Cet article propose un voyage à travers l’imaginaire des haltes routières québécoises. Chronotope de l’espace-temps territorial, la halte routière permet d’en saisir les dynamiques contextuelles, aussi bien culturelles, politiques, économiques que symboliques. Dix arrêts sur image d’un périple fait en 2021 couvrant le réseau gouvernemental complet sont présentés. Un imaginaire multiple se compose au fil des images hétérochroniques et hétérotopiques que ces architectures dessinent et fixent au paysage.

In This Is What We Do: A Muf Manual, the partners of the firm muf architecture/art wrote that ‘paradoxically, in order to make the thing the collaboration has to be about the making of the relationship rather than the object.’1 This article takes this assertion as its basis and examines the implications of treating the individual and collective relationships that structure an architectural project – which I will refer to as the project’s relational field – as a site that can be manipulated in order to affect both production and outcome. This is achieved through the transposition of concepts from Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on creative activity, art, literature, and language to design using a case study of muf’s Barking Town Square project in London (2004–10).

Public space is neither a fixed thing, nor a stable concept. This paper applies the term ‘dialogue’ as a conceptual basis for the idea of public space as something that changes according to multiscalar and overlapping contexts, with use and discourse. The concept of dialogue is developed from the dialogism of Mikhail Bakhtin whose related notions of ambivalence, polyphony, heteroglossia, carnival and chronotope are used to support a dialogical understanding of public space. The paper develops this understanding by creating a parallel between Bakhtin’s dialogism and the Barking Town Square by muf architecture/art (2004-2010). Through this parallel reading, the paper suggests that design proposals for the public realm are valued propositions that suggest a particular transformation of aesthetic, ethical, social and political relations through the ordering and transformation of spatial relations. No design, no conception, and therefore no dialogue creating public space can be neutral — but inevitably takes place within a fraught dialogical context inseparable from individual positioning and responsibility. The question of boundary maintenance thus arises inevitably, and the paper examines a range of such problematic demarcations, including between public and private, typologies and flexible criteria, immediate and social contexts, and ideals and reality. Given dialogue’s condition of ambivalence and incompleteness, the paper argues that the inherent contradictions to the concept of ‘public space’ are its very conditions for existence.