Field trip

To get to the Shift by Richard Serra from Toronto you have to drive north towards King City for fifty kilometers. It is on private property, owned by a developer that would like to tear it down and build mcmansions. I recommend approaching the site from the north-east corner on late September, just before harvest.

Richard Serra, Shift, 1970-1972 (43°55'13.3"N 79°30'39.6"W)

The sculpture is made of six concrete slabs 1,5 meters high and 20 cm thick, the length varying between 27 and 73 meters. In the summer of 1970 Serra visited the site together with Joan Jonas and determined that the position of the slabs would depend on the distance that two people could occupy while still in view of each other.

The sculpture allows the visitors to measure themselves against a landscape which is constantly changing. If you go back at the end of October, after the harvest, your experience of the site will be completely different. You will not have to make your way across the corn and you will be able to see the Shift all at once.

The topography of the site is also very important. The field is not flat and as the slabs appear or disappear into the ground your relation with the landscape changes. When the concrete is at eye level it feels like a protection but when is at ground level you are completely exposed.

Since 1990 the Shift is a protected cultural landscape under the Ontario Heritage Act.

Richard Serra, Shift, 1970-1972. Photographs Mariana Siracusa

You are what you read

Who is Cedric Price?

He is the guy who designed the Fun Palace and the Pottery Thinkbelt.

He is the one who built the kinetic Snowdon Aviary at the London Zoo.

He is the one always wearing a white collar and chomping a cigar.

Cedric Price, Selft-portrait, 1982, RIBA12989

Where does he come from?

Being myself a compulsive reader I find personal libraries to be a fascinating tool of investigation. Cedric Price’s personal books reveal that architecture was for him a family business. With the Retriever, Eleanor Bron and Samantha Hardingham did a terrific job in cataloguing each volume and tracing any available information about the book’s origin: some are his father’s (the architect who designed the 1930’s Odeon cinemas in the UK), some are his brother’s (architect and planner who collaborated for many years with Cedric), and some are his own. But even more interesting is his office library, held now at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montréal together with the bulk of his archive. Before they were transferred to the CCA, Price annotated many books adding further importance to the collection. Browsing through them all gives a good overview of his architectural passions.
    

Cedric Price's office library at the CCA. Photograph Mariana Siracusa

Engineering is certainly a major topic. Let me use his notes as orientation.
On Bauten der Technik, ihre Form und Wirkung: Werkanlagen by Werner Linder he wrote:

On Building and Structural Tables: For Architects, Builders and Engineers by Frederick Hyde Blake he wrote:

On Conveyors and Cranes: Including Continuous Elevators, Stackers, Skip Hoists, transporters and Electric telphers by Williams H. Atherton he wrote:

On Machine Drawing: For the Use of Engineering Students in Science and Technical Schools and Colleges by Thomas Jones he wrote: 

On Riccardo Morandi by Giorgio Boaga he wrote:

On Prefabrication: A History of its Development in Great Britain by R. B. White he wrote:

On Vladimir G. Šuchov, 1853-1939 : die Kunst der sparsamen Konstruktion he wrote:

Then there are books about British architecture, books about the future, books about ideas that changed the world, books about how things work, books that he received from friends. Finally there is a series of odd comments that I would take as evidence of his personality.
On Sweet Disorder and the Carefully Careless: Theory and Criticism in Architecture by Robert Maxwell he wrote: 

On Phoenix at Coventry: The Building of a Cathedral by Basil Spence he wrote:

On Intentions in Architecture by Christian Norberg-Schulz he wrote and then added:

On Treasury of Trees by Herbert L. Edlin he wrote:

On Brunel and his world by John Pudney he wrote:

On The Major Seaports of the United Kingdom by James Bird he wrote:

On Walls Have Feelings: Architecture, Film, and the City by Katherine Shonfield he wrote:

There are hundreds of books that would be worth mentioning but, while waiting for Samantha Hardingham's definitive anthology on the work of Price, I refer you to the CCA catalogue.