Third-year students from Carleton’s Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism showcased their three-week group projects to professors and faculty Oct. 23, in an “In, On, and Under the Marionette Theatre” event.
In previous years, the students participated in the Dinner is Served project, where they were required to design and build a dining pavilion on the bank of the Rideau River, according to Janine Debanne, an architecture professor at Carleton.
This year, Stephen Fai, the project’s co-director, opted for something different with the marionette theatre event, which required groups of students to design and build a puppet theatre and provide a production along with it.
“Studio projects need to be refreshed occasionally or they start to become self referential,” Fai said.
This year’s projects were “stunning and inventive,” according to Debanne.
“I know that, at the beginning of the term, some third-year students were disappointed that we were not doing the Dinner is Served project,” Fai said. “It had been a fixture for some time.”
Anne-Gaëlle Tari, a third-year architecture exchange student from Paris, said some students were disappointed by the small amount of space they were given to work with. (They weren’t allowed to exceed 2 x 1 x 1.2 metre dimension, within the architecture pit.)
Tari said there were also concerns about fire safety within the area, and that overall it wasn’t a great space for the design of the puppet theatres.
In the end, however, it turned out to be a non-issue since not all the students presented within the pit, which provided more space for the designs.
Patricia Alemany, a third-year exchange student from Spain, said “some students were upset because it was a change, and because [the students] had no reference from other years.”
“Others thought that the marionette theatre is nothing about architecture,” she added.
Another reason students were slightly confused about the project, Tari said, was related to the aspect of creating puppets. She said the idea was quite abstract and students had to distort their designs to accommodate puppets.
Despite the obstacles, the students all seemed to enjoy the project, Debanne said.
“The students seemed very excited about, and engaged in, their projects,” she said.
Alemany said she believes Fai’s change to the event was a positive one.
“In Spain, teachers never repeat the assignments,” she said. “They do a new one every year based on the same concepts that they have to teach that year, but always different from the previous year.”
Tari said the event was “very interesting.” She said students didn’t merely present performances for children using the puppets — they found ways to make the productions abstract.
“In the end, the project was much appreciated by the students,” Fai said.
“They were certainly engaged, building and performing some very compelling theatre.”
