|
Want to read the other news?
BACK TO NEWS & EVENTS > |
ARLIS/Canada Chapter NewsSubmitted by Jonathan Franklin / posted: 8 February 2005As the national chapter comprising three local chapters (Montreal-Ottawa-Quebec, Ontario and the Canadian members of NorthWest), ARLIS/Canada would normally expect to meet every two or three years, outside the annual ARLIS/NA conference. Our last such gathering was in 2002 in Banff, whose matchless Rocky Mountain splendors will be experienced by many Update readers when it plays host to the 2006 ARLIS/NA conference. The Canadian chapter is therefore due for another meeting, but given the challenges of the 2006 conference we have decided to focus our energies on that objective instead. Fortunately, the New York conference in April proved a magnet for Canadian members, with record attendance at the chapter meeting; nor have we been idle since. Our web site (www.arliscanada.ca) has been overhauled by James Rout, who has implemented a content management system allowing the chair to carry out updates remotely. As a result, a consistently bilingual site in English and French has been achieved for the first time. The individual meetings of the Montreal-Ottawa-Quebec, Ontario and NorthWest chapters will no doubt be described for Update by others, but I would like to pick out a few recent highlights. MOQ has engaged in some serious soul-searching about its future directions by means of a questionnaire inviting members to reflect on their chapter involvement, and has emerged, I believe, stronger for this exercise. Ontario, together with Western New York, successfully landed ARLIS/NA special funding for a highly promising joint meeting in Toronto next May. And NorthWest were lucky indeed to have the spectacular new Seattle Public Library by Rem Koolhaas as the venue for their meeting, although it was actually outside Seattle's Experience Music Project by Frank Gehry (b. Toronto 1929) that I witnessed an authentic tribute to powerful architecture, namely a distracted motorist rear-ending the car in front. Art demands its sacrifices. Top of Page |