Joshua Prince-Ramus: “Building a theatre that remakes itself”

Even if you’re not an architect, this is worth watching:

I wish this building had been finished while I was doing my thesis. Would’ve made a great precedent.

The Roadshow Interviews

It’s worth mentioning that interviews with most (all?) of the presenters from this past fall’s Canadian Architecture Roadshow are now available online. The easiest way to browse/watch is at the Roadshow Vimeo account.

The first Roadshow hosted designers and architects from across Canada, including Battersby Howat, Marc Boutin, DIN Projects, PLANT architect, Philip Beesley, Atelier In Situ, Atelier Big City, Atelier TAG, and Roger Mullin.

I attended the first of the eight stops in Vancouver at SALA, and though all the presenters had some trouble sticking to the 10-minute time (it ended up a little long), it was certainly a great chance to see some young, top Canadian designers present their work. Highlights of the evening were Atelier TAG’s (now award-winning) Bibliothèque St. Hubert and Roger Mullin’s Uncertain Centre of the Mary Celeste.

I certainly hope this becomes an annual event!

Canada’s sad Expo pavilion

Lisa Rochon pans the government’s lack of imagination in choosing Cirque du Soleil to produce Canada’s 2010 Expo pavilion. So sad. It’s kind of a big middle finger to all us Canadian architects.

Even more embarrassing considering what the likes of BIG from Denmark have planned, for example: BIG’s Danish Expo Pavilion

I found a gallery of construction photos of the pavilion here.

(via Archinect)

Google’s new approach to China

Wow. A fairly bold direction on Google’s part with respect to its operations in China: A new approach to China

(via Mezzoblue)

David Byrne: “The Limits of Multiculturalism”

An interesting bit of commentary on the nature of multiculturalism from musician David Byrne: The Limits of Multiculturalism (Thanks, Fish!)

Tequila

A nice little VideoSong cover of the 1958 classic “Tequila” by The Champs.

What’s a VideoSong? These guys invented it. They have lots of good ones.

Phoenix in Paris

The band plays a little set of recent songs on the streets of Paris, like buskers: beneath the Eiffel Tower, on a bus, and under a bridge. La Blogotheque Take-Away Show with Phoenix. Very fun!

Phoenix - 1901 - A Take Away Show from La Blogotheque on Vimeo.

There’s an impressive archive of Take-Away shows featuring the likes of Yo La Tengo, Múm, Patrick Watson, Sigur Ros, Sebastien Tellier, REM, Animal Collective, Caribou, Malajube, Final Fantasy, Architecture in Helsinki, Of Montreal, Sufjan Stevens, The Shins, Arcade Fire, Au Revoir Simone, Grizzly Bear, Jens Lekman, Xiu Xiu, and (and!) Casiotone For The Painfully Alone, among many, many others.

(Thanks, JP!)

Cakelife site news

1. I think comments are working again. I’ll have to disable them again if the spam returns…

2. When I read my RSS feeds, I often come across things that are interesting but don’t warrant a whole post. These are in the “From the Feeds” chunk at right. If you want to subscribe directly to these, my Google Reader Shared Items, you can subscribe using this URL: feed://feeds2.feedburner.com/cakelife/shared.

HBBH merges with Cohos Evamy

Vancouver-based architecture firm Hotson Bakker Boniface Haden has decided to merge with Alberta-based mega-firm Cohos Evamy. HBBH, probably best known for the Granville Island masterplan and more recently, the Nk’Mip Desert Cultural Centre, have long been one of Vancouver’s more design-oriented offices, while Cohos Evamy is better known for executing fairly massive institutional projects, a few of which I remember from my time at the University of Alberta. I’m still not sure what to think of this, considering the relative scales of each firm and the term “merger.” Vancouver has seen this happen a few times, and there are both positive and negative consequences.

Some may recall Stantec’s buying sprees in the early 2000s (more than 30 acquisitions between 1998 and 2006!), where it snatched up quite a few firms across western Canada including Keen Engineering and Architectura. These types of “mergers” usually appear in the press release as the big guy gaining high-quality expertise from the small guy, and the small guy gaining increased exposure and resources from the big guy. In practice, however, the talented designers and engineers, now cogs in a much larger machine, quickly become disillusioned by the new arrangements and make a break on their own. In Stantec’s case, the mergers begat smaller firms like AME Group, Perez Engineering (who worked on Larry McFarland’s LEED Platinum Gulf Islands Operations Centre), and McFarlane Green Biggar, now an architecture and design powerhouse with international scope.

Another notable example might be Perkins+Will’s merger with/acquisition of Busby Associates in 2005. While I think the evolution of this one is still playing out, I happen to work for a former Busby Perkins + Will associate principal in a small 6-person architecture firm. I recall seeing Peter Busby speak at the UBC School of Architecture in 2005-ish, probably not long after the merger had been announced, and in response to a question, he explicitly stated that boutique architecture firms are no longer viable and that these large corporate conglomerates were the way of the future.

So, the downside: we effectively see the end of established firms, whose name has become synonymous with a certain level of quality and/or design identity. But the upside – the sprouting young firms led by some of the people responsible for that quality and design identity – is something to get excited about. The eventual expansion of Vancouver’s tiny architectural community can only be a good thing. While we might “lose” one firm, we might easily gain a handful of progressive, forward-thinking, future-focused others.

KRob Architectural Delineation, Architectural Drawing & Illustration Competition

Winners of the 2009 KRob competition were recently announced. Some very outstanding architectural imagery. I'd love to see a "time" factor next to each one (i.e. "Duration: 83.5 cumulative hours"). The past few years are worth a look. Nathan Freise, now a multi-time winner, was featured on BLDGBLOG not long ago as well. The "Making Of" video for the Freise brothers' short film, The Machine Stops, is worth a look too. (Thanks, JH.)

The right kind of procrastination

This piece from essayist, programmer, and programming language designer Paul Graham helped make a few things clear: “Good and Bad Procrastination” To summarize in a couple sentences, if you can’t be bothered to read it (you are looking for something else to procrastinate on, aren’t you?):

Good procrastination is avoiding errands to do real work.

and

What’s the best thing you could be working on, and why aren’t you?

If you’re like me, and you’ve always got a handful of possible future projects on the brain, I think the second point tremendously motivating.

Transmedia Storytelling

As I’m notoriously good at accumulating stacks of things to read faster than I can read them, I’m only now reviewing Volume #19 from May 2009. The issue’s theme, “Architecture of Hope,” so far has had relatively little to do with architecture.

“Transmedia Storytelling” by Henry Jenkins (available on his website) offers ten points on the horizontal nature of media conglomerates operating across multiple creative fields simultaneously. The result is an environment of encyclopedic content production, as storylines and character development receive dedicated treatment but the story as a whole cannot be found in one place. (The Matrix is cited as an example, with films, video games, and animation shorts each contributing to an overall narrative.) The fragmented content environment encourages fans to communicate as they piece together the creative “franchise” – for lack of a better word – in anticipation of future plot developments, or contribute their own creative output (in the form of fan fiction, for example).

Jenkins, Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Art at the University of Southern California, maintains a prolific media-studies blog with a deep archive going back to 2006. Definitely worth a browse…

Bailey D Buffalo

This is a photo of a pet buffalo. Bailey unfortunately passed on a few years ago, but his memory lives on in this gallery of collected appearances.

(Not Photoshopped.)