We are pleased to announce YEE-O 2020 – Year End Exhibition – Online edition for this 2019-2020 academic year. This annual event celebrates the hard work and creative achievements of over 500 undergraduate and graduate students from every unit and level in the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Manitoba. Unfortunately, COVID-19 led to the cancellation of this in-person event, but sharing and celebrating student achievements must go on!
Hunting the Shadow
The Precast Studio
Instructor: Neil Minuk
ARCHITECTURE MEANT TO BE EXPERIENCED: LIVING, BREATHING, UNGRASPABLE LIVING, BREATHING, UNGRASPABLE
HUNTING THE SHADOW focused on exploring the process of constructing an architecture that is palpable, felt and not static or dead. An architecture which is alive is one that embraces the phenomenal realm and instability of meaning. In its best version, this architecture is comprehended by individuals on their own terms and they don’t tire of it, instead, it is expansive and revealing. It possesses an embodied uniqueness, complexity and strength.
The studio is titled after a Jonathan Hill chapter in Immaterial Architecture. In this studio, the shadow is the back story, one’s own shadow, the fourth dimension, the shifting nature, the intangible. The reason that Adolf Loos would not allow his buildings to be photographed, ‘because one can simply not taste the dust in the sofa.’ is the shadow that is being tracked here.
PRECAST CONCRETE
The act of architecting requires making consequential decisions, being aware and open to discoverable opportunities, and possessing a critical affirmation and ability to respond to the history of architecture and building. Since constraints illicit responses, many aspects of this studio including the material focus was set. The studio focused materially on concrete and specifically on PRECAST CONCRETE. This studio received funding assistance from the CPCI.
Adaptive Assemblies
Austin Dorn
Adaptive Assemblies is a research topic in the potentiality of a new, modular building system, manifested through an adaptive apartment complex located at Higgins and Main. This system utilizes a 10’ X 10’ precast concrete frame to allow parasitic cellular construction within. The advantages of this system are that it is very easy to build as well as disassemble and re-arrange. The goal is to give back an element of control to the inhabitant over the architectural lens through which personal experience is formed. Apartments can be re-arranged according to individual preferences, rebuilt for new tenants, and grow according to the needs of a young family or low income tenants. Not only do these dwellings push the boundaries of permanency and stagnation, but they provide a host of different moments, experiences, and connections around every corner. The result is a new type of architecture that does not limit the human experience. It is designed in part by its own inhabitants, adaptive to change, specific to site and expressive of culture.
Burton’s Complex
Nicole Luke
Burton Cummings Theatre was once called the Walker Theatre in the early 1900’s and has gone through a series of renovations and name changes. It was originally planned to be a mixed use space combining a hotel, office space and retail space along with the theatre but only the theatre was able to be completed before funds for construction became unavailable.
The general area of Downtown Winnipeg is concentrated with parking lots, so it was decided to use the Burton Cummings Theatre parking lot as a site to complete the essence of the Walker Theatre history and recreate a social space for Winnipeg. Burton’s Complex is mixed use project that includes an informal live band/social area and cafe space located on the ground level. The upper floors contain a modern hostel which provides a flexible dwelling condition with rooftop terraces.
Pritchard’s Creek Healing Centre
Reanna Merasty
Located along the riverbank of the Red River, Pritchard’s Creek Healing Centre aims to assist in the mental, physical, and emotional health of the users and surrounding living elements. The site, and its inhabitants (animals, creatures, vegetation), guided the project in its form, program, and experience. The site was home to Pritchard’s Creek. The project features a wall to represent the creek, which extends from the interior to the exterior of the structure. The program includes a gathering space, residential units, and lookout, each space offers its own unique experience based on its location on the site, and viewpoint. The project offers space to allow for all living elements of the site to coexist through a cantilever that gently hovers over the river.
Office of Collective Memory & Mythology
Royce O’Toole
The Office of Collective Memory & Mythology seeks to disrupt the ‘memorial boom’ that often attempts to freeze collective memory into a singular state of existence. The office is invested in developing a fluidity of collective memory, avoiding any possibility of congealing memory into a consentient state – collective memory should be contested and emotionally varied. The office collects, analyzes, and organizes memories, dividing public consciousness into layers of living reality and myth. The office also preserves and displays relevant objects to Winnipeg’s history, chronicles, memories and myths. These are displayed as active or experiential moments rather than symbolic objects, meant to facilitate a continuation or provocation of multiplicity of memory and myth.
The Hidden Monastery
Yang Peng
A Buddhist monastery locates in the campus of UBC.
A precast concrete structure hidden in an undeveloped forest.
A concentric-circled form floating above the ground.
An obvious entry exiled from the site.
A tunnel connects the entry and the monastery.
A person walks in the dark and reaches
a place with no name.
A golden Buddha with no face.
A believer dumps all his tears.
A host harvest the liquids,
an eternal piece is made.
A raindrop broke on the eave.
A leaf lying on a bench.
A day again.
North Point Douglas Women’s Centre and Residences
Wilrose Pingol
My term project aims to create a safe place for women who are healing from domestic violence and to translate the idea of an architecture that responds to vulnerability.
The model for women shelters in the past often displaced women and their children into converted communal housing, kept in secret and “hidden” from the community. These forced communal situations compromises the autonomy of each individual and often creates more tension between individuals and inhibits healing against trauma.
Although transitioning back to the community is the ultimate goal for each individual, it is important that the framework allows a woman to ease through this transition, and give her the ability to control the levels of interaction to which she partakes in, in order to heal and reintegrate herself back to the larger community.
Foraging Roots
Luxmy Ragunathan
Delving into the reaches of what can be borrowed from the built environment, people, land, flora and fauna, this project sits, sinks, or floats on this historically rich place in the flux and flows of ecological restoration. Borrowing things like the Great Grey Owl borrows its nests, Foraging Roots, a non-profit organization borrows this site to teach and build the capacity of community sourced food practices.
Foragers and chefs teach visitors how to meander the site like a fox to forage and harvest food, how to maintain a garden through the winter, and how to preserve mushrooms to cook with garden vegetables over ‘pich’ stoves within the boughs of the Old Pinawa Dam ruins.
The Community Performance and Art Center
Nushinsadat Samavaki
This center offers the versatility required for both rehearsals and performing private art events. The aim of this center is to improve social interaction, bring the Arts to everyone, and bridge the gap between artists and non-artists in Winnipeg . The center includes 4 zones which are Residential, Music Studios, Dance Studios, and Performing rooms. The main concept was to design spaces that are experiential and have the quality of continuity. I tried to create spaces with varied levels and layers of transparency, in order to blur the boundaries between outside and inside and create a sense of ambiguity between visibility and invisibility, a quality which can lead to continuity and integrity in the whole project.
Self-transformation Retreat Center
Rachuri Thilakam
Life is so rich; full of sensation, aroma, light, sound, compassion, and connection, the body has carefully calibrated very unique and specialized adaptations contrived to capture and perceive the details of the world around us. We interact with the space through our senses. Through interaction, we recognize the value of the space and it becomes meaningful to us. This studio project investigates the significance of experience, the senses, light, nature, texture and material and their influences on the built environment, and the people who inhabit it.
I proposed to construct a self-transformation retreat center in Winnipeg, Canada. It is a retreat that allows one to escape from the mundane life, returning back to the center of oneself—the solitude and the spiritual freedom. The whole idea of the project, which enables user to focus on their heartbeat and breathing, that will make more mindful of their own place and state of mind in a particular moment, ultimately, relax a little.
Also part of Hunting the Shadow: Darian McKinney