UTOPIA FACTORY: Part 3 Research Station - Architecture and National Identity: The Centennial Projects 50 Years On

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Utopia Factory: Part 3 Architecture and National Identity

Please join us on Thursday, May 4 at 7:00 PM for the opening reception and curator's tour of Architecture & National Identity: The Centennial Projects 50 Year On.

UTOPIA FACTORY is a research and exhibition project that engages in larger discourses about the conceptualization of communities and their landmarks from a historic and contemporary perspective and encourages accessible dialogue with a broad range of publics on issues of nationalism, state-making, inclusion, and belonging at a critical juncture in Calgary’s urbanization and planning for a new public art gallery.  

The project will investigate how state-building relates to city-building, while tracing how architecture and monuments inform memory, community-building and representations of nationhood. UTOPIA FACTORY also addresses the complexity of forming designated creative and cultural zones and civic-planning, while offering new forms or urban vitality.  

UTOPIA FACTORY is comprised of three parts:  

1. When Form Becomes Attitude, curated by Noa Bronstein
2. Research Station, curated by Lisa Baldissera and Nate McLeod
3. Architecture and National Identity: The Centennial Projects 50 Years On, curated by Marco Polo & Colin Ripley

-- Architecture and National Identity: The Centennial Projects 50 Years On

Curated by Marco Polo & Colin Ripley

Top Gallery, May 4 – July 30, 2017

The Centennial Projects are a series of major works of architecture resulting from several federal government programs leading up to the Centennial of Confederation in 1967. The ambitions of these programs, which amounted to a gigantic public building campaign, went beyond the strictly utilitarian, aiming to uncover and give form to the identity of a modern nation entering its second century of existence. 

Between 1964 and 1970, the Centennial Grants Program and the Centennial Memorial Program provided funding for over 2,300 projects across the country, including some 860 buildings, many of which are important landmarks in their communities; several are important works within the development of Canadian modern architecture. In this exhibition, we present 21 of the most important of the buildings to emerge from the Centennial programs. These are organized loosely into three themes: Building the New; Brutalism and Landscape; and National Identity and Regional Difference. 

All the buildings presented, from the National Arts Centre in Ottawa to the UFO Landing Pad in St. Paul, Alberta, are important documents of this particular moment in Canadian life and culture. The Centennial Projects, in the youthfulness and vigour of their design, matched well to the youthfulness, vigour, and optimism of Canada in the 1960s. Now, 50 years on, it is time to re-examine this remarkable moment in Canadian architecture.

Organized and circulated by Confederation Centre Art Gallery, Charlottetown, with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.