MONTREAL — It's time for an architectural checkup.
The Canadian Centre for Architecture presents "Imperfect Health: The Medicalization of Architecture," a unique, conceptual exhibition with your good health in mind. While the likes of epidemics, obesity, allergies and aging may not sound like the components of an intriguing museum visit, this is more fun than you can shake a thermometer at. The fact that large glass partitions separate the galley spaces and evoke an alarming Hollywood-esque quarantine movie is no coincidence.
Incorporating architectural design into society's health concerns stems from more than a century ago. The initial gallery offers a number of pastoral Robert Burley photographs of Frederic Law Olmsted-designed urban spaces. Central Park, Boston's Emerald Necklace and Rochester's Seneca Park, all designed by Olmsted during the 1800s, followed his belief that these green urban spaces were meant to be the "lungs of the city," according to the exhibit's accompanying text.
While city planners of today may not have the luxury of building large expanses of green lungs by expanding outward in current prime urban real-estate markets, there is another direction they can go — up.
French botanist Patrick Blanc and landscape architect Michel Desvigne have teamed up to design vertical gardens in Bordeaux and Paris. These vertical gardens can grow on any building façade without the use of soil. The result not only cleans the air but reduces energy consumption by maintaining the building's internal temperature, according to the text. A number of vertical-garden photo examples are on display.
While the great outdoors is often associated with helping heal health woes, how about going indoors — and underground?
The exhibit states that some 235 million people around the world suffer from asthma. In 1843, a Polish mining physician named Feliks Boczkowski introduced the concept of speleotherapy, a treatment for asthma where patients spend quality time in the salt mines of the Ukraine and Eastern Europe. Boczkowski's studies stemmed from the observation that salt-mine workers hardly ever developed lung cancer due to the medicinal effects of saline dust present in the air, the exhibit text reads.
Photos on display show patients tucked in bed, receiving treatment at the Solotvyno salt mine, which continues to house and treat upward of 5,000 patients annually.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the exhibit to a North Country resident is the advent of vertical farming. While the farming landscape is prominent to the North Country, it's not so easy to grow a garden or raise livestock in an urban setting. The solution: a tower farm for agriculture, pigs and cows.
Parisian architects SOA have created La Tour Vivant, the Living Tower, a building that combines housing and office space with a hydroponic farm.
These vertical blueprints are also adapted to livestock. The design team from the David Garcia Studio offers the "Instantly Quarantinable Farm," a cruise ship-like structure that provides five floors of milking stalls and outdoor grazing for our bovine friends.
Meanwhile, MVRDV architects have designed "Pig City," a Netherlands-based conceptual apartment-like tower complex that houses pigs.
Consider the statistics provided. Pork was the world's most consumed meat as of 2000, with the Netherlands being Europe's leading producer of the product. But pigs need a lot of room to be raised, and the Netherlands is a small country. While "Pig City" has yet to be realized, the concept would solve problems of land use, food production, transportation woes and also reduce animal disease. Something to think about at your next barbecue.
"Imperfect Health" continues through April 15.
Also on display is "Alturas de Macchu Picchu," sketches by architect Alvaro Siza and photos by Martin Chambi of the iconic Peruvian ruins.
Steven Howell is the author of Montreal Essential Guide, a Sutro Media iPhone travel app available at iTunes.com.
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