Sala Rosa Concert

Photos by Andrew Chau & Welland Sin

The One and Only, Kweku and the Movement, and First U Get the Sugar at Sala Rosa, Montreal. April 5.

a wrapped courtyard

Posters by Evelyne Bouchard

A video of the Tunisia installation at the McGill School of Architecture. The exhibit explores the notion of private space in the traditional Islamic medina. The wrapped cloth restricts access to the interior courtyard but allows for liminal views to the sights and sounds of the country.

Video by Andrew Chau

‘tokyo in a box’

i got the most pleasant surprise in the mail today. a pop-up card of tokyo, tokyo in a box, as my friend calls it!

1. laid flat

2. pop-up card.

i must admit, mesmerizing is the perfect word to describe it. thanks, don!

freight train graffiti

Some photos from the decommissioned CN freight yards in the north end of Montreal.

detroit in a flash

My trip to the automotive capital. Yes, it’s run down and there were a lot of abandoned buildings, but there was a lot of new activity too: the new compuware center in the heart of downtown, the newly renovated detroit institute for arts, the high-end malls in the suburbs. One day was definitely not enough time to see the city, and I could have easily spent a week there.

Michigan Central Station sits abandoned and awaiting future plans (photos: A Chau)

“Q: What must I do to be saved? A: Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved” (photo: J Chau)

The Ford Rouge river factory sits on a sprawling campus in Dearborn. (photo: A Chau)

The Detroit Institute for Arts renovation by Michael Graves is tasteful, mixing a modern style with relics from the past. Each section of the galleries subtly reflects the work on display, through Gothic Arches, careful stonework, or monumental squared columns. The DIA has one of the most extensive collections in all of the states. (photos: A Chau)

I would argue that it was in Detroit where the international style found its place. here is Minoru Yamasaki’s building at Wayne State. Detroit is also home to Mies Van Der Rohe’s Lafayette residences, and Albert Kahn’s many buildings. (photo: J Chau)

The Guardian building in downtown Detroit was recently renovated and restored by SmithGroup. (photo: A Chau)

molson brewery

montreal’s own high line

One of my favourite new buildings/architectural interventions is the High Line in New York City. It is a linear strip of parkland built on long-abandoned elevated railway tracks that wind their way through the city.

They provide a radically different view of the city.

Images of the High Line courtesy of Joel Sternfeld, 2002

Montreal’s own version of the High Line, albeit a more car-friendly one, is a portion of Rue Notre Dame E. in Old Montreal, anywhere west of Rue Montcalm.

mcgill’s macdonald campus powerplant

The old building spewing smoke from its chimney provides power to the campus. It is 75 years old and embarrassingly out of date. The hodgepodge renovations include steam pipes jutting out of the wall and ground every which way, a hastily built chain link barrier fence, all seeming very out of place from the stately stone building they are tacked onto.

pale blue dot

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

i think that there is no better time than right now to revisit Carl Sagan’s thoughts on the voyager 1 photograph. this photo really puts things into proper perspective.

suburbanizing detroit

much has been written on the demise of inner-city detroit.

abandoned united artists theatre hidden by the people mover, from forgottendetroit.com

while its downtown core has been languishing, the suburbs around the city have been growing and prospering. 80% of the population in the detroit metro region lives in the periphery. to make the point even clearer, detroit is the poorest city in the usa, while oakland county, just to the north, is the nation’s second-richest.

detroit is emblematic of the worldwide trend of shrinking city cores and ballooning periphery suburbs, a trend that began with ebenezer howard and the garden city (1950s). it is similar to new orleans’ problems after katrina, its many abandoned neighbourhoods and population that has been more than halved.

abandoned michigan central station, from forgottendetroit.com

there has been much written on how to rehabilitate detroit: should planners facilitate the city’s thinning out by demolishing the remains, abandon whole parts altogether, create more suburban models in the inner city?

a number of projects have dealt with suburbanizing/re-naturalizing the city: