In conjunction with their upcoming publication, In Depth: Urban Domesticities Today,  SO – IL founders Jing Liu and Florian Idenburg will discuss their practice's decade-long pursuit of transforming the paradigm of urban housing today—towards a denser, more human and communal environment.  

Appealing to students and professionals alike, In Depth examines how housing might promote the well-being of its inhabitants by presenting new typologies for our ever-more urbanized world. The design office’s attempt to “hack” the codes, cores, courts and corridors takes center stage, exemplified by a selection of  SO – IL’s most recent projects, exploring concepts including porosity, connectivity, community and orientation in urban living.  

Jing Liu, born in 1980 in China, is a founding partner at  SO – IL. She grew up on three continents and in five cities, and most of her childhood homes were lost to rapid urbanization. She teaches at universities on the East Coast of the United States and works from her current base in Brooklyn, New York. Florian Idenburg is co-founder of SO – IL and Professor of the Practice at Cornell University. His grandmother’s house was designed by her great-uncle H. P. Berlage. On her veranda, he learned firsthand the benefits of the space in between. 

Liu and Idenburg are the 2024-2025 Frank Gehry International Visiting Chairs in Architectural Design.  

About the Harold Solomon Kaplan Lecture

Established by the Kaplan/Reiss family, the Harold Solomon Kaplan Lecture honours the prolific Toronto architect (1895–1973) whose work helped define the city’s cultural and communal landscape. From iconic Art Deco and Art Moderne theatres to foundational Jewish community institutions across Canada, Kaplan transformed cities through buildings that brought people together for shared experiences. The annual lecture, part of the faculty’s public program, celebrates Kaplan’s legacy by inviting leading architects to offer perspectives and advance dialogue on the architecture of collective spaces.

Inaugural lecture

Public City is a Canadian architecture and landscape architecture studio based in Winnipeg with offices in Toronto and Edmonton. Framed as a light-hearted but pointed rebuttal to the prevalence of private space in the Canadian city, Public City argues for a public realm that is layered, messy, culturally generous, and focused on wellbeing in the collective human experience. This lecture explores the evolving relationship between civic engagement (through architectural and landscape architectural acts), human equity, and individual responsibility. Through a lessons-learned exploration of recent projects, Liz Wreford and Peter Sampson share how the work of their hybrid design studio accepts practice as a public act.  

About Peter Sampson and Liz Wreford

Peter Sampson is the Principal Architect and co-founder of Public City where he leads architecture and urban design initiatives on social infrastructure. Peter's design work bridges public policy, cultural programming, and meaningful community engagement. Peter led the Governor General Medal winning Forest Pavilion, along with a number of other national awards recognizing his commitment to design excellence and public impact. Peter’s projects span from transitional housing and public washrooms to community theatres and neighbourhood libraries. Much of his work is shaped by a belief that architecture should invite participation, provoke dialogue, and expand a realm of belonging. Peter has taught architecture at the Universities of Manitoba, Waterloo, and Toronto.

Liz Wreford is the Principal Landscape Architect and co-founder of Public City. She leads the firm’s work in inclusive, culturally resonant, and ecologically responsive public spaces. With over two decades of experience, her projects are recognized for vibrant storytelling, historical depth, and transformative civic impact. Liz’s leadership has shaped award-winning works including the 2SLGBTQI+ National Monument in Ottawa, Park Park in Calgary, and Manitoboggan in Winnipeg. A committed advocate for design equity and mentorship, she founded the Prairie Chapter of Building Equality in Architecture and serves as a Council Director with the Winnipeg Arts Council. Her practice is rooted in collaboration, experimentation, and a belief in building common ground.  Liz has taught landscape architecture at the Universities of Toronto and Manitoba.

How we use land reflects the values of our society and their culture.  Land always holds multiple histories and multiple futures.  But the narratives created about land are not always complete.  In the article, The Crucial Difference Between Story and Narrative, the author writes, “If story is “an account of imaginary or real people and events told for entertainment,” narrative is the choice of which events to relate and in what order. Put simply, narrative is how we choose to tell a story. We apply different narratives to the same story all the time”.

This is particularly true of the neighborhoods still recovering from the legacy of urban renewal, urban erasure and chronic disinvestment. Land Narratives & Protopian Futures:  From Fictions to the Just City, Toni L. Griffin will share insights on the importance of uncovering the layers of land histories -  cultural, political, economic and social - as essential to designing more restorative, reparative and just cities for and with the people most harmed by exclusion, extraction, and erasure.

About Toni L. Griffin:

Toni L. Griffin is founder of urban American city (urbanAC LLC), a planning and design practice working with public, private, and nonprofit partners to reimage, reshape, and rebuild more just cities and communities. urbanAC leads transformative urban planning and design projects rooted in addressing historic and current disparities involving race, class, and culture. They have collaborated with cities on the cusp of just social and economic recovery including Detroit, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Rochester, and St. Louis. Ms. Griffin is also Professor in Practice of Urban Planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and is founding director of the Just City Lab, a research platform that investigates how design’s impact on social and spatial justice in cities.

Lecture by Michael Hough / Ontario Association of Landscape Architects Visiting Critic Dr. Jala Makhzoumi

The introduction of ‘landscape’ was part and parcel of Western, colonial modernization of traditional cities in the Arab World. Since then, the word has come to be associated with the reproduction of landscape imagery drawn from European cities – imagery that is readily produced regardless of environmental constraints and traditional social values. The association has limited the role of landscape architecture, an emerging profession in the region, reducing it to urban beautification, namely through tree-lined boulevards and city parks. It has taken Dr. Makhzoumi a lifetime to overcome these associations – what she refers to as landscape’s colonial legacy. Through her practice, research and teaching, Dr. Makhzoumi has sought to ground landscape architecture in the regional ecology and the needs and aspirations of local communities. In this talk, she will share milestones of this journey.

About Dr. Jala Makhzoumi:

Jala Makhzoumi is the 2021 laureate of the International Federation of Landscape Architects’ Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe Award for her outstanding contribution to education and practice. She is adjunct professor of landscape architecture, American University of Beirut, and acting president of IFLA Middle East Region. In her practice, teaching and research, Jala pioneers an ecological design approach that promotes grounded and community inclusive landscapes. Her expertise includes landscape heritage conservation, postwar recovery and sustainable urban greening. Her most recent publication is a volume she co-authors, entitled, Landscape Architecture in the Arab Middle East (Routledge, 2025).

Design tools shape how we think as designers. This lecture and exhibition explores experiments using interactive design technologies and architectural tools of design, to resist the flattening tendencies of screen-based workflows by reintegrating bodily knowledge into creative practice. Drawing from research at the intersection of architecture, AI, craft, and human-computer interaction, "Unruly Intelligences" presents projects spanning real-time VR sketching, generative AI workflows, robotic fabrication, and sensors, each positioning the designer's body as an active site of knowledge production.

About Humbi Song:

Humbi Song is an Assistant Professor and Emerging Architect Fellow at the University of Toronto. Her work focuses on the intersection of architecture, technology and human-computer interaction. She investigates the evolving relationships between human creativity and interactive technologies, such as physical computing and AI, in the context of broader societal and technological influences on how designs are conceived, created and experienced. In her practice, she builds spatial installations and fabrication experiments to explore these co-creative processes between designers, responsive interactive technologies and AI.

The lecture will immediately follow the opening of the exhibition taking place from 5:00 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. in the Larry Wayne Richards Gallery. The exhibition will be on view weekdays from February 27 to March 27, 2026. 

Join the Daniels Faculty’s Lukas Pauer for a discussion of his integrated practice, research and teaching—an effort to recentre the study of how sovereignty is acquired and disputed as a practice-based matter of space and power. In recent years, Pauer has worked on a series of projects aimed at decoding and deconstructing built objects that political actors around the world have used to project power. As such, his academic practice seeks to empower marginalized, underrepresented and vulnerable individuals and communities.

This event is part of the Daniels Faculty’s Winter 2024 Public Program. Pauer has also curated a corresponding exhibition, How to Steal a Country, on view in the Larry Wayne Richards Gallery at 1 Spadina Crescent from March 6 to May 14, 2024.

Daniels Faculty Emerging Architect Fellow Lukas Pauer is a licensed architect, urbanist, historian and educator. His Vertical Geopolitics Lab, an investigative practice and think tank at the intersections of architecture, geography, politology and media, is dedicated to exposing intangible systems and hidden agendas within the built environment.

Join architectural and art historian Mark Crinson, Birkbeck (University of London), for a special guest lecture on Monday, March 11, hosted by the Daniels Faculty's Architecture, Landscape, and Design PhD program.

In this talk, Crinson will focus on the early years of a new understanding of infrastructure, and uses various forms of representation (brochures, a feature film, architectural drawings) to explore the phenomenon in the case of the international airport just after the Second World War when infrastructural projects came into existence not only as “signs of themselves, but as trope, rhetoric, image, poetics.”

London (Heathrow) airport became the main location for the film Out of the Clouds (1955), interpreted here as a training manual in how to learn the airport, namely how to negotiate infrastructure either/both because you don’t really know it is there or/and because you understand it as demonstratively sensitive to human craft and experience. The film’s treatment of infrastructure has continuing associations to contemporary conversations about forced labor, central state planning, territoriality, immigration, and citizenship.

All members of the Daniels community, and interested members of the public, are invited to join. No advanced registration required. 

Mark Crinson is emeritus professor of architectural history at Birkbeck, University of London, and previously taught at the University of Manchester (1993–2016). He served as vice president and president of the European Architectural History Network. Recent books include Shock City: Image and Architecture in Industrial Manchester (2022, winner of the 2024 Historians of British Art Prize); The Architecture of Art History: A Historiography (2019, co-authored with Richard J. Williams); Alison and Peter Smithson (2018); and Rebuilding Babel: Modern Architecture and Internationalism (2017). His current book, titled Heathrow’s Genius Loci, will be completed in summer 2024. He was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2023. 

One of the founders of SHoP Architects, Kim Holden established her own practice, Doula X Design, after her experience giving birth led her to become a doula. In this lecture, she will discuss how design can facilitate better birthing experiences, in particular by creating positive environments that support labour rather than inhibit it.

Kim Holden is currently the William Henry Bishop Visiting Professor of Architectural Design at Yale School of Architecture. A registered architect, trained birth/postpartum doula and certified lactation counselor, Holden is focused on the intersection of design and women’s health. Through her work and examination of the role that design plays in shaping the physical, physiological and psychological experience of birth, she seeks to improve outcomes and experiences for women, birthing people and their families. Championing safer, more respectful and more equitable care, her work seeks to reframe childbirth not as a women’s topic but rather as a societal one.

Banner images courtesy Pobby Tan and Katie Jin (1), Raven Xu (2) and Nicole Niava (3, 4)

London- and Los Angeles-based artist P. Staff will discuss recent exhibitions, influences and working methodologies, as well as read from their recent collection of poetry. Recent exhibitions include In Ekstase, Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland; Impact Play, Fundacio Joan Miro, Barcelona; and On Venus, most recently presented at the the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, titled The Milk of Dreams. Staff’s work spans installation, poetry and video, and is concerned with affect, biopolitics, queer and trans theory and disability and debility.

Born in the UK in 1987, P. Staff lives and works in Los Angeles and London. As a filmmaker, installation artist and poet, they draw from a wide-ranging assortment of inspirations, materials and settings, of which recent examples include Achille Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics, affect theory and the transpoetics of writers such as Che Gossett and Eva Hayward, as well as their own studies in modern dance, astrology and end-of-life care. In Staff’s interdisciplinary practice, these varying threads serve to emphasize the processes by which bodies—especially those of people who are queer, trans or disabled—are interpreted, regulated and disciplined in a rigorously controlled society. Staff has exhibited extensively, gaining significant recognition and awards for their work, which is held in private and public collections internationally. Staff received their BA in Fine Art and Contemporary Critical Studies from Goldsmiths University of London in 2009. They completed the LUX Associate Artists Programme and studied Contemporary Dance at The Place in London in 2011.

Banner image: In Ekstase, 2023 Kunsthalle Basel. Photo by Philipp Hanger

Join Zachary Mollica, Emerging Architect Fellow at the Daniels Faculty, for this lecture on the promise of re-diversifying the ways we build with wood. By using more than just a few species, as is currently the practice, builders and designers can help re-establish healthier processes, reversing the simplification of forest ecosystems worldwide. This talk is in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name (pictured above).

Inaugural 2022-2024 Emerging Architect Fellow Zachary Mollica is an architect, maker and educator whose work with trees has become a primary reference in alternative wood building futures. His work integrates innovative digital methods with craft and material knowledge in the pursuit of better natural, social and constructed environments.