Essay ‘Building on Unsettling Ground’ featured in Galt Issue 3: Burning.
McMillan, Jason. ‘Building on unsettling ground: Instability and adaptation in Arviat, Nunavut.’ Galt Issue 3: Burning (Cambridge: Riverside Architectural Press, 2020): pp. 95-98.
‘Unsettling Ground’ awarded a Canadian Architect Student Award of Excellence.
Architecture Archaeology Anastylosis: Projects for Parco del Celio showing at Waterloo Architecture Rome Studio (November 29, 2019)
Roma XL, curated by Sascha Hastings, designed by Jason McMillan, at the Italian Institute of Culture (October 16 - November 1, 2019)
Read MoreStudent lead for Civic District Charette with the Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery (June 7-8, 2019)
On Empathy: 'Notes From Up Here' on research in Arviat, Nunavut at Bridge Centre for Architecture and Design (May 22, 2018)
'Questioning the_: Projects Review 2018' at Design at Riverside, curated with Brianna Cartwright, Joanne Yau, and Anne Bordeleau (April-June 2018)
'Unsettling Ground' shown in process at TRACE EXHIBITION at Bridge Centre for Architecture and Design (March 8-10, 2018)
DIALOG Design Residency in honour of Tom Sutherland 2018 at DIALOG Edmonton (February 2018)
Fuelling Outports presented by Prof. Lola Sheppard at Adapting Heritage Conference in St. Johns, NFLD (October 2017)
Fuelling Outports featured in Site Magazine's Future Legacies Exhibition and SITE Magazine vol. 37 (September 2017)
States of Disassembly for Lateral Office exhibited at the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism (September 2017)
The coast is wild. It is layers of intensities, speeds and latent energies coalesce in the narrow territory between land and water. Ebb and flow, erosion and sedimentation, calm and tempest. It is across these gradients of energy that we experience the coast: the draw of the edge and the necessity of retreat. This migration to and from the sea that has defined life on the Orkney islands condensed in the dual nature of the lodge on the Brough of Birsay.
Birsay Station amplifies the sensible and the latent in the coastal condition. The Inner Lodge is stable and familiar. Warm and solid, the weather outside is viewed through framed views of the sea and the sky. The collective areas are centred around the warm spaces of the mechanical room, kitchen and hearth, with views out to the landscape and the Outer Lodge. The Outer Lodge walks across the layers of the coast, a ghostly familiar which the meteorological and climatic phenomena of the site act on and around. It challenges our confrontation of the remote as sublime by allowing the residents of the lodge to establish and intimacy to the weather and the tides.
While the Inner Lodge is embedded into the landscape, the formal familiarity of the outer lodge to Orkney architecture is weathered by the effects of the edge, rather than standing as heroic architecture against the landscape. Here, intimate to the wild, travelers can convalesce, artists and scientists can explore the landscape, its ecosystems and climate.
On the coast, the duality of the project frames human experience of the coast, crossing the gradient from the most intimate human moments deep inside the inner lodge to the openness and precarious character of the edge.
Site Aerial / The Brough of Birsay is an eastern protrusion of the Orkney islands, looking west across the North sea and the Atlantic. It is here, on the edge, that the energies of land and water start to blur. They are pressing up against each-other, aggregating and eroding, ebb and flow. Siting the lodge on the low side of the island creates an intimate connection to the subtle cycles of the island. The Outer Lodge toes out over the tidal zone, which is a continuously changing landscape. Both lodges are turned into the approach of storm systems and fog banks that regularly pass the island from the east.
Coastlines are always changing face, and BIRSAY STATION seeks to expose some of what is latent in the site. Its presence exposes much of what is missed by the temporary visitors to the site.
Site Plan
Left: Lodge Approaches, Right: Tidal Zone View
Lodge Plan
Entry Section
Dining Section
Sleeping Section
Left: the Edge Walk, Right: Accommodations
South Elevation
Details
WATERLOO / Presentation on Amphibious Architecture on First Nations Reserves in Central Manitoba at ICAADE 2017 at the University of Waterloo with Snehanjali Sumanth and Dr. Elizabeth English (June 2017)
Mending the Periphery exhibited in Superposition: Projects Review 2017 at Design at Riverside (April 17 - May 21, 2017)
Project team: Anna Longrigg, Jason McMillan
At the periphery of Rome, modern suburbs dissolve into agricultural landscapes with the staccato of ancient ruins rising from the landscape. The Parco degli Acquedotti is no exception, where the ancient aqueducts mark a path from the Alban hills into the city centre. However what this produces is a fragmented edge condition of the city, often disconnected from the historical centre. This, however, is where Rome is at its most open.
The Roman periphery has more recently become a site of arrival, one of the many sites across Europe where refugees and new migrants find space in the gaps of the city, but often away from the services and employment available in the centre.
Our proposal seeks to unpack the complex edge condition into a complex of public spaces, connected by a new urban edge on the park. We began by uncovering the ruins on the site to create a sequence of fora, each bordered on three sides by social housing and a monumental arcade of market and commercial space. The fourth side remains open to the landscape of the park, bounded by the ancient aqueduct the runs through the park.
The new arcade is operates like an extended porch, a public threshold between the established neighbourhood and the arrival city.
Site Axonometric
Left: City Wall, Right: Park View
Ground Plan
Excavation Plan
Site Section
Axonometric
Left: Colonnade Views, Right: Housing Facade
Section Projection
The aqueducts were conceived and constructed at the scale of the city, and as the city has grown out to meet the aqueducts, their permanence has molded the urban fabric. The fragments of the Aquae Claudiastill exist at a monumental scale, however between the fragments, the city has incoherently expanded into the void. The scale of the graft is at the urban scale, at the scale of the city. The graft mends the Acquae Claudia and the periphery, giving coherent form to the spaces around it. In the voids of the Acquae Claudia is the marginal space of the city, where the marginalized have made their homes. These unplanned neighbourhoods have been left on the edge, without a plan and disconnected form the city. Mending the Acquae Claudia frames these neighbourhoods as being inside the formal city, not as slums at the edge.
This segment of the project formalizes the open space at the edge of the city, which is at present only bounded on three of its four sides. On the fourth, it melts back into the informal fabric of the neighbourhood. It is in the unformed, marginal space where we construct the ‘other’, the transient, the migrant, the destitute. The encounter is always washed with the idea of ‘the other’. ON THE EDGE, the space of encounter is not in the margin, but in the interstitial zone. The relationship of the resident stumbling into the transient is inverted, giving the transient a refuge from the public sphere. In section, a gradient of public visibility to private repose.
Site Perspective
Section Perspective
Urban Space Diagram
Site Plan
Elevation
Fuelling Outports exhibited in Bearing: Projects Review 2016 at Design at Riverside (April 18 - May 21, 2016)
Project team: Anna Longrigg, Jason McMillan
The large scale boom and bust economies in Newfoundland (fish, oil and tourism) are hugely problematic for the semi-remote outport, communities. These small towns and villages find themselves subjected to the long-term instability of economic mono-cultures. All three resources which have defined the Newfoundland and Labrador economy are contingent on a finite resource and the trends of global markets.
Following the collapse of the cod fishery in 1992, the future of the outports have become precarious. Lack of economic opportunity has led a generation away from home, causing many towns to shrink and in some cases close down. The government moratorium on the fishery also left a stock of industrial scale processing plants that had served the fishing fleet. The generic character of these buildings present an opportunity: a series of simple structures and large spaces at the heart of the towns that can begin to build diverse economies and build resilience on the island.
We Our appropriation of the fishery will create a regional hub for food security and community life, subverting generalization while generating valuable bi-products and diversified micro-economies. The fishing plant is a megalith relative to the town, and our interventions preserve the industrial ghost while subverting and dividing its presence on the site.
Site Plan
View from across the bay
The complex of buildings that comprise the plant are on another scale to anything else in the town. To address the size of the project, we developed a phasing strategy for the building that would tie the building project to the regional strategy. For example, the first phase would include the installation of the biogas power plant, which is the most capital intensive portion of the building, but also the spine of the project, connecting the site to waste and energy flows in the region.
The second portion of the project is to begin renovating the building envelope into greenhouse space, workshops, artists studios and community spaces. These spaces can be constructed as the building envelope is sequentially renovated. Resources in communities are often limited, and the project can be slowly expanded. Many current projects and initiatives we encountered on the island were dependent on grants and subsidies, and so expansions are always contingent on the needs for space and the means for construction become available. We propose constructing a work shop, which can serve ongoing renovation projects in the community, and be used to fit out the interior of the plant. The remaining spaces and outbuildings will can be incrementally renovated and re-used on the time scale of decades.
Ground Plan
Site Section
Cross Section
Perspective of the community Garden
Exploded Axonometric
Perspective view of the fly and studio area.
Examples of interior modules.
Project team: Anna Longrigg, Jason McMillan
The large scale boom and bust economies of fish, oil and tourism are hugely problematic for outports, which fall victim to economic mono-cultures. All three are resource based economies, who’s value is contingent on sweeping global trends, external to Newfoundland. Paradoxically, the continued function of outports, and the potential for growth demands centralization and large scale thinking, which runs against the intensely local cultures of the towns. The sharing of resources is a necessity for the survival of the declining populations.
The abandoned fisheries are relics of not only great prosperity, but also the great failure of mega-economies in these towns. Our appropriation of the fishery will create a regional hub for food security and community life, subverting generalization while generating valuable bi-products and diversified micro-economies. The fishing plant is a megalith relative to the towns, and the architecture subverts and divides its presence on the site.
Fueling Outports adds resiliency directly to electricity, food and waste networks in the region. Indirectly, cultural exchange and community building are products of the interaction of each node with its respective town, and amongst the network of nodes.
Bonavista Peninsula / Regional Strategy
The cast of characters tied together are diverse and vast. At the largest scale, the projects conception is deeply tied to the constellation of governments and government agencies which input support into the island. Grant organizations such as ACOA and non-profit partners in the Food Security Network and Healthy Corner Stores will be key players.
The project through both its phased conception and operation as a community enterprise, welcomes the local culture to invade the site. The community has a strong fishing culture despite its recent setbacks, and its desire to engage youth are parts of the cultural growth which the project encourages.
Cast of Characters / Local and regional stakeholders
Local Network / Trinity Bay North
Site Axonometric / Trinity Bay North
The waterfronts of outports have always been about the processing of resources and labour. Rather than convert the site into a post-industrial park, Fueling Outports brings community and economic activity to where it has always been - between land and water.
The nodes generate intra-regional activity, while the Port Union Fishery, where the cultural and the infrastructural are combined reaches into a constellation of stakeholders above the project. It funnels energy (money, electricity, waste, culture) and distributes it into micro-economies and cultural growth, in an attempt to reconcile the need for centralization while growing the intensely local outport.
Site Photographs / Port Union Fishery
Site Panorama / Port Union Fishery
Biogas Generation System / The Fishery renewal is centred around a small scale bio-gas power plant. The plant redirects the much of the waste generated in the small communities away from open landfills into the production of power and compost. This, paired with a regional community gardening strategy begins to close the waste loop on the peninsula while adding economic and infrastructural resilience to the communities.
Project Energy Flows / Circular Economies
Community Garden Planting Schedule
