Notice Board

“TOTALLY FALSE CREEK: Vancouver, Dubai and marayaprojects.com”

THE TALK: Of several dozen North American architects and academics invited to the Aga Khan Award for Architecture ceremonies in Aleppo, Syria several weeks after 9-11, Trevor Boddy was the only one to attend.  While there he was invited on to Jordan and the United Arab Emirates to tour and teach.  There he saw the early construction of “Dubai Marina” a clone of Vancouver’s Concord Pacific developed, rising in the desert around a simulation of False Creek, filled with seawater from the Persian Gulf.  No editor would publish this story until photographs of the Yaletown-like buildings came available three years later, proving the Vancouver link was no accident (it was designed and managed by ex-Vancouverites for UAE’s Emaar, now the world’s largest developer.) 

In 2005 Trevor Boddy presented a talk entitled “Very False Creek” at the Presentation House Gallery.  In the audience were Vancouver artists Henry Tsang, Glen Lowry and Simon Levin. Inspired by Boddy’s talk, the trio then founded “The Maraya Project,” an interactive art installation proposed for the almost identical-looking Sea Walls of the Concord Pacific/Vancouver and Emaar’s Dubai Marina.  The talk will investigate this project as a critical participant-observer, a means of revealing the state of public art and urban space in both cities.

THE SPEAKER: Vancouver-based Trevor Boddy is a critic of contemporary art + architecture, and consulting urban designer.  His writing on buildings and cities has been awarded the Alberta Book of the Year and Jack Webster Journalism prizes, Western Magazine Award, the Architecture Canada/Royal Architectural Institute of Canada’s 2010 Advocacy Award, membership in Lambda Alpha International (the honorary organization for real estate professionals), and an Honorary Membership in the American Institute of Architects. At the 2011 World Congress of Architecture in Tokyo, Boddy’s essay (for A/V in Madrid) on contemporary design in his country entitled “MEGA + MICRO: Canada, Innovation at the Extremes” was awarded a commendation for the UIA’s Pierre Vago Prize for best architectural criticism published worldwide in the preceding three years. His “HybridCity” was included in the Vancouver Art Gallery’s 2011 exhibition “WE Vancouver: 12 Manifestos for the City.” Following on the national tour of his “Telling Details: The Architecture of Clifford Wiens,” as curator Boddy produced the 2008 exhibition “Vancouverism: Architecture Builds the City” and related Trafalgar Square site-specific construction, which was named a marquee event for the 2008 London Festival of Architecture, then re-mounted it in Paris in 2009, then home to Vancouver for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. In 2014 he curated “Gesamtkunstwerk” for developer Westbank on a design proposal for downtown Vancouver by the Bjarke Ingels Group. Boddy was appointed Adjunct Professor in UBC’s School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture in 2012, previously holding professorial appointments at Manitoba, Oregon, Toronto and Carleton, and serving as a studio critic and lecturer world-wide.