The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) has announced many recent institutional achievements and upcoming events. May 7, 2013 marks the opening date of Archaeology of the Digital, an examination of the foundations of digital architecture at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. Part of a larger research project curated by Greg Lynn that studies the genesis and establishment of digital tools for design conceptualization, visualization and production, this exhibition and its accompanying book (to be published in collaboration with Sternberg Press) feature four seminal projects that establish distinct directions in the application of novel digital tools: the Lewis Residence by Frank Gehry (1985-1995), Peter Eisenman’s Biozentrum project (1987), Shoei Yoh’s roof studies for the Odawara Gymnasium (1991) and Galaxy
Toyama Gymnasium (1992), and Chuck Hoberman’s Expanding Sphere (1992). This exhibition will be on view until October 13, 2013 and will be accompanied at the beginning of the summer by a seminar on digital architecture addressed to graduate students.
Following in autumn, Tom Avermaete and Maristella Casciato curate an exhibition that suggests a new historiography of modern urbanism based on two major urban experiments in the Global South: Chandigarh – planned by a team consisting of Le Corbusier, Jeanneret, Frey, Drew and local architects and planners – and Casablanca – conceived by Michel Ecochard and a team of young French and Moroccan architects. The exhibition fosters fresh discussions on the engagement of local particularity with the universal in the framework of the growing economic and political cooperation promoted by the United Nations and other global organizations such as the International Monetary Fund. Partly based on the Pierre Jeanneret fonds recently donated to the CCA, the exhibition and accompanying publication will include new photographic commissions by Yto Barrada and Takashi Homma offering a contemporary reading of these two cities. This exhibition will open on November 19 and will run through early 2014.
Exhibitions planned at the CCA Octagonal Gallery include installations by the sculptor Geoffrey Smedley from early June to early August, and of photographer Donovan Wylie from early September to mid-November, in the context of the Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal festival.
For more information, please visit www.cca.qc.ca.