Under the supervision of Professors Michael Jemtrud, Kiel Moe & Theodora Vardouli. Team of 9 students.
Design January - April 2019 Construction May 2019
The performance stage for musicians was designed for the bicentennial celebrations at McGill University in 2021, as a collaboration between the faculties of architecture and music.
In May 2019, we put together the pavilion for the first time at the Jardins de Métis, where it is located at the entrance to the International Festival Gardens. The structure is an array of collapsible “X”s and hinging surface panels that will be dismantled and set up on McGill’s lower field in 2021.
The identical structural elements arrayed at different angles create subtle curves that direct sound waves from the stage and improve the auditory experience for spectators. The locally sourced cedar surface panels are hinged to follow these curves, generating a playful pattern as well as facilitating assembly and disassembly.
The construction process was an incredibly valuable experience. It exposed us to the extraordinary gardens and surrounding towns, and allowed us to appreciate the singular beauty of Quebec’s Saint Lawrence estuary.
[second and last photographs are from the Jardins de Métis website]
Under the supervision of Professor Robert Mellin.
August 2019
This was the third edition of the Community Design Workshop offered as a summer course at McGill University. A group of 10 students moves to the town of Tilting, on Fogo Island in Newfoundland and builds something for the community that lives there.
The first week of the workshop was spent painting the seaside town as a way to become familiar with the area. This was also an opportunity to get to know the community.
The project we built this year for the small fishing outport was a deck and series of paths/steps to access a viewpoint where a statue looks over the town. The statue has significance for the locals and the paths and platform make it easier to get up and enjoy the view by her side. The built-in seating also serves to block the often wild sea breeze. The wood planking was carefully scribed into the rocks so that the natural landscape is showcased.
To inaugurate the new stage, we held an exhibition of the paintings made in the first week followed by musical performances, setting the tone for future uses of our little addition to Tilting’s built environment.
[Last two photographs by Robert Mellin.]
May 2017, with Rachel Li.
Exploration of construction technique using sand-filled water bottles for a school in Ghana.
In May 2017, I visited Kokobrite, a small fishing village on the outskirts of Ghana's capital city Accra. Through a connection in the UK, my friend and I met with Jane and Marshall who run a children's centre there. They provide homework supplies and support for kids after school and help pay many of their tuition fees. The centre itself was recently completed and provides a cool, clean and safe place for learning. Jane and Marshall want places like this to be more common.
Due to the heat and poverty in Ghana, the roadsides are peppered with concrete skeletons of unfinished buildings. They have been stripped of anything removable by thieves and become dangerous. There is also no lack of discarded water bottles there.
This got Marshall thinking.
He was inspired (and taught) by Andreas Froese to use sand-filled water bottles as building blocks. The bottles are held in place with lacerite, a clay-like cement, and strung together around the necks to form a strong mesh.
Over the course of my stay there, I was able to partake in every step of the building process of a school building they are putting up right now, from filling the bottles with sand, a task the school children often help with, to mucking in the walls with lacerite.
The intention was to get an overall understanding of the building technique. We also created a photogrammetry 3D model of the work site (see plan in images to the left). This enables us to continuously examine the bottle walls during future design, and really explore the properties of the bottles as building blocks.
Could the metal and cement column cores be completely eliminated with a circular building form?
