How do you grow a prairie town?
The gopher was the model. Stand up straight: telephone poles grain elevators church steeples Vanish, suddenly: the gopher was the model.
Robert Kroetsch Seed Catalogue
Flatbox Eduardo Aquino
a rriving in the Prairies from the West (the Rockies) or from the East (the Shield) the rapid erasure of iconographic elements inverts the process of image accumulation as if a painter finished a painting with a blank canvas. Movement in the Prairie landscape occurs as a progressive observation of objects. Sequence is less a product of time, as it is a condition of experience. What is left is an apparent rigid land with sparse marks, the horizon predominantly washing out orienting indications or references. Flatbox is located at the Fort Whyte Centre in Winnipeg, Manitoba.The site is a mound between a prairie dog town and a bison field, giving the visitor a bipolar experience of the prairie landscape in a number of ways. Fort Whyte is is located in an urban edge condition — spatially rural in that it lacks any density and buildings are more individual elements than they are a cohesive whole, and urban in that the park is the remnant of an industrial district used for the development of the urban core.
Immensity
The prairies originated in the ice age with the drying out of Lake Agassiz. Thoreau wrote about a lake, ‘It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature’. Henry David Thoreau.Walden, or, Life in the Woods. New York: Houghton Mifflin Co, 1893 . Immensity is not an attribute given to something observed but is a perception caused by an enormous sense of absenteeism which provokes us to internalize experience and to measure our own natures. Flatbox identifies, accentuates and celebrates the wide blue sky with its vast horizon, instigating a new way to think about architecture on the Prairies. It is a device to experience the prairie landscape through the spatial and physical phenomena of place. It is a study on viewing, light and perspective; it is a receptacle for the sensorial body.
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O n S ite review
S urface
I ssue 9 2003
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