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oil index
- housing (1)
- maps (1)
- project outline (1)
- research groups (1)
- terminology (1)
- 0.1 Stage One
- Architects Without Borders Canada
- Carol Kleinfeldt: What kind of town do we need to support such industrial ventures?
- Colley Valentine: an International Energy Campus
- F.B.D.: Aiding Transience
- Fuller / Hatherley / McPherson: Equilibrium
- Low / Ong: Heading Towards Green Cities
- Manering / Courtney: Athabasca Sands
- O'Donoghue / Suen : a prototype for mining colonies off-planet
- Todd / Rabyniuk : architecture of change in a contested landscape
- Townsend / Semeredi / Ng: Solution without Pollution
- f(x)
- white: living lightly
2 Comments
Reader Comments (2)
This is a brilliantly precise definition of the problem. Somewhere in this process of designing or creating this new town, it has to be acknowledged that it will exist in extraordinary circumstances and that conventional urban normality is not powerful enough to either respond to just how different such a town will be, nor is it an adequate counterweight.
Transience: the people and the oil companies are transient; the oil and the consequences of the mining process are not. The need for oil is transient (dependent on consumption and technology), the oil is not. Aboriginal people have been in the region at least 10,000 years -- not very transient, but the treaty and reserve system is only 120 years old, not even seven generations yet, but just about.
Transience is only measurable against permanence, and that permanence is in the public mind only registered in urban centres which have the physical mass and embedded energy to seem eternal. The public should study Anselm Keifer's Barjac, or the lessons of Chernobyl, a bit more. All social systems and their products are transient.
Good connections between this piece and f(x). The street views here show the consequences of not taking short, individual, transient, troubled lives seriously. One feels that the attitude of Fort McMurray, the oil industry and everyone who profits from the extraction process thinks that no matter what social problems there are with the rotating shifts of workers, there are plenty more where they came from.
Resource towns are distinctly different from the standard model for towns and demand a different approach.
Architecture that is as neither public, home, nor work. (In a way it sounds like the indigenous building of the nomadic first nations people in Alberta historically – teepees.)
A dynamic and practical idea, but it is dispersed and regional and contrasts our central hub approach. (We would like to collaborate with the hubs idea and to resolve the dispersal of resources that would be required for a New Campus Town and Small Frontier Settlements model.)
Very specific to the in situ mine-site housing solution, and reclamation, but not sure what the community energy would be like (and how it differs from current work camps.)