PRESENTERS
FABRICATING TRUTH
PALLAVI SWARANJALI, Carleton University
Forging Architecture: The Contronymic Nature of Architectural Creation in the work of
STEVEN BEITES, Laurentian University
KATIE GRAHAM, Carleton University
Architectural Storytelling in Virtual Reality: How VR Can Expand on Architectural Perception
TED LANDRUM, University of Manitoba
Poetry as Research: Fabricating Architectural Truth
Truth is neither self-evident nor an impenetrable enigma; rather, as a work of fabrication, it lies somewhere in-between. The same is true of architectural truth.
Never simply a factual thing independent of the vagaries of meaning and experience, truth in architecture is a collective fabrication, open to continual interpretation.
In this presentation I will read selections from my new book Midway Radicals & Archi-Poems (Signature Editions, 2017), and reflect on poetry as a mode of
research. The symposium theme presents an opportunity to contextualize this work of heuristic fabrication in relation to questions of truth in architecture,
philosophy and poetry. Sources framing the discussion will include: Adrian Forty’s chapter on “Truth” in Words and Buildings: a Vocabulary of Modern Architecture;
Louis Sullivan’s Kindergarten Chats; Robert Duncan’s Fictive Certainties; Hans Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method; Oscar Wilde’s essay “The Decay of Lying”; and
other sources foundational to what I call archi-poetry.
Etymologically, “poetry” (poiesis) simply means making. Paradoxically, however, true making requires fabricated truths characteristic of fiction and artifice. For
Aristotle, poetry is a moving event mimetic of human praxis (practice, or action). Although poetry has come to name verbal arts, its original scope included the
making of anything humanly useful or desired, including stories but also practical and symbolic artifacts. In our culture of ever-increasing specialization, it requires
a willing suspension of disbelief to translate this synthetic understanding of poetry to “practices” of architecture, place-making and community-building. If we
accept that truth is a construct, is it correct to suggest that buildings, cities and towns are works of artifice? These questions are perhaps unanswerable in prose; it
is the task of poetry to make universal questions perceptible through compact but meaningful fabrication.
FABRICATING IN SITU
SCOTT GERALD SHALL, Lawrence Technological University
Borrowed Intelligence: Leveraging Industrial Fabrication To Evolve Building Production
NAHID AHMADI, Carleton University
Asphalt Deserts: Rethinking the Architecture of Surface Parking Lots
DIETMAR STRAUB, University of Manitoba
A Beautiful Waste of Time: Operating a Snow Academy
JENNIFER SMITH, Auburn University
INCREMENTAL: Resilience through Disaster-Relief Housing
BRYAN HE, University of Manitoba
Making of the Hakka Vernacular
SOCIAL FABRICS
VALENTINA DAVILA, McGill University
Down the Back Stairs: Servants’ Spaces in Montreal’s Square Mile
LAWRENCE BIRD, Winnipeg
ELLEN GRIMES, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
History's Future Fabrics: New Models for Historic Ecologies
NIKOLE BOUCHARD, University of Wisconsin
RYAN STEC, Carleton University
Making Public Space: Examining Walter Lippmann & John Dewey’s pragmatism as a
constructive expansion to the spatial theory of public space
MEDIATING FABRICS
LANCELOT COAR, University of Manitoba
Lignes d’erre: Tracing the History and Future of Force Flow in Structures
FEDERICO GARCIA LAMMERS & JESSICA GARCIA FRITZ, South Dakota State University
Master Building Complex Forms in the Absence of Graphics
JOE KALTURNYK, Winnipeg
The Temporary and the Intermediate: Strategies for a Better Dinner
photo: Landon Lucyk [M2 Architecture]
The 2018 Atmosphere Symposium is co-chaired by: Lisa Landrum and Liane Veness with the support of the Faculty's Cultural Events Committee and the Centre for Architectural Structure and Technology (C.A.S.T.); web design and graphics support by Tali Budman (ED4 Architecture student), and administrative support from Brandy O’Reilly (Faculty of Architecture, Partners Program).
Questions? Please contact info@atmos.ca