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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)
ah yes, escape. Ameliorate ghastly working conditions through leisure. What wonderful little clips of completely daft play are shown here. And Fort McMurray is portrayed as a kind of North Korea.
There is collection of small Alberta towns: Pine Lake, Sylvan Lake, Alberta Beach whose sole aim is just the kind of playland described here. The BC equivalent: Peachland, Summerland, Penticton, Kelowna, once little orchard towns where visitors swam all summer and skiied all winter, have turned into very odd places: expensive and retirement-oriented, high property values in monster-house suburbs. The lake fronts are increasingly owned by wealthy Albertans who install swimming pools which tax the limited water supply, rather than swimming in the lake.
Gold River on Vancouver Island was a company town built in the mid-60s based on logging and a pulp mill. It closed in 1998 and the town was almost immediately auctioned off as a retirement village. Young retirees moved there and it is now, again, a centre for leisure activities: fishing and hiking mostly. Pulp mills are pretty poisonous, but nothing like oil extraction.
It is interesting, how and why towns come into existence and what propels them into the forms they take. Forts are service centres, little different from gold rush towns: people go to them from the hinterland, not so often farther into the hinterland. I suppose we should ask what leisure means to the people who live in the region. It might be different than what it means in urban centres.
Really, for Alberta, this is the most realistic submission. They already do the monster truck thing.
We are interested in what responsive architecture would be and how the town will be mobile with changing boundaries of the oil sands.
Liza +Travis