Research materials, including a copy of Heavy Construction News magazine featuring Guy Desbarats, a spread from the Toronto Star Weekly on Expo '67, a photograph of the atelier of Roger D'Astous and a diagram titled "Integral Power" from Adventure in Growth: Collected Papers of James T. McCay 1956–1967.

Architect in Control (Archive in Control)

Presentation: 27 August 2015, @6:00 pm 
Shaughnessy House
Presented in English

After working under the directive to “dig into the archive,” the recipients of the 2015 Power Corporation of Canada Award present three stories from the archives of Roger D’Astous, Guy Desbarats and Victor Prus. Acknowledging that moving through the archive is a subjective process, the story of these three architects is also understood as the story of three researchers. The discussion will consider both the architects’ work and the archival-based research itself through the lens of control, whereby the authority of the architect and the archive are simultaneously confronted.

D’Astous, Desbarats and Prus each made significant built contributions to Montreal during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, including through their participation in Expo ’67. As described in the 2004 CCA exhibition and publication The 60s: Montreal Thinks Big, this was a period of optimism and international awareness, resulting in an architectural playing field of exceptional opportunity. In contrast, the book Anxious Modernisms, co-published by the CCA in 2000, identifies in the post-WWII period a shared sense of anxiety. In the case of these three architects, this summer’s research project asks: did newfound freedom cause newfound anxiety?

Through the investigation of D’Astous’s Christian Pavilion, Desbarats’s Man the Producer Pavilion and Prus’s unrealized International Centre for Advanced Studies in Human Development, award recipients Desirae Cronsberry (M.Arch., Carleton University), Ila D’cruz (M.Arch. [Post-professional] candidate, McGill University), and Ian Lowrie (M.Arch. candidate, University of British Columbia) narrate their research through personal encounters with the archive.

> via cca.qc.ca/en