[III] Winners of the 2012 ar+d Emerging Awards
27/11/2012.
By The Architectural Review [LONDON] UK
metalocus, INÉS LALUETA
metalocus, INÉS LALUETA
Bloc 10 Housing, 5468796 Architecture, Winnipeg, Canada.
The question of affordable housing lurks, the recurring bad dream of contemporary architecture. The difficulty of building dwellings simply and well imparts a night terror to many of us, and we are unable to deny its sepulchral truths in the days that follow. The Art Nouveau era—much like the similarly sinuous boom of the last decade—were times of splendidly urbane apartment blocks, or villas in city or countryside brimming with lush ornamentation and restless surfaces.
But at the end of the First World War, the profession turned as one (in Continental Europe, at least, where destruction was most concentrated) to the problem of affordable housing. Whether the German debate about existenzminimum, Le Corbusier’s speculations about the house as a “a machine for living,” to the prototypes, both good and bad, tested at Stuttgart’s 1927 Wiesenhofsiedlung, new housing forms to repair a blasted Europe were the heart of the Modern project.
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When Winnipeg-based 5468796 Architecture were highly commended in the 2010 AR Awards for Emerging Architecture for the OMS Stage they flew their whole team to Europe for the prize giving. The Canadian posse was 12 strong, including the project developer, and together they rented a house and ‘made London home’ for a few days. It was their first taste of international recognition, just three-and-a-half years into their careers, and was significant not only for them but also for the community of local start-up practices that have emerged in Winnipeg in recent years. Stuck in the middle of Canada, Winnipeg is, by their own admission, a remote and conservative place, where it is difficult to convince people of the value of architecture and design. Now, however, a clutch of 10 or so new practices are challenging the status quo, and helping to revive the Modernist legacy established by the disciples of Wright, Mies and Gropius who came to the region in the ’60s and ’70s to help make the Department of Architecture at the University of Manitoba one of the strongest Modernist schools in Canada. As practice founder Sasa Radulovic says, however, ‘over the last 20 or so years, the scene has been relatively stale’, so sensing a renaissance in the offing, in everything they do − from practice teaching to public engagement − they seek to raise the profile of architecture.