Since the 1970s, Frank Gehry has recast the understanding of building types such as the house and the museum as well as architecture at large. Yet his trajectory has been far from linear. As this year’s deliverer of the Daniels Faculty’s annual George Baird Lecture, Jean-Louis Cohen of The Institute of Fine Arts at New York University discusses how the design revolution that Gehry has fomented was prepared by years of research and a “no-rules” architecture, developed both in close contact with the city of Los Angeles’ artists and in opposition to its dominant firms. The talk will draw on Cohen’s own in-depth research into the architect’s archive, aimed at the publication of an eight-volume catalogue raisonné of Gehry’s sketches.

Trained as an architect and a historian, Jean-Louis Cohen has held the Sheldon H. Solow Chair for the History of Architecture at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts since 1994.  

He has curated numerous exhibitions and published more than 40 books, including Building a New New World: Amerikanizm in Russian Architecture (2020), Le Corbusier: The Built Work (2018), France: Modern Architectures in History (2015), Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes (2013), The Future of Architecture Since 1889 (2012), Architecture in Uniform (2011) and Le Corbusier and the Mystique of the USSR (1992).  

In 2020, Cohen has published Frank Gehry: Catalogue Raisonné of the Drawings, the first in a set of eight volumes produced by Cahiers d’Art.  

In this talk, the Toronto-based filmmaker, writer and geographer Brett Story will explore the relationship between research and creative practice, arguing for filmmaking as a mode of radical inquiry.

Sharing select scenes from her current project, a feature documentary charting the unlikely union-organizing trajectory of a small band of Amazon workers in Staten Island, New York, Dr. Story will discuss the geographies of scale, the precarity of current labour struggle, and the desire for the political as aesthetic form. 

For more information on Dr. Story and her body of work, visit her website.

This event is co-presented by Images Festival.

Human activity causes massive environmental changes across scales, including the spread of invasive species, climate change and biodiversity loss. However, understanding both these changes and their trajectories into the future can be challenging, yet is paramount to targeting conservation action. In this lecture, Brian Leung of the Department of Biology at McGill University will discuss his attempts to understand and forecast invasive pest spread and biodiversity loss at global, continental and regional levels, presenting his insights, the main challenges and some reasons for cautious optimism. 

Brian Leung is an Associate Professor at McGill University, UNESCO Chair for Dialogues on Sustainability and Director of the Neotropical Environment Option (NEO) graduate program, a collaborative program between McGill and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI). His research focuses on predictive, integrative modelling under uncertainty, and has included global, country-scale and regional ecological forecasts, bio-economic risk analysis, management and policy as well as development of theoretical tools. He has worked across terrestrial, aquatic and marine biomes. 

Featuring Tura Cousins Wilson of SOCA, Jessica Kirk of the Wildseed Centre for Art and Activism and Jessica Hines of Black Urbanism Toronto, this conversation about what it means to take accountability within the practice of design and focus on Black community engagement is the first in a series centred around Blackness in architecture, landscape, and design within academia. As noted in the University Commitment in the Scarborough Charter, the work of Black flourishing and thriving should “be informed, shaped and co-created by communities” in order to be effective. Other discussions in this series will include Black Flourishing through Design (February 15), a workshop for designers and educators called Blackness in Architectural Pedagogy and Practice (March 1) and a student-led online event that centres Black belonging through design.

This event will be moderated by Assistant Professor Anne-Marie Armstrong of the Daniels Faculty. Poet and playwright Greg Birkett will also perform a special spoken-word piece.

Tura Cousins Wilson is a co-founder and principal of the Studio of Contemporary Architecture (SOCA), a Toronto-based practice focused on inclusive city building and beautiful spaces. As an architect, Tura has experience in various scales and types of projects, including housing, cultural spaces, heritage and urban design. He is also passionate about small-scale architecture and the craft of residential design.

Jessica Kirk is a cultural worker, creative and organizer based in Toronto. She is the Executive Director of Wildseed Centre for Art and Activism and a member of Black Lives Matter Canada, both dedicated to supporting Black liberation efforts in Toronto and across Turtle Island. Kirk is also a co-founder of Way Past Kennedy Road, a grassroots art collective supporting marginalized artists. Holding an MA in Social Justice Education from the University of Toronto, she focuses her work on community care and expression.

Jessica Hines is an acclaimed business psychologist, utilizing her MSc in International Business Management and BA in Psychology to assist immigrant and small businesses in the Caribbean and Canada.

Greg Birkett is a Torono-based poet and playwright. Two of his plays, Do You Remember Me and Pieces of a Black Woman’s Soul, were performed at the Toronto Fringe Festival and for sold-out audiences at the Sandbox Theatre in downtown Toronto respectively.

Based in Algiers and Barcelona, artist Lydia Ourahmane will be discussing recent work, including her 2022 exhibition Tassili, which is the fourth commission in Mercer Union’s Artist First program. At the centre of the exhibition is a moving image work filmed in Tassili n’Ajjer, a Sahara plateau in southeastern Algeria.

Once a fertile “plateau of rivers,” as the translation of its name implies, the region is now an arid expanse of desert that is inhospitable to the many forms of life previously known to thrive there. Ourahmane, together with a group of collaborators and local guides, journeyed on foot for thirteen days to a part of Tassili n’Ajjer near the border of Algeria and Libya. Both the group’s footage and movement are at the centre of Ourahmane’s exhibition at Mercer Union, which marks the first presentation of her work in Canada.

Learn more about the exhibition here.
Learn more about the event here.

Banner images: Views from Lydia Ourahmane: Tassili, SculptureCenter, New York, 2022. Photos by Charles Benton.

Join architect Lina Lahiri, a partner at Berlin-based Sauerbruch Hutton, as she outlines the firm’s experiences working with timber modules. A hallmark of Sauerbruch Hutton’s work is its exploration of technical and spatial innovation and the responsible use of existing resources of all kinds. Lahiri will share three timber-module projects done by the firm over the last few years, two of which are now built. Her presentation will be moderated by Roberto Damiani, Assistant Professor (Teaching Stream) at the Daniels Faculty.

Lina Lahiri joined Sauerbruch Hutton in 2005 and has been a partner since 2020. As project manager, she is responsible for a large number of international competitions as well as the planning and implementation of various projects. A focus of her work is the Scandinavian region and the design and planning of high-rise buildings. She regularly gives guest lectures at universities, conferences and symposiums and has been an external critic at Dalhousie University, the University of Hong Kong and at the textile design department at Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule Halle. Lahiri graduated with highest honours from Oxford Brookes University and received her Diploma in Architecture from Bartlett, University College London in 2005.

Join architect and author June Williamson as she presents ideas and material from her recent book, Case Studies in Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Strategies for Urgent Challenges, which examines how defunct shopping malls, office parks, parking lots and other obsolete suburban development patterns are being reinvented across North America and how retrofitting them can improve public health, leverage social capital, support an aging society, increase and diversify mobility, and increase environmental resilience in the face of climate change. 

The book, co-written with Georgia Tech urban design program director Ellen Dunham-Jones, was the winner of the 2021 Great Places Award for books. 

After Williamson’s talk, the Daniels Faculty’s Michael Piper and Richard Sommer will moderate a q&a focusing on the exhibition Housing Multitudes: Reimagining the Landscapes of Suburbia Exhibition, currently in the Daniels Building’s Architecture and Design Gallery.

June Williamson is a registered architect and professor of architecture at the Spitzer School of Architecture at The City College of New York, where she is director of the Master of Architecture program. Her books include Retrofitting Suburbia: Case Studies in Retrofitting Suburbia and Designing Suburban Futures: New Models from Build a Better Burb.

Join Kathleen James-Chakraborty, Professor of Art History at University College Dublin, for the 2022 W. Bernard Herman Distinguished Visiting Scholar in Art History Lecture, entitled “Expanding Agency: Women and the Global Dissemination of Modern Architecture, 1920-1970.”

To understand the agency that women have had in shaping the built environment demands looking beyond a handful of celebrated architects, their patrons, and the critics who supported them. This in-person lecture, which will be followed by a public reception with the speaker, examines the role of 20th-century journalists (especially writers for the shelter press), those who ran design businesses and sponsored real estate development, and those who were active as institution builders, as well as of women who designed buildings while working outside of the channels that deliver conventional fame. In particular, the impact that Ethel Madison Bailey Furman and Chloethiel Woodard Smith had upon Washington, D.C. and Richmond, Virginia demonstrates yet more ways to read the built environment as the product of motives that stretch far beyond stylistic innovation.

Kathleen James Chakraborty, a historian of modern architecture, has been Professor of Art History at UCD since 2007. A graduate of Yale University, she earned her doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania and has taught at the University of California at Berkeley (where she reached the rank of full professor), at the Ruhr University Bochum (where she was a Mercator guest professor) and at the Yale School of Architecture (where she was the Vincent Scully Visiting Professor of Architectural History).

For more details on this lecture, which is free to attend and open to all, click here.

Join architect and planner Dilip da Cunha, the Daniels Faculty’s 2022 Michael Hough/OALA Visiting Critic in Landscape Architecture, for Ocean of Wetness: Where Design Begins, his Hough/OALA Lecture on designing habitation in an age of rising seas and ubiquitous wetness. In 2017, da Cunha and the late Anuradha Mathur initiated a design platform called Ocean of Wetness, which is dedicated to imaging and imagining habitation in ubiquitous wetness rather than on a land-water surface. That same year, they were awarded a Pew Fellowship Grant, followed in 2021 by the Mercedes T. Bass Landscape Architects in Residence Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome.

According to da Cunha, the world is immersed in a wetness that is everywhere, from clouds to aquifers, in the air, earth, sea, flora and fauna. But this is not how habitation is typically thought of or how designers are taught to design it. Rather, they are taught to see habitation on a land surface where water has a given place either behind a line in entities such as rivers, lakes and seas, or confined in time to temporary weather events. Today, however, this surface is increasingly plagued by rising seas, violent storms, melting ice caps, species extinction and destructive floods; given the oppression and injustices that land existence has also wrought on indigenous peoples, it is time, in his view, to acknowledge that land exists by design and to search for an alternative in ubiquitous wetness — something that he and Mathur have long sought to do in their teaching and projects.

In addition to running Mathur/da Cunha, a design and planning firm based in Philadelphia and Bangalore, da Cunha is an Adjunct Professor at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University. He is the author with Mathur of several books, including Mississippi Floods: Designing a Shifting Landscape (2001), Deccan Traverses: The Making of Bangalore’s Terrain (2006) and Soak: Mumbai in an Estuary (2009). They also co-edited Design in the Terrain of Water (2014). In 2019, da Cunha’s book The Invention of Rivers: Alexander’s Eye and Ganga’s Descent was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. It received the 2020 ASLA Honor Award and the J.B. Jackson Book Prize.

Three of the winners of the 2022 Aga Khan Award for Architecture will be delivering a virtual guest lecture this week to Daniels Faculty students — as well as to anyone from the community who would like to listen in.

Bangladeshi architects Rizvi Hassan, Khwaja Fatmi and Saad Ben Mostafa have been invited to address the research studio being conducted at the Faculty this year by Marina Tabassum, the 2022-2023 Frank Gehry International Visiting Chair in Architectural Design and herself the winner of a 2016 Aga Khan Award for a mosque project in Dhaka.

Anyone from the Daniels Faculty who is interested in listening to the Zoom lecture has also been invited to do so. They can start watching at 9:00 a.m. ET on Friday by clicking here.

Hassan, Fatmi and Mostafa were awarded the Aga Khan prize this month for their sustainably constructed community spaces for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. Theirs was one of six projects to win a 2022 award, the others being in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Iran, Lebanon and Senegal.

For more details on and a look at their award-winning designs, click here. For more information on Tabassum and the Gehry Chair, click here.