speed limits at cca

Speed Limits, the current show at the Centre Canadien d’Architecture, is thought-provoking and disconcerting. Using a variety of media - posters, lithographs, video clips, and artifacts - the expo displays in detail, and calls into question, the pace of modern life.

The show opens with the image of a snail crawling across the ceiling, while urban motion/commotion is projected across the floor. The juxtaposition, both luminous and biting, hints at the complexity of the subject.

Demonstrating how architecture and design aided our desire for speed in the 1950s, a series of videos show a woman at work in an efficient kitchen. Watching, I felt nostalgia for that idyllic era, and the continuing promise that technology creates both more time and more possibility. Then I cringed with embarrassment.

With sleek drawers and streamlined, labeled bins putting everything within her reach, and electric appliances making cooking and cleaning faster, what registered ultimately was the housewife’s increased servitude.

A large screen showing date-stamped photographic sequences of the construction of the Irving Trust Building in New York, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and the China Central Television Building in Beijing were amazing - until subsequent sequences showed the fast, horrifying razing of other structures.

A display based on Claude Lelouche’s “Rendez-vous Paris” consists of several videos playing at once - each a sports car driven at top speed through a different major city. The viewer’s perspective is from the driver’s seat, the angles are sharp, and the sound of revving motors fierce. Motion-sickness trumped my curiosity here, and I didn’t linger.

A quieter gallery showed sleep aids (great design, and again the promises of advertising) against gorgeous footage of Usein Bolt’s record-breaking sprint in the 2008 Olympics. Here the contrast was less jolting, and the examples reminded why I visit museums: to experience sheer, uncomplicated beauty.

Bolt’s movement was pure perfection - not a sentiment I shared with the other examples (though likely others will.)

Immersed in the speed of the modern world, I yearn for… not slowness, exactly, but quiet, and simplicity. This show was perhaps more complicated than I bargained for. But its contrasting, multilayered approach to an abstract design idea is one reason I love the CCA.

If you go:

Speed Limits runs until Oct 12, 2009, 1920, rue Baile.

Free tours look closely at the expo, held Wed - Sun, 2pm in English, 3:30pm in French; meet at the information desk.

Photograph courtesy CCA.