How are endings made? Or rather, what are they made of? Better yet, how does the end’s material inform new beginnings? These questions propel Local Technique.
Local Technique is a Toronto-based not-for-profit organization working at the intersection of architectural conservation and waste tracing possible futures and entangled pasts of sites, structures and materials. Through interdisciplinary research and projects, Local Technique is a practice of careful listening, creative probing, and critical thinking.
Understanding building demolition and deconstruction to be a form of material production, Local Technique considers how it is returned to the land. In doing so, it asks: how does (building) material displacement constitute an act of design? Taking cues from the cumulative architectures it occupies, it asks: how do materials themselves both persist and resist? How do they shape and reflect longer trajectories?
Often working in collaboration, Local Technique draws together a constellation of histories, geographies and actors, to offer a portrait of architecture - not a static object - but as a moving project. In doing so, it aspires to prompt consideration of the sites beyond the site, of architecture’s remainders and discards and the processes which create it.
What makes a place, a place?
It is that which remains
and that which has been displaced.
It is a social stratigraphy embedded in
buildings of brick, glass and concrete,
dimensions of road, overlooked vegetation,
and the storied materials contained therein.
It is also the movement of these pieces -
a tectonic choreography
which extracts and extrudes, mixes and moulds.
This shape-taking process
- a Local Technique -
occurs in the working and living,
the wrecking and rearranging
the gathering and building.
At both the center and periphery,
entangled matter is returned
beloved though contaminated,
inherited and inhabited by generations
of wild life.
Operating at the intersection of architectural conservation and waste, Local Technique conducts interdisciplinary research that explores underlying patterns of material use and exposes new ways of conceptualizing the relationship between past and future landscapes.
Through collaborative and independent projects, Local Techniques explores themes of erasure, accumulation, movement and transformation. Created and presented in a range of settings, these projects explore the multiple, entangled values of sites, structures and materials.
Alison Creba is the founder and principal investigator at Local Technique. Her research explores themes of demolition, deconstruction and displacement and investigates the physical and cultural landscapes generated through these processes. She holds a Master degree in Heritage
Conservation through Carleton University’s School of Indigenous
Alison Creba is the founder and principal investigator at Local Technique. Her research explores themes of demolition, deconstruction and displacement and investigates the physical and cultural landscapes generated through these processes. She holds a Master degree in Heritage
Conservation through Carleton University’s School of Indigenous and Canadian Studies. She
held a public appointment on the City of Toronto’s Circular Economy Working Group
(2019-2021), has conducted research at ERA Architects (Toronto- 2017) and Rotor (Brussels -
2018) and made recent contributions to AD magazine, the Journal of Cultural Heritage
Management and Sustainable Design, the Architectural Conservancy of Ontario’s Toronto
Branch. She is a faculty member of Willowbank school for Restoration Arts and its Center for
Cultural Landscapes. In addition to this, Alison has a background in the arts and trades,
experience which supports her role as Building Operations Manager of Artscape Wychwood
Barns, a heritage structure converted into residential, studio and community spaces.
Giaimo is a Toronto-based architecture firm integrating design and heritage conservation who have been implementing deconstruction and material re-use on a variety of projects to conserve, and thus leverage, the existing embodied energy and carbon of a building. They are committed to bridging the gap between the well-established deconstruction research that exists across academia and international precedents with the current state of the real estate, construction, architecture, and building industry in Ontario.
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