Tom Strickland:About the graffiti — Chris Roberts: The building was a warehouse of graffiti and the quality was very good. We didn’t want to sanitize the building. It often happens with older buildngs, they become this pristine restoration. We wanted to keep as close to the way we found it as we possibly could. Two reasons: the only way to do it economically, historically it keeps all the pieces of the building there. TS: Economically? CR: If you want to reuse these kinds of structures, the less you do the cheaper it is, and the less you do, the better it is historically. Pilkington built beautiful buildings when they built them, and they built them all over the world. All we did was re-excavate the basement.The building was a strong object, we couldn’t afford to restore it, so we did the minimum to make it habitable.
TS: In this aesthetic of the temporary installation in a found artifact, could you explain more about these stairs? How exactly do they attach to the building? CR: Well, the fastening to the walls is quite minimal.There are 400 people in a four-storey building: they weren’t going to be taking the elevators. Exit stairs became the primary way of moving through the buildng. We wanted them memorable. I grew up in Montreal and as a kid used to walk across the Jacques Cartier Bridge that had an open grate walkway over the St Lawrence. The water was rushing below — you really knew you’d walked over a bridge. We’d done open-grate stairs before, and once proposed an open-grate pedestrian bridge that scared the hell out of everybody. But this is a company of twenty-year old skateboarders. They could handle this.
marche est absolument clair. Le problème n’a jamais été d’une nature technique, il était plutôt d’une nature perceptu- elle. Avant qu’on y mette la rampe, l’escalier de service était terrifiant. Mais il s’agit là d’une bonne chose. On s’en souvient.
TS : Et puis, il n’y avait aucune problème avec les codes? CR : Il s’agit d’une enceinte à l’épreuve du feu. Les grilles ouvertes sont habituellement assez sécuritaires. Elles ont une assez bonne adhérence et puisqu’elles ont des arêtes assez solides, il vous est pos- sible de voir la profondeur de marche utile. Le nez de
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O n S ite review
T ransformations
I ssue 7 2002
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