Blueprint for a Hack: Leveraging Informal Building Practices [Hardcover]

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 contemporaryarchitecture and urban issues.ES When you first approached us, we were somewhat confused with your terminology.What exactly was hacking? But as you explained what you were trying to do, we reacted We do that all the time! As Inuit living in a remote region, with limited resources, we must reuse all the available materials and reimagine new possibilities for the kind of stuff that is usually considered waste... --Tonu Napartuk, Mayor of Kuujjuaq