Cyclical Cities

Ephemeral events can move across a landscape like a tornado — ‘touching lightly’, perhaps, but leaving a swath of debris in their wake. Yet cyclical celebrations offer important lessons for human settlement in the next century and serve as good examples of how we might live in greater harmony with the earth and each other. One of the most productive and at the same time destructive aspects of modern society is our emphasis on growth and progress, both of which rely on the idea of linear time. Traditional societies by contrast, understand time as cyclical — a mirror of the rhythmic patterns of life on earth.

Our talk will explore some recurring festivals that form ‘cyclical cities’ — from India’s Kumbha Mela and Mecca’s Hajj, to the Feria in Seville and religious camp meetings. Each continent and each country in the world has events similar to these. We will look at lessons embodied in these events: how they organize people into prototypes of community, how they create cultural landscapes, respond to the seasons, and operate as self-regulating systems. As the only species that communicates with itself across the entire globe, humanity is constantly drawn to assembly, communication and exchange. Cyclical cities are one ancient and powerful means of realizing such encounters, and are likely to be with us as long as we are here.

Christine Macy Christine Macy is a professor of architectural design and history at Dalhousie University in Canada. Her research areas include the representation of cultural identity in architecture, public space design, civic infrastructure, temporary urbanism and festival architecture. Educated at UC Berkeley and M.I.T., she practiced architecture in New York and San Francisco before establishing her partnership, Filum, with Sarah Bonnemaison in 1990, specializing in lightweight structures and public space design for festivals. Before joining the faculty at Dalhousie, Prof. Macy taught at UC Berkeley and the University of British Columbia. Her books include Greening the City: Ecological Wastewater Treatment in Halifax (Dalhousie, 2001), and the co-authored Architecture and Nature: Creating the American Landscape (Routledge, 2003), and she is currently working on a visual history of dams in the United States.

Sarah Bonnemaison has a doctorate in human geography from the University of British Columbia and degrees in architecture from Pratt Institute and M.I.T. As an assistant professor of architecture at Dalhousie University in Canada, her research areas include cultural landscapes, temporary urbanism, lightweight and tensile structures and experimental form-finding. The co-author of Architecture and Nature: Creating the American Landscape (Routledge, 2003), she is currently working on an edited book about installations as a form of architectural practice.

Macy and Bonnemaison's design partnership Filum, is a research-based practice focusing on the design of ephemeral architecture and design research in the form-finding and fabrication of tensile structures. Their recent work explores the role of motion-capture technologies in architectural design.

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