Douglas MacLeod

Yuri entered the School of Architecture at the University of Toronto in 1973 during its most radical incarnation. The school had charged itself with re-inventing both architecture and the world, and while in many cases this mandate simply served up architectural conventions wrapped in new rhetoric, Yuri was able to distill that the real value of this experiment lay in communications.

His lyrical presentations of these ideas were a delight to experience - Yuri could weave a building out of thin air with just the spoken word - and he continued to develop his techniques long after he had left the school. Here too, he formed a lifelong, if irreverent, approach to technology. Slides, audiotapes, video, looms, printing presses and xerography were all grist for his presentation mill. Aircraft carriers on Eglinton Avenue and hydraulic houses on Baffin Island were all presentation tools to help him communicate a different relationship with the built environment. A meticulously re-crafted Monopoly board was the vehicle to explore suburban Toronto and a chaotic model of Plexiglas and copper was the means to create a Museum of Suburb.

While the experiment at the University of Toronto has long since faded into notoriety, Yuri was often pleased to admit that he took the best parts of the school and used them as the foundation for the Banff Publishing Workshop. More than anyone else, he benefited from the cauldron of new ideas that was architecture in the early seventies, for whether he was creating buildings, presentations, seminars or software, Rubinsky understood the essence of design.

Michael Century

Yuri was first employed at The Banff Centre to work with me and Michael Bawtree in a bootstrapping office responsible for 'arts planning'. Bawtree was the Arts Planner, I his assistant. Yuri arrived sometime in the summer of 1980 to write the prospectus for the new year-round program, basically a catalog to advertise the various programs already in place but more importantly, the ones which we cooking up at a feverish pace. So his job was to interview all the program directors and administrators, and write the text describing their programs. Harder was to express the philosophy underlying the new directions, which was all about 'inter-arts'. This was a philosophy of inter-relatedness between the arts, tilting toward experimentation and invention of new art forms. There was quite a split between the traditionalists, teaching established courses like clasical ballet, opera, or music, and those of us trying to start up new courses dealing either with contemporary forms, or to create hybrids which drew on these traditions. Yuri was somehow able to bridge all these differences, able in other words to get to know and understand the whole gamut, earning everyone's trust by his genuine interest and enthusiasm. So within a few weeks, he had the whole campus cased, knew everybody, and was a ubiquitous figure from the ceramics studios to the backstage scene shops. Yuri had lousy health those days, constant digestive problems, I recall. I think the Centre in those early heady years of the 80s, when we had direct sympathetic patronage from the Alberta government, were a paradise for Yuri. The chance to be close to so many different kinds of creative people, at all professional levels, was a great opportunity. Very soon he too got into the spirit of dreaming up and designing new programs too, though his job was really a short term staff writer contract.

We hired Yuri at the suggestion of Ian Brown, whom I had recommended earlier in 1980 to write a plan to start an arts magazine published by the Centre. Ian came back that summer to present this report, and sometime during the visit, I think, the notion of the Banff Publishing Workshop was hatched. I do recall doing the administrative legwork to arrange for Ian and Yuri to pitch the concept to the senior management. It was to based on the Harvard-Radcliffe workshop, and the President was a Harvard MBA who I think like the idea because it seemed classy, without having much of a clue about what was involved; certainly it was quite a departure from the art school's main focus. Anyway, they were intrigued enough to let Yuri develop the idea, but no money was available in that fiscal year, nor any infrastructure (except for me) to get it started. For this reason, along with my pre-occupation with getting other new programs launched, I tried to persuade Yuri to take the Publishing Workshop to the Centre's other academic unit, a school of management. I reasoned that at least half the program content was managerial anyways -- marketing, business planning, sales distribution, and the like -- which made it a strange beast in the School of Fine ARts. Yuri opposed this suggestion fiercely, indeed this was the occasion of our only real fight. The issue was settled in the end by the non-interest of our management colleagues. They couldn't even grasp what Yuri was trying to do, and it was bounced back into our laps.

In that first year, which I guess was 1981, Yuri worked with two co-directors, Valerie Frith for Books and Doreen Sanders for Magazines. These were both established names, whereas Yuri had really no profile in the trade and was reliant on them to open doors. Roundtable brainstorming sessions with publishing people, including Bill Clarke and Douglas Gibson went on, as the program was designed. By the second year,the Publishing Workshop was already functioning in a more or less autonomous way, with Yuri and Val Frith at the head. It needed very little financial support from the Centre beyond in-kind administrative support, which made it a unique program in a Centre where a lot of money went into scholarships and faculty fees. If memory serves, from the start the faculty weren't paid to teach, just their basic expenses covered. Companies were expected to pay the rather steep fees for their junior employees to attend. We knew at Banff that the program had struck a nerve in the industry, based on the response and the extraordinary intensity of the experience of the students. I only attended the sessions in the first few years, and then sporadically, such as when a celebrity like Robertson Davies would be asked to address the workshop. In those early years, the mold was set that somehow drew super-human energy and concentration out of all involved, particularly in the completion by the working groups of really difficult assignments, like creating entire publishing lists or new magazines in a fortnight. I didn't really know at the time how this was achieved, it's only clear to me now how much it was Yuri's alchemical gifts.

However the program model wasn't unique in one sense: in the air was the notion Banff shouldn't do anything run-of-the-mill, that short intensive, transformative courses worked best and yielded the best pedagogical payoff. The key was to continually re-shape every course, taking advantage of whatever was new and exciting, either in ideas or people. I think computers came very near the beginning, probably 83 or 84, but Stan Bevington will know the details of this.

For details of the development of the workshop, I'm sure records will be easy to track down in the Archives at Banff. Elizabeth Cameron (Elizabeth_Cameron@banffcentre.ab.ca) is the archivist, and she's always been very quick and helpful.

Apart from the publishing workshop, I would venture Yuri's other main contribution at Banff was coming up with the idea of holding an architectural competition to design the studios of the Leighton Artist Colony. This is a facility for senior artists-in-residence, but in 1980 it was only one of many ideas on the drawing board. Yuri saw this as a chance to invite the most distinguished Canadian architects to design an ideal single person building - a perfect studio that embodied in miniature their philosophy and stylistic ideals. He had come across a similar project, kind of a post-Bauhaus artist studio complex in Stuttgart, showed us photos from architecture history books and he took it from there. It was quite a brilliant idea, and played out just well in practice. Eight of the top names were picked- Ron Thom, Doug Cardinal, Ian Davidson, Richard Henriquez, for instance. A condition of taking part was that they couldn't really charge anything for their time, they had to work for cost only. And they had to treat it as a group project, discussing their ideas with each other, agreeing on site assignments, design materials, and the like. Something like going back to graduate school, a charette in effect, but this time with a budget to build something. I recall the enthusiasm and special atmosphere of that project with warmth, in which fierce professional rivals took joy in a pure act of creation. It was odd to see a guy who might be building a city in Saudi Arabia yesterday talking today with passion about his poetic idea for little $20,000 shack in the Canadian rockies. The whole thing was magical, quirky, and enriching for all involved.