| Explorations
into forming this building lean towards that undercurrent existing in
Canada
today which, mindful of our artistic pasts, can be called "architecture
of paucity". Posturing with this "poor-art", architecturing
manifests
representation through a less liking of, and absenting from, the
dogmatic
voices of the real, the press, and history.
Without
brandishing a manifesto or forced "intellectual" embroidery,
architecturing
thoughtfully manipulates and invest geometries with the functionality,
economy and flexibility of prefabricated, new and composite materials
while
aware that a renewed confrontation with forming must bind it to a
convulsing
practical and theoretical rethinking, if it is to penetrate the
essential
nihilism of Ottawa's recent and current building history's encagement
to
"contradiction", "neo-eclecticism", "participation", and
"allotropy".
Even
if rather minuscule, this intervention, in mute respect to the big
national
"stars", tries to discretely unfold an interesting discourse on
experimentation
with materials and construction methods, with the ego-figure in its
social
entanglements (space-making), and with the "art of building, an art of
compromise which unites the beautiful with the practical, the ideal
with
the possible, the ephemeral with the concrete"1.
Footnotes:
1.
Rybczynski, Witold, "The Most Beautiful House in the World", Viking
Penguin,
1989, pg. 66
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