Mirko Zardini, right, and Giovanna Borasi, left. Photo by Richmond Lam.
On September 11, the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) announced a major change in its leadership. Director Mirko Zardini will be stepping down at the end of the year, to be replaced by the CCA?s current chief curator, Giovanna Borasi.
Zardini has led the CCA for nearly 15 years, through a period when the scope of the discipline has shifted. Politics, global economics, urbanism, and social activism have actively entered into architectural discourse. Under Zardini, the CCA?s exhibitions tracked?and in some cases, anticipated?this expanded field. Sense of the City, his first exhibition at the institution, explored non-visual aspects of urban environments, while the current exhibition, Our Happy Life, looks at the spatial effects of the global happiness industry. Other exhibitions have looked at environmental concerns, health, and migration. While many of Zardini?s exhibitions were more concerned with architecture as a discipline, rather than as a profession, others were relatively straightforward in putting architecture front and centre. The Archaeology of the Digital initiative, started in 2011, looked at the early entry of digital technologies in architecture. The series of three exhibitions, accompanied by digital and physical publications (as well as behind-the-scenes research into best practices for archiving digital materials) led to donations of important works by architects including Foreign ...