Christopher Macdonald: SweaterLodge Curator, Interim Director UBC School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture

The installation at the Canadian Pavilion for the 2006 Venice Architecture Biennale has been fashioned by the Vancouver based practice Pechet and Robb Studio. The project attempts to provide an extraordinary experience in which issues of current urban and architectural cultures are explored and enacted.

The primary and most arresting manifestation of the project is the insertion of a hugely overscaled polar fleece sweater within the interior of the pavilion. The literal legibility of the sweater is supplanted by the creation of a sensually engaging backdrop for the duration of the Biennale.

The work references the emerging design culture of the city of Vancouver — a city in which an extravagant geographic setting establishes an unflinching measure of the activities associated with settlement and building. Vancouver’s urbanity is vitally contaminated by everpresent leisure activities, a pervading concern for environmental propriety and the essential optimism of a hugely diverse population preoccupied with the fabrication of home.

Vancouver’s contemporary housing has been reduced to a highly schematic and normative expression amplified through the marketing of associated lifestyles. In a social culture that privileges individual difference, the provision of domestic environments has developed into a monoculture of podium, tower and honed granite countertops that at best approximates the received virtues of a boutique hotel. The appropriation and resuscitation of such spaces can invite a kind of urban camping, appropriate to inhabitants who understand very well the virtues of the transitory.

While exhilarating in its expression of capital flow and conventions of domestic taste, design speculations often locate themselves along a cultural perimeter. The essentially blunt nature of current city building is probed through more agile explorations associated with landscape, furniture, set design and public art installation, always maintaining a critical and oftentimes quizzical regard for the brittle experiences of this place.

Pechet and Robb’s accomplishments include a number of installations within the public landscape that anticipate and even provoke the invention of new social practices. Within an urban realm that is largely unprecedented, such installations might be considered provisional invitations, awaiting the forcefulness of built presence to be fully accommodated in daily lives.

This critical regard between the routine and the improvisational not only characterizes the nature of Pechet and Robb’s practice, but also draws a direct resonance between the actions of the designer and those of the citizen. Each is obliged to undertake a revision of the environment as found in order to cultivate personal and nuanced meaning. The reading of the city is framed by individual and particular vested interests, which, in turn, intersect and collide to create a collective identity of layered communities.

In its allusion to the aboriginal constructions known as sweatlodge — structures built for the purposes of ritual purification and communal association — the SweaterLodge installation evokes another powerful strain of Native American culture, that of the trickster. In their use of puns, arcane allusions and double entendre, Pechet and Robb make manifest one valuable strategy for minority values to maintain a degree of invisibility within the realm of the more dominant culture. Allied with shifts in scale and a general inclination to decontextualize the familiar, the work operates as both visceral and intellectual stimulus — its final meaning constructed again and again by individual visitors to the Biennale.

The exquisitely ephemeral material of recycled plastic drink containers rendered in the monumental scale of a titan’s sweater transformed again into a comforting interior that evokes Barbarella while reminding us of architecture’s ultimate affiliation with the essential shelter of clothing….

A cipher for the order of complexity and substance that lies at the heart of this project we call architecture.

Christopher Macdonald