Archinect - News

Toyo Ito donates early-career archive to the Canadian Centre for Architecture

2023-12-06T17:21:00-05:00

The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) has just announced its acquisition of architect Toyo Ito’s early-career archive.

The trove entails drawings, models, and sketches related to his practice Toyo Ito & Associates, Architects (founded as Urban Robot) from 1971 until 1989. The CCA says the donation will help researchers establish a better through line from the 2013 Pritzker Prize winner's early-career work in dialogue with its other archival holdings. The decision was made in September after 82-year-old Ito apparently determined he could not find an “appropriate place” in his home country in which to store the collection, according to The Yomiuri Shimbun.

In a press announcement, Ito said: “The CCA is an architectural museum and research center I have the utmost trust in. Upon this donation, I received requests from many Japanese architects and researchers, asking if it is possible to keep those archives in Japan. However, I have the confidence that CCA offers unparalleled ac...

Curator Giovanna Borasi picked to lead the Canadian Centre for Architecture

2019-09-11T20:15:00-04:00

A change in leadership is taking place at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal, where the current chief curator, Giovanna Borasi, has been tapped to take over the institution as long-time director Mirko Zardini steps aside.

Zardini has led CCA for over 14 years and is responsible for the organization's enhanced international reputation, as well as its evolving approach to conveying architectural concepts and issues. Borsai, speaking with The Globe and Mail, said, "Our specialty is to take a broad societal issue, and bring it into a dialogue with architecture.”

After nearly 15 years of disruptive provocation, Mirko Zardini will step down as our Director this December. Today, we are thrilled to announce that Giovanna Borasi, Chief Curator since 2014, will take over the role in January 2020. pic.twitter.com/anJMjUo397
— CCA (@ccawire) September 11, 2019

CCA was founded in 1979 by influential architect and curator Phyllis Lambert and has rocked the boat ever since, pro...

Montreal's CCA to study postcolonial perspectives on the architecture of the African continent

2019-07-29T13:12:00-04:00

The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) is embarking on a new initiative aimed at understanding "architecture's historical role in decolonization, neocolonialism, globalization, and their manifestations" across the African continent, according to a recent announcement.

The focus on Africa's architecture represents a desire on the part of CCA to expand scholarly research efforts by reconsidering its archives in order to "challenge the reliance on Western sources by looking beyond institutional archives to others constructed around single buildings, international organizations, urban spaces, new policies, statistics, laws, photography, financial programs, and philosophical, intellectual, or cultural propositions."

Starting in October 2019, CCA will host an 18-month research effort in collaboration with 10 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation researchers to undertake this challenge. The scholars will develop projects that "seek to analyze and historicize the ways in which architecture manif...

At age 90, Phyllis Lambert looks back on her career in CCA exhibition

2017-02-01T18:30:00-05:00

Phyllis Lambert is 90 years strong, and the impact she has made in architecture in the last six decades still resonates to this day. While her influence in architecture is well known, what is Lambert's perspective on her own career? In celebration of her 90th birthday that was on January 24, the CCA in Montreal is currently exhibiting “Phyllis Lambert: 75 Years at Work”.

Curated by the CCA Founding Director Emeritus herself, the exhibition highlights milestones like the early days in her career, her iconic role as Director of Planning of the Seagram Building, to her conservation and restoration projects in her native Montreal and abroad.

Find out more on Bustler.

Phyllis Lambert receives 2016 Wolf Prize in Israel

2016-06-03T18:47:00-04:00

The one and only Phyllis Lambert continues to rake in architecture honors from around the globe. She received the American Academy's Brunner Memorial Prize this past April and was bestowed the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement during the 2014 Venice Biennale. Most recently, the former Canadian Centre for Architecture Director has been honored with the 2016 Wolf Prize in Israel. Past laureates include Eduardo Souto de Moura, David Chipperfield, and Peter Eisenman.

Phyllis Lambert recognized with 2016 Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize

2016-04-06T14:48:00-04:00

The American Academy of Arts and Letters announced architect Phyllis Lambert as the 2016 recipient of the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize [...]. Dubbed as the "Joan of Architecture", Lambert is widely recognized for founding the Canadian Centre for Architecture and her role as Director of Planning for the iconic Seagram Building (which she commissioned Mies van der Rohe to design), among her other initiatives that advocate for architecture's cultural value.

More of Phyllis Lambert in the Archinect news:

"The Other Architect" explores alternative practices and radical research projects

2015-10-27T15:59:00-04:00

For as long as architecture has been reduced to a service to society or an “industry” whose ultimate goal is only to build, there have been others who imagine it instead as a field of intellectual research: energetic, critical, and radical. But how can we produce or maintain this position?

The Other Architect, an expansive exhibition that considers "architecture’s potential to identify the urgent issues of our time" through twenty-three case studies from the 1960s to the present, opens tomorrow at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal.

Curated by Giovanna Borasi, the exhibition looks at various groups that have sought to critically intervene in the architectural profession, as well as to mobilize architectural thinking towards an expanded field. If the "normal architect" works within established conditions and using a defined toolset, these "other architects" developed (or borrowed) new methodologies, experimented formally and conceptually, and sought alternative organizational structures.

Architecture witnessed a proliferation of radical experiments beginning in the mid-20th century, resulting in outputs in a variety of a media, such as pamphlets, manifestos, videos, questionnaires, and books. In the exhibition, the material is organized in thematic ga...

Álvaro Siza donates his architectural archives to institutions in Portugal and Canada

2014-07-24T18:53:00-04:00

Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza this week announced to donate his architectural archive to public architectural institutions in Portugal and Canada. The decision was motivated by Siza's desire of fostering discussion and dialogue in a research-oriented context.

One part of the archive will be donated to the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal, and the other part will be given to two Portuguese institutions, the Fundação Gulbenkian in Lisbon and the Fundação de Serralves in Porto.

“The CCA is thrilled to accept this generous donation," remarked CCA Director Mirko Zardini. "I have known Álvaro Siza and followed his work closely for several decades. His architecture escapes easy classification, but always offers a lesson – a new way of seeing the world around us. His buildings have a distinct character and particular relationship to their urban or natural settings, always born from the desire to participate in the world. Siza’s drawings and sketches reflect his ability to...

"The Mound of Vendôme" digs up Paris' dirty revolutionary past

2014-07-02T19:20:00-04:00

Situating The Mound of Vendôme, the current exhibition on view at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, requires looking back into Paris' history after the French Revolution. For a tumultuous two months in 1871, the city was under the control of the Commune de Paris, a socialist revolutionary government. Their distaste for imperialistic brute force and Bonapartism led to their demolition of the Place Vendôme Column, a monumental column celebrating Napoleon's military victories -- and so on May 16, 1871, the Column was felled, and the statue of Napoleon from the Column's peak melted down for coins. After the Commune was ousted, the Column was rebuilt in 1874, topped by a copy of the original Napoleon statue.

To control the Column's fall and protect surrounding buildings, Communards piled a large mound of sand, straw, branches, and manure at its base, a large architectural intervention that completely disrupted the Column's imposing icon. These days, however, all traces of these events...

Phyllis Lambert steps down from Canadian Centre for Architecture

2013-12-05T14:01:00-05:00

Phyllis Lambert, 86, announced Wednesday she is retiring as chair of the board of trustees of the museum and research centre she founded in 1979. A tireless defender of Montreal’s built heritage, Lambert has taken an active role in every major urban planning debate in the city in the last four decades, from redeveloping the Old Port to protecting Mount Royal.

Phyllis Lambert, founder of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, is stepping down as chairperson. She had also served as Director of the CCA until 1999. Toronto architect Bruce Kuwabara will succeed her as chair of the world-renowned museum and research center.

Before becoming an architect in the 1960s, Lambert established herself as Director of Planning for the Seagram Building, where she was responsible for hiring Ludwig Mies van der Rohe as the designer. She recently published a book, Building Seagram, chronicling the experience.

Demedicalize Architecture

2012-03-06T12:51:00-05:00

Contemporary architecture and urban planning seem to address uncritically the conditions and context in which this discourse on health is developing. In most cases, the design disciplines rely on an abstract, scientific notion of health, and very literally adopt concepts such as “population,” “community,” “citizen,” “nature,” “green,” “development,” “city” and “body” into a professionalized, disciplinary discourse that simply echoes the ambiguities characteristic of current debate.

In its latest exhibition and book, Imperfect Health, the Canadian Centre for Architecture critiques what curators Mirko Zardini and Giovanna Borasi call a “new moralistic philosophy: healthism.” Zardini and Borasi trace the long relationship of environmental design to shifting social and political concepts of well-being, from 19th-century urban parks to 20th-century sanatoria to the "healthy buildings" of today. And they ask: would it be possible to “demedicalize” architecture — to replace the prescriptive solutions of “cure” with the more expansive goals of “care”?