Waterloo Architecture’s 50th Anniversary Celebration
The Gardiner Museum brings together people of all ages and backgrounds through the shared values of creativity, wonder, and community that clay and ceramic traditions inspire.
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Waterloo Architecture’s 50th Anniversary Celebration
July 21, 2017 @ 5:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Part of the Community Arts Space: Art is Change
Led by Jonathan Friedman of PARTISANS Architects, a team of Waterloo Architecture students will create a site-specific built installation on the Gardiner’s outdoor plaza. Coinciding with Waterloo Architecture’s 50th anniversary, visitors will be invited to embellish colourful benches with mosaic tile as part of a month-long communal art-making activation exploring the scarcity of meaningful public space in Toronto. A series of discussions and activations will engage the public in this ongoing dialogue throughout the month of July.
Originating as a graduate elective course taught by Friedman in the winter of 2017, graduate students from the University of Waterloo’s School of Architecture were tasked with activating the Gardiner’s outdoor plaza with a site-specific built installation. The course focused on three key areas of architectural investigation: materiality (linking traditional methods with new technologies); the site (an opportunity to engage with the building, the forecourt and the public realm in a meaningful and thoughtful way); and the poetics of space (the opportunity to create a poetic and provocative piece of art and design). In the process, the students have had the opportunity to examine the importance of civic space and to engage directly in the act of city building.
What Makes a Space a Place? was led by the following graduate students (listed in alphabetical order): Negar Behzad, Suhaib Bhatti, Golnaz Djamshidi, Alexandra Hucik, Carly Kandrack, Ali Mohebali, Cam Parkin, Fotini Pitoglou, Danielle Rosen, Pavel Tsolov, and Anqi Zhang.
About the Community Arts Space: Art is Change
The Gardiner Museum’s unique history and identity is rooted in the city, but its future is increasingly shaped by those beyond the core cultural corridor. As space increasingly becomes a premium downtown, the Gardiner has collaborated with six cultural and community partners to consider how institutional outreach can be re-shaped by local artists, curators, and architects. Looking to the rapid high-rise developments happening within the Museum’s own Yorkville neighbourhood, the projects in Art is Change consider how the city’s unique and varied local histories of art and social activism can be re-mapped for the future. Learn more
