modernism than was ever enacted in Western European or American cities. And in this was the problem. Architecture as freely practiced on rule-less sites ignores the rules of the culture it is serving. The Legislative Assembly counters this through the process of construction and the shape of the building itself. Harriet Moulton-Burdett, who had a practice in Iqualuit and now is located in Halifax, has noted the way that people working in the building have occupied it with their own work: sealskin intarsia abounds — the building is a housing for significant cultural practice. Bruce Allan has noted that during an assembly if a herd of caribou is seen on the street through the open glass walls everyone leaves to hunt them — the building is a housing that doesn’t interrupt significant cultural practice. He also speaks about the sealed nature of the construction; there are no voids to fill with snow. The building is constructed of wood which is a more malleable material than steel: the forgiving tolerances of timber are put beside the high performance details that confront the weather. The periphery is the centre for those who live there, the circumpolar region is increasingly well defined and self directed. We have lots of what can be seen as periphery in Canada. It points to a direction for Canadian architecture: we might look to our edges, which are culturally rich, individual and full of different kinds of challenges and are uniquely ours.
The periphery is the source of many movements that seed future developments at the centre. Latin American political theorists invested the word periphery with its simultaneous underdeveloped and activist reading: colonies provide the raw resources for the benefit of the core. It suits the core to keep the colonies from developing to the point that they are self-sustaining and don’t need to export their resources — resources, the story goes, that the centre no longer has, or is too complacent to extract. Naturally after a time the periphery began to feel a bit exploited and the resultant anger fuelled the decolonisation movements of Africa in the 1960s. Also in the 1950s and 60s, South American colonies ‘decolonised’ in the nineteenth century through Spain’s ineptitude, found that economic colonisation was still alive and well. André Gunder Frank proposed that the choices for Latin America were underdevelopment or revolution, Cuba being the most long lasting example. Now, this is an almost irresponsible gloss on a half-century of rich and important social movement, but I want to use it to locate some of the peripheral architecture being built in Canada today, using the core-periphery relationship. We have a large periphery — the hinterland outside the urban centres, and local peripheries — the edges of those urban centres. We have designers peripheral to the profession and a country peripheral to the well published architectures of the oldest centre of all, Europe and the twentieth century centre, the USA. Reading Frank,Wallerstein,Anderson and other such economic theorists, one is pleased to discover that innovation, lateral thinking and provocative movement happens at the edge, not at the core. In the case of the TransAlta Call Centre, building on the edge simply provides a rule-less site on which to experiment, there is no cultural component here, as there is with the Legislative Assembly in Iqaluit. The developing world is replete with social and political experiments built in architecture — look through John Donat’s World Architecture of the 1960s and one can find a much more adventurous
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