Join Harvard GSD professor Charles Waldheim for a discussion based on Technical Lands: A Critical Primer, which he co-edited with Jeffrey S. Nesbit. The book, published this year by Jovis, assembles authors from a diverse array of disciplines, geographical specializations and epistemological traditions to interrogate and theorize the meaning and increasing significance of technical lands—spaces that are united by their “exceptional” characteristics, such as remote locations, delimited boundaries, secured accessibility and hyper-vigilant management.

Charles Waldheim (pictured below) is the John E. Irving Professor of Landscape Architecture and Director of the Office for Urbanization at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. His research examines the relations between landscape, ecology and contemporary urbanism. His latest published work, Technical Lands: A Critical Primer (Jovis, 2023), was co-edited with Jeffrey S. Nesbit.

Join acclaimed Canadian architect Bruce Kuwabara as he discusses the influence of professor emeritus and former Daniels Faculty dean George Baird (by whom he was taught and for whom he once worked) on his approach to architecture and the public realm and on how it has informed the practice and work of KPMB Architects, the firm Kuwabara co-founded in the 1980s. In his lecture, Kuwabara will present KPMB buildings and projects that demonstrate how architecture contributes to the formation and vibrancy of the city while addressing the most pressing issues of our time, including climate change, affordability, mental health and reconciliation.

Bruce Kuwabara acquired his Bachelor of Architecture degree from the University of Toronto in 1972, is a founding partner of KPMB Architects and chairs the Board of Trustees of the Canadian Centre for Architecture. As co-founder of KPMB, he has worked on a wide array of acclaimed projects, including the National Ballet School in Toronto and the Remai Modern in Saskatoon. In 2006, he was awarded the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada’s Gold Medal. In 2012, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada for “shaping our built landscape in lasting ways.”

Portrait by Karri North

By re-contextualizing the history of architecture through the discourse of disability, David Gissen’s 2023 book The Architecture of Disability: Buildings, Cities, and Landscapes beyond Access challenges current modes of architectural practice, theory and education by proposing architecture that fully integrates disabled persons into its production. Both the author and book look beyond traditional notions of accessibility and show how certain incapacities can help to positively reimagine the roots of architecture. A Q&A session will follow Gissen’s presentation.

A disabled designer and historian of architecture, David Gissen is professor of architecture and urban history at Parsons School of Design at the New School in New York City. His 2023 book, The Architecture of Disability: Buildings, Cities, and Landscapes beyond Access, is published by University of Minnesota Press.

Join architect Nzinga Biegueng Mboup, principal of the Dakar-based practice WOROFILA, for a lecture on designing and building in the Senegalese context, with references to its climate, culture, traditions and unique “concrete modernity.” Mboup will address working with biomaterials, passive design strategies, her various cultural projects, and her research and collaborations. A Q&A session will follow.

Nzinga Biegueng Mboup is a Senegalese architect and principal of Dakar-based WOROFILA, a practice that specializes in bioclimatic architecture and construction using locally sourced earth and biomaterials. In addition to co-running WOROFILA, Mboup has piloted research projects and is a participant in the 2023 Venice Biennale of Architecture. She was recently appointed curator of the Canadian Centre for Architecture program CCA c/o Dakar, a series of public programs and research projects in the Senegalese capital.

Join Lyndon Neri of Shanghai-based Neri&Hu Design and Research Office for this lecture on the subject of ruins, the conception of which has long shaped Western architectural historians’ origins narrative dating back to antiquity.

Largely skewed by a distinct visual culture and the optics of the “ruin gaze,” the ruin has predominantly been associated with romantic imagery possessing its own metaphysical charm.

In this talk, Neri will present relevant projects from his studio, seen through the critical lens of Chinese art history, to offer alternative representations of the past, readings of site, building and visual memory.

Lyndon Neri co-founded Neri&Hu Design and Research Office, an interdisciplinary architectural design practice based in Shanghai, China, with Rossana Hu in 2004. He received his Master of Architecture at Harvard University Graduate School of Design and his Bachelor of Arts in Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley.

Alongside his design practice, Neri has been deeply committed to architectural education and has taught and lectured in numerous universities. He was appointed the John Portman chair at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 2019 and 2022, the Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor in 2022 and Norman R. Foster Visiting Professor Chair in 2018 at the Yale School of Architecture. 

In this talk, Alexis Kyle Mitchell presents an experimental and essayistic collage of archival footage, personal writing, scientific research, hand-processed film and specially commissioned sound scores that are part of her forthcoming feature film The Treasury of Human Inheritance.

Presented here for the first time, these diverse materials are attuned to the complex legacies of auto-ethnography in filmmaking, and to forms of embodied knowledge within alternative kinship structures.

The Treasury of Human Inheritance uses the body as both resource and material, performing ritualized repetitions as a method and mode of research into the inherited traits of familial genetic disease and disability.

Mitchell's talk is the last event in this term’s MVS Proseminar series.

Based between Canada and the UK, Alexis Kyle Mitchell often works collaboratively alongside artist Sharlene Bamboat as Bamboat | Mitchell. Mitchell recently completed a PhD in Human Geography at the University of Toronto, where she held an SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship. She was artist-in-residence at Akademie Schloss Solitude (2015-2017) and at the MacDowell Colony (2018) and was a fellow at Sommerakademie Paul Klee (2017-2019).

Recent screenings and exhibitions include Mercer Union in Toronto, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival & International Film Festival Rotterdam and an upcoming solo exhibition (Bambitchell) at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle. Recent writing and research can be read in Digital Lives in the Global City (UBC Press) and in Queer at Camp (Fordham University Press). In 2020-2022, Mitchell will hold a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Center for Disability Studies at New York University under the supervision of Dr. Faye Ginsburg.

Still from The Treasury of Human Inheritance courtesy of Alexis Kyle Mitchell

Join us for a talk by Palestinian curator and writer Nasrin Himada on the subject of Cinema, Friendship, and the Epistolary. 

Himada’s practice is heavily influenced by their long-term friendships and by their many ongoing collaborations with artists, filmmakers and poets.

Their recent project For Many Returns experiments with writing as an act dictated by love and typifies their current curatorial interests, which foreground embodiment as method, desire as transformation and liberation through many forms.

Nasrin Himada currently holds the position of Associate Curator at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.

Their talk is part of the MVS Proseminar series and is co-presented with Images Festival. 

Building on fieldwork from 2015 to the present, this talk by Jeffery Hou of the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington addresses how Taipei's “Open Green” Program, the latest iteration of community planning initiatives in the Taiwanese capital, transcends the established boundaries of urban communities and community design practices to turn placemaking into a vehicle for collaboration and social learning. In Hou's view, the outcomes and processes of the program suggest directions for the ongoing evolution of civic urbanism(s) in Asia. This talk is being held in collaboration with the Global Taiwan Studies Initiative at the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto.

Jeffrey Hou is a Professor of Landscape Architecture and the director of the Urban Commons Lab at the University of Washington in Seattle. His work focuses on the agency of marginalized social groups in transforming the built environments. In a career that spans the Pacific, Hou has worked with indigenous tribes, farmers, fishers and villagers in Asia, as well as inner-city immigrant youths and elders in North American cities, on projects ranging from the conservation of wildlife habitats to bottom-up placemaking.  

Join Phyllis Lambert, legendary founder of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, for a discussion on the origins and composition of her latest book, entitled Observation Is a Constant That Underlies All Approaches.

Lambert founded the CCA in 1979, growing it into an international research institution and museum premised on the belief that architecture is a public concern.

After delivering her presentation, Lambert will take part in a q&a session with three members of the Daniels Faculty: Brian Boigon, Peter Sealy and Brigitte Shim. This will be followed by a q&a exchange with the audience. The event will be moderated by Juan Du, Dean of the Daniels Faculty. It will also be livestreamed on the Faculty’s YouTube channel.

An architect, author, photographer, conservation activist and critic of architecture and urbanism, Phyllis Lambert is Founding Director Emeritus of the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA).

Lambert inaugurated the field of architecture and photography with Photography and Architecture: 1839-1939 — the first book published by the CCA — and with a series of photographic commissions for her own publications and for the CCA beginning in the mid-1970s.

She was Director of Planning for the Seagram Building (1954-58) and awarded the Golden Lion of the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, and she recently received the 2023 Ada Louise Huxtable Prize for Contribution to Architecture. 

Phyllis Lambert portrait © Alicia Lorente 

Landscapes are hard, all messy and complex. Sites are tough, many toxic and degraded. Neighbourhoods are complicated, uniquely layered and deserving. Good design isn’t enough: environmental regeneration, social equity, savvy resourcefulness and sheer joy are also required. Be it a coal mine, a shipyard, a city full of polluted soil and all sorts of abandoned sites, D.I.R.T. does what Cornelia Hahn Oberlander would do: dig deep, carefully and empathetically find, let form and process emerge from the place, and design the landscape with a vengeance.

Julie Bargmann is internationally recognized as an innovator in the design and building of regenerative landscapes. She founded D.I.R.T. studio to research, design and build projects with passion and rigour. Raised in New Jersey, Bargmann is forthright and unafraid to provoke debate to tease out what matters most about places. She is the inaugural recipient of the 2021 Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Prize in Landscape Architecture, and has received the American Academy in Rome Prize and the National Design Award by the Smithsonian Institution’s Cooper-Hewitt Museum. After 30 years of teaching generations to take risks and do good, not just design, she was recently named Professor Emerita in Landscape Architecture at the University of Virginia School of Architecture.