THE ARCHITECTS ARE HERE

I have always said that when the College buildings go, so do I. One sniff of a wrecking ball and I am out of here and never coming back. I mean it.

It was distressing to hear almost the same thing coming from Dakota McFadzean at last night’s Regina Public School Board meeting during his presentation about the coming demise of Scott Collegiate. I didn’t know that Regina’s continual self-destruction depressed other people to the point they start thinking of packing up and moving on, but of course I can't be the only one. Each building that is destroyed is one closer to the limit of what I can stand, not just for the architecture itself, but for the unthinking motivation behind it.

One of the statements that seemed to stick in the Scott supporters' craw yesterday was RBE member Russ Marchuk’s pithy statement “If the horse dies, get off,” in reference to Scott’s supposed failure to support its students architecturally.

I can’t help but think about the hundreds of slum houses around the Scott facility – each a tiny marvel of architecture in its day – that have been used to pump money out of North Central residents and into slumlords’ pockets for decades, with the complicity – if not the outright blessing – of policy makers in every level of government.

Who knew it was all architecture’s fault? Thank goodness the architects are going to come and fix it for us. So glad that's sorted.

Maybe we needed to have the dead horse image planted in our heads whether we want to see it or not. If that’s how the school board sees its buildings, we’re better off knowing.

How do we communicate back to our representatives that the horse isn’t a building, a learning model, or even a school board, but the city itself? Who sees us as we step off and walk away?

NB: One of my recent favorite books is Michael Winter’s The Architects Are Here. The title of the book is fictional shorthand for a kind of impersonal, lurking force of doom, like accidents, distruction, and poverty.