HEAR FROM THE CCA: THE MUSEUM IS NOT ENOUGH
Park Semi (Park): The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) was founded in 1979 by Phillis Lambert, and it has established itself as a new type of cultural organisation, committed to promoting architectural discourse through exhibitions, publications, public programmes, collection of works, research projects, and curatorial programmes over the past 40 years. Could you explain in detail the identity and purpose pursued by CCA?
Giovanna Borasi (Borasi): The CCA was conceived in line with the fundamental premise that architecture is a public concern, and established to stimulate individuals, to increase public awareness of the role of architecture in society, to contribute to the architectural discourse, and to promote research in the field. Since 1979, it has adopted a curious, imaginative and polemic perspective intended to benefit society by offering tools that will explore the role of architecture and probe the larger questions affecting society. Let me explain how we work and what drives us: the CCA has operated since its beginnings via an institutional framework that demands and underwrites curiosity, both our own, and from our public. Curiosity doesn’t solve problems; it poses untimely questions, charts new lines of inquiry. How can we – from our perspective within architecture, from our outpost in Montreal – address the most pressing questions in contemporary culture and society? How do we proceed in these explorations? How do we anticipate what will be important, rather than just reacting to current conditions? In this way, curiosity could also be a way of taking responsibility, of taking a risk.
The framework we work within at the CCA is articulated as a series of questions we ask ourselves. What about the environment? Can we expect technology to solve our problems? What about health? What happens after ‘progress’ fails, or, sometimes worse, succeeds? How do we experience the built environment in ways beyond the visual? What tools do individuals have to influence the forms and power
