A section through the scarred Vermont landscape in the Rock of Ages #13
Journeys, the latest exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), is a modern-day matryoshka doll. It is a research project, a show, a book and an ongoing online exhibition. And it is a wonderful process of unravelling.
As the title explains, the exhibition is about the movement of people, ideas, buildings and fruit, and how this has made an impact on our environment. Though the notion of borders and national identity is immensely topical, it is a political minefield. However, this show approaches the subject from a different perspective. Instead of measuring the merits of migration, it denotes its effects and its drivers. Though it touches on immigration, the exhibition and accompanying book are not limited to human migration, nor are they tethered to a discussion about open borders and globalisation. Rather, through the use of storytelling they offer a comprehensive and alternative way into the conversation about the effects of movement.
Each story is divided into themes in the exhibition and illustrates a different aspect of change through different agencies. In the case of the higgledy-piggledy residential communities of Newfoundland, Canada, it was government-enforced relocation that saw fishing communities, previously isolated along the coastline, moved into areas that could be serviced by an existing infrastructure. Residents had to drag their houses – literally – across land and sea to new villages. The epic journey was made possible only because of the residents’ foundation-less houses, designed to be moved according to fishing patterns.
The exhibition’s wide-reaching spectrum also takes in the effect of changes that occurred without an external human agency. The buoyant husk of a coconut has allowed it to travel below the commercial radar to re-seed unregulated areas and has, because of currents and weather patterns, changed the economy, image and appeal of its host shores. Indeed, one aim of the show is to highlight the fallibility of human agencies. What might have been intended by one action can have myriad unforeseen results.
Under the theme Interpretation, for example, OMA’s 1986 proposal for the Bijlmermeer estate in Amsterdam highlights the convergence of different ideologies and aspirations. Siegfried Nassuth’s new addition to the city was envisioned as an application of modernist principles of air, traffic separation and equal opportunities for its residents. The ideals did not hold up in the face of poorly managed services: residents were isolated and the buildings neglected. Following the influx of Surinamese immigrants to the Netherlands in 1975, the vacancies in the Bijlmermeer offered long-term housing for them and other minority groups. Though communities interpreted and appropriated the modern spaces to their own means, the lack of facilities and increase in poverty and crime made Bijlmermeer an image of urban planning defeat. OMA’s plan was never carried out, though it remains one of many positive responses by designers to a problem common to modernist, social housing around the world.
Journeys through time in Ireland with 'Two houses, one traditional, one modern'
By analysing the architectural issues raised by increased global mobility, the curator Giovanna Borasi offers a new lens through which to understand change. It is one that shows cause and effect as being far from linear.
Along with the exchange of ideas and experience, it is often economy that affects and is effected by movement. In the 1950s Japanese farmers who emigrated to Bolivia were unsuccessful in employing traditional Bolivian farming techniques. So they experimented with methods and crops alien to South America and those farmlands are now the centre of agrarian commerce for the country. In Liberia it was social status that created a new landscape. When freed slaves in the American south settled in Liberia, they took with them the image of prosperity and built houses in the style of their previous owners. In America, raised verandas and pitched roofs were considered fit only for the wealthy, so in Liberia the style became a ladder for social mobility.
While other themes use a variety of material to tell the story, Max Belcher’s beautiful black and white photographs mirroring the similarities between the two continents is powerful. In stark contrast are the huge colour photos by Edward Burtynsky of the Barre quarries, which envelop a huge area of Vermont, USA. The population’s skills – imported from turn of the 20th-century Italy – and the density of expertise determined the growth of this small town as a national centre of memorial sculpture.
Designed with Brooklyn-based artist Martin Beck, the show draws on commonalities and tensions between themes using contrasting and complementary media and colour coding. The levels of complexity of such a wide topic as migration have been carefully mapped and the result is comprehensive and undictatorial.
Journeys: How Travelling Fruit, Ideas and Buildings Rearrange Our Environment, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal – until March 13th
