Jana Macalik Tanya Southcott Michael Leeb Zahra Ebrahim Crystal Melville Ella Chmielewska Mariana Mogilevich Stephanie White Jamelie Hassan masthead
Nicole Dextras Jen VanderBurgh
Front Cover: Toronto Island, 2007 Back Cover: Home Movies
Canada Council Grant for Literary and Arts Magazines The University of Edinburgh Schools of Architecture, Cultural Studies and Scottish Studies Government of Canada Canadian Heritage program for Postal Assistance to Publications
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archives and museums: On Site review 20
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