Exhibition: Collaborative Exercise 2024
- Date
- January 11, 2024 - January 24, 2024
- Time
- 6:30 PM EST - 8:00 PM EST
REAL/surREAL, the 2024 Collaborative Exercise held in early January, addressed real issues currently challenging Toronto’s liveability and affordability, by engaging some 240 students in a surreal design approach. The goal was to create architectural responses through collaboration that would otherwise be unimagined by a single designer. The suburban Centrepoint Mall, which is slated for demolition, was identified as a viable and unencumbered site offering a unique situation for such a collaborative design exercise.
The inherently collaborative architectural design process was loosely based on the Exquisite Corpse game…
“A game in which each participant takes turns writing or drawing on a sheet of paper, folding it to conceal their contribution, and then passing it to the next player for a further contribution. The game gained popularity in artistic circles during the 1920s when it was adopted as a technique by artists of the Surrealist movement to generate collaborative compositions.”
The Exquisite Corpse game was embraced by Surrealist artists as a means by which to access the powers of the psyche through collaborative creativity. The game was seen as a system, a method of research, and an antidote to the rationality that had led to the horrors of the First World War.
The Centrepoint Mall site was divided into twenty-four segments for which individual teams of students envisioned variations of an eminently livable, accessible, exclusively pedestrian, and human-scaled urbanity. Over the four days of the Exercise, individual teamwork was progressively amalgamated into an eclectic and collaborative design response demonstrated through engaging perspectival vignettes, a composite figure/ground plan, and a wonderfully crafted and intriguing physical model at a 1:200 scale.
The pedagogical aim of the REAL/surREAL Collaborative Exercise was to encourage the open exchange of ideas, impressions, and design approaches between individual students and teams, coupled with a similar sharing of insights when it came to sketching and model-building. This provided a fulfilling experience leading to an intriguing outcome. A surreal “bottom up” approach to architectural projects can also provide students with an additional perspective with which to complement their evolving architectural attitudes and design abilities.