04 Framework
The Roadshow is born from an inability to define, a rethinking of the conception of a singular “Canadian Architecture” in the face of the profound diversity that has characterized our contemporary lives. The show seeks to explore a moment in Canadian architecture (has it already past?) by collapsing the vast distances that separate us and through this manifest an instant of shared consciousness.
The framework for The Roadshow is conceived as a conceptual bridge between exceptional, contemporary Canadian architectural exploration and topics that are defining current domestic and international architectural debate. The work of Rosalind Krauss and Anthony Vidler, who articulated the notion of an “Expanded Field” within the realms of sculpture and architecture respectively, serves to inform the underlying conceptual framework for The Roadshow. Here, the theoretical dualism of meaning (form and function) commences this framework - and also introduces the idea of the relevantly expanded field to address complexities in today’s milue for cultural production.
This thematic re-conceptualization takes inspiration from Krauss’s ground-breaking essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” which strove more than three decades ago to reposition post-war sculptural production within a wider realm. Here there is an understanding that in “the situation of postmodernism, practice is not defined in relation to a given medium - sculpture - but rather in relation to the logical operations on a set of cultural terms.”1 For Krauss, what would be thought of as traditional sculpture in the post-war era was defined by its oppositional relationship to landscape and architecture. From this there is a logical series of combinations between these two themes (architecture-not architecture, landscape-not landscape) that greatly expand one’s conception of sculptural production and its possibilities.
This notion of an “Expanded Field” is taken-up in explicitly architectural terms through Vidlers essay “Architecture’s Expanded Field.” Here the concept is used as a tool to examine specific themes within contemporary practice and how they address the historic dualism between form and function. In this respect Vidler interprets all of the attempts to define the “essence” of architecture since the Enlightenment as “struggles to reduce this dualism to a singularity.”2 For him, in the last decade, three new unifying principles have emerged as the most dominant: ideas of landscape, biological analogies, and new concepts of program. In this respect these themes “seem to go beyond singular concepts in order to frame a new field of action for architecture that subsumes form and function into a matrix of information and animation.”3
Where Vidler does a strong job defining key thematic strands in contemporary architecture, he leaves it to Krauss to suggest the idea of diagramming the “relationships among the various disciplines that constitute the new expanded field of architecture.”4 Without this conception one is in danger of missing half the story, of focusing on the figure at the expense of the field claimed by such new theoretical realignments. Recently, a number of modes of practice have begun to exploit such space. This is reflected in forms of practice such as Urban Ecology, Landscape Urbanism and Parametric Design that position themselves at the intersection of a number of overlapping themes to propose novel approaches to the way we think and act as designers.
The Roadshow is an effort to explore and map an expanded field of contemporary Canadian architecture. As a point of departure, we ask each participant to think about the central themes that define their practice and specifically within work they choose to present. How can such innovation allow one to (re)examine the historical dualism between form and function in relation to the creation of meaning and intentionality in more inclusive and complex terms? How has new formal and programmatic inspiration been found in a host of disciplines and technologies from landscape design to digital animation? We acknowledge that these themes are not inherently ‘Canadian,’ but their translation into practice can be viewed through the lens of country or nation state. As Alan Colquhoun notes, “It is precisely because the ingredients of contemporary architecture are so similar all over the ‘developed’ world that slight differences of interpretation to which they are subjected in different countries are so interesting.”5
As The Roadshow unfolds the hope is that these presentations will facilitate an exploration of points of confluence and difference between these themes that the participants outline and through this process map the cultural landscape that composes Canadian Architecture’s Expanded Field.
1. Krauss, Rosalind. “Sculpture in the Expanded Field.” October, Vol. 8 (spring, 1979): 30-44.
2. Vidler, Anthony. “Architecture’s Expanded Field.” Artforum (April 2004): 142-147.
3. Vidler, Anthony. “Architecture’s Expanded Field.” Artforum (April 2004): 142-147.
4. Krauss, Rosalind. “Sculpture in the Expanded Field.” October, Vol. 8 (spring, 1979): 30-44.
5. Gruft, Andrew ed. “Restructuring the Discussion on Contemporary Architecture.” Substance Over Spectacle. Arsenal Pulp Press, Vancouver (April 2005): 175-182.
