The Canadian Pavilion explores the juxtaposition of the familiar with the foreign, a curious union implied by the very existence of a Canadian Biennale. Viewed from the river, the building recalls the local vernacular; at oblique angles, it reveals itself to be angular and ambitious, as well.

Programme is organized to make the project as approachable as possible. The street is fronted by the foyer and shop, and the subtle deflection of the entrance plaza invites passers-by. At the riverside walk, generous ramps ascend walls of vegetation, culminating in a terrace and restaurant with views overlooking the river; a visible, friendly, and inviting
destination is provided for pedestrians and vehicles alike. This establishes the project as an extension of the park system; the raised terrace, planted with small trees and furnished with cafe tables, extends the park sectionally, while the transparency at grade extends the park through the building along Grand Avenue.

The main gallery volume is cladded in a prefabricated plywood rainscreen, contrasting the planted administrative plinth. In a play on scale, the weathering of a single piece of wood is magnified cover the entire gallery volume. Skylights and windows, being larger or smaller or more angular than expected, continue the reinterpretation of building scale. The play on scale, combined with the diagonal grid of the plywood panels and their gradient finish, dissolves the formal rigidity of the pavilion; it becomes cloud-like, as if its edges are blurred, and floats effortlessly on glass and planted walls.

Ultimately, the intention is for the pavilion to strike a balance between romantic gestures and domestic sensibility in order to resonate with the inspirations of a burgeoning cultural city.

Video commissioned by Toronto’s RVTR Architects for their inclusion in the 2008 Young Architects’ Forum. Operational Practices was exhibited alongside three other videos from May 8 to July 11, 2008 at the Urban Centre in New York.

Studies for a facade in a transient neighbourhood.

Music: Lake of Dreams by Mirage.

The Globe followed up with another story after the show, by John Bentley Mays, that summarized the four “Collaborations” projects. Here’s what he wrote about the booth for Ciot:

“The project created by a team led by Pina Petricone and Ralph Giannone was the most fantastic contribution to the Collaborations exhibit. It offered a charming lesson on the possibilities of stone in design — old stone, including sumptuous green Connemara marble from Ireland, and something new, a compound called Caesarstone, developed in Israel from crushed quartz, resin and pigments. […] Is there anything Caesarstone can’t do? I doubt it. Like every other material used in Collaborations, this fabric-like stone showed an unusual side, opening the way to new plays of contemporary design imagination.”

This is my final project from 4A- a mixed-use development just outside the Aurelian Walls, at Porta Maggiore. Here we see the urban fabric unravel from San Giovanni in Laterano and Termini station, two significant public spaces in Rome, to the unsavoury fringes at the edge of the site. Using new programme to complement existing cultural programme adjacent or near the site (which is staggering in its untapped potential: the Museum of Musical Instruments, Museum of Military History, Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, the Aurelian Wall itself, and partially excavated Roman ruins, including an old amphitheatre), the project aims to create a new destination, while at the same time remaining sympathetic to the neighbourhood and its residents. Hence the concept of transcending scales, which parallels that of the fractal.

All three of my project boards are on flickr. They’re available in full, glorious resolution, if you so choose. Like the project itself, the boards change scales from the first board (city scale and relationships) to the last (personal experiences within the project).

Download project PDF [416 kb].

Somewhere between a momentary lapse of judgement and a momentary surge of bravery, I decided to post a flickr photoset of my sketches from rome (and thereabouts). I love these sketchbooks; underneath a lot of reluctance, there is pride and rediscovery. And a way to explore the rich layering of urban armatures and public spaces. Enjoy.

House of Rooms challenges boundaries: their physical manifestation, their influence on spatial perception, and their necessity to domesticity. The site, an extremely narrow strip between an aqueduct in the Roman campagna and an existing building, has a magical ’secret’ quality that a typical dwelling would have obliterated. Instead, independent, sculptural ‘rooms’ curiously occupy the space while maintaining its integrity; only the resident can unlock the ‘house’ from the ‘rooms’.

Download project PDF [228 kb]

The fountain, at first reduced to the flatness of a postcard image, is then experienced in solitude at night, and finally reanimated by a theatre show in its place.

The video playfully retells the many histories of the fountain- celebration, vanity, struggle, vision, and collage- through three experiences: the superficial, the contemplative, and the imaginary.

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Team: C Fearman / A Fernandez / J Lee

This video is a map that seeks to explore complexities along the Via del Mandrione and the Roman Campagna through the relationship between objective and subjective, and between the physical and the experiential. Invisible boundaries are made tangible through motion and the site is interpreted through the manipulation of tempo, the composition of sequences and the layering of sound. Our map follows the movements of a subject through the site as well as his perceptions of the invisible traces, experienced as voids by the settler and as events by the nomad. As a result, the map provides its user with a basis for divergent interpretations, rather than a single mapped entity: the map is open-specific and highly dynamic.

Team: M Karimi / J Lee / D McNinch / R Micacchi / S Neault / A Ng / K Schwartzkopf / M Tataryn / G Washer

Part of the presentation of this project involved flipbooks, to recreate the act of traveling through different spaces of this proposal; these are reproduced digitally in the video below.

Download project PDF [372 kb]