Theme: SIPHON

In the West, water runs uphill toward money.

-Richard Manning, Rewilding the West

Innocent, courageous, curious, the characters of Canadian literature have a longstanding reputation as victims: servants of colonialism, and explorers of an unruly nature. In her anthology, Survival, Margaret Atwood presents this underlying theme and poses Nature as a great Monster. She demonstrates time and again the monster’s fury, her weapons being rock, ice, and trees. But where in the story, does this leave the role of grass? It’s as if explorers reached the edge of the prairie and found the ample belly of the beast, naked and defenseless. Here, they thought, we can create order.

So they started carving straight lines running to the east and west, establishing order, and feeding the coasts. In some ways, they were playing the landscape’s own game, a game of motion, draining steadily to the east.

The uplift of the mountains created a gentle tilt of the old sea bed, a consistent slope of ten feet to the mile from the mountains all the way to the Mississippi. This tilt meant the plains would drain, but slowly.

Richard Manning suggests that our infrastructure was a continuation of motion, only now it was substantially sped up. Finally, the landscape was the victim. In Survival, Atwood presents some literary works that mark a critical shift in the perception of Nature from that of a monster, to one of a victim. Earle Birney’s poem, Transcontinental, tells the story of the Railroad through new eyes.

…behold this great green girl grown sick

with man                        sick with the likes of us?

Toes mottled long ago by soak of seaports

ankles rashed with stubble

belly papulous with stumps?…

…For certainly she is ill                her skin

is creased with our coming and going

and we trail in her face the dark breath of her dooming

On the Prairie, we are left to deal with her two sides, juggling her quiet malleability with her unpredictable rage. The “creases of our coming and going” were like canals, moving not only resources, but power. And with it, there is a steady drainage of people. Farmers, no longer able to compete with conglomerates, move on. The landscape continues to be siphoned.

This is a story not only of resource loss, but also the loss of a quality vital to place making, the unknown. As we build more sameness, and deplete or contain all rarities, we’re establishing a new emptiness. It becomes increasingly more difficult to lose oneself in the wildness of a place, as there is little left to be found.

More is known; there is less to know; we lose both what we know and what we don’t. It is certain that species are vanishing without ever having been known to science. To think about this is to imagine the space inside our heads expanding but the places outside shrinking, as though we were literally devouring them.

-Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Theme: EMPTINESS

It was so empty that two strangers could feel they had a common bond simply because they were encircled by the same horizon.

- Jonathan Raban, Bad Land: An American Romance

Emptiness is deemed as a space to be filled, like a parking spot, or a glass. Void of content, the space is charged with potential to be claimed, owned, and filled or altered. At the scale of geography, the North American Prairie was settled with emptiness at its core. But this was merely a cultural perception.

In his book, Place and Placelessness, E. Relph describes Geography as an awareness of the world relative to one’s intentions. He suggests that geographical space “is not indifferent space that can be arranged or dismissed, but always has meaning in terms of some human task or lived-experience.” In the eyes of farmers, ranchers, and founders of all kinds, the prairie was unequivocally empty.

Armed with telescope, compass, and chain, the surveyors set out on a cardinal trajectory to divide and package empty space. Each parcel held the promise of an empty glass in a well stocked bar, a vessel for whatever libation fueled your vision. Richard Manning proposes that the survey was one of the greatest acts of democracy his nation ever saw, and that it was a lie. “The land was assumed to be democratic.” They cast a perfect grid of square sections, 640 acres each, reckoned both equal and empty. It was an unprecedented structuring of Tabula Rasa. In its Latin origin, Tabula Rasa means ‘scraped tablet’. The space is not only empty, but erased.

Persistently malleable and unfixed, the prairie is unable to shake the habit of falling empty into the hungry eyes of yet another enterprise. Failed land passes from hand to hand, towns grow into cities without edges, drills dig deeper and broader. A blank slate or empty space is a magnet for the homo fabrican: Man the Maker. But as Joe Truett suggests in his book Grass: In Search of Human Habitat, there may also be a deeper genetic draw to empty spaces, a survival instinct. The short grass of the prairie provides good visibility, a habitat that “would have let us eat more and be eaten less.”

Consider now a shift in the perception of emptiness, from that of a void, to that of a thick substance, fluid, and unknown. In her book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit reads into the title of a photograph taken from a common phrase.

The ‘leap into the void’ is sometimes read as a Buddhist phrase about enlightenment, about embracing the emptiness that is not lack as it seems to westerners, but letting go of the finite and material, embracing limitlessness, transcendence, freedom, enlightenment.

Emptiness in both terms is the promise of potential. The question is whether it is experienced as exclusive or inclusive.

Theme: DRIFT

The power of the land moves, and those who derive their power from the    land must move with it.

-Richard Manning, Rewilding the West

I began to feel that the vastness, the bulk, the overwhelming power of the prairie is the same in its immensity as the sea – only the sea is changeless, and the plains, as I knew, were passing.

-John Noble (quoted in Bad Land: An American Romance, Jonathan Raban)

Bo was always restless, always chasing another dream. When the bars went dry he went north. When the snow flew and the crop failed he sought out shelter in town. And when disease struck the town, he ran Whiskey by the carload. As a character he was both pig-headedly stubborn, and frustratingly impulsive, changing course at every junction. Wallace Stegner wrote him to be much like the land he came from, somehow hard and soft at the same time. And as I read his story, reflecting on the accounts of places and people I’ve found, he is the embodiment of an unavoidable penchant to drift.

The Prairie sustains itself on an underlying current. Motion is the only constant. In Grassland, Richard Manning tells a story of a place that goes back to a time of Glaciation.

Always there were winds, enormous winds sweeping off the unobstructed plain of ice. Wind and cold stripped vegetation, leaving soil exposed, creating dust. This dust piled in dunes that became the foundation of grassland soils today, a wind-bred soil ready to run again at the slightest excuse of wind.

Grass rooted itself deeply in the landscape, building soil from dust. But always there is the idea of some shifting body below the surface. Manning describes the grassland in flux, expanding and contracting, its edges shifting in response to rainfall and fire.

            The place shifts both in this slow, unperceivable way, as well as suddenly, without warning. This landscape is unpredictable, temperamental like the sea. In its early written and charted history, it was neither land nor sea, ambiguously blending with the whiteness of the page. But even today it’s greatly misunderstood. No matter how we try, it cannot be harnessed. Nothing can be sacred when everything is changing.

Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be.

- Willa Cather, My Antonia, pp 7

From Near to Far

I want to introduce a cast of architects that shaped this landscape. They created and carved space from the scale of a single seedling, to a quilt of fields that drape an entire region. These architects were farmers, railroad tycoons, surveyors, explorers of all kinds. And they gathered a kit of tools for getting lost, and finding place. They erased the places they didn’t see or didn’t understand, and plotted new grounds for dwelling and uncovering the unknown. When I visit her this summer, I’ll ask my grandmother to stand on the front porch of the old house that looked across the road at their wheat field, and tell me the stories of all the things and places she knows, as far as the eye can see.

Space and Architecture reach from the scale of the intimate to that of the infinite, and all scales make up our perception of the world. An outsider in the prairies is engulfed by the weight of the unknown, while an insider is surrounded by all those things that compile their sense of place. They couldn’t possibly find themselves lost in this field of familiar landmarks.

Humans instinctually shift from exploration to dwelling, from near to far. To explore is to seek out the unknown, the “blue of distance” as Rebecca Solnit would call it. And to dwell is to pause in the realm of the unknown for long enough for it to become familiar. The dwelling creates our sense of place from which to then depart and search for new unknowns. Solnit presents the “Blue of Distance” as the thin band of color that falls on the horizon. You can never reach it because it always recedes into the distance. But arguably, its human nature to try.

The Prairies have seen a great many explorers seek out the blue of distance. Perhaps it’s the absolution of the horizon that defines its Genus Loci: the tension between staying and going.

It was so empty that two strangers could feel they had a common bond simply because they were encircled by the same horizon.

-Jonathan Raban

The Horizon is the boundary of this place, creating a sense of belonging for everything within it. Yet every boundary is also a passage, the place where you move from inside to outside. It’s a constant reminder of all that is still unknown. Whether you are a nomad or a drifter, the Prairie and its horizon are the epitome of the exchange between exploration and dwelling. This exchange is how we create place.

Lost In Place

Rebecca Solnit proposes that being lost is “a psychic state achievable through geography”. Humankind shares a desire to get lost, in order to escape, to find oneself, or to find a sense of belonging. Just as drudgery and devotion to place is embedded in our culture, longing for distance seems embedded in our nature. But being lost takes on a number of forms.

There is the desire to be lost for discovery. People hope to lose themselves in search of the new, of reinvention. They embrace the unknown. They shed one skin in order to don another. It’s the kind of being lost that children find in playing. It’s a kind of being lost that is vanishing with all that terrain labeled terra incognita.

I worry now that many people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know.

-Rebecca Solnit

Solnit suggests that our modern places and landscapes are suffocating our ability to get lost for discovery. Media, fences, networks, and design, are cutting off and disembodying the unknown. And as architects, we’re at the forefront of the problem. It would seem that a world caught up in design and communication has created a new sense of being lost.

We now find ourselves so often lost in longing. With so many opportunities available to us, at such costs that we can never obtain them, we are always in search of more. It’s a similar form of losing oneself, but now instead of seeking the unknown, we seek those things we know as distant. When shiploads of city dwellers packed up and left in search of more, they headed for the prairies. The railroad and the government promised ample opportunity, cutting no costs in spreading the word. The prairies were founded in the spirit of getting lost.

In this way, place making and a sense of getting lost, are intertwined. But there are two ways of being lost that create entirely opposite senses of place. The first is to be lost as in never knowing truly where you are. You are physically lost in place, attempting to recreate where you came from. You are detached from the here and present, from the inherent qualities of the landscape. Your sense of place emerges out of where you came from, and what you expect.

Or you could be lost because you’re absolutely immersed. You are, in this way, lost to the outside world like a set of keys, but entirely present wherever you are. Solnit quotes Walter Benjamin as he states that being lost is “to be fully present”. It might have been the captives who found this sense of being lost, or the farmers who wholly dedicated themselves to a new land and new life.

The Prairie Landscape, as in the introductory chapter titles of both Solnit’s “A Field Guide to Getting Lost” and Raban’s “Bad Land: An American Romance”, presents an “Open Door” through which to get lost. But some exploration might discover that much of the place created in being lost, was in longing and detachment, rather than discovery and immersion.

The qualities of place come from two paths, those inherent and those inscribed. The prairies are built on a strenuous convergence between the two. We find the cultural qualities, the longings and preconceptions that followed the founders, inscribed on the landscape. And those qualities that are embedded in the landscape can be read on the people themselves. They are the qualities that pass from one culture to another, revealing the unavoidable truths of the place.

The Lightness of Place

Nearly a hundred years after they were born, the accidental nature of their conception still haunts these towns. Their brick work has grown old, the advertisements painted on the sides of their buildings have faded pleasantly into antiques, yet they seem insufficiently attached to the earth on which they stand. Leave one in the morning, and by afternoon it might easily have drifted off to someplace else on the prairie. Such lightness is unsettling.

- Jonathan Raban, Bad Land

As towns were founded across the prairies like rest stops on a road trip, each town came into the world teetering unsteadily on its land. Someone, somewhere else, conceived of it, pinpointing it on a map and claiming it by name. The roots in these towns grow shallow and wide. They reach east to the eager emigrants leaving Europe, and west with the ambitions of the railroad. But at its center, the town lies as though the slightest gust of wind might have it wither and blow away.

This incredible lightness of place is both a Western and Modern phenomenon. So often have I felt detached from place, from the physical geography of place. In a globalized world where the architecture and culture of one place bleeds into that of another, place is becoming increasingly homogenous. Place hovers lightly over the landscape it’s built on. It is neither here nor there, but everywhere.

In the Prairies, the manufacturers, surveyors, and railroad officials exemplified this homogeneity with the systems they laid over the landscape. They painted the prairies with a lexicon of mass-made, pre-manufactured, and imported illusions that eroded from the harshness of the landscape.

In addition to the lightness of our insignificant being, the temporal nature of the prairie has rendered its places impermanent. They have seen the decay of their buildings and crops alike. Entire towns have washed up like shipwrecks on an unforgiving sea. Their ruins slowly dissolve into the grass. Amid a scattering of ghost towns, our presence takes on an entirely moral stature. It is one that’s unique to the new world, where place is founded with ideas rather than traditions, and is cast in loose soil, beneath a temperamental sky.

But in contrast, the lightness of place has caused an immense weight on the landscape. Our treads degrade much slower than we do. And they’ll shape the landscape for longer than we can perceive. This is the imperceptible weight of our lightness.

Over Terra Incognita

This is a story about Place Making. From a landscape that was once read as placeless, to a new kind of placelessness inscribed upon it, the Canadian Prairie is a region that inherently asks us, what is place, how is it created, and how to do we value it? There is a fine line between a sense of belonging and being lost, a possibility that they are one in the same, and a fear that we are losing our ability to sense either.                                                                                                                                    

These are the stories of a cast of architects, each with particular motives, and a complex web of forces that came together to create places where there were none before. In the act, they built a new kind of placelessness, no longer empty, but filled with ambiguity. In its relatively short written history, the Canadian Prairie is a microcosm of our placeless existence. It witnessed the mass movement of an expanding population, opening its doors as a “new” or “final frontier”. It is a place built entirely by people who came from elsewhere, carrying the weight of previous lives and expectations, and hoping to start anew. It’s a place built on the pursuit of opportunity, preceded by an image, and founded in a gamble.

This is a story that questions our modern paradigm of place, but looks with optimism upon the human spirit. It explores our ceaseless drive to create, to withstand hardship, and potentially to rediscover what we’ve lost.

Floodplain Dwelling

The Dwelling Design has become another cardboard moving box, questioning and packing up the pieces of home. Between the design of a mobile dwelling on a Unimog Frame, and a landscape space cast into the floodplain, we’ve been exploring those agents that tie people and architecture to place. In the truck, a sense of place is boundless, always available out the front window. Its also protected and carried with you, a cozy bunk in the back. On site, the place is part of the very riverbed it sits on. Its exposed to the flood and the ice, robust enough to withstand the forces, but malleable enough to capture an impression of passing seasons.

All the parts of home are divided into either those that you carry on your back, the necessities for survival, and those that you return to, unlock, and let spill out into open space. For us, there would be a cistern, a cellar, a library, and a fire pit waiting in the flood plain for our return. But the design of the space left behind could incorporate all those personal nooks and collections one stashes away and comes back to, like the obscure ashtrays my Grandfather collected even though he never smoked, or the miniature spoons my Grandmother hung on the wall and never used.

The two halves of the home then start to take two approaches to a minimal existence. The truck takes its cues from survival and efficiency. The home is tailored to the mechanics of the vehicle, and to the everyday parts of living, compacted. Its design attempts to carve out every available space for storage, and then to leave spaces one can tuck them self away in. On the other hand, the site is minimal in the sense of defining space. It does not use walls or roofs, but instead it uses topography to form space. Platforms and benches for lounging, eating, and bathing, are cast into the riverbed. Flooding can flow over and around them, pooling in basins and streaming through gutters. In this minimal palette of edges and platforms, space is able to grow.

 One pulls up with all their belongings in tow, opens up the watertight cells that keep their books or spoons, and inhabits the open space that becomes home.

Harvest Scales

From the scale of a single grain of wheat, and the way it propagates, to the scale of the human body, and the extent of it’s arm swing, to the scale of the machine, and the horsepower that pulls it, animal or manufactured. With each increasing scale, the swathe widens, and so too does the extent of the field. During Harvest, where time is a constant and limiting factor, the space that can be reaped is defined by the speed of the reaper. Collectively, a grid of farm fields creates a pattern of not only space, but of the imprint of time. 

Sources:

Barlow, Ronald Stokes. 300 Years of Farm Implements and Machinery. Iola, WI: Krause Publications, 2003.

Deere & Company. John Deere Agriculture. 2011. http://www.deere.com/en_US/ag/online_brochures/combines/combines_brochures.html (accessed March 8, 2011).

MacEwan, Grant. Power for Prairie Plows. Saskatoon, Saskatchewan: Western Producer Book Service, 1971.

Seeligman, Genetta. BitterSweet. Springfield-Greene County Library District. Spring 1974. <http://thelibrary.springfield.missouri.org/lochist/periodicals/bittersweet/sp74toc.htm> (accessed March 7, 2011).

Todd, S. Edwards. The American Wheat Culturist. New York, New York: Taintor Brothers & Co., 1868.

Thing: Cardboard Moving Box

My mother dropped a stack in the hall outside my room. It landed with an unremarkable thump. She carried in two boxes and assembled them on the floor in front of me. A papery dust wafted out as she folded the flaps, and tipped the hollow side up. She pressed open the top flaps along the crease, and uncapped a marker with her teeth. On one box, she wrote, “Lindsey’s Room” and on the other, “Lindsey’s for Storage”. She resealed the marker, and left a black garbage bag, explaining with sympathetic eyes, “This is for anything not worth keeping”. That was a precarious idea. Might there really be something not worth keeping? Every old stuffed animal, scrap of paper, or shard of broken toy was a part of my childish world, real or make-belief. When it retired from the realm of useful things, it found a new purpose in the hands of my imagination.

I pruned my belongings of anything I could part with: things that were replaceable, objects more valuable in memory than in substance, and things I was embarrassed of. Now I had to sort through the ‘keepers’. We were moving over seas for two years, and bringing only what we needed. We would leave the rest in storage until we returned. I began with the bookshelf. I needed my favorite nighttime stories: Grandma and the Pirates, The Snow Queen, and my collection of Roald Dhal and Robert Munsch. These would come with me. I wanted my sticker collection and book of Cat’s Cradle. These would be stored with my schoolbooks, neither wanted nor needed, but obligated to keep. I continued in this manner, weighing needs against wants, sifting through dolls, marionettes, pencils, puzzles, and other oddities. Each thing was carefully considered for how lonely it might be, abandoned in a warehouse, or for how lonely I might be without it. The boxes eagerly welcomed the objects, filling up far too fast. My Mother tackled the wardrobe, filtering out clothes that were too small, too big, or too itchy to wear.

The room was emptying as I rearranged the contents of the box, trying to squeeze out any extra space. Inside, everything looked shabby against the fresh cardboard. My things were foreign, just objects, stacked with the efficiency of a seven-year-old. My hands felt dirty, covered in a thin film shed from the box. Only a bed, bookshelves, and a little desk remained. They would all disappear when the moving truck arrived in the morning. Mom sealed the boxes with packing tape, and took the garbage bag down to the curb. I sat on the floor, my world shrunken from around me.

It would be several weeks before we saw the boxes again. They took the slow voyage by ship while we packed our suitcases and flew. For weeks we camped out in a furnished apartment, on loan. When we heard the ship was fast approaching, we moved. I slept in an empty room, in an empty house, on an overgrown lot. I got to know every ripple in the ceiling and every snag on the carpet. The whole house was ripe with potential, awaiting the sound of moving vans turning up the drive.

It was clear the boxes had taken the brunt. They were no longer new, but marked up, dented, and wilted from sea air. The movers carried them in, one after the next, stacking them in the living room. Excitement erupted in all of us as our handpicked world unfolded in an alien place. I found my box amongst the heap. Like all the others, it was branded with the mover’s stamp, and in finer print, the words, “Lindsey’s Room” were scrawled in the corner. I heaved open the flaps and let out a musty scent of home. My things lay there, untouched, against the weary cardboard. They looked brand new.

After the boxes had been lovingly unpacked and dismantled, we began to build. We built fortresses with watchtowers, hideouts quilted with pillaged blankets, and rocket ships embellished with triggers and controls. Those spared of our playful destruction, were stowed away for the trip back. Then I would be faced again with the tiresome task of re-evaluating my material world.

With every move my collection got smaller, my boxes more expertly packed. I tested ways of classifying possessions: by room, by association, purpose, material, or fragility. The cardboard box became a ritual in my life, a de-tox of sorts. Its rigid dimensions are a constantly nagging discipline. Every possession has been scrutinized for its ability to be packed into an 18” by 18” by 22” cube. Anything larger must be exceptionally sturdy, or easily dispensable.

Those boxes that are still intact, that have not been dismembered of flaps and sides, are folded flat. They’re stacked under the bed, collecting dust, awaiting another move. The cardboard box continues to keep my world small, and renders it mobile.

Place: Out the Window

Outside the window, there is an aging picture of a motley place. I’ve watched it passing, from the back seat of the car.

I’ve always felt safer behind the driver. So I took the left back window. Dad was in the driver’s seat. Mom played navigator from the passenger side, though she couldn’t read a map while moving. My brother sat in the right side back. And the dog, patrolling both windows, sat roughly in the middle. There was a battle over album choice. It was often resolved with the radio, until we’d lost the signal. Mom would call the time, even if we could have squeezed out another kilometer, before caving to Blue Rodeo. From then on, Mom glued herself to the volume control. My brother plunged into his Game Boy, resurfacing only for rest stops.

Outside the window, the road was lined in trees. Saplings were planted and relentlessly spaced in suburban fashion. They careened past the window with such forceful rhythm, I’d cover my eyes for fear of hitting them. Eventually they’d grow dense to form a wall. And behind them, another, then another, until they walked up the sides of the valley, and withered when hill turned to mountain. When dusk fell over the highway, Mom turned off the music and we’d sit in silence, watching for eyes in the trees. The dog, who had been enjoying the album, whined and pawed at my knee. The darkness made her anxious, as it did all of us. We knew too well that at dusk, the deer were unpredictable. By daylight, they stayed clear of the highway. They hid behind the trees, until the trees had burned to white, and you could see through them for miles.

Beyond the blackened pavement, and before the still burning flames, the valley was draped in a wiry coat of stumps. I wrapped a scarf around my nose and mouth, filtering out the putrid odor. Smoke had stifled the valley, and rangers led packs of summer travelers to safety. The trees looked as though they could crumble to ash, then blow away in a gust, and leave the landscape barren.

Where trees were few, one could be spotted from far. With its roots planted deep to withstand wind and drought, the tree stood proud. Like all objects erect along those prairie roads, the tree first appeared in miniature. It grew until it filled the window, and passed in an instant. It dwindled to a fleck in the rear view mirror. The car was getting hot. There was no shade to be found, and the road was unlikely to curve away from the sun. The dog was panting over my knee. I rolled down the window and we both let our heads hang out. The smell of warm canola wafted in from a yellow field. A yellow house stood in the middle. It must have been freshly painted, for it showed no signs of weather.

Each field passed by the window like a painting, in yellow, gold, brown, then green.

Green thickened into mounds that rolled along a gravel road. From the peak of a knoll, I could see the lane winding ahead. It sauntered over and around hills, curving to greet each quiet house. This place smelled like peat moss and Wriggley’s gum. Combined with the scent of new car, it makes me nauseous even now. But the dank air eventually gave way to rain, and I rolled up my window. Droplets clung to the glass, tumbling down towards the corner. As they picked up speed, they’d collide and merge into slower beads. They’d roll until they reached the edge and were swallowed by the frame. I could watch this slow race for hours, set against an emerald backdrop. This place was quaint.

Where lush green was torn open, there were sheets of solid limestone. Our van zipped across an abandoned seabed, void of plant life, and worn smooth from wind and rain. The rock was cracked in coral-like patterns, and the rain streamed through its crevasses. The plain reached out and sheared the coast, where it disappeared into a crash of waves. We turned up the music, and pressed on in the rain.

As the air turned cold, the raindrops turned to sleet, then snow. We were high above sea level. Some prehistoric force had sliced the rock, and heaved it up into the clouds. Then someone else had carved a road, so that we might dapple in sublimity, from the safety of our SUV. The road clung tight to shear faces, and our truck unwillingly followed. We were top heavy with gear, leaning on every bend. Even the dog sat still, for fear of throwing us off balance.

Out the right window, the cliff pressed its jagged face against the glass. A net hung between us, catching falling rock. To the left, the plateau dropped into a frozen stream. The ice was whittled by the same wind that cut the valley. It was splintered over uneven rock, and the shards were blanketed in snow.

The snow falls heavier in the prairies. It swirls around the car and cloaks our view. Dad is steering toward the shoulder, and we follow the rumble strip through whiteness. Mom is gripping the dashboard, and my Brother has tucked his cell phone into his pocket. The dog is sleeping in the middle seat. She shows no interest in the snow, or the sound of the pavement. Her eyes are droopy. Her hair is grey.

Time: Two Minutes of Choreographed Dance

His Mother kicked the soccer ball back to center field and scooped up the boy. Hurrying through the side door, she clenched her teeth as the hinge squealed. She tiptoed across the room. Even muffled in his Mother’s shoulder, the boy’s wailing competed with the music. His Mother side stepped into the kitchen, and sat him next to the sink. She wiped the grass stains from his shin as he whimpered pathetically. A girl was dancing in the room. She didn’t flinch. He watched her drift across the floor, one foot following the other in conversation: s l o w - s l o w - quick quick - s l o w - s l o w - quick quick, until she was ten long paces to the wall. She reached out with her fingertips, and brushed the wall, throwing herself back towards the center of the room.

She cherished that empty room. For an hour, until the others arrived, it was hers. With her bare toes, she’d sweep up the dust, and watch it hover in a stream of afternoon sun. She’d stretch out every movement, bouncing lightly from wall to wall, sweeping the entire floor. Pock marked from party banners and sign-up lists, there was no judgment in those walls. The music echoed from their corners, and reverberated in the floor.

Entirely consumed, the dancing girl took no notice of the watchful boy. Just a few measures into the piece, she had succumbed to the driving beat. She couldn’t read music, and she had no understanding of musical theory. She could not play an instrument. She blamed her double-jointed thumbs for her clumsiness at the piano, or her little finger for its weakness on the guitar.

But her feet knew the sound of a drum.

 They heard it at the half beat, and at double time. They diligently followed, in counts of eight. In one measure, they walked four paces to the right, until the knee re-nagged, wrenched the hips backwards, threw the torso off tilt, and peeled up the last standing foot until it was gripping desperately with its toes. There the body hovered at the end of the measure, until the next rushed in, and caught her falling torso on the first count. It would start again. You could say it was time experienced purely in the moment. But it passed so quickly, the moment was indecipherable. With every rehearsal, the moments fused into a chain.

She’d have an hour to rehearse a two-minute piece, precisely two minutes according to competition rules. There, even a strand of hair that floated out of the curtains, and into the judges view, would start the clock. But there were no such rules here. There were no stage lights exposing her vulnerability. And there was a different kind of quietness, a casual quietness. In these two minutes, she felt like she could escape. She hid away everything that weighed on her. But emotion seeped out. Joy quivered in the extremities of her fingers and toes. Sadness dripped from the weight of her limbs. Anger sharpened movement. The pressures of the day were not forgotten, but recycled. Surely every fumble, and likely any breakthrough, was brought on by an upsurge of emotion.

While the drama of her teenage life fed the dance, choreography burrowed its way into muscle memory. Time and space were malleable, choreography their sculptor. She could unwind a single pirouette to rotate one joint at a time, starting at the toe, and working its way up in a snake-like motion, bringing time to a halt. Or she could pin her foot, whip her head around sharply, and the body would follow unnoticed. She could stretch out the arc of a back bend, folding each vertebra over an invisible pocket of air. Then she’d collapse over, curl inwards, and hold the air in tight. Choreography pushed and pulled those two minutes, as if they were made of clay. She left every moment behind, knowing it disappeared the instant it occurred. And she reveled in unpredictability, colliding with each approaching step.

In these two minutes, she knew how it felt for time to pass. She understood it as a substance, one to be used up. The time before was meditative. She spent it calming her thoughts. After, her thoughts were blurred, her mind swollen with adrenaline. The pulse throbbing in her wrists deafened her. She paced across the room, waiting for it to come into focus. The little boy’s cleats scurried out the side door, and a cool draft carried in the sound of children on the field.

When she left the studio some hours later, she was satisfied with a well-spent Friday evening. She started to walk, one foot seamlessly following the other. She paid no attention to the time it took for an arm to swing front to back, or a foot to shift heel to toe. Time tucked itself away behind her, and followed her unnoticed.

On Place Names

Imagine the prairies, painted in a vibrant palette of names. Every name is an adjective that describes the place for what is really there, or what it actually is. It’s a hill, a waterhole, or a warning. It's an element in the landscape that deserves our attention. And the hundreds of names converge into a collective memory that is fast disappearing. In this painting, the landscape begins to resemble a sort of constellation. The names weave an image of a larger, more complex place.

Today, these names have been long forgotten from a cultural conscience. We’ve blanketed the vast reaches of prairie land under a single, homogeneous naming system. Under the survey, every 160 acres, or quarter-section, is given an equal weight. The landscape is no longer understood for its collection of natural elements, but instead for its ability to be smoothed into a constant purpose. We now value the landscape for acres, for section after section of unfaltering land that can be harvested with increasing efficiency. Protrusions and disruptions, though they unconsciously captivate our impression of a place, no longer define it.

Consider that names hold more than sentimental or ritual value. They form a deep collective understanding of the landscape. And by cloaking these names in a generic grid, we’ve made a profound inversion to our perception of the place.

Introduction to Biograph

A thing, a place, and a time, are three instances that each in their own way, contribute to one’s understanding of the world. In three distinct ways, they help define our ideas, our questions, and our perceptions of the world around us. A thing, or object, causes a point of revelation. It represents an idea that comes to us in the moment when one is faced with that object. It forms a physical substance from which all other ideas or objects are compared or understood. A place, instead, allows an idea to steep. It’s an immersion into one particular view of the world, an idea that surrounds you. Thirdly, time causes the unconscious development of ideas. Over time, perceptions grow and change without acknowledgment.

I have chosen three distinct instances that are not related to each other in time or location, but have each contributed in the above-mentioned ways, to my perceptions of space. While they represent three different interpretations and scales of space, together they form personal values and conditions that I consistently look to when inhabiting, designing, or dissecting a space.

A Thing: A cardboard moving box, a re-occurring object in my life.

A Place: The space outside the backseat window of the car, a place where so many personal insights and questions have been formed, a place for daydreaming.

A Time: The time inside two minutes of choreographed dance, either in class or on stage, a time of completely unconscious integrity and focus.

Ice Fishing Hut: Images

Ted Harrison, The Cremation of Sam McGee

Lac La Ronge, Saskatchewan

Ice Fishing Hut: Thoughts

The Ice Fishing Hut as a Manifesto came from a desire to build something essential in a place of isolation, exposure, and extreme cold. It’s a place to explore the absolute necessities of inhabitation. While it must be strong enough to stand up to harsh winds and freezing temperatures, it also needs to be delicate and light, stripped of anything beyond the essentials, able to move at the first sign of spring. And so it is also a temporary place, tied to the seasons.

The hut is sited on a small lake, no more than 300m wide, in central Saskatchewan. Clarence Lake is part of a provincial park, north of the prairies, but still within driving distance from the populated southern end of the province. The hut would be located at the lake year round, on ice by winter, and on shore by summer. Its on shore location would provide services to the hut, and act as a loading base for collecting supplies, food, and firewood, before the ice comes in. Through the design process, three key ideas came to the foreground. The first was a question of rootedness, the second was a distillation of essentials, and the third was a focus on shared ritual.

ON ROOTEDNESS:

It’s immediately apparent that an ice-fishing hut implies a temporal existence. It is an independent structure, light and portable, without foundations. Yet the hut is also fundamentally routed to its environment. In every way the hut depends on the place, and would not exist without it. Harsh site conditions create the need for a shelter, while also allowing the very program on which the hut is based. The hut relies on the ice as a foundation, and is connected to the water below as a means for survival and purpose. In every aspect of the design, the hut must respect the nature of its site, for its site is fragile and temporary. This became a key realization for me. The architecture here will remain in material, but the place itself is temporary. The ice will melt and move out, and the precise site, with all of its conditions from wind patterns to uninterrupted views of the sky, will disappear.

For me, the hut raised a question of how architecture can be rooted to a place. Rather than a notion of permanence, physical foundations buried deep in the earth below, the hut is tied to a cycle. Its roots are in its ability to move or change with the seasons. Its connection to the landscape is told by its design, and the experience from within the hut is based on a portal, a direct link to the ice below. 

ON FUNDAMENTALS:

An ice-fishing hut is designed from fundamentals, both in physics and in survival. At first it needs to meet all the physical needs of the site, respecting the properties of the ice, and tailored to mobile and fragile existence. In addition, it’s an ideal place to study the potentials of a minimal dwelling. It has only the weight and space capacity to include the absolute essentials. And its program is distilled to a singular ritual experience. It reduces the components of a dwelling beyond program or spatial assignment, to fundamental elements: heat, light, shelter, walking surface, working surface, and resting place. When the design is thought of in terms of elements rather than programmatic commodities, they can be combined and entangled to build up the experience of one shared ritual, while reducing the volume and complexity of the space itself.

ON RITUAL:

I began to think of a one-man band. An entire musical ensemble reduced to one man, well endowed with a range of instruments or sounds, precisely located around him for access and timing. He places each instrument in relation to both the body part that plays it, and the other sounds that accompany it. The hut must be designed the same way. Its lay out accommodates the rhythms of the inhabitants, and is condensed in such a way that every experience is central, and every element can be used in combination with another.

Ice Fishing Hut: Design

Sledge Design: A consideration of lightness, distribution of weight, surface area on which the hut touches down, and aerodynamics of the roof form.

The linear design is based on two parallel runners, with a structure building up from and across them. The roofline is developed from a mono-pitch that is low at the front end of the sled, and high at the bag (to reduce drag).

The section is developed from a central focus around two elements: the fishing hole, and the heat source. A topography of benches, counters, and bunks are built up, giving space between them and the cold of the ice below.

The final plan, with the entry off the end, one central fishing and dining space, and bunks above.

Monograph, The Harvest

The Monograph will consider the Harvest as a central theme and departure point for the study of rural culture and landscape. The research will take two directions that I hope will begin to overlap into a narrative structure, recounting past and present versions of the harvest. The first direction is technical, developing an understanding of farm machinery, terminology, growing technique, and weather patterns. It may also involve looking at the economic aspects of farming, and how it has become tied to the commercial economy.

            

The second direction is from a social or cultural standpoint. It will be comprised of individual voices re-counting their personal experiences around the harvest, both work and feast. These voices will include my own family members, grandparents and parents, as well as accounts in literature I’ve yet to find. The research may also look more generally at harvest festivals and rituals across the continent.

            

Finally, although the monograph will focus on the harvest event itself, the research should broaden itself to consider the context of the annual cycle, including the seasons that lead up to, and follow the harvest.