Aiden Schurek doesn’t remember the first time he went to K-Days as a kid, but the Next Architecture junior architectural technologist remembers the early impact the carnival made. “It all felt so big, especially at night with all the lights,” he says. “But my clearest memories are definitely when it was just me and a couple friends running around in the sun, grabbing snacks and going on rides.”
Albert Parfonov heard of K-Days on the very first day he arrived in Canada, “because that was exactly one week before K-Days last year.” The Ukrainian-born senior architectural technologist, who came to Canada to work for Next Architecture, brought his mother and says the festival was something he’s “never seen before.” So when the pair heard of Media Architecture Design Edmonton’s (MADE) second K-Days design competition, they were excited to enter — especially Schurek, who started his career around the same time Parfonov came to Canada to continue his. “A lot of my job is the technical side — drawing the blueprints rather than designing a building,” Schurek says. “So, with this project, they gave me a little more freedom. It was kind of a jump in the deep end in some ways, but one that was very appreciated.”
Schurek may remember K-Days’ bright night lights, but for day-walking festival goers, escaping the heat is key, hence MADE’s theme for this year: Throwing Shade.
It would be easy, and appreciated, to throw up an artistically designed umbrella, awning or gazebo. But that’s not how designers think. Like any public art work, people enjoy the end result, but designers start with a story — Edmonton’s story.
“When we started to think about what we wanted to do, we decided to jump into the history, because K-Days takes its origin from Klondike history, right?” Parfonov explains. “It was completely new to me, and I was fascinated.”
The pair dug through early Edmonton history, seeing what type of structures gold rush explorers erected on their way to the Yukon’s Klondike area, from houses and shelters to dams and sluice boxes. “We decided to use the simple materials they used that time, which was wood, and the simple shapes — boxes, made from planks,” Parfonov says. “Then we manipulated the form, made it breathable, and let the structures throw shade. But the main concept is the history of the Klondike.”
Painted bright pink, orange, yellow and blue, the four structures fit well within the K-days kaleidoscope. But thanks to film colourization, the pair found that people liked the same pretty colours on buildings back then, too, “especially on the routes that went into British Columbia,” Schurek says.
The partially pitched, slatted structures provide shade but look different from every perspective, including the sun’s. “We did a solar study to see exactly how the sun goes around this time of year,” Parfonov says. “At this time of year, between 12 and 1 p.m., the sun is almost 90 degrees to the ground, which provides the least shade we can get from any structure. So we distorted it from two different angles to block the sun from shining inside.”
A 360-street-level view looks different from almost every degree. Walking straight in, the slats fall in line and can look like a single frame that somehow provides metres of shade. A few steps to either side reveals the openings between slats. A few steps more, and it looks like a solid structure. “I feel this is the cool part of our design, or any good design, that everybody can see a different aspect of it,” Schurek says.
One aspect of the competition was that, like K-Days itself, the structure — dubbed “Parallax,” a mathematical concept about changing perspective the designers say “sounds cool” — had to be temporary, and reusable for years to come. This was a refreshing challenge for Parfonov, who for years has designed big, permanent buildings constructed around the world to last for many years. In this case, the spruce-pine-fir wood — which was donated by Alberta Woodworks, and constructed by Onetwosix Design — “could not be anchored to the ground,” Parfonov says. “They are free-standing structures that need to be heavier, with many layers of wood on the base to make it more stable. And they had to be disassembled and stored for the next K-Days.”
As a young designer, Schurek says it’s exciting to see his first design realized in full, adding that winners of most design competitions never leave the computer screens, so he appreciates what MADE is doing for the local design community.
“But even bigger than that for me, though, is going back to making those memories at K-days. If I can be a part of the K-Days experience for the next group of kids, even if it’s not the main thing they remember, it’s special.”
This article appears in the September 2024 issue of Edify
