Cul-de-Sac

Landscapes, highways, houses. These are the design typologies in Cul-de-Sac, a three-person exhibition curated by Amery Calvelli at the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton from April 13 to Aug. 18. 

With works that bracket the fields of architecture, photography and video, these sketches of suburban landscapes gesture to the politics of space as negotiated by patterns of human settlement. It is the cul-de-sac that takes precedence here, in particular its framing by Calvelli as both a dead end and a space of possibility, an active form engaged with by the artists on view.

The exhibition begins with an attempt to experiment with the cul-de-sac. Documentation of Ottawa-based architect Douglas Cardinal’s practice works against the grain of suburban planning. One project in particular, Cluster of Ten Homes, 2005, subverts the logic of the cul-de-sac in exciting ways. 

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Installation view of architectural renderings by Douglas Cardinal Architect Inc. (photo by Charles Cousins)

In an act of reversal, Cardinal flips its orientation. Instead of houses framed by a road, the road encircles a ring of houses that open onto a shared courtyard in the centre. This simple shift in form facilitates transformative results for domestic space. 

For instance, the courtyard encourages shared childcare, and the circular formation creates an enclave for extended families to live together communally. Cardinal’s work effectively parses current practices of single-family dwelling through a holistic socio-ecological framework. His is a strong presence in the exhibition, notably for his work’s tactile engagement with the built environment. 

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Christoph Gielen, “Untitled X Arizona,” 2010, C-print (courtesy of the artist)

As we move through the exhibition, we are introduced to aerial photographs of suburban developments by New York-based Christoph Gielen and a video installation by Montreal artist Isabelle Hayeur that dissects landscapes of human disturbance through montages of artificial and natural environments. 

If Cardinal’s work points to active design processes that re-imagine the cul-de-sac, subsequent works in the exhibition take a more reflective position through which capitalist and extractivist dwelling practices are put on display.

Landscapes, highways, and suburban houses are also three acts of design taken up by American architectural theorist Keller Easterling, in which she outlines the development of these sites as the result of larger organizational processes. 

The design of a typical suburban house is not, therefore, an autonomous act of residential architecture but rather is embedded within larger processes of organizing space shaped by socio-economic forces and industrial practices of environmental control. In other words, the spatial arrangement of the suburb – the organizing principle of the cul-de-sac, for instance – becomes the design, rather than the buildings themselves.

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Isabelle Hayeur, Uprooted, 2012

HD video, installation view (Art Gallery of Alberta Collection, gift of the artist; photo by Charles Cousins)

If Gielen’s and Hayeur’s work represents the organization of the suburb in this way – with Gielen’s emphasis on spatial repeatability and Hayeur’s poetic reflection on human disturbance – then Cardinal eschews representation in favour of developing productive alternatives. 

His presence in Cul-de-Sac lingers while moving through the exhibition. It is one thing to represent the suburb, but it is quite another to hack into its form and re-adjust its organizational principles. 

This is a task that Cardinal’s reversal of the cul-de-sac embodies. His is a practice that holds a critique of dominant housing models close, while never simply repeating these forms. The work shines in Calvelli’s exhibition for this reason, addressing the causes, rather than the symptoms, of a suburban frame of mind. ■

This review by Daniel Walker, who recently completed his Master’s degree in the history of art, design and visual culture at the University of Alberta, is the winning entry in the essay category of the 2019 SAAG Writing Prize at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbridge. 

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