Curatorial Editorial
Recently, in my capacity as curator at the Design Exchange, I was invited to give lectures at the University of Lethbridge and the University of Manitoba’s School of Architecture. In each case, my hosts gave me a wide berth in terms of my subject matter. I was, of course, expected to talk about Canadian design but I was quite free to do whatever I thought best. In terms of my visit to Lethbridge, I was asked to lecture in a popular course titled “Art and Design Now.” Under the direction of Professor Victoria Baster, this course has the distinction not only of being run as a visiting lecture series, but one constituting an ongoing exploration of contemporary cultural practice and production in Canada. Indeed, the students registered in the class, as well as the many others people in the auditorium who come from the university and the wider Lethbridge community are given the quite remarkable opportunity of listening weekly to another lecturer of some cultural distinction and then having the opportunity to ask questions. As such, Professor Baster and her colleague Patricia Horrocks have established a pedagogical model that turns on the premise that students will be enriched by hearing the thoughts of leading Canadian artists, designers and theorists. And the list of guest lecturers is impressive: painter Guido Molinari, designers Andrew Jones and Patty Johnson, curator and author Rachel Gotlieb and so on. And that the lectures are videotaped means that the University of Lethbridge holds an invaluable archive of artistic and creative commentary. And when it came time for me to speak, I chose to talk about how a scholar might go about theorizing Canadian design – historical and contemporary – and how if one is accepting of the fact that artifacts and designed objects constitute social texts that can be read, then any desire to speak about the material history of Canada needs some analytical framework.
At the University of Manitoba – long-esteemed as one of the country’s premier schools for the study architecture and interior design – my lecture was part of an ongoing series about design. Again, I took the opportunity of speaking to the assembled students and faculty about trying to make sense of the meanings of Canadian design and the oft-asked question of Canadian identity. Now, I have to say that in my work at the Design Exchange and in my work as a material historian, I frequently consider questions about Canadian design identity. While always a complicated topic, it seems safe to say that no nation has ever been characterized by a stylistically monolithic material culture. Rather, social organization will always mean that one stylistic or expressive mode may dominate and find official or widespread popular sanction, but at the same time there will be other trends and patterns. And in all cases these diverse physical articulations of moral value, ideological stance, class bias and aesthetic preference are indelibly representative of the complex and always contested societies that produced them. Add to this the ways that history and commerce can and will effect the material culture of any place participating in the world, then the search for a national design idiom as a means to understanding identity becomes a challenge, both quixotic and unsettling.
Now that I was given the opportunity to explore these questions at the University of Lethbridge and the University of Manitoba is worth another few moments of reflection, especially given the capacity of architecture and design to represent ideas and values. I say this because the physical sites of my lectures – Arthur Erickson’s magisterial university of 1969-1972 nestled in the rolling coulees of southwestern Alberta and the University of Manitoba School of Architecture’s John A. Russell Building – represent rather different studies in the ways that important architecture can fare.
On the one hand, the University of Manitoba recently undertook a painstaking renovation of Smith, Carter and Katelnikoff’s 1959 School of Architecture, a building that with its aluminum curtain wall and tree courtyard proclaimed Winnipeg to be a progressive, modern and daring place. On the other hand, and constituting a very different approach to the need to respect design and architectural authorship, the University of Lethbridge, has slowly, deliberately and irrevocably moved away from the master plan of architect Arthur Erickson. Here, what began as a quite remarkable project of bringing a university to southern Alberta and enlisting an internationally important architect to design the university, has devolved or degrade into a situation where the integrity of the original structure and proposed spatial arrangements of the campus have been terribly compromised.
In the case of the Russell Building, the renovation was led by the Winnipeg firm of LM Architectural Group and included the complete replacement of the curtain wall (the first in Western Canada) and the refurbishment of certain other structural elements. Determined to restore the building and to maintain its aesthetic integrity, the University undertook this 4 million dollar project because it recognized the significance of a landmark but imperiled structure. In October 2006, resplendent after the three year long project, the Russell building was rededicated, an event that appropriately coincided with the opening of the Winnipeg Art Gallery’s exhibition on Manitoba Modernist Architecture, 1945-1975 by curators Herb Enns and Serena Keshavjee. In Winnipeg and at the University of Manitoba, it might be fare to say that the future of architecture is one rightly tied to the careful stewardship of historic structures that said much about Canada and its determination in the optimistic decades after World War II to be a modern country.
In Lethbridge, or more particularly at the University, the utopianism that saw Erickson get the commission to design the new university has been replaced by what might be described most accurately as changed values and pragmatic realities. Indeed, Erickson’s University of Lethbridge, represented the architect’s desire – need -- to explore further his idea of a unified and monumental structure housing the diverse peoples and programs that constitute a university. Having begun this critical investigation with his and Geoffrey Massey’s wining entry for the master plan and design of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, Erickson approached the project in Lethbridge with an idea of long, seemingly narrow and multistoried single volume running across the undulating landscape. The plan, as early drawings and models show, called for a second like structure to be built parallel to the first but slightly advanced in the landscape thereby projecting a type of partial zig-zag pattern on the land. Bridged together and anchoring other conical-shaped university buildings resting on the hilltops of the Oldman River valley, Erickson’s vision was singular and poetic. As he wrote in his 1969 plan “Forms must be simple and geometrically concise, as elaborate forms and fussy detail show as weakness. As the geometry of the section measures out the landscape, one must work with an equally clear geometry or appear indecisive. Just as the prairie landscape has been reduced to essentials, so must its buildings be elemental."
And to this day, the Erickson powerful buildings reveal this singular and remarkable creative thinking. Erickson’s university plan and his Lethbridge buildings are extraordinary and yet because of the conceptual originality and comprehensiveness of the design – any deviation away from the original plan would unavoidably result in a type of broken vision, a metaphor of sorts for the shift of modernity and its penchant for master narratives and master plans to take a more post modern approach of the incremental and oft-insignificant feel-good, head-in-the-sand answer to a problem. For not unexpectedly, the University of Lethbridge grew and so in turn, the administration approved the construction of other structures often and usually without consulting Erickson. The result is now a university that has taken on more of a look of the type of eclectic college campuses of older institutions that started small and grew into complex collections of buildings. The result, perhaps not surprisingly, is difficult to assess. Certainly the spatial order of Erickson’s proposed campus has been truly sundered and the architect’s work, despite retaining its deep power and its capacity to awe – has been, without question, compromised. And such, given the need for a nation to have and to hold its masterpieces in appropriate regard, the example of the University of Lethbridge – arguably one of Erickson’s most important buildings – is a conundrum of considerable aesthetic artistic and practical complexity.