Prix de Rome Winner Investigates the Abused and Neglected
University of Waterloo architecture graduate Michaela MacLeod is the winner of the Canada Council for the Arts’ Prix de Rome in Architecture for Emerging Practitioners.
The committee saluted MacLeod’s interest in using ecological processes as an active agent in the design of landscapes, leaving the final shape of the design open to these outside forces. They agreed that this profoundly understated approach to design stands at the forefront of contemporary research, and that the first experiments in that direction need to be seen in the flesh.
Michaela will have the opportunity to research various design approaches taken to the reclamation of waste sites within North America and Europe. She hopes the research will culminate with a presentation at a symposium focused on the future of wastelands in Canada, organized by Macleod herself. (More here.)
Coincidentally (or perhaps not), this year’s VIA lecturer Alan Berger will be discussing a very similar theme.
Author of “Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America” and “Nansga
Coastal City: Landscape and Urbanism in the Pearl River Delta,” Alan
Berger scans the globe with camera and insights into contemporary
development - your guide to a vast, largely ignored field of waste
landscapes and to the new chaotic urban landscapes in the emerging
world. Expect a radical reconceptualization of your thinking.
Pencil it in: May 23, 7 pm - SFU Harbour Centre (515 West Hastings).
Add comment April 16, 2007
