Jeannette Kuo is founding partner of Zurich-based Karamuk Kuo, an architecture office whose work often intvestigates the relationship between structure and space. She has taught at numerous universities including MIT and EPF Lausanne and is currently Assistant Professor in Practice at Harvard GSD. Recent publications include A-Typical Plan, Space of Production, and a monograph of the office by El Croquis.

Read More

Adrian Phiffer is originally from Romania. He received his Master of Architecture from University of Architecture and Urbanism “Ion Mincu” in Bucharest, and a Master of Urban Design from University of Toronto. In 2001-2002 he studied at Ecole d’Architecture de Toulouse under a Socrates-Erasmus Scholarship offered by the European Union. He has worked with Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam. In parallel to Office of Adrian Phiffer, he teaches at the University of Toronto - John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design.

Office of Adrian Phiffer is an architecture office based in Toronto, Canada. The work of the office is characterized by an openness that considers all aspects of the contemporary city, including its surreal nature, in a real and rational manner. The result is an architecture afraid neither of appearing generic nor uncanny and emotionally charged. The office engages in projects that range in scope from movies and art objects to monumental buildings and large urban plans.  The projects are developed mainly via international design competition. Exercising and adhering to the format of design competition has allowed the office to experiment with a range of design methods that bring new intensities to the current practice of architecture. The office works with apparently contradictory notions: bricolage, found objects, non-authorship, grossform, repetition, and generics. The members of the Office of Adrian Phiffer make time to teach, write, and instagram as a way of expanding the office’s thinking on architecture.

As an assistant professor of landscape architecture at the University of Toronto and a member of the Dredge Research Collaborative, Justine Holzman researches landscape infrastructure for regional design, responsive technologies in landscape architecture, and the epistemic history of scientific landscape modelling. Holzman previously taught at the University of Tennessee and Louisiana State University as a visiting assistant professor. At LSU, Holzman worked as a research fellow with the LSU Coastal Sustainability Studio, a transdisciplinary research studio with scientists, engineers, and designers working on coastal issues in Louisiana. Holzman is co-author of Responsive Landscapes: Strategies for Responsive Technologies in Landscape Architecture (2016) and previously worked as a Research Affiliate for the Responsive Environments and Artifacts Lab. Holzman holds an MLA from LSU and a BA in Landscape Architecture from UC Berkeley. ​

Julia Jamrozik and Coryn Kempster are Canadian designers, artists and educators who have collaborated since 2003. Together, they endeavour to create spaces, objects and situations that interrupt the ordinary in critically engaging and playful ways. Their multi-disciplinary practice operates at a variety of scales, from temporary installations to permanent public artworks and architectural projects.

Julia is an Assistant Professor and Coryn is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture at the University at Buffalo SUNY. Their academic research focuses on the role of play in the built environment and alternative methods of documentation as a form of historic preservation. In 2018 the Architectural League of New York honoured their work with the prestigious League Prize.

www.ck-jj.com

Michael Young is an architect and educator practicing in New York City where he is a founding partner of the architectural design studio Young & Ayata. Young & Ayata were awarded a Design Vanguard Award from Architectural Record for 2016. In 2015 they received a first place prize to design the new Bauhaus Museum in Dessau, Germany. In 2014 they received the Young Architects Prize from the Architectural League of New York, and were finalists for the MoMA Young Architects Program at the Istanbul Modern.

Michael is currently an Assistant Professor at the Cooper Union. In the Fall of 2016 he was the Louis I. Kahn Visiting Assistant Professor at Yale University. He has previously taught at Princeton, SCI-Arc, and Columbia. He has published essays in Log, The Cornell Journal, Thresholds, AD, and in 2015, the book titled The Estranged Object. Michael received his Master's Degree from Princeton University and a Bachelor of Architecture from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. He is a licensed architect in the State of New York.

Terri Chiao (b. 1981) is a multi-disciplinary artist and designer based in Brooklyn, NY. She collaborates with Adam Frezza at CHIAOZZA. Their studio explores play and craft across a range of media, including painted sculpture, works on paper, installation, public art and design. Chiao received her B. A. from Brown University (2004) and her M. Arch. from Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (2008). Read More...

Note: This Midday Talk will take place on a Tuesday (most other Midday Talks happen on Wednesdays).

The Midday Talks lecture series is coordinated by Assistant Professor Wei-Han Vivian Lee. These lectures are open to the public and registration is not required.

Introduction by Wei-Han Vivian Lee.

This talk by Tei Carpenter of Agency—Agency will explore speculative and built work at the intersection of architecture, infrastructure and the environment that opens up alternative possibilities and agency for design. It will focus on a relationship to scale and an interest in systems and processes that underpin existing conditions, materials and protocols.  Recent work includes projects that deal with, for example, water infrastructure, waste, and public space.

Tei Carpenter is an architectural designer, educator and founder of Agency—Agency, an award-winning New York City-based architecture and design studio that seeks out an expanded role for architecture by engaging buildings, objects, interiors, infrastructures, speculations, and environments. She is Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto Daniels Faculty and Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and Director of the Waste Initiative, an applied research and design platform.

Carpenter’s design and research work has been supported by the New York State Council on the Arts and has been exhibited at the Storefront for Art and Architecture and at the 2016 Venice Biennale. In 2018, Agency—Agency was named one of the New Practices New York by the American Institute of Architects. Recent design work and writing have appeared publications including Architect, The Avery Review, Oculus and RIBA Journal. Previously she has taught at Brown University, Cornell University, City College of New York and at Rice University as the Wortham Visiting Lecturer. Carpenter earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Philosophy from Brown University and her Master of Architecture degree from Princeton University where she was awarded the Howard Crosby Butler Traveling Fellowship in Architecture.

Date change: This event has been moved from November 7 to November 28, 2018.

The Midday Talks lecture series is coordinated by Assistant Professor Wei-Han Vivian Lee. These lectures are open to the public and registration is not required.

Introduction by Michael Piper.

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Peter Sampson and Liz Wreford are the co founders and principal designers of PUBLIC CITY, a hybrid urban, building, and site architecture practice working  in Winnipeg, Toronto, and Calgary. They will share their perspectives on the design of their practice and their approach to the design of the public urban realm upon which their work is currently focussed.  

As architect and landscape architect, Peter and Liz work collaboratively in design without division or professional territory. They continue to focus their professional efforts towards a design practice that is open, comprehensive, raw, and playful. In doing so, they have produced award-winning landscape architecture and architecture commissions at a variety of scales and have been recognized by Azure and the Globe and Mail as one of Canada’s most exciting emerging practices.

Liz and Peter will present work that demonstrates the kinds of opportunities that have emerged in recent years from their trans-disciplinary approach to design, the public realm, and the workplace. Fundamentally, their design methodology prioritizes the belief that form follows the pleasures of life over the functions of program.

Peter holds a degree in Literature from McGill University and a professional Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Toronto where he graduated with the Lieutenant Governors’ Medal, the AIA Gold Medal, and the Canadian Architect Student Award of Excellence in 1999. He has taught and been a visiting critic at the Universities of Waterloo, Manitoba, and Toronto. Currently, Peter co-teaches a graduate architecture and landscape architecture option studio at the Daniels School of Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Design.

Liz grew up in Winnipeg and holds a degree in Environmental Design and a Master’s degree of Landscape Architecture from the University of Manitoba where she graduated with the MALA Gold Medal.  She has practiced in Perth Australia, Seattle, Vancouver, and Winnipeg. She taught at the University of Manitoba’s Faculty of Architecture between 2011-16. Liz co-teaches a graduate architecture and landscape architecture option studio at the Daniels School of Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Design.

The Midday Talks lecture series is coordinated by Assistant Professor Wei-Han Vivian Lee. These lectures are open to the public and registration is not required.

Introduction by Mason White.

To be an advocate is to defend the cause of another, or to support the interests of another. This is a term that one might find readily in the realm of law, politics, and activism. But what does it mean for Architecture to be a form of advocacy? In this presentation, Joyce Hwang will first discuss several projects developed through her research and practice that draw awareness to urban wildlife habitats, in efforts to advocate not only for architecture’s critical role in urban ecology, but also to promote the inclusion of new (non human) subjectivities in the built environment. She will reflect on how fundamentally rethinking architectural structures and building typologies can suggest a more palpable, resonant environment that not only impacts species and habitats, but also human perception and experience. Further, she will expand upon the idea of “Architect as Advocate” as a strategy to reconsider models of design practice, moving beyond power structures inherent in conventional architect-client relationships, and toward a cultivation of new forms of empowerment through collaborations around mutual agendas. Along these lines, the presentation will include a short discussion about Joyce's co-edited book, Beyond Patronage: Reconsidering Models of Practice (Actar, 2015).

Joyce Hwang, AIA, NCARB, is the Director of Ants of the Prairie, an office of architectural practice and research that focuses on confronting contemporary ecological conditions through creative means, and Associate Chair and Associate Professor of Architecture at the University at Buffalo SUNY. She is a recipient of the Architectural League Emerging Voices Award (2014), the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Fellowship (2013), and the MacDowell Colony Fellowship (2016, 2011), among other awards. She is co-editor of Beyond Patronage: Reconsidering Models of Practice, published by Actar. Hwang received a M.Arch degree from Princeton University and a B.Arch degree from Cornell University.

The Midday Talks lecture series is coordinated by Assistant Professor Wei-Han Vivian Lee. These lectures are open to the public and registration is not required.

Introduction by Shane Williamson.

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Manon Asselin is a principal at the Montreal based design firm Atelier TAG and a professor at University of Montreal School of Architecture.

Asselin, along with her partner Katsuhiro Yamazaki, formed the architectural design practice Atelier TAG in 1997. Since its inception, the studio has sought to create meaningful spaces by reinterpreting the civic function of architecture through the careful study of the sociocultural contexts within which a given program operates. TAG’s growing body of work has allowed it to develop a design methodology focused on advanced building technology and materiality. The work of the studio is a quest for simplicity, where the built space, through the calculated play of light and materiality, embodies the physical, the cultural and the poetics of architecture.

The young office’s output is consistently rewarded for its design excellence, including four Governor General’s medals, the prestigious Prix de Rome in architecture by the Canada Council for the Arts and the 2012 Emerging Voices from the Architectural League of New York.  

A professor at University of Montreal since 2008, Asselin oversees core design studios and lectures on materiality, culture and constructive imaginaries. She was the 2012 Gerald Sheff visiting professor at McGill University. Asselin has lectured on Atelier TAG’s built work and participated in numerous national symposia. She has also served on numerous international, national, and local design juries as an advocate for design excellence, including at the Canada Council for the Arts.

Manon Asselin is a member of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (MRAIC), and a registered architect and a member of the Quebec Association of Architects (MOAQ).