The Ambience of Matter:
Architecture has turned to focus more closely on the properties of matter, which are often dynamic, changeable and difficult to fix as an image. This has led designers and researchers to open up the black box of architectural materials, in order to understand their underlying physical characteristics, their toxicity or carbon and energy footprints, as well as the social and cultural forces that underlie their production and which accrue to them through use. Even materials that have traditionally appeared incidental to architecture – such as the air, or the waves that pass through it – have also appeared at the centre of architectural investigations.
Moderator: Anne Bordeleau – University of Waterloo
Alessandra Ponte – Université de Montreal
Bio:
Alessandra Ponte is Full professor at the École d’architecture, Université de Montréal. For the last eight years she has been responsible for the Phyllis Lambert International Seminar, annual events addressing current topics in landscape and architecture. She curated the exhibition Total Environment: Montreal 1965-1975 (Canadian Center for Architecture, Montreal, 2009) and collaborated to the exhibition and catalogue God & Co: François Dallegret Beyond the Bubble (with Laurent Stalder and Thomas Weaver, London: Architectural Association Publications, 2011). She has recently published a collection of essays on North American landscapes titled The House of Light and Entropy (London: AA Publications, 2014) and for the last three years she has been a member of the research group Future North a project initiated by department of landscape and urbanism of AHO (Oslo) in collaboration with the Barents Institute.
Abstract:
In the canonic 1942 text “Milieu and Ambiance: An Essay in Historical Semantic”, Leo Spitzer argued that the history of the word ambiance cannot be separated from that of medium or milieu. In fact, dictionaries presently propose as synonymous for ambient and ambiance the terms milieu or environment. After the Latin ambiēns, ambience, like ambient, follow the present participle of ambīre, tosurround, from amb-, ambi-, meaning around. The Italian, ambiente and the Spanish medio ambiente, derived from the same root, can be translated in English as milieu or environment. The paper will address the multiple meanings and understandings of these terms insisting on our present obligation to design (and re-design) milieus, environments, atmospheres, and ambiances.
Jane Hutton – Harvard University
Bio:
Jane Hutton is a landscape architect and Assistant Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She is Co-Director of the Energy and Environments Master of Design Studies concentration and faculty liaison to the Loeb Library Materials Collection. Her work focuses on the extended relationships of material practice in landscape architecture, looking at links between the landscapes of production and consumption of common construction materials. Hutton is a founding editor of the journal Scapegoat: Architecture, Landscape, Political Economy, and is co-editor of Issues: 01 Service, 02Materialism, and 06 Mexico D.F./NAFTA.
Abstract: Inexhaustible Earth: tracking guano flow from an island to a park.
A spectrum of urban wastes and imported fertilizers improved the soil of Central Park’s meadows and produced the verdant pastoral affect that its designers had envisioned. These materials indexed the shifting metabolism of late-nineteenth-century New York; more intensive farming required more intensive nutrient inputs, and nutrient cycles expanded from the scale of the farm to the urban region to South America (in the case of Peruvian guano). This paper traces the movement of guano from the Peruvian Chinchas Islands to New York City and is part of a larger project which brings into focus the otherwise externalized landscapes, people, and other species involved in the making of landscape architecture.
Charles Stankievech – University of Toronto
Bio:
Born 1978, Canada. Lives and Works in Berlin, Germany / Toronto, Canada. Charles Stankievech’s diverse body of work has been shown internationally at institutions including the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal; and the Venice and SITE Santa Fe Biennales, among others. He’s lectured at dOCUMENTA (13) and the 8th Berlin Biennale. He is an editor of Afterall Journal and co-Director of K. Verlag in Berlin. A founding faculty member of the Yukon School of Visual Arts in Dawson City, he is currently Director of Visual Studies in the Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design at the University of Toronto.
Abstract: Magnetic Anomalies in the Arctic: Colonial Resource Extraction, Meteoric Cults, and the Rare Earth Age
By examining the Canadian Arctic, one can trace a complete phylogenesis of metallurgy, starting with the nomadic smiths of the Inuit gleaning meteoric iron for weapons and domestic use, through the birth of cybernetics and networked warfare in the Cold War’s Distant Early Warning Line, to the speculative market of Rare Earth Elements in the twenty-first century.
Respondent: Dereck Revington – University of Waterloo