Monday Schedule

We'll all pin up by 13h15 in the two crit rooms on the first floor. You should put everything on the wall and in front of reviewers that you think helps build the project narrative. We'll go through from 13h15 until 13h30 getting the wall looking good. Here is what was sent to the potential reviewers:

CoA@TTU Montréal Summer Studio 2009

PROJECT REVIEW
Monday 27 July 2009 at 13h00
McGill SoA First Floor Crit Rooms

PROJECT STATEMENT
Urban Centre
at Place d'Youville, Montréal

How else dispose of an immortal force
No longer needed? Staunch it at its source
With cinder loads dumped down? The brook was thrown
Deep in a sewer dungeon under stone
In fetid darkness still to live and run –
And all for nothing it had ever done
Except forget to go in fear perhaps.
No one would know except for ancient maps
That such a brook ran water. But I wonder
If from its being kept forever under,
The thoughts may not have risen that so keep
This new-built city from both work and sleep.

excerpt from “A Brook in the City” by Robert Frost, 1924

Place d'Youville sits on the former Little St-Pierre River waterfront edge of the old city. It is akin to Canal Street in New York- once a brook, then a canal, then a sewer, then paved over. The studio site is a through block hole in the northern edge of the Place. Under the place in front of the site lies the ancient sewer that will tie the project to the Archaeology museum at the other end of the sewer. Under the site lies the foundations of the former city wall. The Parliament of Canada once sat ablaze in a riot in the Place. On the south side of the place, outside the old city, sits the Grey Nun's Hospital, the generator of the skewed secondary grid in the city's fabric.

The project program is generically speaking an Urban Centre. The studio, whose focus is urbanism, is the last in a sequence that starts with representation and moves through form, program, structure, and envelope before getting here. Each student, through a careful reading of the site and its surroundings in highly contextualist terms, has come to a particular position on how the building and the city will meet and how the project is shaped and will shape event structures in the city.