Blueprint for a Hack - Dave Harlander

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Résumé :
Over five days, some 60 residents of a northern village teamed with designers from southern Quebec to conceive and build an outdoor community pavilion that activates a central recreational area.

Blueprint for a Hack aims to reimagine community spaces. Faced with extreme housing shortages, physical isolation, and a challenging climate, outdoor public spaces in northern communities remain largely undesigned and underused. These 'in-between' spaces are strewn with stuff. Most housing and civic buildings in the communities emerge from and stand like physical markers of Euro-Canadian values. The Royal Architectural Institute of Canada has begun a discourse on design in northern Canadian communities, but discussions continue to dwell on housing and civic buildings. A strong need exists to open conversations about design and the public realm in northern villages, which this project tries to address, creating a unique experience in which northern and southern groups could apply a hacking mindset to reimagine community spaces. With Contributions of: The foreword is by Mirko Zardini who was the Director and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He is an architect who teaches, curates exhibitions, and writes about contemporary architecture and urban issues.

Biographie:
Susane Havelka is a researcher, architect, and educator who specializes in sustainable housing and community building and planning. She studied science, art and design at MIT and architecture at Columbia University. After completing her Master's degree, Susane continued to practice architecture in New York and Europe before undertaking a doctorate in Architecture at McGill University. During this time, she designed and tested a self-build prototype inspired by her friends in Nunavut and the Monolithic Domes Institute as a potential building system for extreme climates and remote northern communities. Susane also co-curated a design charrette at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) and the Kuujjuaq Hackathon with Prof. Vikram Bhatt, which won the RAIC 2018 National Urban Design Award. She is also a contributor to the Minimum Cost Housing Group (MCHG) projects and while working with a community on developing the groundwork to an experimental cluster of dome houses as the first working prototype of the Monolithic Dome in an Arctic region is currently doing research on housing and well-being and working as a postdoctoral research fellow at Memorial University in Geography on Indigenous housing and homelessness. Her focus is on alternate housing delivery strategies for remote northern communities that can enable people to design and self-build their own houses by using simple building systems and the internet to share design and ideas.