Prince Albert, Saskatchewan

Tim Atherton
After being established in 1866 Prince Albert experienced early success and prosperity, but this turned out to be a fleeting and often temporary experience. The Canadian Pacific Railway chose a more southerly route that sidelined the city. When the important institutions were shared out, Prince Albert lost the university to Saskatoon and got the penitentiary instead. Since then, the city’s fortunes may rise and fall – but never quite far enough to be disastrous or truly prosperous.
So, downtown Prince Albert and its Central Avenue didn’t undergo all the periodic changes that other prairie cities went through. And now the central core can either appear mildly depressed – following the closure of the Weyerhaeuser pulp mill – or, a year later, now optimistic with the potential of a diamond mine from DeBeers, the mood judged by the opening of the new cappuccino bar.
Walking Central Avenue you find yourself going from the brand new hopeful and contemporary Forestry Centre to pre-First World War stone faced bank buildings to false-fronted early twentieth century shop-fronts to the flourishes of tinwork frontages and Prairie Historicism all within a couple of blocks.
Big wall-sized mid-twentieth century advertisements still remain painted on brick-sided buildings for O-Pee-Chee chewing gum and Old Chum Tobacco, faded almost to transparency. Elaborate cornices and touches of Romanesque are noticed if you take the time to look around.
Along with this, the post-modern migration – even in such a small city – from centre to edge continues unabated. The first generation of malls, dying and almost empty, are now being replaced by new parking-lot surrounded mega-stores – the home building/lifestyle supplies stores, the super-Walmarts, competing supermarkets and the drug store chains that now sell everything from cough syrup to milk to summer garden supplies.
John Szarkowski, Director of Photography, Museum of Modern Art said, ‘these pictures have a kind of fragile, tentative beauty that I associate with such northern places (including my own home town) where the idea of civilisation itself seems an experiment, on probationary status’.
In Prince Albert the grain elevator just hangs on and civilisation here does indeed often seem to be on probationary status, still an experiment.

Atherton, Tim. 'Prince Albert, Saskatchewan' On Site review, no. 19 Spring/Summer 2008
©Tim Atherton and On Site review

Inscription

marking our place on architectureSarah Zollinger
When we become lost in the cities we live in, we rediscover our place by responding to the stories that architects tell with our own marks — words and images that tell stories in the cities we inhabit. Writing one's name on a building claims space and makes place: it makes that building surface ours. Design cannot be spontaneous, but graffiti needs to be. Architecture may be hard and solid and slow, but writers move quickly. Writing names and identities onto the city is how we engage the slowness of architecture and put ourselves into the stories of the places we live.
Aldo Rossi's city is a collection of the architecture that makes it up: a human-built object, an assembly of artefacts; often a collection of the ‘nameless architecture of large cities, streets and residential blocks’1 — LA, Houston or Toronto—but when we look more closely a counter-definition starts to emerge. Lives lived within these architectures add layers to the palimpsest of a city. With architectures as repositories, cities are ‘the production and distribution of discourse, writing, including the bodily traces of a building's occupants, and its divisions of space, time and movement'.2 This ‘visual litter’ both private and commercial, is part of our dialogue with the city. Competing images and texts might seem entirely chaotic but ‘neither cities nor places in them are unordered, unplanned; the question is only whose order, whose planning, for what purpose, in whose interest’.3
When the modern city disregards the individual in an attempt to plan for the universal, graffiti, stickers and stencils are some of the ways that urban dwellers physically and visually make their individual presence known. This urban art is part of a long tradition of marking the places we live. It is the trace of people we know and things we can identify. Because of the marks made by others like us the city becomes ‘a place that we can identify ourselves within’. 4 Each mark is the trace of another person ‘…every graffito can … be seen and/or read as a miniature autobiography of a member of a society in the sense that the graffitist reveals a part of himself and his society in all that s/he writes’.5 This idea of autobiography is at the heart of graffiti and what makes it unique.
Graffiti is about naming: writing ones name in the city allows ‘an announcement of one’s identity [as] a kind of testimonial to one’s existence in a world of anonymity’.6 Whether it be to sign a contract, or write yourself a name tag, or tag a wall, ‘when one makes a mark, one leaves something of one's self behind’, claiming both identity and belonging.7 For urban youth in a culture of nameless-ness and identity-less-ness, graffiti is a route to belonging, not only in a group but also in a large and anonymous city.8 Naming and re-naming implies the creation, or re-creation, of self and serves as a means of empowerment.9 The subsequent marking of one's name on a public surface adds to this the physical claiming of space and the delineation of boundaries within the city. There is a sense of pride in seeing your name or the names of friends impacting the city. One belongs by marking one's presence.
In this, buildings, the collection of stories told by architects, become the backdrop. The anonymous walls of anonymous buildings become canvases where the average person comes in contact with the city and meets the moment when our lives can inscribe the rigid world that we live in. This is where the people that walk the streets make architecture human: flexible, changeable and where we urban dwellers, who live our lives in the shadows of buildings, push back at an unyielding architecture.

Zollinger, Sarah. 'Inscriptions: marking our place on architecture' On Site review, no. 19 Spring/Summer 2008
©Sara Zolllinger and On Site review

Cold War Neon

WarsawElla Chmielewska
In the common imaginary of the West, gray was the colour of the communist city; the drab and uniform tone was only punctuated by the red of the flags. This ideological urban myth could be unsettled by the remaining artefacts of the communist era in Warsaw, though they have been disappearing fast from the surface of the city. Displaced by garish noise of printed advertising and cheap signs of hyper-capitalism, the evidence of the little know urban phenomenon of neonization of the communist cities in the 1960s has been crumbling, leaving only street photographs to attest to the spectacular aspects of socialist modernity.
After the death of Stalin and the political changes of 1956, Warsaw was released from its Socialist Realist shackles, and allowed to become modern. Mies-inspired buildings appeared in the city centre, and elaborate neon signs sprouted everywhere on rooftops and building facades. Architectural and design journals called for surrounding the citizen with beauty, light, and clarity of form and discussed modern uses and the compositional-aesthetic sense of light in architecture. References to the fantasy and ‘magic of city lights and advertising’ and ‘illuminated composition’ illustrated the metropolitan ambitions and highlighted the role of graphic space in urban design. The new metropolitan street was posited as an evidence of aesthetic taste, sophistication, and ‘European elegance’.1
The celebration of light and colour, however, was not to be spontaneous nor chaotic as chaos was seen as characteristic of capitalist cities and their ‘obscene spatial compositions’.2 In a socially progressive city, technology, industry, art and urban detail was to meet in the careful choreography of neon signs that constructed the proper image of the socialist metropolis. Not ‘the nonsensical fashion for neons’ not synchronised with architecture, but the careful design of the street interior, was called for; order, harmony, and centrally coordinated urban composition. 3
At first, the term neonization meant a critical reference to the visual noise on the urban surface.4 Later, the term came to mean the comprehensive programme developed and implemented in the1960s and carried through the 1970s, the programme coordinating harmonious design of ‘night architecture’ and the city’s daytime image carried out by the special office of the Chief Designer of the City.5 The office functioned from 1972 to 1991 alongside the position of the Chief Architect of the City of Warsaw and was responsible for the aesthetics of public space, urban signage and advertising and all issues related to information and decoration in the city, including engaging artists in consultations regarding the colours for building façades, design of neons and illuminated signs, shop windows and public displays.
The Neonization Programme established an elaborate design and approval process requiring careful consideration of site, building scale and detail, the context of other signs, relevant views, colour sequences, as well as the signs’ graphic form, typography, and even the wording. Technical aspects of signs, their sequence of switching, specifications for the materials and mechanisms, were also part of the stringent approval process. Most importantly, the neon signs were not treated in isolation, and the approval process was not a mere regulatory formality. The design of urban signage, advertising and occasional decorations became an important source of revenue for the local graphic artists and architects, and the approval documents provide an astonishing testament to the quality expected and the attention to detail demanded of the projects.
The neons were not simply positioned in available spaces. They were designed into the buildings’ exteriors: forming hypersurfaces, as it were, enveloping the buildings, outlining them, respectful of their form and detail, highlighting their silhouette. They retreated during the daylight, with only a delicate line of writing visible against the sky, or the building surface. The neons, like the posters visible on the streets of Warsaw, were designed by graphic artists and were used in the rhetoric of modernity and the Polish contribution to European (Western) culture.6


1 Jerzy Hryniewiecki. ‘Ksztalt przyszlosci’ (The shape of the future), Projekt, no.1, (1956). pp 5-9; Stanislaw Jankowski, ‘Urbanistyczne wnioski z Festiwalu’ (Post-festival urban reflections) Miasto (The City), 61 no 11 (1955) pp 26-29.
2 Henryk Sufryd. ‘Zagadnienia sztucznego oswie tlenia architektury’ (Problems of the artificial light in architecture) Miasto, 55 no 9 (1959) pp.12-15.
3 Ibid.
4 Olgierd Budrewicz, Stolica (The Capitol), March 1958, p. 9.
5 Stanislaw Soszynski, Chief Designer of the City of Warsaw 1972-1991 (interviews, May 2003). See also: Archives of the City of Warsaw, Neonizacja, 1969-1972, document AB.UA-647-71.
6 Ella Chmielewska ‘Sites of Display: The iconosphere of Warsaw, 1955 to the present day.’ Peter Martyn (ed), City in Art. Warsaw: Institute of Art, 2008, pp.127-143, fig.1-51.

Chmielewska, Ella. 'Cold War Neon' On Site review, no. 19 Spring/Summer 2008
©Ella Chmielewska and On Site review

Lucrae ante populus

Jill Browne
McKenzie Towne is an olde-new ‘village’ in Calgary, surrounded by the flat and densely packed acres of new houses that make up the subdivisions collectively thought of as McKenzie. When I asked a few people about living in McKenzie, they were quick to point out that McKenzie Towne is just a small part of McKenzie world.
I remember reading about McKenzie years ago in the newspaper, when it was a gleam in the architect’s eye. The vision was of a pedestrian-friendly place with a village feel. More fool me for thinking that would include local jobs.
Recently I’ve made a couple of trips out to McTowne (their community association was advertising using this name) and have been mulling it over.
It’s easy to be negative and critical about the tweeness of the olde bits, but there are some positives about McKenzie, including the green spaces. Despite the fact that many of the houses are unbearably close together, McKenzians have visible pride of ownership. They were not the ones who designed their homes and took them from lot line to lot line. In Calgary’s new subdivisions (and most of Calgary is new), homebuyers pick from what the developer offers. If it’s not on the menu, you can’t have it.
The thing that gets most to my point is found in one of the children’s playgrounds. There are some play structures set up like a little town. At the pretend bank counter, the sign says ‘BANK. Lucrae ante populus’. The intended meaning is, ‘Wealth before people’. I think it is a sophomoric ironic statement unsuccessfully mocking bankers. The irony is terribly misplaced to the point of being mean.

‘Wealth before people’ is how McKenzie works. The people who live there can’t actually afford if they were dependent onwages available locally, in McKenzie itself. This is not because the residents want it that way, it’s because their employers do. The cost of commuting - both the direct costs of driving, and the much larger indirect costs in terms of quality of life - are borne by the residents. The city planners and council have no apparent motivation to change things.
If McTowne had an economic centre beyond the retail outlets that dominate its northern half, the village life of the vision might just be possible. I don’t see how a place can justifiably be called pedestrian-friendly if the would-be pedestrians are depleted after commuting two or more hours daily to make a living. What kind of village is that?

Browne, Jill. 'Lucrae ante populus' On Site review no.18 Fall/Winter 2007/2008
© Jill Browne and On Site review

Chicago

White, Stephanie. 'Prairie culture' On Site review, no. 18 Fall/Winter 2007/2008