M1 2024-2025 studio descriptions

Architects don’t make shelter.  They make models of shelter. 
Vito Acconci

In this studio we will make models and we will study models.  Models are the dominant graphical medium in contemporary architectural practice.  We think through models far more than we think about them.  

"From toy miniatures to computer simulations, modelling is a primary means by which we make sense of and act upon our material lives, the lives of others and the culture at large.  Everyone models: from artists and designers to prototype machinists and engineers to children.  Models may be provisional or idealized—rehearsals of things yet to be or representations of those that already exist—professional or slapdash, sustained or ephemeral. In particular, models, whether prospective or mimetic, have long animated disciplines and discourses that centre on knowledge formation and innovation.  Models can represent existing conventions or visionary inventions; in both cases models are scalar constructions with the potential for affective, aesthetic, conceptual, and technological effects.”
Annabel Wharton

The model we will work from is a historically significant post-war single family housing model that is here in Winnipeg—Green, Blankstein, & Russell’s (GBR) 1946-48 Wildwood Park (WiWo) commissioned and built by Hubert Bird.  Wildwood Park is an early exemplar of the “Superblock” model of architecture, landscape, infrastructure, & urbanism.  It is a remarkably “unmetropolitan” urban construction less than 15 minutes from the city centre.  There are elements of this model that touch on:
 

• Ebenezer Howards’ Theoretical “Garden City”
• Bauhaus Planning Principles of Ludwig Hilberseimer
• Zoning Codes of Herbert Hoover
• Pre-Fabrication and Modularity in Construction
• Building Material Recycling
• Community vs. Public Space

The primary evidence of the genesis of WiWo is lost—tossed out somewhere in the last few decades—before data was ubiquitous and cheap.  We have access to the contemporary artifact and 30 houses in WiWo have offered to open their doors for us to look in and explore.  We have an incredible amount of ephemera related to the project such as Carl Nelson’s CMHC funded study of WiWo, Hubert Bird’s letter charging GBR with the design of the 75 acres of housing, fragments of research into pre-fabricated construction, mentions of re-used lumber, and we have all of the mentions of the neighbourhood in newspapers but we don’t have any of its actual planning or design records.  So, to move forward we will move forensically—backwards to reconstruct the model to move forward and construct a new model from successes of this WiWo model lost to us in plain sight.

Architecture in the 20th century was dominated by practices of representation made up of sets of fragmentary planimetric drawings interconnected via notational systems to abstractly infer an constructive plan of action, a program of inhabitation, and a sense of atmosphere.  Our ability to build interconnection between things outstripped the volume of knowledge we knew about the building.  No one imagined that a professional school student could represent in drawings a comprehensive sense of a building the way we expect you to model them now.  Drawings were rich but fictive.  We preferenced novelty, invention, notational interconnection, and abstraction in our work because we didn’t literally know how much a building would weigh or how much energy it would use or how much it would cost or how long it would last.  Data was rare and expensive.  Data was not interoperable across media.  Ink drawings didn’t translate easily into a physical model. 

Modelling today is an amplified graphical practice of geometric drawing notationally embedded with increasingly interconnected flows of data.  Comprehensive building design studio came to be in architectural curricula as the parameters and data sets that simulate the literal issues of our projects have become knowable, manageable, inter-relatable, ubiquitous and cheap through the model and modelling practices.  Baudrillard’s notion of the simulacra, a once profound idea projecting an autonomous model with no referent, is obvious in today’s modelling practices.  Where we once made fictions with few facts, today we struggle to integrate data and information we know.  How much authorship will professional designers retain as our models are informed in BIM by pre-packaged libraries of systems in simulation? In this studio we will work through the comprehensive expectation to explore how it is, as Mario Carpo suggests, we’ve moved since the 1970s from working like musical composers, alone with our notational abstractions, to working like conductors of a collective in simulation that manufactures a digital twin of the literal. 

To remain in control of our practices we should both learn to model construction and to construct models.  The effectiveness of a Comprehensive Building Design model is measured in its veracity—how tightly the data of its direct facts delivers the story.  Knowing how to practice through models, to understand the theoretical underpinnings of what a model can find, convey, and specify is the academic goal of this studio. 

“No actors. [No directing of actors.] No parts. [No learning of parts.] No staging. But the use of working models, taken from life. BEING [models] instead of SEEMING [actors]"¹

“A filmmaker is a man like any other; and yet his life is not the same.¹ Seeing is for us a necessity. For a painter too, the problem is one of seeing: but while for the painter it is a matter of uncovering a static reality or at most a rhythm that can be held in a single image, for a director the problem is to catch a reality which is never static, is always moving toward or away from a moment of crystallization, and to present this movement, this arriving and moving on, as a new perception. It is not sound—words, noises, music. Nor is it a picture—landscape, attitudes, gestures. Rather, it is an indivisible whole that extends over a duration of its own which determines its very being. At this point, the dimension of time comes into play in its most modern conception. It is in this order of intuition that the cinema can acquire a new character, no longer merely figurative. The people around us, the places we visit, the events we witness—it is the spatial and temporal relations these have with each other that have a meaning for us today, and the tension that is formed between them”.²

Aldo Rossi in The Architecture of the City coined the term FATTO URBANO [Italian] which translates literally as ‘urban fact’. More optimistically, after reading Rossi and others who make sense of him, FATTO URBANO connotes a fulsomeness of living with others. I have always been drawn to Italy for so many reasons but never really stopped to reason why. I believe, the attraction is this desire for a full life. It is the multiple contradictions and paradoxes and diversity and difference. Protecting tomatoes is more important than politics. Actually, protecting food and quality and tradition is politics. Why Italy Now? is the theme of edition 53 Fall 2021 of LOG journal and it tries to expose and uncover some of the richness and is one resource for us amongst many others.

Students will examine what fulsomeness of living with others means to each of them and might mean to an architecture that they author. Fall term will commence with exposing a students’ own biases and determining what matters in relation to their own FATTO URBANO and then developing a proposition that can be expanded into a living realm. Housing and other stuff will be the winter comprehensive project. We will take a Fieldtrip to Italy [not mandatory but encouraged] to experience a fulsome life firsthand.

Complementary and embedded into studio are:
COMPREHENSIVE PROGRAM REPORT in Fall term. 
COMPREHENSIVE DESIGN STUDIO TECHNOLOGY COMPONENT in the Winter term.

This is a studio with support from CPCI [Canadian Precast Concrete Institute].

1.  Bresson, Robert. Notes on the Cinematographer, Kobenhavn: Green Integer. 1997. : p. 14.
2.  Antonioni, Michelangelo, Documentary from L’Eclisse DVD

 During an NBA All-Star basketball game in Salt Lake City, Utah, Jully Black, a Juno Award-winning R&B singer, altered the lyrics of the Canadian national anthem. She replaced the anthem's original opening line, "O Canada, our home and native land," with "Oh Canada, our home on native land," emphasizing the word "on."

By substituting "and" with "on," this simple modification emphasized the presence and substantial contributions of Indigenous peoples and urged Canadians to reevaluate our connection and involvement with Indigenous land rights.

Nevertheless, in both versions of the national anthem, the semantic connection to the phrase "native land" remains intact, depicting indigenous land as a distinct location separate from ourselves.

This studio is considering a revised version of the phrase, removing the words "and" and "on" and substituting them with a simple comma: "our home, native land." this modification suggests that "native land" is a synonym for home rather than something distinct from it. As a result, it recognizes the interconnectedness of all living beings, both human and non-human that make up our home.

Thematically, this studio we will begin by critically examining the concept of home, expanding outwards from the scale of the body (home) the neighborhood (house), and reaching beyond to the ecological scale of our "native land."

We will explore philosophical and critical questions, including:
What is home? 
What is the designation between house and home? Is it merely semantics, or is there a difference?
When and where do we feel at home? 
Can we feel at home without a house?
If someone experiencing homelessness has all their worldly possessions in a suitcase, can this case be considered their home? What happens when they unload all those belongings and lay claim to some space?

Programmatically, this studio will be tackling the pervasive and socially intricate issue of the rising numbers of individuals without a home in Winnipeg. Heidegger argued that "feeling at home" is distinct from "being at home," but to achieve this perception of belonging, we must first feel “at home" in our immediate community, our city, and our "native land".  For many people experiencing homelessness, this sense of belonging is not achievable, highlighting the myriads of social, cultural, and perceptual factors that contribute to homelessness. 
Working in collaboration with St. Boniface Street Links (a local not-for-profit social organization that is working towards ending homelessness,) This studio will concentrate on the growing number of encampments emerging along our riverbanks, deliberating on innovative and comprehensive solutions to the crisis. We will briefly explore short-term solutions and then conclude with a comprehensive multi-unit, multi-program social housing solution that considers the relationship between human and land rights in the context of current social housing policies and practices.

The studio will stay close to home, traveling to Clearwater, Manitoba to participate in an immersive field study that possess the question, how do we feel at home when we are away from home.

The students in this studio will also have the chance to contribute to the design and construction of Prototype (home), a Warming Hut entry that will advocate for the urgent need to provide a home for the many people experiencing homelessness.

*Title of this studio is borrowed from a 2022/23 CCA's exhibition entitled “ᐊᖏᕐᕋᒧᑦ / Ruovttu Guvlui / Towards Home” which explored northern Indigenous concepts of home.