Making it Real

Making It Real is a juried exhibition of digitally fabricated objects organized by OCAD University faculty members Jesse Jackson and Greg Sims, with the assistance of technology innovator Gregory Phillips. The exhibition takes place May 14-28 as part of the Toronto International Jewellery Festival and coincides with the Society of North American Goldsmiths' 2013 conference, Meta-Mosaic. Virtual objects will be submitted electronically from around the world and “made real” locally using a variety of 3-D printing technologies. Making It Real will showcase innovative designs for jewellery, products, fine art, and other small objects that take maximum advantage of direct digital manufacturing. Students, professionals, and creative individuals working in all areas of small-scale digital design and fabrication are encouraged to participate.

Automatic / Revisited

From January 19 to February 16, 2013, I installed Automatic / Revisited at Latitude 44 Gallery. This exhibition is part of Toronto Design Offsite, Toronto's annual festival of design. Automatic / Revisited summarized two bodies of work created in collaboration with Luke Stern.

Automatic / Revisited Left Side (2013)

 

Automatic / Revisited Right Side (2013)

Automatic / Revisited is an ongoing exploration of the physical creation and philosophical implications of experimental unit-based construction systems.

The first part of the installation, Automatic, deconstructs and reconstructs the assembly of concrete blocks used by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright in a series of 1950s family homes. With these homes, Wright demonstrated how a system of modular architectural units could be designed in advance of the building in which they were to be used, and how these units could produce not just one but a remarkable variety of compelling buildings.

The second part of the installation, Revisited, reinterprets Wright’s intentions and forms. Just as Wright responded to design imperatives of his time, this evolution responds to contemporary desires. By employing the logic of an existing computer graphics algorithm, a new system of concrete units was developed with greater creative freedom and environmental performance than Wright’s original conception. Again, the system does not anticipate any specific building, instead suggesting a variety of possible end results—or even multiple end results, as the new system is designed for disassembly and reassembly.

These construction systems each permit buildings that are responsive to specific sites and programs. Similarly, the installation responds to the gallery’s dimensions and the location of the audience: the repeated symmetries and opposing placement of the Automatic and Revisited systems creates a dialogue between two progressive ideas in architecture, past and future.

Toronto Design Offsite documented the opening of the exhibition here. Many thanks to Tori Foster, Roderick Grant, Gene Mastrangeli, Genevieve Scott, Geoffrey Turnbull and Nancy Wilson for their assistance with the installation.

A set of slides about this body of work can be viewed here.

A paper about this body of work was presented at ACADIA 2012.

Timespace

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Timespace is an ongoing body of work (2007-present) comprising of composite images that represent the experience of time at specific sites as singular still image products. Timespace is an example of the Time Overlays method.

 

Timespace: Tom and Lucas at Eleven Hepbourne Street (2010)

 Timespace: Luke Stern in the Jester/Pfeiffer Residence (2008)

 Timespace: Cao Chang Di (Construction Corner) (2008)

 Timespace: Cao Chang Di (Times Square) (2008)

 Timespace: Cao Chang Di (Main Entrance) (2008)

This post was created in support of a Social Science and Humanities Research Council Insight Development Grant application, submitted January 2013.

Figure and Ground

From May 5-22, 2011, I exhibited Figure and Ground with Derek Flack at the Gladstone Gallery. This exhibition is part of CONTACT, Toronto's annual month-long festival of photography.


Eight images from this body of work are shown below. Each limited edition print is available for purchase in 50" x 50", 36” x 36,” 18" x 18" and 9" x 9" sizes. Please contact me for more information.

75, 100 and 150 Graydon Hall Drive, Toronto (2011)

35, 43 & 47 Thorncliffe Park Drive, Toronto (Rideau Towers) (2011)

2600 Don Mills Road, Toronto (Hunter's Lodge) (2011)

10 Edgecliff Golfway, Toronto (2011)

7 & 9 Crescent Place, and 102, 104, 106 & 108 Godwood Park Court, Toronto (Crescent Town) (2011)

110 and 130 York Mills Road, Toronto (2011)

655 Broadview Avenue & 10 Hogarth Avenue, Toronto (Montcrest Apartments) (2011)

40 Godstone Road, Toronto (2011)

This project began in May 2007 when I exhibited Landmarks and Monuments: Residential Complexes in Toronto’s Urban Periphery at the Larry Wayne Richards Gallery. At that time, I described the work as follows:

The residential complexes in the periphery of Toronto are definitive landmarks: markers of boundary and locality, points of orientation, representations of an instance and turning point in time, and structures of compelling historical and aesthetic interest. Their monumental significance is belied by a lack of conscious popular awareness of their presence and status. By presenting these buildings as consequential architecture, I aim to stimulate discourse about their role in our city.

Or, to put it more succinctly: by shooting the tower apartments as places of beauty and significance, I help make them worth renewing.

By adopting the technique and style of commercial architectural photography, this work deliberately deviates from a more common artistic approach to the subject of tower apartments, which is characterized primarily by ambivalence.

Images from this growing body of work have formed the visual basis for a large number of tower apartments neighbourhood renewal initiatives over the past four years. This unanticipated but welcome adoption and use fulfills my artistic intent: to stimulate discourse on the role of Tower Neighbourhoods in Toronto, creating the opportunity for the consequential nature of these sites to enter the popular consciousness.

The new images shown above will serve as a launching point for a book project on the topic of Toronto tower apartments. The work featured in the book will be disseminated through a variety of media and distribution methods, including public exhibition at non-traditional venues (e.g. shows in tower neighbourhoods) and facilitation of the work’s use in future scholarly and public outreach initiatives (e.g. publication-ready image packages). The book will be funded in 2013, and published in 2014.

This ongoing project is important because it creates visibility for the subject matter, making it familiar, accessible and emotionally affecting for scholars, design professionals, artists and the public. It also serves an important documentary function, cataloguing this ubiquitous buiding type at a pivotal moment in its history.

On May 12, 2011, I presented this body of work at the second Tower Neighbourhood Renewal Symposium. The poster from this presentation is shown below.

On May 18, 2011, this exhibition was featured on BlogTO.

An image from Figure Ground was exhibited at Gallery TPW as part of Photorama 2012.

Iterations

From May 1-31, 2010, I exhibited a selection of work from Iterations, an ongoing collaborative project with Tori Foster.


The four exhibition prints are shown below. Each limited edition print is available for purchase in 24” x 96” and 12" x 48" sizes. Please contact me for more information.

Eleven Home Depots, Southern Ontario (2010)

Seven Essos, Toronto (2009)

Eight Best Buys, Southern Ontario (2010)

Nine Beer Stores, Southern Ontario (2010)

Iterations is focused on repeated built forms and their surrounding environments. Each panorama is comprised of several photographs that are composited through transparency overlay. For example, Seven Essos, Toronto consists of seven different Esso gas stations in the city of Toronto superimposed on one another, creating a juxtaposition of the common and the unique characteristics of each scene. Resonant elements, such as the bright red canopies over the pumps, constructively interfere, while inconsistent elements, such as the pavement markings and the surrounding environments, resolve in an inchoate and ephemeral manner. The subject matter of the completed work shown above are branded structures; the subject matter of work currently in production includes street furniture (Eight Streetcar Shelters, Spadina Avenue Toronto; Seventeen Sugar Beach Chairs, Toronto) and urban and suburban housing (Eight Low-Rises, Regent Park; Thirteen Single-Family Homes, Markham).

Iterations privileges ubiquitous forms of urbanity; it is a method for deriving archetypes through the accumulation of formal information. These composite moments also reveal how our visual world is organized around these architectural anchors by conflating the self-reinforcing narratives of repeated built forms with the unique circumstances of their occupation and of their surrounding environments.

On April 24, 2010, Iterations was the featured on Serial Consign.

On February 21, 2011, Iterations was featured on The Online Photographer, as part of a conversation about Corrine Vionnet's Photo Opportunities.

Selected work from Iterations has also been exhibited at Gallery TPW as part of Photorama 2009, Photorama 2010, and Photorama 2011. At Photorama 2011, we exhibited a new piece, shown below. In March 2013 this piece will be auctioned off as part of Project 31, OCAD University's annual fundraiser.

Eight Streetcar Shelters, Spadina Avenue, Toronto (2011)

Small Object Design

Details coming soon. . .

Click here for Winter 2010.

Click here for Summer 2010.

Click here for Winter 2009.

Constellation

In August 2010, Luke Stern and I entered Constellation in the Sukkah City competition.


The text of our proposal read as follows.

On a typical night in New York City, most constellations are missing: light pollution is an unfortunate reality in today’s cities, resulting in bright but starless night. During the 10 days of Sukkah City, we propose a series of unique installations -- Constellation -- that will regenerate the missing stars.

Constellation is a modular system of lightweight elements constructed of contemporary schach: composite products comprised of renewable or recycled celluloid products. These sustainable building materials reinterpret the Sukkah in a contemporary context. Constellation’s eleven unique components can be flexibly assembled into a nearly infinite variety of enclosures, each of which satisfy the Sukkah’s constraints and creating a remarkably fluid interior space.

Each morning, a team of volunteers will assemble Constellation into a new configuration: the ancient patterns of the night sky will govern its formal evolution. The installation will reveal, through a precisely aligned aperture, the spot in the sky where specific stars were once visible. These missing stars will be made visible by harnessing the city's excess luminance to backlight a pinhole screen.

By recreating the missing stars, Constellation will bring the delight and wonder of the cosmos back to the heart of New York City. Unlike online maps and global positioning systems, these ancient navigational beacons do more than just identify our coordinates: they help us contemplate our place in the universe.

This proposal was an evolution of our Master of Architecture thesis project, Fabricating Sustainable Concrete Elements.

BlocKit

In July 2010, Geoff Turnbull, Gavin Berman and I entered BlocKit into the Open Source House competition. Excerpts from our competition panels are shown below.

Automatic Revisited

On April 23, 2009, Luke Stern and I successfully defended our Master of Architecture thesis project at the University of Toronto Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, entitled Automatic Revisited: Fabricating Sustainable Concrete Elements.


Our thesis abstract summarizes our intentions:

The constructional elements of a building are normally considered components in service of the greater architectural endeavor. Yet elements are also design problems: direct consideration elevates them from the conceptual role of passive expression to that of active contribution, and calls into question their accepted form, function and materiality. The desired qualities of a complete building -- firmitas, utilitatis, and venustatis -- are the same as those desired in a constructional element, suggesting that elements warrant evaluation beyond their ability merely to be organized creatively: the architecture of the element is itself architecture.

We have developed a family of modular armature elements that permit a large degree of formal variability using a small number of discrete parts. These elements emerged as a contemporary response to Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonian Automatic project, an early exploration into the constructional element as a parallel design exercise. The Automatic system provided a point of departure, and prompted a new set of concrete forms that respond to contemporary sustainable criteria, including maximal architectural freedom, optimal environmental performance, and minimal life-cycle costs. Through an open-ended collaborative problem-solving process, we developed several prototypes; through full-scale fabrication, we tested the validity of the prototypes in confrontation with reality.

A selection of images from our final presentation is shown below.











Two images of our final installation are shown below.



In 2010, this project was published in the journal MAS Context.