The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) is launching a new iteration of its website as a way to better engage contemporary issues in architecture. The website is conceived as an active editorial project to not only disseminate information and resources from and about the CCA, but to take positions and over time involve an expanding network of contributors through original texts, images, and videos. Content on the site is organized by themes that reflect the CCA’s ongoing research and thought on specific topics.
This continually expanding online publishing platform serves as a viable “Second Building” for the CCA by initiating, supporting, and influencing contemporary debates on architecture. The Second Building allows the CCA to better reveal the international scope of its modern and contemporary architecture collection, while advancing its objective of making its research and resources more accessible to a geographically diverse audience of students, professional architects and designers, and a broad community of researchers.
The CCA’s full range of programming (lectures, workshops and seminars, exhibitions, publications, research programs) produces valuable content relevant to contemporary culture, and specifically to readers interested in the built environment. Whereas most museums tend to have an informational and promotional online presence serving visitors by reinforcing the physical activities and venue, the new CCA website is an experimental reading platform and research tool targeting the digital visitor—a geographically distributed audience that can fully engage with the CCA without ever visiting the physical building in Montréal. As CCA Director Mirko Zardini writes, “Digital technology and the internet have changed the fundamental assumption that our institution is tied to a specific location with a geographically determined public. More and more, our public is constituted by a network of dispersed groups that requires a new building which is accessible online from any place at any time.”
The initial phase of the website was launched on May 20, 2016, and will continually grow with new articles, editorial themes, as well as functional improvements. The content of the new editorial website is guided by a conceptual shift in navigation and interactive design, away from an emphasis on the components of the physical CCA and towards an explicit thematic organization that reflects the CCA’s way of thinking about and investigating contemporary issues in architecture. The new website thus gives a more focused curatorial framework for new and archival content while reflecting the unique collection, exhibitions, research activity and institutional voice of the CCA.
Under thematic groupings such as “The Planet is the Client,” “Origins of the Digital” or “Technology Sometimes Falls Short,” the website brings together content generated, hosted or commissioned by the CCA at different periods into wider narratives and lines of investigation.
This editorial website is supported by an institutional section for thorough information about the CCA activities, and a dynamic search tool that enables unprecedented access to all of CCA’s resources in a single interface: website content alongside collection items, archives, library holdings, and bookstore inventory. Combining results from all databases allows for in-depth research and image-comparisons by subject or topic independent of catalogue structure. The search tool and entire website will be continually developed, evolving on a functional as well as editorial basis.
About the CCA
The CCA is an international research centre and museum founded in 1979 on the conviction that architecture is a public concern. The institution is a leading voice in advancing knowledge, promoting public understanding, and widening thought and debate on architecture, its history, theory, practice and role in society today.
