Exhibition: Designs for a U of S School of Architecture
Drawings and models imagining the new U of S School of Architecture by architecture students at Ryerson University
Future School: Designs for a new University of Saskatchewan School of Architecture
An exhibit of drawings and models by architecture students at Ryerson University
Curated by Colin Ripley, a professor in the Department of Architectural Science at Ryerson
When: February 13-16, 2017
Reception: Feb 16, 3 to 6 pm
Where: Gordon Snelgrove Gallery, 191 Murray Bldg.
Info: 306-966-4208 email: gordon.snelgrove@usask.ca website: www.usask.ca/snelgrove
About:
Every day, architects design the future. The places they design will be used for decades if not centuries. If they are not thinking about the future conditions of the world, only about today, they are ignoring our responsibility to later generations. But what will the future look like? What conditions will we face? Of course we can’t know, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t consider it. We all have to be futurologists.
In this senior undergraduate studio at Ryerson University in the fall of 2016, students were asked to imagine our architectural future by considering, first, the place where we learn what it is to be an architect, to develop bold and speculative visions for how the John Deere Plow Building in Saskatoon might be put to use for a new School of Architecture (and Visual Art) at the University of Saskatchewan. Built in 1910, the building was occupied by John Deere Plow Co. from 1910 until 1961. The City of Saskatoon purchased it in 1961 and gifted it to the University of Saskatchewan School of Architecture in 2010.
The work offers a wide range of perspectives on what the future has to hold for us. The visions these students have produced are by turns compelling, strange, beautiful. They are visions of an uncertain but hopeful future, and they demonstrate the powerful role that architecture can have in first imagining and then bringing into being a future that we all want.