News, Jul 1, 2017
McGee, Thun, and Velikov Win 2017 AZURE Magazine AZ Awards

McGee, Thun, and Velikov Win 2017 AZURE Magazine AZ Awards

EXTRACTION, the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale Canadian Pavilion Project, led by curator Pierre Bélanger (OPSYS) in collaboration with a team including architect and exhibition designer, RVTR, led by Geoffrey Thün (Associate Dean for Research and Creative Practice and Associate Professor in Architecture), Kathy Velikov (Associate Professor in Architecture), and Colin Ripley was awarded AZURE Magazine’s 2017 AZ Award in the Social Good category.

Microtherme by Matter Design, a design practice led by Wes McGee (Assistant Professor in Architecture and Director of the FABLab) and Brandon Clifford, received an Award of Merit and the People’s Choice Award in the Temporary Architecture category.

Azure highlighted that this year’s submissions reached a staggering 813 from 41 countries. The jurors for this year’s awards met in March to narrow down the hundreds of submissions to a shortlist of 70 finalists. 20 winners were then recognized at an awards ceremony on June 23, 2017.

For more information about this year’s awards: http://awards.azuremagazine.com/cms/2017-2/

More about EXTRACTION:

An exhibit at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, boldly acknowledging Canada’s colonial history of territorial appropriation. It also reckoned with the resources that support the architecture of the Canadian mining economy – specifically, the extraction services, technologies and operations that yield everything from gold to potash.

There, at the juncture where the Canadian, French and British pavilions meet, one visitor at a time looked through a solid-gold keyhole to view socially and politically charged footage and images dating back to the Magna Carta, including rare news clips depicting the standoff between police and Mohawks during the Oka Crisis in the 1990s. While Prime Minister Justin Trudeau prefers to present an almost saccharine image of gentleness, inclusion and resourcefulness, the reality is that Canada is home to more than 75 per cent of the globe’s prospecting and mining companies, and much of their activity is happening on unceded land.

Extraction presented the sort of hard-hitting commentary about Canada that is rarely acknowledged or heard, especially in art.

Source: http://www.azuremagazine.com/article/2017-az-awards-winner-social-good/

More about Microtherme:

In her influential book Thermal Delight in Architecture, Lisa Heschong contends that people take pleasure in variably hot and cold environments – imagine, for instance, sitting outside in a hot tub during winter. The exterior of the Microtherme installation by Matter Design resembles a floating wooden shed, but inside, visible through portal-like holes and accessed through its open bottom, is a sculpted concrete interior. The temperature of the structure ranges from a chilly 9 degrees Celsius to a stifling 50 degrees thanks to embedded copper tubes carrying frigid or scalding water. Stepping inside to feel these extremes is a destabilizing and thrilling experience.

Source: http://www.azuremagazine.com/article/2017-az-awards-of-merit-landscape-and-temporary-architecture/

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