Architecture Canada 1999: The Governor General's Medals for Architecture/Les Médailles du gouverneur-général pour l'architecture ed. by Essy Baniassad (review)

404 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 however, what the artists have to say significantly validates Krims=s focus on the sound of the music in rap throughout the book: mapping a musical poetics of rap music is a crucially important means of understanding how the sounds do cultural work, and Krims has made a significant contribution to that end. (SUSAN FAST) Essy Baniassad, editor. Architecture Canada 1999: The Governor General=s Medals for Architecture/Les Médailles du gouverneur-général pour l=architecture Tuns Press. 144. $24.95 This book is a bilingual catalogue documenting the winning projects for the Governor-General=s Medals for Architecture in 1999. Designed to recognize outstanding achievement in contemporary Canadian architecture, these medals are awarded annually through a juried competition co-organized by the Royal Architectural Institute and the Canada Council. In the year under consideration the jury decided that the winning projects, of which there were ten, reflected two tiers of work. As a result, five of the ten projects were awarded a >medal of excellence,= while the remaining five were awarded a >medal of merit.= The catalogue includes an introductory essay written by an independent observer of the competition, architectural historian and critic Wilfrid Wang, and documentation of the winning projects. That documentation consists of project descriptions, colour photographs, and orthographic drawings. The photographs are ample in number and the orthographic representations bear clear captions indicating the distribution of space program in each project. This makes the book a useful guide for the non-professional looking to understand more about current tendencies in Canadian architecture. In addition, each project description concludes with a brief statement by one of the jury members, summarizing what the jury deemed to be its specific merits. From the National Archive situated just outside of Gatineau (in what jurist Larry Richards describes as >a particularly unattractive no-man=s-land of shopping malls, industrial parks and suburban housing=) to the Cinémathèque québécoise (located in the heart of Montreal), the projects vary widely in terms of both their siting and their programmatic agendas. The architectural strategies deployed in these projects are no less diverse, ranging from Ledbury Park, in which a new topographic condition was created by the bold application of a cut-and-fill technique, to the extreme discretion shown by Julien Architectes in their Centre d=intérêt minier de Chibougamau, where, as jurist Stephen Teeple puts it, >The project is as simple as lighting a tunnel and letting people go in to see what it looks like.= Such diversity aside, certain tendencies emerge as definitive of the current HUMANITIES 405 moment in Canadian architecture: a preference for the formal vocabulary of modernism (however inflected by the introduction of new materials and construction techniques), a desire for a greater level of integration between built form and landscape, a related concern with the environmental and urbanistic implications of architectural construction, and, finally, a willingness to at once preserve and critically engage with what is most valuable in the existing built environment. One suspects that these concerns are not exclusive to the Canadian context. This raises a question: what, if anything, defines the specificity of contemporary Canadian architecture? Wang=s introductory essay offers no definitive response to that question. It does, however, go some distance in defining the forces that are currently shaping architectural culture in Canada, as in other nations on the periphery of the United States= global hegemony. In Wang=s view, three things may be thought to define the specificity of Canadian architecture at this historical juncture: its cultural location at the imaginary intersection of European and American values, its unique climatic and topographic conditions, and an ever-growing distance from what Wang describes as >true nature.= One might wish that Wang were clearer about just what he means by >true nature.= Nevertheless, his argument is, in the main, a convincing one (if marred by occasional terminological imprecision and other stylistic infelicities). Still more convincing is his discussion of specific projects, as when he shows how two works bearing superficial resemblance to one another, Ledbury Park and Rotary Park, reveal distinct architectonic sensibilities through their deployment of apparently insignificant details...