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The 7th Annual University Charrette

The following text was presented by the jury members at the vernissage of the Charrette exhibition on Monday, October 29, 2001.

The prizes and the jury's comments

Two First Prizes ex aequo, and a special mention

	«Après moi le déluge - Public space heals the hospital» (Projet 20) This project contains a detailed program for the public use of the entire site including Cabot Square and elegantly details a project for a new entrance way. Tupper street would be closed to traffic. Schematic plans, sections and elevations show how to physically relate the square directly to the different buildings and spaces on the block. We are told that «nature breaks its way through the building at different levels and thus opens the public to its new function as a centre for sports and preventative medicine.» The jury greatly appreciated the detailed architectural expression of this public doorway presented in the form of a low relief, giving a fair idea of how it would function at two levels and its eventual impact on the vertical scale of the Tupper street facade.
	«Multiplicité d'entrée» (Projet 27) This project works on the idea of the hospital complex as a small city. The formal logic of individual pavilions set into smaller scale urban space is developed as a way of using incremental interventions over time to progressively transform these magnificently tall and complex structures. This idea has the effect of giving to people using the urban promenade installed between buildings the full impact of the complex monumentality of these structures.
	Une Mention Spéciale du Jury «EXIT» (projet 21) The jury appreciated this original approach to the problem of the reuse of these buildings. «The gift of life through recycling» as the project puts its idea means that those that in the future will no longer want to live in this over populated land could choose to die and to recycle their body parts. It's the analogy of recycling the buildings by the instauration of a new body recycling medical facility. This project was judged to be the best of the group of entries that had worked mainly on the idea of new use.

The jury's comments

1. The theme of this charrette was; « Post-modern Pathologies: Decommissioning the 20th-Century Hospital ».
2. The objectives of the charrette:
Students were asked to propose a reuse scenario for the Montreal Children's Hospital, and to express the vocation of the hospital's new use or uses in the form of a new public entry. Students were asked to consider the institution's history and the building's immediate urban context in their proposals.

The jury:

Members:
Jo-Anne BALCAEN artiste, program coordinator at Articule, the artist run center
Julie SAINT-ARNAUD landscape architect
Sylvie GIRARD architect
Louis BRILLANT architect

Secretary: Alan KNIGHT, Associate professor, School of Architecture, Faculté de l'Aménagement de l'Université de Montréal
Observer: Nancy DUNTON, Head of University and Professional Programs at the C.C.A.

General remarks from the jury:

The jury appreciated the excellent participation of students in this year's 7th edition of the CCA charrette. The jury judged 31 projects, with two more submitted but disqualified for non conformity with the charrette rules, developed by 33 teams of designers coming from 5 different universities associated with the discipline of environmental design.

The jury noted from the start that the challenge of the themes associated with this year's project had resulted in only around 10% of the submitted projects dealing directly with questions of built form and entranceways. The teams were asked to deal with the complexities of programmatic considerations recycling an architectural ensemble of 20th century hospital pavilions built at different epochs, at the same time as they were to look at the urban context of the Cabot Square and the entire Children's hospital block. Finally, the charrette program asked them to explore questions of space and volume, of circulation and orientation, of materials and structure, implicit in the project for a new entranceway into this magnificent collection of buildings.

Five projects addressed themselves to the idea of nature and its healing properties, in a re-working of the perennial dichotomy of Nature versus Culture. These projects were not given prizes as they tended to miss the central interest of the project in the environmental qualities of the site both in terms of the existing green open spaces and the architectural culture of the buildings. They did however provide the jury with an interesting debate on a series of questions, - how to de-construct the buildings, - how to manage the ruins of this ensemble and generally how to re-appropriate such buildings in a less densely populated city.

Other projects interpreted the building and its urban environment within overtly medical metaphors - healing, prevention (and not cure) of health problems, building for life, death, resuscitation, and pathology. One such project was accorded a special mention by the jury. Some projects limited their critical discourse to readings and statements exclusively concerned with the future vocation of the existing buildings, without attacking the problem of architectural form, either of the buildings or of an entranceway. Others were content to provide a commentary on the subject of this year's charrette problem.

Yet other projects reflected on the programmatic problem of whether to create a mega-block, giving the ensemble one major function, or if one should keep the essential character of an urban block made out of separate building pavilions with separate functions and to use the interstitial spaces as smaller scale urban space. These teams saw the hospital complex as a small town, or a city neighbourhood possessing interesting urban characteristics that could be called into play in their projects. These last two approaches characterized the prize-winning projects chosen by the jury for their over-all excellence.
A further note from the secretary of the jury

The jury debated extensively the different issues raised by the projects. Their deliberations were conducted with method and were extremely detailed and rich. All decisions concerning the attribution of specific prizes were unanimous.

and now to the EXPO in an orderly manner