MONTREAL, June 20, 2019 – Canada’s science minister Kirsty Duncan announced the April and October 2018 Canada Research Chair Awards, including one in Architecture, Competitions and Mediations of Excellence, granted to Université de Montréal architecture professor Jean-Pierre Chupin.
One of the few Tier-1 chairs in Canada dedicated to the study of contemporary architecture, it will help Professor Chupin better define the attributes, parameters and criteria for recognizing quality in architecture and understanding its renewal in current practices.
To what extent and through which criteria do architecture experts and users perceive the qualities of public buildings differently? An answer may be gleaned from a review of buildings given prizes or selected by peer juries in Canada since the 1980s as the winning entries in architectural competitions.
As part of his work as a Canada Research chair, Professor Chupin will examine the ability of public buildings to meet the highest aspirations for quality. He will address contemporary issues – be they environmental, technological, economic or cultural –, in Canada and elsewhere, by considering awards and competitions as mediation devices, filters that help identify exceptional buildings and to analyze them in a comparative way.
In addition to expert judgments, his research aims to better understand how people and communities live with and recognize great architecture. Making unpublished data on building characteristics, design criteria and the appreciation of qualities available for scrutiny, and emphasizing qualitative judgments, Professor Chupin wants to invite disciplines such as sociology, political science and ethics to share in his investigation of the relationships between people and built environments.
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For more information : https://amenagement.umontreal.ca/professeurs/fiche/in/in13658/sg/Jean-Pierre%20Chupin/