Warehouse Journal 22 wins prestigious Alcuin Award for design

The 22nd edition of Warehouse Journal, published annually by Faculty of Architecture students was recently awarded top spot in the prose non-fiction illustrated category of the prestigious Alcuin Awards.

The annual awards are handed out by The Alcuin Society, which promotes and celebrates fine book design in Canada. Since 1981 the Alcuin Society has sponsored the Alcuin Society Awards for Excellence in Book Design in Canada, and 
the Robert R. Reid Award and Medal to recognize lifetime achievement or extraordinary contributions, to the Book Arts in Canada.

UM Today spoke with the editorial group who published Warehouse 22, Aaron Pollock, Evan Gomes and Robyn Arnason.

Warehouse Journal 22.

What the theme was for the issue?

For Warehouse Journal Vol.22, we wanted to create an organization and structure for the journal that would provide a better understanding of the undergraduate program and how it relates to the graduate programs in the Faculty of Architecture. The Environmental Design program is often misunderstood and our goal was to provide some clarity through the organization of work within the journal.

How did you land on a theme?

In discussions about what the Environmental Design program means to us and how it relates to the Master’s programs, we decided that showing the progression of work from the first year of Environmental Design though to the graduate level would be a clear way to discuss the evolution of work through the Faculty of Architecture. As the first editorial team of 3, we each represented our respective streams within the Environmental Design undergraduate program: Architecture, Interior Environments and Landscape + Urbanism. We believe that this gave us an unique prospective and allowed us to look at the work holistically, as well as provide a better understanding of the type of work done in the different streams and departments. We tried to highlight the differences between the disciplines, but also demonstrate how they relate to each other.

Tell us about working together to organize your content and design around the theme.

Individually, we would each go through submitted projects from our respective streams and rate them for inclusion based on concept, quality of work and presentation. Concurrently, the other two members would review the same streams and collectively decide on a rating. We would then come together and discuss each submission and determine, as a team, which projects we felt should be included. In using this method, we believed that a student’s work was judged fairly from a multidiscipline standpoint, and thus created a dialogue between the streams on our understanding of the students’ intension. Otherwise we played to our strengths and divided tasks appropriately, but always came together to make final decisions.

How did the experience of editing the journal enrich your student life?

It is an amazing opportunity to be a part of the Warehouse Journal‘s legacy. The journal begins to take us, as the editorial team, out of an academic world and allowed us to communicate with design professionals both locally and nationally about the journal, student work, and the benefits it poses as a publication for design education. The journal also gave some very real world experience, as we knew in the end, there would have to be a physical book in our hands, and we were the ones responsible for it.

>> Click through (using the right and left side arrows) for a slide show of sample pages from the award-winning Warehouse 22.

Warehouse #23

The editors for the upcoming year have already been installed. We spoke to editors Liane Lanzar and Kevin Complido about how the volume is looking so far. They’ll be spending their summer setting up the structure of next year’s book (the volumes come out in late fall) and working through submissions: sorting, categorizing, and following up on anything that may be missing. “We’ve also been involved with meeting up with potential publishers, and talking about our initial ideas for the book with them. At the moment we’re busy with promoting Warehouse at events for the Architectural Fringe Festival and RAIC week,” they add.

How did you choose the theme for #23 and how will you go forward with the content you’ve received?

There isn’t a theme for this year as much as there is a work ethic we’re hoping to carry throughout the process. In our proposal for the editorship, we talked about our ambition to be ‘good hosts’ (a thought borrowed from Charles Eames) in the treatment and presentation of the projects and the book itself. Our hope is that the way we handle the student work honours that idea. For us personally, the ‘details’ have always been a thing we’ve been big on. The way the book reads and feels should be as just as thorough and thoughtful as the students’ work.

Why is editing the journal  a worthwhile project for you?

Liane: This was a great opportunity to take on something larger than myself. I have learned so much from this program and becoming an editor has allowed me to start applying those skills towards the Warehouse Journal on a professional level.

Kevin: For me, half of it is feeling like I never fully applied/immersed myself in Winnipeg/UofM’s rich design culture. Warehouse has always been something I’ve wanted to do and felt like I could (hopefully) do a good job of, so I guess this felt like the most comfortable way to participate.The other half is because I admire and like being able to look into everybody’s work. It’s a nice way to end our Environmental Design degrees, and we’re really happy to have been given the opportunity this year.