Lisa Landrum & Ted Landrum
Time to [In]completion
Pedagogical Pauses and Architectural Rushes
10 Scores for the Next Millennia
“the end aimed at is the starting-point of our thought, the end of our thought the starting-point of action.”
— Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics 1227b32-3
“... since the Machine cannot reach the real Past until it has first shot into the Future, it must pass through a certain point, symmetrical to our Present... which we should call the imaginary Present."
— Alfred Jarry, "Practical Construction of the Time Machine" [1899]
Architecture embodies multiple temporalities, tempos and timings, which we can never fully inhabit, exhaust, or comprehend. We inhabit not one time, but many times and polychronic rhythms. The present is a palimpsest of memories and anticipations, pacings and pauses, dynamic histories, open futures and myriad urgencies of now. How does architecture participate in all these converging and diverging temporalities?
Challenged by temporal questions, Studio Tempo explores architecture as a way of finding and staging meaningful durations, simultaneously intimate and expansive. Beginning in Fall 2022, students in Studio Tempo built “Time Machines with Waiting Rooms” - some of which are featured here - and devised quick-quick-slow plans for Quality Time Institutes.
This exhibition features a selection of festina lente “scores” in gestation, providing a glimpse into Studio Tempo’s “Time to [In]Completion.”
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PROJECT DESCRIPTIONS
FORGED FUSIONS
Jeramee Fajardo
This trio of drawings maps storied transactions across three scales of space-time. One incorporates multiple narrative exchanges performed during a meal. The second discloses converging encounters in the social setting of a diner - Eddy’s Place - over an afternoon. The third tracks daily and seasonal events across the milieu of a Winnipeg neighborhood. The polychronic drawings rehearse and record both the rhythms of transformation happening over time, and the fusion of sensations experienced in an instant.
For more on this project, see: https://umanitoba.ca/architecture/ardt2023fajardo
FULL MOON CENTRE
Daniella Fernandez
Explorations of Peruvian Quipus and Chakanas, as early chronicles and calendars, gave rise to considering the moon as an enduring time piece. The Full Moon Centre is a women’s support and ceremonial dreamspace, connecting Indigenous stories and struggles across hemispheres. Sited at a nexus of loss and regeneration, this space of empowerment and celebration participates in cycles of the Moon and fluctuations of the river, while fostering personal and cultural growth and reflection.
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STRAIGHT TALK
A. Manachou
AM Kunsthaus Tacheles is an iconic Berlin example of Schwarzwohnen, whereby thousands of citizens lived illegally in vacated buildings in the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany) in the 1970-80s. These three drawings chronicle the skewed socio-political circumstances surrounding the occupations of Tacheles (Yiddish for “straight talk”) over its 100+ year history: from its 1902 construction as a department store; through its troubled war times; to its transformation into a celebrated alternative art house; to its controversial renovation into luxury condominiums. Striving to plot a future inclusive of its history, these “scores” investigate embedded tensions between cultures and subcultures, commodities and communities, and the engendering of social agency.
For more on this project, see: https://umanitoba.ca/architecture/ardt2023manachou
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SKYHOUSE
Hyeonji (Angie) Kwon
In a memo on “Quickness,” Italo Calvino suggests that narrative digressions are a strategy to extend time and forestall the end. Can architectural digressions similarly slow time and sustain quality durations? Skyhouse is a place of long-term care for the elderly and their families in the city. It is a place for pacing and pausing in dignity, with dream-filled digressions of memory and imagination. Intertwining hospice healthcare and assisted-living with galleries for art and music therapy, rooftop terraces and sunken gardens for solace and social promenades, Skyhouse gives enduring hope to an ephemeral story: shared life.
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ZOOMORPHIA
Yi Wang
Inspired by the transformation of Winnipeg’s historic exchange district over many millennia, from a crossing for herds of wild bison to a bustling city mingling people from around the world, Zoomorphia is a gigantic arts and community centre. It is an exquisite corpse of a building, fed by narrative experiments, sci-fi journeys of imagination, and spatio-temporal “scores” choreographing routines of multi-media makers.
Studio Tempo is a graduate architecture studio led by Prof. Lisa Landrum and Ted Landrum at the University of Manitoba, 2022-2023.
Lisa Landrum, is Associate Professor and Associate Dean Research for the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Manitoba. She holds a B.Arch from Carleton University and a post-professional Master’s and PhD in Architectural History and Theory from McGill. She is a registered architect in Manitoba and New York and works via leadership roles to strengthen bonds between academia and practice, while leveraging architecture’s potential for justice and joy. Her creative research on the origins and potential of architectural agency, drama and democracy is widely published, including the co-edited book, Theatres of Architectural Imagination (Routledge 2023), assembling material from the 2021 Frascari V symposium
Ted Landrum teaches architecture at the University of Manitoba, and helps curate Winnipeg’s annual Architecture + Design Film Festival (adff.ca). His experimental “archi-poetry” can be found in Midway Radicals & Archi-Poems (2017) and online at UbuLoca.com.