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!
Elemental Situations
Instructor: Eduardo Aquino
Elemental Studio sought to explore the basic elements of architecture through the investigation of small buildings with simple programs. The studio investigated a quietly growing crisis in the architectural culture at the beginning of this new century, the fact that architecture has been gradually losing the status of an artform, distancing itself from the imaginative tradition, increasingly assuming the role of a “service industry,” with no commitment to history, experimentation, invention, local culture, spatiality, or even the original poetic mandate of architecture. This crisis directly affects architecture education as well, with higher and higher demands coming from the profession for more productive outcomes, which include technical and managerial skills, but rarely requests for improvement in critical, imaginative, or design skills. The forces of the capitalist apparatus overwhelm the aesthetic and spiritual role of architecture by investing almost exclusively and defiantly in an “object for profit”, reducing the value of architecture as an art. Due to the reduced availability of resources and human labour, the super-valorization of profit, the new code of environmental ethics, the exclusive power and control of developers, architecture has been gradually losing its connection to art and imagination, becoming more a commodity and a service object. However, the integral relationship between art & architecture has been for the past four decades experiencing a new renaissance as an attempt to recover architecture’s intrinsic quality as art. This new renaissance results in an individual’s or a collective’s pragmatic needs but also reclaims the unprecedented role of architecture as a poetic act, resulting from imagination, and reaching people’s spirit.
Life in Containers
Nurielle Gregorio
Griffintown is undergoing stages of gentrification where culture and interactions amongst its community is decreasing. New developments mean new residents, while half of the neighborhood is untouched; remaining the same.
How could we engage the new with the old? What is the relationship and dialogue between the industrial and the community?
The design proposition of Life in Containers provide a community space for the residents of Griffintown. In contrast to the new development of high rise, commercial buildings, the Cultural Center is enough to offer space for the neighborhood. It allows opportunities of interactions and engagements amongst a diverse group of people. It hopes to revive the old; the “industrial slum”; the shipping containers of Montreal.
Le Musée des cadres
Kenyo Jacob Musa
The project is an amalgamation of processes that emanated from the Lachine canal. Themes of the site’s ‘growth’ through water pollution and human intervention were present in the initial exploration and the final intervention. Le Musée des cadres or the museum of frames emerged from the affinity between the native residents of Griffintown (Montreal) and the historic sites surrounding the Lachine canal. The project is anchored to the Lachine canal through its dock and framed views above, it is essentially a space for visitors to enjoy a visual educational journey of the historical importance of the Lachine canal through specifically framed views. Also, the dock’s contact down into the Canal’s water allows visitors to experience the subsequent growth of the intervention alongside the site.
Also part of Elemental Situations: Cassidy Cantafio, Eric Decumutan, Meighan Giesbrecht, Jami Holden, Alexis Impey, Owen Toth, Kendra Wile, Odudu Umoessien