Competition for 2012 Venice Beinnale Canada Pavilion

Competition 2012- Short-listed

Richard Yiu Cheong Li 

Adaptation to the unfamiliar ‘new’ landscape

Every landscape (place) is distinctive; its location, its climate, its atmosphere, its people, its culture, its history…

My migrating experience to the ‘new’ landscape is about adaptation to the unfamiliar context comparing to where I was from. The design of the landscape and the dwelling reflects on this idea. It begins with the most familiar image of a dwelling (a pitched roof house) on a flat landscape. As the landscape gets manipulated into different configurations, the dwelling simply adapts to it. The dwelling you see in front of you is a reflection of this particular ‘new’ landscape. The image of the dwelling changes continuously as one migrate into another ‘new’ landscape, landscape=dwelling. 

Competition Brief

The intention of this competition is to bring the Venice Biennale to Canada, by promoting and exposing the up-and-coming generation of Canadian architects and designers to the Canadian public before showcasing them in Venice. The goal is to build a young, architectural “Team Canada” to represent Canada in Venice. The migrating landscapes competition invites young Canadian architects and designers to reflect o their cultural migration experiences and un/settling encounters and to design dwellings- in a sense, first acts of settlement- onto the new landscape designed by MLO (Migrating Landscapes Organizer). This new landscape is an abstract assembly made of wooden module, and contestants are invited to act as its first immigrants. The act of constructing the first dwellings will be enactments of first immigration onto this abstract landscape. 

Background

When people migrate, they bring with them cultural memories of a place, and unique cultural heritages, which affect one’s identity and inform one’s values. These migrated memories, either from another place or another time, transform as they settle into new contexts. New memories are forged, through processes of layering, erasure and juxtaposition, as the migrated memories negotiate with the unfamiliarin the context of new landscapes and architectural environments. In this sense, one never really settles or unsettles, and the resulting built form is neither of the former nor of the present. Instead, unique forms of un/settlement result that resonate with both local conditions and one’s own migrated cultural memories.

The Migrating Landscapes Competition invites young Canadian architects and designers to reflect on their cultural migration experiences and un/settlingencounters and to design dwellings – in a sense, first acts of settlement - onto the new landscape designed by MLO. This new landscape is an abstract assembly made of wooden modules and contestants are invited to act as its first immigrants. The act of constructing the first dwellings will be enactments of first immigrationonto this abstract landscape. The dwellings and the landscape will together form both the regional exhibitions and the exhibition in Venice, providing a unique view into Canada’s past, present and future.