The objective of this architecture gallery is to present exhibitions which will educate, challenge and question the thoughts and the ideas which inform contemporary architecture. It is a multi-functional space which is able to present exhibitions, be a classroom and a meeting space for the discussion of issues relating to architecture.

Canada's Donald Chong Studio, lateral architecture and NIP paysage were invited to create installations in response to the of idea personal space. The exhibition PERSONAL SPACE also features new writing by Andrew Westoll in response to his own reflections and questions posed by this idea.

Harbourfront Centre thanks the architecture advisory committee for their assistance: Valerie Gow, Margaret Graham, John Ota, Marco Polo, Lisa Rapoport, Scott Sorli and Tim Scott.

Special thanks to

This exhibition space devoted to architecture is brought to you in part by the generous support of our donors: Core Architects Inc., du Toit Allsopp Hillier | du Toit Architects Limited, Kirkor Architects & Planners. We also acknowledge the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts.

PERSONAL SPACE

Saturday September 27, 2008 — Sunday January 4, 2009
Public Opening Reception: Friday September 26 | 6pm – 10pm
235 Queens Quay West, Toronto, Canada M5J 2G8 | 416.973.4000

PLUS: The Dry Season by Andrew Westoll, a literary component presented in partnership by Authors at Harbourfront Centre and Visual Arts at Harbourfront Centre

Donald Chong Studio, (Y)ourspace, 2008.
Exhibition installation photography by Peter Legris.

(Y)ourspace

Donald Chong Studio

The choice for the city life is a choice, also, to share one's many urban experiences with others, and within the context of multiples. High-density living offers known conveniences and efficiencies, but can pressure the known ideals and pleasures of one's personal space.

Where, then, does the idea of you fit in to what we call our collective space? What does the public realm truly mean without a glimpse into how one's private realm may actually be perceived?

(Y)ourspace seeks simply to unfold those projections of one's private realm onto the public realm, and to reveal a closer sense of what self might be in our civic spaces of appearance.

Team: Donald Chong, Chris Routley, Bernard Sin
Collaborator: Miracle Glass & Door Specialists, Andrew Luczak

Donald Chong Studio

Clearing

lateral architecture

Everyday our personal space is negotiated, wrested, if only, temporarily, from the public realm and environment. This territorial line is nebulous. It expands and contracts in differing circumstances contingent upon our acceptance or willingness to engage with a given environment or body. Clearing demonstrates the competitiveness of personal space.

Clearing invites visitors to modify and customize their immediate individual physical and atmospheric limits. The intervention will be mutable and invite gallery visitors to participate in customization of their personal space, and its subsequent impact on others.

Team: Holly Jordan, Mason White, Lola Sheppard, Joseph Yau

lateral architecture

lateral architecture, Clearing, 2008.
Exhibition installation photography by Peter Legris.

NIP paysage, Please Swing, 2008.
Exhibition installation photography by Peter Legris.

PLEASE SWING

NIP paysage

Personal space is not about being alone and escaping city realities.

A park bench, a picnic blanket, a beach towel, a sandbox. These are all intimate and personal, yet they exist in the (sometimes) harsh and bustling reality of the city. Remember the old rusty swings in your neighbourhood park: were they not the most amazing personal experience, even when dozens of children were swarming all around? This proximity of users and spatial intensity actually elevates the personal experience and for a moment a "pleasure bubble" is created for the park user.

Personal space is much less defined by quantitative terms (comfort distances, safety setbacks and standardized densities). Personal experience of space is all about program and experience. Quality design and thoughtful planning in all public spaces can and should stimulate multiple forms of individual appropriation.

Team: Mathieu Casavant, France Cormier, Josée Labelle, Mélanie Mignault, Michel Langevin
Collaborators: Georges-Étienne Parent and Tessier Récréo-Parc

NIP paysage

The Dry Season

Andrew Westoll

"If writers and travellers have one thing in common, it is that we trespass on the private space of others. Cloaked in the arrogance of the wise interpreter, we infiltrate and then we wait. Something will happen here; a story worth telling will unfold before our eyes. It is never the story we expected. This is especially true for the travelling writer."
— Andrew Westoll

In Andrew Westoll's The Dry Season, thousands of miles from his city home, a travel writer looks for solitude in the jungles of Suriname. What he finds is an alternative metropolis in which an overlapping network of personal spaces means that his presence in the scene is never truly that of a man alone.

This literary component of the exhibition of architecture and personal space is presented in partnership by Authors at Harbourfront Centre and Visual Arts at Harbourfront Centre: part of an ongoing interdisciplinary focus.

Andrew Westoll | The Dry Season

The Dry Season

I emerge from the jungle and scramble down the cliff to the river. The long dry season has been extended this year and the water is very low. When the rains finally come, this section of Suriname’s Coppename River will roil with white-water rapids. The churning waters will be six metres deep and fifty metres wide and will lap against the trunks of the mighty silk-cotton trees that buttress the sky from the shore. But now the river is just a shallow, black-water stream, nothing more than a few metres across.

The Coppename floods twice a year, inhaling and exhaling with the rhythm of the rainy seasons. On each exhale the river bares itself, and to walk in these empty places feels as foreign as walking on the floor of an ocean, as if I’m once again trespassing on private land. The massive stones that give this river its violence sit fully exposed, a field of smooth grey boulders strewn across the riverbed as if thrown by the random hand of a child. They form a labyrinth of possible footpaths. Some of the stones are taller than me. Their coordinates are burned into the memories of Sonny, Bigga-man, Set-man and Petrus, the Maroon boatmen whose instincts are as finely tuned to the underlying skeleton of this river as a surgeon’s are to the underlying skeleton of a human.

Bigga has a ritual for the rare occasions when his boat scrapes against one of the boulders. “Oh stone,” he says softly. “You kill me.”

I follow the same routes through the stones as the tukunari and anyumara swim when the river floods. For much of the year, these pathways are haunted by caiman, schools of piranha and swarms of electric eels. But now there is nothing here but smooth stone, flats of hot sand, a floor of jagged granite and a modest stream. This might be nature’s most intimate disclosure – deep inside the world’s largest tract of pristine rainforest, the public riot of life gives way to a hushed, inanimate nothingness.

Or that’s how it seems at first. The longer I walk, the more the story changes.

In the small pools that dot the riverbed, clouds of tadpoles the shape of watermelon seeds await their adult bodies. They careen off each other and thrust their heads into the sand to feed, powered by temporary tails that wiggle back and forth with the invisible speed of hummingbird wings. On the miniature shores of these pools, pregnant frogs have dug craters in the sand and water from beneath has risen to fill them. In each of these transient nurseries, a gelatinous egg-sac sits half-submerged. When the sun strikes them, these sacs become translucent. I can see the amphibious children inside each egg, tiny flecks of green or brown patiently waiting for their tails.

Surrounding these circular bowls, the sand is riddled with worm-paths, a tangle of tunnels each the thickness of a finger. They fragment the sand like rivers on a map, dividing the earth at my feet into random provinces, the oldest ones collapsing down their length and revealing secret burrows beneath. Traversing this fleeting landscape, footprints of wading birds and thirsty rodents crisscross the sand, uncaring of worm-made boundaries or nursery walls, as if giants had lumbered across an expectant world.

Above the sand, great slabs of granite bake in the sun. The stone is covered by a light-brown network of scorched vegetation, lichens burned to death by four months of sunlight. Upon bending down, though, I find thousands of impossibly thin plant-stalks shooting up from the stone. On the tops of these fragile limbs, tiny seed-cases balance in the breeze: next season’s crop of riverbed plants waiting for the nourishing rains. As I walk among the boulders and watch birds in tuxedos pick insects off the rock, I crush perhaps a hundred of these seeds with every step.

From its shores, this parched riverbed looks like an inert desert, especially in comparison to the teeming jungle that surrounds it. But there is life among the stones – early, hopeful life – and to witness these private struggles is to engage in a level of voyeurism perfectly suited to the travelling writer. When the rains return this place will flourish, rivaling the forest its unbridled bloom.

The sun is dropping so I wander back to shore. The last thing I want is to further disturb this river’s quiet germination by blundering through it at dusk. Up ahead, encircling the summit of one of the tallest boulders, five black-legged vultures stand facing each other. Every now and then, one of them leaps up into the air and tries to land on the head of one of its mates. They might be playing or they might be fighting, their talons scraping the stone like sabres as they jostle for position. The scavengers have evil in their eyes and shadows in their wings, but they are weak and scrawny reflections of their well-fed selves. As the river waits, so too the vultures wait. Only when life bursts forth will the edible begin to die.

— Andrew Westoll, September 2008

Andrew Westoll’s (Canada) work has appeared in explore, Outpost, the Walrus, and the Globe and Mail. At 23, he spent a year following wild troops of capuchin monkeys through the remote Central Suriname Nature Reserve. Four years later, he returned, this time, not as a scientist, but as a writer. That second journey became the inspiration both for The Dry Season and for his first book, The Riverbones.