Archinect - University of Manitoba (Shannon)

Burning Down the House

2012-01-15T20:13:34-05:00

There are four more weeks of writing left for me to compose into entries before I can call this blog complete, but while I muster up the courage to revisit the final month of our thesis I thought I'd share some more recent images instead.

On one of the few really cold weekends in November (this winter has been unseasonably warm in Manitoba) we made the drive out to my parents' farm to finish the work we started in early January.

What better way to say good-bye to a labour of love than with a big bonfire?

Week Nine

2011-10-17T23:34:55-04:00

My hiatus has been a lot longer than I expected it to be! Final thesis reviews were in April, and we went back to the house for another month in May to bring the project to as much of a final resolution as we could given the time available. There is still more standing out at the site than we would like, but in a few weeks a big bonfire should take care of everything that's left. We're hoping for some pretty amazing final photographs when the studs that are still standing start to catch. If we make a video, is it too cheesy to use 'Burning Down the House' as the soundtrack?

In the meantime, we made the final book, took an amazing trip through the Netherlands, Germany, and Scandinavia, and in July I went back to work full time. It's been hard to bring myself back here to finish what I started, but it would be a shame not to see it through to an end, considering the writing is already done. So here it is, Week Nine, written way back in March when there was still a foot of snow on ...

Week Eight

2011-05-11T17:36:19-04:00

11.02.22

With trim and finishes in the southeast bedroom removed, we transition to the hardwood. The flooring in the first bedroom did not come up cleanly enough to salvage, so we decide to start removal from the opposite direction to see if it has any effect.

At the suggestion of our technical advisor, Jordy welded together a tool to help increase efficiency. A 2” pipe fixed to a 6” x 8” x 1/8” steel plate acts as an oversized crowbar, increasing leverage and taking up more boards at once. We’ve been told that if executed correctly, hardwood planks should roll off the shiplap, pulling the nails with them. Instead, the nails resist, tearing through the dry fir boards, leaving the tongue trapped beneath.

Surveying the damage, we’re unsure if the strategy failed due to our direction, misuse of the tool, or if the wood is simply too old and dry to salvage. After lunch, we take the heavy steel piece to my cousin’s shop where he welds on an extension. Back at the house, the modificati...

Current Status + 2012 Venice Biennale in Architecture

2011-05-11T00:31:58-04:00

Well, I'm way behind on entries but I do have a few more weeks of work ready to blog once I compile the photographs and documentation of the smoke drawings. We passed our final review (yay!) and are in the process of completing the book, so the final chapters should be ready to share very soon.

There's still a bit more house to take down, but we've come much further than I thought we could in a few short months. The above photograph was taken three days ago – we aren't salvaging the addition so two rooms on the main floor are all that remain. We're going out to the site again for another week before the end of the month, which means there's light at the end of the tunnel. On May 30th, Jordy and I are heading off to Europe (the Netherlands, Germany, Copenhagen, Sweden, Norway, and Finland) for a five week research trip funded by a pair of travel scholarships we received. When we come back, we'll have to sort out where all of the material is going and plan for a really big bonfire / ...

Week Seven

2011-05-03T23:33:05-04:00

11.02.12

In our weekly review, we’ve begun discussing the means by which the home’s undoing can transition into the pages of a book. In a project that must somehow translate itself to a far-removed audience, starting early in this process will be critical to ensure we don’t miss any essential moments.

We begin with a sectional concept, where the spine of the portfolio acts as a slice through the building, cutting between interior and exterior or room and hallway in order to orient the view and draw out the deconstruction. Preliminary layouts feel heavy-handed and repetitive, lacking in a consistent tone and scale. The two-image spread also makes it difficult to capture movement, especially with the multitude of images we have for each wall in both daylight and darkness as it comes apart.

Preliminary sectional layout.

We decide to shift our focus to a room-by-room disassembly, where the full influence of both worlds can be felt. With two strips of continuous imagery running in p...

Week Six

2011-04-05T10:24:17-04:00

11.02.05

The death of the house is a slow withdrawal, a peeling away. With the layers of asphalt shingles and fir planks removed, heavy drifts of snow settle onto the exposed shiplap. Temperatures climb from -30 degrees celcius to +1 in a matter of days, and dark stains begin to spread across the ceiling tiles upstairs. Soon, water is dripping in a repetitive cadence on the hardwood.

We arrive a day too late – the second floor is saturated. We face the damage reluctantly, knowing that it is our doing, that the watermarks blooming on the exposed building paper and the intense smell of smoke and mildew have occurred due to our own inaction.

In penance, we spend two hours shoveling wet, sticky snow off the roof. Working on our knees, we pull out nails one by one in preparation for the removal of boards above the southwest bedroom. We will touch every nail in this house by the time the project is complete.

11.02.06

The more nails we pull the more boards loosen beneath our feet, shif...

Week Five

2011-03-26T22:49:12-04:00

11.01.29

Snow falls inch by inch, hour by hour. Almost everywhere in the province highways are closed to traffic. Stuck in the city, we explore the missing gap in the full-scale drawing process. As building paper only exists on the floor and exterior walls in each room, we question how the interior walls can be carried into the reconstruction, and whether or not this is a necessary introduction.

Considering the use of blueprint paper developed with Windex as a simple way to produce large images, two possible methods emerge: one, that we could use a projector to expose the photographs we take onto the paper at the true scale of the room, and two, that we could tape the room projections simultaneously onto the building paper and blueprint sheets before exposing them to daylight.

Preliminary tests with the projector prove that this particular process will be very time intensive. After three hours, the image is only faintly visible. With so few days in the city as it is, it seems dou...

Week Four

2011-02-23T22:29:16-05:00

11.01.22

The fire is too large for a test this early in the drawing process. Lacking a strong updraft, smoke pours from every unattended opening. An exhaust pipe that went unnoticed inside a kitchen cupboard, poorly blocked vents in the bedrooms upstairs – all of these unsealed orifices begin coughing up thick, gray clouds of smoke.

Testing the furnace in the first semester.

Fumes curl out of each joint in the make-shift ductwork we concocted last week but failed to tape at the seams. The heat begins to thaw the joists and shiplap, and water drips onto the floor like rain. Frost recedes up the stairway, melting away from the peeling paint and fir door whose inlaid panel has buckled and bulged after years of seasonal shifts in temperature.

The basement is hazy and choking, as though the house is fighting us off, pushing back against actions that will only incur increasing levels of decay. We open windows and run outside for fresh air. Adrenaline mixes with fear - of smoke inhalat...

Week Three

2011-02-06T19:55:53-05:00

11.01.15

A classmate in need of some old hardwood planks meets us in the morning and we drive out to the site together. She’s able to salvage a large sliding door from one of the tractor sheds on the site, and we get a big bag of homemade perogies in exchange (thanks Aleksandra!).

Our own focus shifts from the theoretical to the pragmatic. In the 1970s, the house was unfortunately insulated with a product called Urea-Formaldehyde Foam Insulation (UFFI) that was only around for a few years before it was deemed toxic and damaging to occupants’ health. The CMHC has an information fact sheet on it here.

The foam is yellow and crumbles to the touch, creating a high volume of dust. Although we’re wearing ventilation masks whenever we stir it up, we need to determine the best way of removing it, as it’s in all of the exterior walls. In the morning, we attempt to reach it from the outside, but being up on a ladder struggling with a crowbar and sledgehammer proves to be too dangerous.

Du...

Week Two

2011-01-31T23:05:33-05:00

11.01.07

It’s windy. Snow snakes across the road in murky strands, and the path my dad cleared to the house begins to drift full of snow. Once on the roof, we’re thankful that the sheathing on the north side is still intact. We bring down the remaining boards on the east side, inadvertently shattering one of the exterior panes in the bay window. The sound is startling, a sharp and immediate crack against the dull thud of boards as they hit the snow below.

In the afternoon, we drill nine apertures into the ceiling of the southwest bedroom. Based on the sun’s path across the site, it seems intuitive to begin in the space that receives the most light for the duration of the day. This particular bedroom (along with one other room and the downstairs living area) was stripped of its plaster and dry-walled in the 1990s, and contains less of the home’s original character features. As a result, we treated it less preciously last semester and performed some preliminary demolition work.

The...

Week One

2011-01-27T19:43:59-05:00

Please refer back to the previous entry for a summary of the project thus far. The following daily entries were written during our first deconstruction weekend at the site.

11.01.01

It seems appropriate that our work at the site begins on the first day of the new year. We start in the dark cavity of the attic, plugging holes around the perimeter with loose bits of insulation to block the last remnants of daylight from leaking in. Attempts at making an aperture to create a camera obscura are unsuccessful, as the hollow metal tubes of the massive antenna on the roof are too thin to be captured. Instead, we carry out a series of lighting tests on pieces of wallpaper from the bedroom below, exploring the potential for light to project images through a surface. Whenever we turn on our headlamps, hundreds of frost-covered nailheads are briefly illuminated.

Bachelard describes the attic as a space for dreaming, but after working in the pitch black it becomes more psychologically draining ...

First Semester

2011-01-22T22:17:02-05:00

With the house in our possession (see photo in the last entry) but no clear understanding of what it could become, we spent the first semester trying to uncover the latent potential embedded in the site.

Interior photographs of the house.

Typically in our program, students spend the first term pursuing a line of research that leads to a set of theoretical inquiries about the nature of a specific architectural condition. A site is then selected that in some way embodies or furthers this condition, and an intervention is proposed.

In many ways, we were working backwards, searching for something already existing that we could take hold of. Although the symbolic weight of the site’s history instilled a certain reverence, an intrinsic desire for preservation was countered by the knowledge that within the next year, the building has to come down.

We found ourselves returning again and again to the same questions: How do you bring a house to its death? How is that death enacted?

In th...

An Introduction

2011-01-19T20:50:45-05:00

So it begins! I’m Shannon – welcome to the final semester of my Master of Architecture thesis at the University of Manitoba.

As there hasn’t been a blogger from our school in a couple of years, I’ll give a short synopsis of how the faculty is currently structured. The M.Arch program is completed over two years, with the thesis being pursued in the second. The studio environment has been arranged to allow students more freedom to work with a professor of their choosing, instead of being assigned to a group. At the beginning of the first semester, professors present the research focus of their studio, which extends through both terms. Students make a list of their top three choices, and are able to meet with each of them for an interview. Professors then make their own selections and by the end of the week, most students end up with one of the critics on their list. The studios are also vertical, which means masters and undergraduate students work alongside each other.

Although it’s...