Project Description

A project to design a National Archive of Canadian Environments sited in Lebreton Flats. The proposal is an excavated void in the earth that functions as an open device recording traces of movement through the site at multiple time and physical scales. In the archive, a ring of deposits on bedrock walls documents flood water; a soil bed is aggregated by gusts of wind off the Ottawa River; a buffed line on a stone column traces the hand of visitors turning a corner. 

Comprised of its site, the archive is calibrated by factors of inhabitation, environment, and time. Program is suggested in a series of Possible Atmospheres narrating near and distant contingencies of (human) use, e.g. 2370 CE: melting glaciers flood the archive enabling use as a classroom for pond ecology. The representation of the project poses the question of when a building is, with prospective section cut lines drawn seasons and centuries apart then shown layered together. With the strata of earth as its walls and the minutia of movements aggregating and eroding its surface, Sited Open Archive is an embedded receptor of non-fixity, documenting the ambient influence of multiple frequencies over time.