Projective architecture: an approach to building an immersive Art Centre for Sudbury, Ontario

Abstract

This research explores the design for an art centre in Sudbury, Ontario in which the architecture is not only activated or animated by its community but also inspires its community to be more active within the city’s culture. Drawing upon the concept of Projective Architecture as coined by Sarah Whiting and Robert Somol, the proposed art centre would respond to and with its surrounding context to focus on its effects on the social condition of the surrounding community.1 The proposed institution would facilitate the community’s engagement by a layering of substrates, filters, light, film and video projections, by an interactive exterior screen-like facade system, to reveal the movements of the art centre and its art film-making residency program artists. This second-skin surrounding the abandoned General Hospital building in Sudbury would facilitate views to the landscape beyond connecting the visitors with the surrounding Northern city through an unusual and interesting lens. Film and video art, haptic diagramming, conceptual object making and immersive installation art all served in the research-creation process to determine the aesthetics and ideologies of the proposed art centre. Focused on an active reciprocal engagement between the community and emerging arts artists, the centre seeks to breed new genres of Northern Ontario art.