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Doctoral candidates: Adrienne Costa (UdeM), Mandana Bafghinia (UdeM), Sherif Goubran (Concordia) and Alessandra Mariani (UQAM) each receive a LEAP support grant in March 2017 thanks to our FRQSC infrastructure

A travel guide for those in search of architectural quality, this book can be browsed in many ways. Written in a clear and concise manner by about thirty authors, it features a collection of editorials from the Canadian Competitions Catalogue (CCC), a large online digital archive open to the public since 2006. The editorials explore more than sixty Canadian architecture competitions held in the last seventy years. Especially in recent years, both public and private institutions have organized competitions across Canada, producing hundreds of architectural, urban planning, and landscape design projects. Together these proposals, most of which remain unbuilt, constitute a fantastic treasure in our tangible and intangible common heritage. Given that competition organizers, designers, juries, and critics never operate alone, there is no doubt whatsoever that this book results from the collaboration of a myriad of people, contributing to and competing for excellence in architecture.

Directed by Carmela Cucuzzella and Alessandra Mariani

« Les fondements architecturaux et écologiques de l’Environmental Design aux États-Unis : 1953-1975 »

<p/p>Under the supervision of professor Louis Martin at UQAM, the thesis examines the nature of the intersection in between Environmental Design and the natural sciences, and its effects on architecture both as a discipline and as a profession in the 1960s’. The first chapter retraces the origins of the discipline of Environmental Design in the 1950s’ in the teachings of Serge Chermayeff at Harvard and in the College of Environmental Design in Berkeley created by William W. Wurster, and it gives an overview of its successive development, dissemination and gradual institutionalization throughout the United States in the 1960s’. The two following chapters are case studies of two landscape architects who have introduced ecology, biology and other natural sciences in their discourse during this last decade: Ian McHarg from the University of Pennsylvania and Lawrence Halprin from San Francisco. My thesis shows that, although McHarg and Halprin approaches ecology from two different points of view, the aim of the intersection with the natural sciences in the 1960s’ was to help formulate a new unified theories of design and sciences which gives the landscape architect the responsibility to both solve the environmental crisis through enlightened and inclusive design practices, and solve the internal problems of post-war American architecture through the dissemination, among the anglo-saxon architectural culture, of a new definition of architecture as «natural process» rather than «design object».

Launching of the new Cahiers de recherche du LEAP Research Notebooks (Du potentiel des grandes structures urbaines abandonnées / On the Potential of Abandoned Large Urban Structures) with heads of schools represented at LEAP. April 5th, 2017, AME room 1150, 18h00.

Abandoned building, modern ruin, urban ghost, skeleton property, deserted structure … these are some of the words used in an attempt to circumscribe the phenomenon of abandoned city fragments. This abandonment, whether partial or total, temporary or long-term, is examined through the “potential” that the survival of these structures would offer. This first edition of the LEAP Research Notebooks gathers 12 case studies, each structured around a common theme in the disciplines of architecture, art history, and semiotics. From Montreal to Berlin, from Detroit to Turin, the various contributions are structured around four tensions calling into question the status of these structures (monumental / monument), their scale (architectural / city planning), the figures they materialize (utopia / ruin) and the poetics they embody (resistance / potential).

As revealed by the authors, these large abandoned urban structures are far from being inert. Not only are they vectors of a collective memory, of potential projects, of multiple imaginations, but they also act as a trigger for a critical re-evaluation of our contemporary societies. Therefore, the large abandoned structure cannot be restricted to the fields of economy or land planning: such complex interweaving of material, technical, social and cultural dimensions calls for architects to reflect on its survival.Issue coordinated by Jean-Pierre Chupin and Tiphaine Abenia

• Texts by : Tiphaine Abenia, Georges Adamczyk, Denis Bilodeau, Pierre Boudon, Jean-Pierre Chupin, Jean-Louis Cohen, Anne Cormier, Camille Crossman, Carmela Cucuzzella, Louis Destombes, Cynthia Hammond, Bechara Helal, Jonathan Lachance, Alessandra Mariani, Louis Martin, Marie-Saskia Monsaingeon, Michel Max Raynaud, Nicholas Roquet, David Theodore