2006 Winner
Ted Cavanagh, Richard Kroeker, Roger Mullin, Alden Neufeld, and 23 designer/builders of the Faculty of Architecture and Planning, Dalhousie University: Le Théâtre Petit Cercle, an outdoor children’s theatre, for Le Conseil des Arts, Cheticamp, Nova Scotia.
Le Théâtre Petit Cercle playfully engages the infamous Suette winds of Cheticamp in this community project moored to a playground slide. In 2004, the French-speaking town celebrated 400 years of European settlement in Canada by hosting an international festival. This permanent outdoor theatre for children’s festival events has become the seed for a future arts camp to promote Acadian culture and local ways of building. Beginning with a surrealistic, derelict playground, instructors and students learned lessons from local construction, building rock-ballasted wooden cribwork walls “transparent to the wind.” The playground slide with windsock banner anchors the structure at a child-height entry, and suggests making an exciting, sliding “grand entry.” The walls are woven onto vertical ribs made from one-by-fours laminated each side of tapered blocking. One-by-three slats are set diagonally, screwed onto the inside and outside of the ribs creating a “cavity” partly filled with rock to ballast the structure during a Suette. Like boat hulls or baskets, the three dimensional curvature creates stiffness with relatively thin material. In fifteen days, the theatre was designed, built and nearly paid for.
Now, an additional $300,000 has been raised to complete the rest of the theatre camp, building on community spirit and a sense of place. Ted Cavanagh, Roger Mullin, and Richard Kroeker teach architectural design at Dalhousie and investigate innovative ways of building with their students. Twenty-three students helped in the design and construction.Le Théâtre Petit Cercle is winner of the 2005 gold at the National Post Design Exchange Awards for the best public and commercial building in Canada.
