Trevor Boddy
Lindsay Brown
Mari Fujita and Matthew Soules
The Office for Soft Architecture
Alisa Smith and J. B. MacKinnon
Urban Subjects and Neil Smith
Vancouver Public Space Network
The Manifesto 11 Collective
We asked a number of participants in WE: Vancouver to contribute a specific manifesto: a concise articulation of a position that we produced as posters. Printed on broadsheets, the statements will be postered throughout the city over the run of the exhibition, taking their declarations to the streets and extending the revolutionary spirit of the exhibition beyond the doors of the Gallery.
Trevor Boddy, a Vancouver architectural critic and curator, writes on the idea of “hybridCity” as an architectural trend unique to Vancouver. Lindsay Brown calls for the legacy of Habitat ’76 to be fully realized in the present city. Mari Fujita and Matthew Soules’ concept of EcoMetropolitanism is whispered to Vancouverites in the voice of a coyote. The Office for Soft Architecture evokes the city as a body and as a site of resistance, underscored by fragility, variation and movement. Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon have written a manifesto about eating locally, including what the local food movement is not about. Urban Subjects, a Vancouver-based collective including poet and cultural critic Jeff Derksen and artists Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber, collaborated with geographer Neil Smith to produce a statement that calls for revolution in Vancouver and beyond. The Vancouver Public Space Network lays out its framework for a city in which the public is inspired to participate. Together, these texts voice a diversity of positions that describe the city today and imagine its revolutionary potential in the future.
As a counterpoint to the manifestos, a group of the city’s young designers, including Courtney Healey, Andrea Hoff, Linus Lam, Denise Liu, Brian McBay, Hazen Sise, Erika Thomson, Matthew Thomson, Annabel Vaughan, Kevin Wharton and Innes Yates, came together to put forward an alternative position to Vancouver’s standard architecture. Under the name The Manifesto 11 Collective, their response was to design a poster that invites visitors to take action by folding, cutting and manipulating the poster itself as an intervention into one’s material environment.
