war memorials

Submissions are welcomed for an online exhibit: war memorials, beyond cenotaphs.  

 This is a call for submissions for an exhibition that is a collective investigation of what it means, today, to represent the facts, acts and consequences of war.  The online exhibition will provide ideas and images around the issues of war and how and for what reasons a war, or wars, are memorialised.

You define the war, the site and propose a war memorial.

This call for submissions is an open call: we are most interested in registering how people today feel that war might be effectively marked.  What comes after the cenotaph, or Maya Lin’s walls, or wartime memory websites, to honour the participants in war, to validate or invalidate war, to prevent war, to rally to war, to mark war?

For more information, please see the call for exhibitions page: war memorials.

Any questions, please contact us.

 

OIL: a new town in a resource extraction area

The Alberta government announced in the Fall of 2011 that it needs a new town, 100 km north of Fort MacMurray, closer to the oil sands.  We expect that this will be the occasion for a giant, limited competition some time in the future, however, we would like to set an ideas competition for what it means to live near an enormous, toxic, industrial site that is so controversial that not only can it be seen from space, it can be seen from both Europe and Washington.

We want to flood Alberta with ideas: new ideas, challenging ideas, intelligent ideas.  This isn't about a winner, and the fully developed schemes will not be built – well, they could be, but it won't be up to us to do this. 

However, we do sense that there is a paucity of urban thinking about topics which are socially, economically, infrastructurally and environmentally problematic.  Whatever one thinks about the oil sands, they are not going to go away. We want to turn our intelligence, as designers, to this vastly complex project. And, to disseminate our ideas so widely that they become part of the working vocabulary of oil sands urban development.

Three immediate solutions propose themselves— 

1.  Dubai will be built in northern Alberta, we should sign up Zaha now.

2.  the status quo will be maintained: work camps and a transient workforce.

3.  some kind of 21st century ecology will develop.  What will this be?

This will be a three stage project:

1.  outline the urban, social, architectural and environmental issues that will act as the framework for the project.  There is a $25 entry fee for this stage.  TO REGISTER, CLICK HERE TO GO TO THE REGISTRATION FORM    All entries will be published on this website.

2.  propose a town project.  This consists of 2 boards that list the issues, and show the material and architectural responses to these issues.

Each one of these projects will be published on this website and will be part of an exhibition.

3.  these proposals will be further developed: each strategy which will consist of a built model and a very convincing explanation — could be a video, a photo gallery, an installation, a performance.   

 These strategies will be published in as many venues as possible.