Go Sell It On The Mountain
The Walrus|April 2020
Banff Centre started off as a remote artists’ retreat. Now it’s trying to help creatives adapt to the modern world
Tom Jokinen
Go Sell It On The Mountain

One afternoon in 2017, while visiting Alberta’s Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, I took shelter from the rain in Glyde Hall, the visual-arts building. Deep in the basement, near the ceramic and paper-making studios, I came across something odd.

Rock, from the nearby mountains, was coming out of the floor. Not a wee chunk but a huge shelf of limestone, tall and wide enough for at least six people to climb onto without feeling crowded. This, in the middle of a workspace. Embedded in the rock, I later learned, are around 300-million-year-old fossils: stromatoporoids from a reef environment of the Paleozoic era, back when Banff was undersea. Tectonic forces brought the limestone up to where it is now. What I was seeing was an architectural hack: they built the basement around the rock to save having to blast through it. But the effect was deeper and weirder, science-fictional as if the rock had pushed into the building like the Blob, oozing through a crack in the floor.

هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة April 2020 من The Walrus.

ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.

هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة April 2020 من The Walrus.

ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.

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