———— The project

Migrating Landscapes was selected by a national juried competition as Canada’s official entry at the 2012 Venice Biennale in Architecture.It will be presented by Winnipeg-based 5468796 Architecture and Jae-Sung Chon, who joined together for this project to form a new entity: the Migrating Landscape Organizer (MLO).

Migrating Landscapes will act as a forum for Canadian architects and designers to investigate, provoke, document and expose the unique manifestations of cultural memory that overlay Canada today and how it might emerge in the future. MLO will design a ‘new landscape’ – an abstract exhibition infrastructure – and will invite, through a national competition, young Canadian architects and designers to design ‘dwellings’ based on their cultural memories. The invitation is an enactment of ‘settling-unsettling’, and the dwellings will discuss various forms of migrated memories ‘settled-unsettled’ into the ‘new landscape’. The dwellings and the landscape, together, will form the exhibition at Venice 2012.

Video

Feb 9, 2012
@ 12:17 am
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ENTRY 180

[Category: Students]

Team Members:  CHOW, Mei.   UNRAU, Dustin.

Mei Chow and Dustin Unrau are currently M.Arch students at Carleton University in Ottawa. Mei left her birth city of Hong Kong at the age of 10 to move to San Francisco as part of the “1997 Hong Kong turnover” immigrants. A couple years later, Mei and her family moved to Vancouver, and eventually to Ottawa to study architecture. Dustin is a Canadian citizen, but he left his hometown of Kelowna at the age of 8 and moved with his family to Mexico where they volunteered in an orphanage. Dustin lived there for 16 years and recently returned to Ottawa.

Photo:  Left:  UNRAU, Dustin.  Right: CHOW, Mei.

Video Link: http://vimeo.com/36360601

Project Description:

The Bridge

 

The bridge is a place of encounter, where the past meets the present and where two cultures are married. 
Our project portrays the unsettling transition between contrasting landscapes. On one side of the void there is a grid; a manipulated landscape that is designed to control those who settle on it. A sculptural form emerges from the grid in an expression of freedom. The transparency of this form is the memory of the wind and rain resonating on the windows of a high-rise apartment in Hong Kong. 
The other side of the void is a landscape that has been molded by nature. The terrain can be hostile, but the resilience of the informal settlers is great enough to build a solid shelter and forge a community. This is a memory of Mexico, where a barrio growsin the shade of its terraces and in the humid air of its courtyards.