A sensory exploration of some of Montreal’s urban parks

A sensory exploration of Montreal’s urban parks: notes in words, sketches, and film animation

by Aristofanis Soulikias

As city dwellers find refuge in parks, in lack of safe communal spaces in the built city during the Covid-19 pandemic, I begin to observe dormant architectures come to life. Movements, congregations, paths, music, food, conversations and voices draw traces and shapes on the snow, on the ground but also in the air.

References

Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Benjamin, W., & Arendt, H. (2007). Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books. Debord, G. (1994). The society of the spectacle. New York: Zone Books.

Hosea, B. (2019). Made by hand. In W. P. Ruddell Caroline (Ed.), The crafty animator. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.

Koolhaas, R. (2014). Delirious New York : a Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan.

Pallasmaa, J. (2009). The thinking hand :existential and embodied wisdom in architecture. Chichester, U.K.: Wiley.

Virilio, P. (2012). The lost dimension (D. Moshenberg, Trans.). Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).

Figure 1 Shooting drawn animation of footsteps on snow

I think of translating what I see and feel into animation. I think of the synergy of nature and human activities and how their traces merge: an architecture that is never static.

Figure 2 Scene from animated segment

Figure 3 Experimenting with moving elements on tracing paper on top of pencil drawing

The parks of my neighbourhood differ. Ste-Odile, a large park which surrounds a primary school, becomes an enormous schoolyard during recess. During the rest of the day, it is a place for strolling and quiet dog walks.

Raimbault park is busier. Its picnic tables and shelter become places for contemplating the view of the river or for celebrations, especially in summer.

Louisbourg park, with its soccer and baseball fields, as well as the outdoor skating rink in winter, attracts many young people, and, at a time when the neighbouring YMCA is closed, it is a place of heightened physical activity but also passive spectatorship while in summertime, parents set up chairs, tables, and even loudspeakers, creating secondary public “piazzas”.

Figure 4 Carving out the soccer pitch in Louisbourg park

I These three parks have each their own “personality” Are people replicating urbanity in park? Domesticity?

Questions: What are urban parks and what would I want them to be?

Space for play
Creativity
Community
Physical Activity
Nature
Rest
Slow down

Study transition from city to park / Urban space to Nature = Thresholds, boundaries, fences.

When city ceases to move (Covid), the park is still in life-movement-growth.

Comparing the two atmospheres! Expressing it in animation. The elements of the park and how people choose to circulate/congregate become clues of what we should look for in architecture (human proportion, natural materials, access, assembly, circulation).

Figure 6 Louisbourg park in winter

Figure 7 Animating on vertical surface with charcoal

I am also thinking of layers. The layers of materials parks can afford, the layers of activities over time, the layers of my surfaces, translucent and transparent, on my light table.

Figure 5 Raimbault park

What is my interest in this? — expressing, feeling, practising, perceiving senses through bodily techniques.

Feeling — Walking, jogging, playing, sketching, touching, memory of place, spatial understanding and needs

Practising — Sketching, making mimesis of experience, en-visioning, en-sensing, en-pathos

Expressing — Animating the sketches, the objects, multiple layers, sound.

Atmosphere and new Values understood (Values as values of life but also values of senses – intensity, size…)

Perceiving (audience) — How is all this understood/perceived?

What is the goal?

To reappreciate the handmade element in animation
To understand human spatial needs anew and get ideas for what is worth in architecture and design
Elements that are usually “invisible” to designers

Those may be:

The role of the uncontrolled flora
The uncontrolled open space
The free mixture of people and uses, age groups etc.
The adjustment of the body to nature vs the opposite

As architectural theorist Juhani Pallasmaa stresses that drawing by hand is not a simple mediated construction but a mimetic moulding of lines, I am thinking about the qualities of mimesis that can be brought into this project, considering that mimesis can be a form of re- enactment. Hence, whereas animating in situ poses practical problems, recording the sensorial environment of the park by drawing, is also recording the act of drawing in situ, and perhaps the body will remember this act later in the reproduction of these drawings when animating in the studio.

Figure 8 Pencil sketch

Mimesis of my own movement in observing with my eyes, mind, and hand, repeating some of those acts and using imagination to create architectures.

Images begin to move and (once overlaid) they suggest the architectures of multiplicity. Architecture is temporary – appears –dissolves – reappears, mutates, moves.

Thus: We need open unadulterated spaces that do not compartmentalize human activity, do not prescribe it, scribe, inscribe, describe, subscribe… The dissolution of “scribe” into atmospheres/lived…into this necessary mixture of genders, ages, and abilities.

Figure 9 Outremont Park, watercolour on paper

Multiplicity is key in parks.

No café, restaurant, daycare, club, tavern, or even street can offer this overlapping of architectures. This fusion, exchange, co-existence, multi-sensorial, multi-functional, multi- satisfaction. This multiplicity is what I will put in images, I will set in motion.

Multilayered–Multidimensional–Openspace–Opentoimagination Cycles of nature, of seasons, days, weather.

Figure 10 Outremont Park, watercolour on paper

Figure 11 Outremont Park, watercolour on paper

On fragmentation of society speaks Guy Debord in his work “Society of the Spectacle” (1994), in the very first pages. Others speak about this too, like Benjamin with his phantasmagoria of the modern city and the mechanical reproduction of art products (2007), or like Baudrillard with his simulations (1994) or others too who speak about the Post-Modern pastiche we live in such as Koolhaas (2014) and Virilio (2012), or with a critical spirit as Pallasmaa does (2009) and so many others whose works I have come across.

The distancing and alienation of people into individuals, may go against their nature and hence their mental health, and completes itself with the abolition of place.Perhaps virtual reality provides new “places” and connects people differently and in different groupings with different criteriaandfactors(Hosea, 2019).YetI willinsistinthephysicalcontact, thebreath,theodours, and the tactile before we completely “lose touch” of them and desperately seek for them later.

Figure 12 Tolhurst Park, watercolour on paper

Figure 13 Raimbault Park, watercolour on paper

Am I immersed enough in these gatherings? These languages? These emotions? Am I only an outsider with his gaze? A flâneur?

It is true that I am a participant in my own way. My own sensory experience is the starting point of this project. I begin with animations of my own bodily exercises, my daily runs, my dialogues with a tree that I use to do my chin ups. New affordances.

These affordances came to the rescue – provide an arm to hold on to, a sky to look up to and all the possible architectures that movement can provide.

Figure 14 Scene from animated segment, charcoal on cardboard

The image is not an end-product but a thing of making. Handmade drawings remind us of the connection between our imagination and our bodies, the incomplete and undone process that is closest to the stuff of real place.

Figure 15 Scene from animated segment, charcoal on cardboard

And if touch is forbidden and gatherings also, what kind of people are we and why should we accept this? We accept it for our biological survival but soon the senses rebel.

This unsensory reality cannot be “the newreality”, but onlya “great preparation”for the“great celebration” . Only thus can we survive mentally. If, even isolated, we can see real life ahead…

Handmade animation therefore is a series of handmade acts that forecast the great sharing of images but also of the senses that bring them to life.