What Makes a Space a Place?

What Makes a Space a Place?

Waterloo School of Architecture

July 4 – 26, 2017

Led by Jonathan Friedman of PARTISANS Architects, a team of Waterloo Architecture students will create a site-specific built installation on the outdoor plaza at the Gardiner Museum of Ceramics. 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, the installation focuses 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. Inviting the public to participate in the act of contributing helping to create the installation through the physical process of mosaic tiling, allows the work to become an interactive departure point to evaluate the success our public spaces, the contribution of public art in the city, and the importance of the public dialogue over how our city gets built.

We would like to invite you at the opening of the event on the 6^th of July, 5-8pm, at the Gardiner Museum and at the rest of the events that will take place during the month of July which are listed below. In addition, we would like to hear your opinion and perspective on matters of Toronto’s public space through a digital platform that we created for this purpose. Share your media, discuss your opinion, interact with each other @TO_Public_Space at our twitter account: https://twitter.com/TO_Public_Space .

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.