Archives: Recherches

Montreal is home to hundreds of housing cooperatives. Several of them were founded by activist and professional middle-class women to empower low-income women. This paper studies how the physical (architectural) designs of feminist housing cooperatives sought to empower women and how their design aspects have been received by the residents.

Part of a longer history of women’s organized efforts to improve cities in North America for women since the nineteenth century, starting with material feminists and suffrage and settlement house movements, Second-wave feminism led to competing and complementary perspectives on women, how they experience and use the built environment and how their experience can be improved. One strand advocated for integrating hitherto male-only spaces and institutions, and another for creating women-only spaces such as women’s libraries, women’s housing and women’s shelters (Spain, 2016). Feminist housing cooperatives fit the latter scheme.

This paper examines several cooperatively-owned and managed housing projects established in Montreal for women. Feminist housing activists recognized that women, and especially women-led single parent families, were at a disadvantage in both the labor market and in accessing affordable housing (Wekerle, 1980). Cooperative housing projects helped revitalize inner city neighborhoods by improving the building stock and existing community networks, and importantly without causing displacement. Feminists emphasized collective spaces and shared facilities that would support diversity, but, as this paper will show, such ambitions ran short of the CMHSC and other funding agencies’ goals of standardized units and the reality of meagre budgets. Even when afforded and realized, however, further problems emerged about participation and policing. By examining how these important experiments fared using oral history and cultural landscape analysis, this research will contribute to current discussions on housing activism and gender sensitive housing.

Ipek Tureli et Virginie Lasalle
research funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council, the Canada Research Chair in Architectures of Spatial Justice and the Canadian Foundation for Innovation 2018-

A true master of artificial and industrialized stone, “reinforced cement”, Pier Luigi Nervi (1891-1979) is certainly among the most influential structural engineers of the twentieth century. Nervi combined his humanistic approach to engineering with an exploratory method rooted in the working of material to determine a line of research and application of reinforced concrete and ferrocement in particular that would enable him to create a body of remarkable works both in terms of construction techniques and architectural forms. During his career, Nervi has participated in the realization of iconic buildings of twentieth century architecture such as the Palazzetto dello sport in Rome (1958), the Palazzo dello travail in Turin (1960) and the Pirelli Tower in Milan (1960). Another major achievement, directly related to Montréal, is the Place Victoria tower (1964) in the heart of the city, which he designed in collaboration with the architect Luigi Moretti.

This project around the work of Pier Luigi Nervi features several components: presentation of a travelling exhibition accompanied by a local component, a public lecture, a study day, and a visit accompanied by a lecture for the general public. The exhibition, entitled Pier Luigi Nervi. “The art and science of building” is a travelling version, lighter and adapted from the exhibition” Pier Luigi Nervi: Architecture as Challenge” presented for the first time in Brussels in 2010. This exhibition will be presented at the Centre de design de l’UQAM from September 20 to November 20, 2020. The local component of the exhibition will be prepared by professors from the UQAM School of Design and the School of Architecture of the Université de Montréal. This distinct and original content will provide an insight into Nervi’s contribution to the development of three interrelated construction practices: prefabrication, laboratory experimentation, and industrialization. Entitled “Nervi. Master Designer”, this part of the exhibition will be based on the documentation, analysis and model representation of a group of projects carried out by Nervi that testify to his atypical approach to design in the production of the built environment.

The travelling exhibition and its local component will serve as an anchor for the organization of reflection and broadcasting activities for various audiences: a public lecture on Nervi’s conceptual and constructive originality, a study day on the relationship between design and experimentation in Nervi and its legacy in the 21st century, a guided tour of Place Victoria in Montreal, and a lecture for the general public on an experience of working with Nervi.

Several sponsoring organizations have already confirmed their interest in being associated with this project: the Montreal Italian Cultural Institute, the Ordre des architectes du Québec, the Petra group, the Docomomo Québec organization, the Pomerleau Construction Industrial Chair associated with École Polytechnique Montréal, and the Canadian Precast and Prestressed Concrete Institute. The diversity of these partners is a clear indication of the unifying nature of this exhibition, reflection and dissemination project. Even several decades after the end of his career, Nervi remains an icon of modernity in architecture and continues to generate great interdisciplinary interest. The present project around Nervi’s work will allow us to frame its importance, to rediscover the lessons of his practice as a designer/builder, to broadcast these lessons to a large and transdisciplinary audience and to engage in fruitful discussions between all those involved in the project.

Carlo Carbone, Louise Pelletier, Bechara Helal and Réjean Legault
Exhibition and colloquium at Centre de design de l’UQAM funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (Connection Program), the Italian Cultural Institute and the Ordre des Architectes du Québec 2020-2021

Problematic
What do older Montrealers know about urban change? How can we use creative means to foreground this knowledge and experience, and share its value with broader publics and decision-makers? And, how can this knowledge be a guide towards a more sustainable, just, and inclusive city? La ville extraordinaire will support the creation of interdisciplinary pathways to gather and make public the extraordinary urban knowledge held by older Montrealers.

Contribution to knowledge
The four community groups with whom we are working are culturally, racially, linguistically, and politically diverse, and represent very different Montreal neighbourhoods. Our methodology conjoins oral history, community-engaged arts, urban scenography, data collection, and mapping as means to register, creatively respond to, and disseminate the distinct urban knowledge of these partners. Working with digital literacy tools, established and new mapping techniques, and creative, place-based methods, we will mobilize an intergenerational, intercultural, and interdisciplinary approach to our central research questions: what do older Montrealers know about urban change? how can we use creative means to foreground this knowledge, and share its value with broader publics and decision-makers? and how can this knowledge provide a multilingual guide towards a more sustainable, just, and inclusive city?
La ville extraordinaire will make productive links between older Montrealers’ knowledge of urban change, and public, arts-based outcomes. For us, cities are not simply landscapes of youth and unfettered mobility. In addition to serving as a strategic intervention into the escalating ageist discourse in Quebec, our partnership will take the stand that living memory and creative, public storytelling are powerful means to achieve collective engagement and social transformation.

Impact
La ville extraordinaire will gather and make public the extraordinary urban knowledge held by older Montrealers. Our partnership will implement oral history research-creation as our primary method, and we will exhibit our outcomes in 2023-24 at an important Montreal museum, Mémoire des Montréalais.es, who will help us to make this knowledge visible, audible, and palpable. Our goal of gathering and sharing elders’ knowledge of urban change is ultimately to galvanize more robust and inclusive dialogues about the urban future of Montreal, as an intergenerational, intercultural, and storied place.

Cynthia Hammond (PI), Shauna Janssen (Concordia University), Denis Bilodeau and Ursula Eickerand (Concordia University)
research funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (Partership Development Grant) 2020-2022

Problematic
This project aims to understand the built environment as the primary physical context of “restorative justice” and “transitional justice”. These alternative approaches to justice value truth, accountability, reparation, reconciliation, conflict resolution and democratic participation, and are increasingly being used in postcolonial and post-­conflict contexts. Despite the rise of alternative justice paradigms, rarely are the spaces of transitional and restorative justice purpose-­designed, much less studied in terms of their design. The objective of the proposed project is therefore to produce research and creation that will provide scholarly knowledge and practical service to alternative justice efforts in the specific domain of space. We propose to create practical, open ­access answers to our core question: how might design support and encourage non­traditional justice paradigms?

Contribution to knowledge
Our project will increase the accessibility, flow, and exchange of knowledge about the spaces of restorative and transitional justice. In Phases I and II of the project, we will gather secondary research, and upload to our open ­access website/database examples of spaces in which restorative and transitional justice are being practiced. Each item will be accompanied by a short text written by team members. These will explain the example and its significance within the broader scope of restorative and transitional justice design (what precisely is the space, where is it located, what purpose does it serve in terms of restorative and/or transitional justice, and what can be learned from the example). In this way, the project will provide a resource to both the scholarly community and to an international community of practitioners of non­traditional justice models seeking to learn more about the problems and precedents in this field.
Phases III and IV of the project are also designed to mobilize the knowledge that we will produce. The five design prototypes produced in Phase III will be added to our website/database, alongside (with
permission) interview excerpts from our interviewees. These additions will greatly increase the value and dissemination of the project to the public. In Phase IV, the final co­authored, peer-reviewed essay will elicit a broad­ sector readership across the fields of justice studies, restorative and transitional justice, and justice advocacy.

Impact
This project will benefit knowledge creation/intellectual outcomes by being the first scholarly research project, to our knowledge, to make a publicly-available survey of the spaces of restorative and transitional justice practices in different countries. Because it will address purpose-­designed as well as makeshift spaces, it will be of interest to historians of the built environment, and activists alike.

Cynthia Hammond (PI), Ipek Türeli et Luis Sotelo Castro (Concordia University),
recherche subventionnée par le Conseil de Recherche en Sciences Humaines du Canada (Programme développement Savoir) 2020-2022

At the intersection of architectural theory and cultural studies, this research investigates wood architecture as a symbolic universe that allows us to study the presence of nature in human culture. This research will theorize the diversity of expressions of quality in Canadian architecture, from the standpoint of environmental preoccupation, building culture and architectural expression. Considering wood architecture as a form of “cultural ecology”, it has the potential to reveal how Canadian cultures represent and symbolize their relations to the land and natural resources, as well as the cultures of its founding peoples.

Notwithstanding the interest in wood as a major alternative to fossil fuelbased construction materials, this research will highlight the symbolic spectrum of wood buildings, which ranges from local and indigenous traditions to ecological aesthetics, representing forms of making that rely both on traditional architectural practice or recent building technologies and computeraided design. We aim to better interpret and understand how advancements in architectural practice and building techniques affect the way architecture is envisioned and materialized in Canada during the past decades. In parallel to studying the influence of environmental considerations to architectural forms in Canada, we will make sense of a dissonance within the theory of architecture between ideas about the interdependency or autonomy of architectural form (visual appearance), material (what it is made of) and meaning (messages and ideals expressed). This investigation will also provide an empirical study of two theoretical standpoints in architectural theory, that have been presented by authors Kenneth Frampton (Columbia University) and Antoine Picon (Harvard University), who defend opposite views on materiality and digital culture. Considering a corpus of awarded designs centered on wood as a sustainable building material, this research will evaluate exemplary (awarded) Canadian architecture of public cultural buildings and its analytical acknowledgement as a cultural practice. Through a series of comparative analysis within an empirical corpus of 40 awarded projects from Ontario and Quebec, between 2003 and 2020,
our primary objectives and main research phases are:

Identification and illustration of cultural expressions in Canadian wood architecture
To obtain a thorough understanding of the variety of practices and cultures in Canadian wood architecture, we will document and analyze awarded wood buildings (through photographs, drawings, physical models, texts, etc). Second, we will study and identify the tensions between discourses about sustainability and architectural expression, allowing us to probe the place occupied by wood architecture as (1) a symbolic form of environmentalism, as (2) a strategy to engage with aesthetic perceptions, as (3) locus of a debate about traditional and digital cultures in architectural design, and as (4) a means for designers to encourage the vitality of local communities and industries.

Visualization and dissemination of research outcomes
The 40 projects studied will publish in an openaccess source, the Atlas of Excellence in Architecture, a documentation and research platform of Canadian awardwinning architecture. We will also submit scholarly work about Canadian wood architecture to a variety of peerreviewed and openaccess publications, as well as scholarly presentations in academic events. Further documentation will be gathered and organized for an exhibition of exemplary Canadian Wood Architecture.

Izabel Amaral (Laurentian University), Jean-Pierre Chupin and Carmela Cucuzzella,
research funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Insight Development Grants) 2020-2022

The research proposes to delineate the principles of a new skyscraper typology able to respond to the challenges of rising waters, both through an improved resiliency of the lower levels and potential adaptations of the upper floors for safety purposes and the collection of energy.

Objectives:
This research will explore ideas opening on a new category of skyscrapers through a more resilient adaptation of their lower and upper floors.
The initial and critical question is: How could traditional skyscrapers stand-up in case of main floods?
From this standpoint a series of questions can be formulated:
1 – what are the main design strategies that can be deployed by architects to transform the lower levels in case of submersion?
2 – How can the upper levels be rethought, in order to allow a temporary refuge for users?

Impacts:
From New York to Shanghai, coastal cities are at risk as sea levels rise and unpredictable storm surge. According to a well-known prognosis, by 2050 approximately 68% of the world’s population will live in urban areas (Revision of World Urbanization Prospects, 2018), implying the development of vertical structures. 90% of the world’s largest cities are located on waterfronts, but so far, most efforts they made to respond to climate change have focused on mitigation and much less on adaptation. (Depietri. McPhearson. 2017).
In recent years, issues related with water has received a great attention in the international community. The only response to a looming tragedy is to adopt a strategy immediately effective. (Dimensions of Sustainability, 1999.)
So far other strategies have been suggested in cities such as New York, through the addition of superstructures. For instance, the JDS Development Group has redesigned the roofs of residential buildings, unfortunately creating unexciting and unattractive types, limited to high- end residences, and which are not relevant for other types of high-rise structures.

Long-term benefits:
The research will contribute to the necessary debate on the rethinking of skyscraper design, and specifically to the adaptation of the systems to the effects of climate change. The research will open doors for a strategy of improved adaptability. It will also help envision the aesthetics of skyscrapers in an age of climate change, in which they might become active instruments in the resistance of cities to unprecedented threats.

Mandana Bafghinia, PhD candidate, scholar in charge
Supervisors: Jean-Pierre Chupin, PhD and Bechara Helal, PhD
Research Assistant: Conor DeSantis, Masters Student in Urban Studies

Research funded by the Council of Tall Building and Urban Habitat (CTBUH – student research award 2019),

Problematic

This research program will map and theorize a new type of environmental art practice in Canadian urban contexts, which has emerged over the past two decades. This new art form which has been developing a characteristic “explanatory discourse”, or rhetorical strategy within the public realm, crosses the disciplines of art, environmental design, and architecture. We provisionally name this art form the “eco-art installation”. This distinct mode of public installation does not only attempt to persuade the viewer of ecological priorities; rather, it is driven by the urgent need to explain, and thus constitutes an entirely new form of explanatory discourse that places, what we are calling “eco-lessons”, squarely in the public realm. We hold that these new artistic “devices” testify to a historic change in citizens’ relationship to over-whelming environmental issues in the past two decades. In the growing gap between collective awareness and individual engagement, artists have found new terrain as agents of public enlightenment.

Contribution to Knowledge
Despite the increasing number of eco-art installations, this category has yet to receive critical attention particularly in its complex conjoining of art, design, public space, and eco-lessons. We believe that the reason for this lack of attention lies, in part, in the fact that these works are inherently difficult to assess in traditional discipline-based methods: they draw from the fine arts disciplines, yet lay stress on a certain didacticism that late 20th and early 21st-century art discourses view with suspicion. These works are often deeply grounded in sustainable design, yet while they occupy space in many ways that invoke architecture, urban and landscape design, they are rarely confined within the expertise of these professions. The emergence of this art may be related to what the public perceives as the persistent failure of politicians to address the ecological crisis. Beyond the constitution of an online repertoire of representative Canadian eco-art installations, the main objective of this research is to document the conceptual strategies that are the vehicle for this new explanatory discourse in public eco-art, and to theorize the didactic nature of the resulting eco-lessons. It is our hypothesis that these new hybrid practices in the public realm are depositories of unexploited knowledge and point to potential solutions, encapsulating a particular stage of environmental awareness, while distancing themselves from the abstract ethos of their predecessors. How do these practices explore the conjoining of art, design, public space, and ecological concern with highly didactic strategies?

Impact
Along with a scientific monographic mapping, publications and communications, the results of this research, gathered in a bilingual online digital platform entitled the Canadian Map of Eco-Art, will respond to both scientific and educational aims, particularly as delineated by UNESCO, disseminating Canadian expertise in this field, by specifically displaying the didactic approaches and potentially scalable ideas. In a growing digital economy, this mapping will be an important source of documentation for students in all art and design fields, across Canada and around the world, as well as an innovative resource for institutional and commissioning agents. Citizens will become more familiar with important environmental debates and controversies and will be invited to take part in the conversation. Our analysis of eco-art installations should grant access to a deeper understanding of ongoing environmental issues and constitute a knowledge base for future generations.

<strong>Carmela Cucuzzella, Cynthia Hammond and Jean-Pierre Chupin</strong>
Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Insight grants) 2018 – 2022

This research-creation aims to explore the didactic potential of architecture in its relationship with the city through the study and design of places “in-between”. The issue of innovation in school architecture in the Canadian downtown of the 21st century is addressed in an exploration of the interfaces between school and city.

The spatiality of the in-between was studied by the architect Aldo van Eyck in the 1960s and by the theorist and teacher Bernard Tschumi since the early 1990s. Their writings and works are important references for our project. The places that connect the educational spaces and the city still constitute a grey area in current research on school architecture, which tends to focus on educational success with the aim of education, socialisation and qualification for employment rather than theorising the design of the places. We consider, however, that the experience of an architecture attentive to the quality of educational spaces and of the city can contribute to make young citizens aware of the quality of the built environment.

The design of schools and in-between places presents new challenges as functional and technical programs evolve slowly. These technical documents, which describe in qualitative and organizational terms the building projects and from which schools are designed, reproduce a model of a monofunctional building with an outdoor playground at ground level, although it has long since ceased to correspond to the land-related realities of city centres.

Paradoxically, many Canadian cities are short of elementary schools which play a key role in fostering urban development. This research/creation proposes an original mode of investigation based on the competition of ideas. In architecture, a competition of ideas does not necessarily lead to the construction of the winning project, its objective being to bring out innovative proposals and actively contribute to public debate.

In addition to being analyzed, the results of the pilot competition will be available online, in English and French, on the Canadian Competitions Catalogue site and will be the subject of a public exhibition at the UQAM Design Center. In doing so, this project also aims to contribute to the definition of research and creation in architecture and to a better understanding of the role of competitions in the renewal of the discipline and the profession. It will support the training of future researchers and future architects who will be introduced to research by working on issues that will require their contribution in the years to come.

The methodology of the project is based on a principle that we tested in a first SSHRC research-creation project that focused on social housing as a driver of transformation in Canadian and Montreal city centres : the creation component was also based on a competition involving master’s level students.

This new project aims to mobilize researchers from the disciplines of architecture, pedagogy, sociology, psychology, urban design and landscape to develop new pan-Canadian collaborations. Outside the research community, the project is expected to be of strong interest to school boards in major cities in Canada and internationally, as well as groups representing various stakeholders.

Anne Cormier, Jean-Pierre Chupin and Georges Adamczyk
research funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Insight Development Grant) 2018-2021