The work of Dhaka-based Marina Tabassum Architects (MTA) often addresses the needs of marginalized communities, whose well-being has been especially threatened during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020 and 2021, the firm undertook various projects that dealt with displacement, vulnerable populations and humanitarian challenges. During this lecture and presentation, MTA founder Marina Tabassum — the Daniels Faculty’s 2022-2023 Frank Gehry International Visiting Chair in Architectural Design — will be speaking about those projects, about her experience as an architect in South Asia and elsewhere, and about the changing role of architects as agents of change. 

Tabassum founded MTA in 2005. In her work, the Bangladeshi architect and educator seeks to establish an architectural language that’s contemporary yet rooted to place, always against an ecological rubric containing climate, context, culture and history. Her award-winning Bait Ur Rouf Mosque is distinguished by its lack of popular mosque iconography, its emphasis on space and light, and its capacity to function not only as a place of worship but also as a refuge for a densely populated neighbourhood on Dhaka’s periphery. The scope of its work notwithstanding, Tabassum’s practice remains consciously contained in size, undertaking a limited number of projects per year.

Among the schools at which Tabassum has taught are the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, TU Delft, the University of Texas and the Bengal Institute. She has received an Honorary Doctorate from Technical University of Munich as well as the Aga Khan Award for Architecture. Other accolades have included the Soane Medal, the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the French Academy of Architecture’s Gold Medal.

Tabassum chairs the Foundation for Architecture and Community Equity (FACE) and the fair trade organization Prokritee. She is also a member of the Steering Committee of the Aga Khan Awards for Architecture.

Join the Daniels Faculty Institute of Forestry and Conservation and the Forestry Alumni Association on May 27 starting at 1 p.m. ET for an in-person lecture at the University of Toronto's New College in Wilson Hall Room #1016 and learn all about forestry and how foresters work to sustainably manage and grow forests.

Visit the U of T Alumni website to register.

Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi's lecture pushes back against notions of architecture and infrastructure design being rigid and inflexible. Their talk will explore alternative strategies within these disciplines that structure more lateral, resilient and pliable systems capable of hosting unpredictable uses and activities, absorbing cycles of flooding, pandemics, and generating cultural value.

“The sensibilities of the project of architecture and infrastructure are latent with reciprocities yet to be imagined,” they write. “By bending the loose ends of architecture, landscape and engineering together, we imagine an alchemy that generates a more bountiful and inhabitable interpretation of its potential.”

This is a hybrid event featuring the two speakers in person, and will be moderated by Dean Juan Du.

Marion Weiss is cofounder of WEISS/MANFREDI Architecture/Landscape/Urbanism based in New York City and the Graham Chair Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2017, Weiss was honoured by Architectural Record with the Women in Architecture Design Leader Award. Her multidisciplinary firm operates at the nexus of architecture, art, landscape and urban design. Her firm’s Olympic Sculpture Park exemplifies this cross-disciplinary design approach; the project has been recognized internationally through museum exhibitions and design awards. Time Magazine identified the park as one of the top 10 projects in the world; Barcelona’s World Architecture Festival selected it as the winning project in the Nature Category; I.D. magazine awarded it the highest Environment Design Award; and it was the first project in North America to win Harvard University’s Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design.

Weiss received her Master of Architecture from Yale University and her Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the University of Virginia. At Yale, she won the American Institute of Architects Scholastic Award and the Skidmore, Owings and Merrill Traveling Fellowship. She has taught design studios at Harvard University, Yale University, Cornell University, and since 1991 has been a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania's Penn School of Design where she is currently the Graham Chair Professor of Architecture. Weiss is a fellow of the American Institute of Architects and a National Academy of Design inductee.

Michael Manfredi is cofounder of WEISS/MANFREDI Architecture/Landscape/Urbanism based in New York City and is currently a Senior Design Critic at Harvard University. His multidisciplinary firm is at the forefront of architectural design practices that are redefining the relationships between landscape, architecture, infrastructure and art.

Manfredi was born in Trieste, Italy, and grew up in Rome. He completed his undergraduate education in the United States and received his Master of Architecture at Cornell University where he studied with Colin Rowe. He won the Paris Prize, was a Cornell Fellow, and was awarded an Eidlitz Fellowship. He has taught design studios at Yale University, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, Cornell University, and, most recently, at Harvard University. He is a founding board member of the Van Alen Institute, is currently a board member for the Storefront for Art and Architecture, and been a member of the Advisory Council of Cornell’s College of Architecture, Art and Planning. He is a fellow of the American Institute of Architects and was recently inducted into the National Academy of Design.

WEISS/MANFREDI is a recipient of the Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the 2020 Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Architecture, the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Architecture, and has been named one of North America’s “Emerging Voices” by the Architectural League of New York. The firm has also been honoured with the New York AIA Gold Medal and the Tau Sigma Delta Gold Medal, awarded to one individual or firm in the world each year.

The firm’s projects have been featured in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Venice Biennale, the São Paulo Biennale of International Architecture and Design, the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the National Building Museum, Harvard University, the International Landscape Architecture Biennale in Barcelona, and the Design Centre in Essen, Germany. Princeton Architectural Press has published three monographs on their work including their most recent book, PUBLIC NATURES: Evolutionary Infrastructures.

Lina Ghotmeh, the 2021-22 Frank Gehry International Visiting Chair in Architectural Design, will deliver a public lecture, A Place for Life — an Archaeology of the Future, from 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. ET on Thursday, March 3. This online and in-person event will include a conversation with Dean Juan Du and is the second of two public Gehry Chair events.

More than a method of work, Archaeology of the Future is a real approach to the built environment invented by Ghotmeh through her practice, Paris-based Lina Ghotmeh — Architecture. Her firm’s designs develop from thorough historical research and emerge as exquisite interventions that enliven memories and senses. In this Archaeology of the Future, every new gesture is drawn from the traces of the past. A link is drawn between Time, Memory, Space and Place, but also between the Human and the Natural. The past meets the future as histories are unearthed and memories excavated to allow for questioning, innovation and a more sustainable architecture.

Through a “humanist” approach, Ghotmeh’s practice emphasizes the work of the hand and craftsmanship. Through this, the built embraces the traditions of its localities, while validating the subjective experience and the collective memory of those who experienced them. Projects such as the Estonian National Museum in Tartu, Estonia find their contexts in difficult pasts, listening to ancestors and promoting their voices to guide us toward better futures. Similarly, Stone Garden in Beirut, Lebanon anchors that city’s eventful past in the present by calling forward its ruins, its “voids," its histories of conflicts and its ongoing challenges. Home to inhabitants but also to the Mina Image Center, a space dedicated to reflection, debates and exhibitions on the Middle East, the building embodies an Earth-like envelope, hand-chiseled by artisans fleeing neighbouring wars. Its skin was further imprinted in 2020 by the Beirut port explosion, an event that emphasized the ephemerality of our breathing bodies and their relationship to the built one.

In the epoch of the Anthropocene, the need to build better futures has become more urgent. From circular economies to energetic autonomies, the mission of architecture is clear: to achieve a future of symbiosis where everything is a resource and nothing and no one is forgotten.

IMPORTANT:

The Gehry Chair Lecture is a hybrid event with in-person viewing only available to Daniels faculty, students and staff. Doors will open at 6 p.m. ET and entry will be first-come, first-served. Tickets will be required for admission, register via Eventbrite. There is limited seating capacity and, as per the Government of Ontario COVID-19 requirements, enhanced vaccine certificates with QR codes will be scanned for entry. Masks are also required and U of T recommends medical masks. COVID-19 requirements are subject to change and will be updated as new regulations are released.

Photo Credits:
Images 1, 2, 3: Stone Garden photo © Iwan Baan
Image 4: Wonderlab China photo © Guanchen Yu
Image 5: Palais de Tokyo Restaurant photo © Takuji Shimmura
Image 6: Estonian National Museum photo © Takuji Shimmura
Image 7: Saradar Collection © Lina Ghotmeh — Architecture
Image 8: Hermès Workshops © Lina Ghotmeh — Architecture

Lina Ghotmeh’s practice, Lina Ghotmeh — Architecture, is based in Paris. Born in Beirut in 1980, she graduated with distinction from the American University of Beirut in 2003. In 2006, Ghotmeh’s design won first prize in the Estonian National Museum competition, leading her to establish her first partnership to realize the project. Her current practice, comprising a team of 25 professionals of various disciplines, is research-driven. Echoing her lived experience in Beirut — a palimpsest of unrest — the office’s work is orchestrated as an “archeology of the future,” where every project develops from thorough historical and material research, learning from a vernacular past to build a new “déjà-là.” 

Among Ghotmeh’s other major works are Réalimenter Masséna in Paris and Stone Garden in Beirut. Her studio is also currently designing and leading the construction of the new Hermès Manufacture in Normandy and the urban rehabilitation of the Maine Montparnasse grounds in Paris.

Ghotmeh has taught at the Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture and lectures internationally. She now holds teaching positions at Yale School of Architecture and the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design at the University of Toronto. She is co-president of the RST ARCHES Scientific Network and the recipient of multiple awards, including the 2020 Tamayouz Woman of Outstanding Achievement Award, the French Fine Arts Academy Cardin Award 2019, the French Academy Dejean Prize 2016, the Grand Prix Afex 2016 and the French Ministry AJAP Prize 2008. Ghotmeh’s work was exhibited at the 17th Architecture Biennale in Venice and has been widely published by the likes of Phaidon, RIBA, Domus and Architectural Record.

Photo Credit: 
Lina Ghotmeh photo © Gilbert Haget

Following the Korean War, the military government of South Korea sponsored specific industries to improve the dire post-war economic situation. Central to this strategy was to identify export goods that optimized local resources and knowledge, and that targeted international markets. Among those exports were wigs, and by the sixties, Seoul became the global centre for wig manufacturing, relying mainly on its own female population for hair supplies and cheap labour. This talk traces the global trajectory of wigs, and connects the migration stories of Koreans to those of African Americans, focusing on their shared spatial practices in wig stores during Cold War in the US.

Min Kyung Lee, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Modern Architecture in the Growth and Structure of Cities Department at Bryn Mawr College. Her research concerns urban representations and especially the relations between mapping and architectural practices from the late eighteenth century to the present. Her forthcoming monograph, The Tyranny of the Straight Line: Mapping Modern Paris (Yale University Press) studies the surveying of the French capital during the nineteenth century, situating the emergence of orthographic modalities of urban representation in their scientific, cultural, and historical contexts. Based on this project, she was the inaugural Banister Fletcher Global Fellow at the University of London, Queen Mary University and Bartlett School of Architecture, where she organized a public program on the quantification of urban space. She is currently a New Directions Mellon Foundation Fellow and a faculty fellow at the Wolf Humanities Center at the University of Pennsylvania, now working on a project on Korean migration and the American built environment. She will be a Visiting Scholar at the Heyman Center for Humanities and the Center for Korean Studies at Columbia University during AY 2022-2023.

This year’s George Baird Lecture, Tower Renewal and Overcoming Canada’s Retrofit Crisis: Research/Advocacy/Practice, will be given by Toronto-based architect and Daniels alumnus Graeme Stewart, discussing his work in housing renewal with Ya’el Santopinto of ERA Architects and the Tower Renewal Partnership.

Canada’s thousands of modernist apartment towers are the backbone of its purpose-built rental housing system and represent more than half of all high-rise units in the nation. In the context of growing global challenges, this legacy housing is at risk, requiring strategic transformation.

Initially conceived as research at the Daniels Faculty, the deployment of Tower Renewal has grown as a critical component of Canada’s $15-billion National Housing Strategy Renewal Fund. It has resulted in groundbreaking projects such as the recently completed Ken Sobel Tower in Hamilton, Ont., the world’s largest residential Passive House retrofit.

Showcasing the evolution of Tower Renewal through a critical program of research, advocacy and practice, this talk will outline the design, process, finance and industry advancement required to scale efforts for this legacy housing to meet the acute challenges of inequity, public health and decarbonization required of 21st-century urbanism.

Graeme Stewart OAA FRAIC CIP RPP CAHP is a Toronto-based architect and urban planner. A principal with ERA Architects, he is a founding director of the Centre for Urban Growth and Renewal (CUG+R), a cross-disciplinary non-profit organization to improve livability and sustainability across rural, suburban and urban environments. Stewart’s career to date has largely focused on a critical issue facing Canadian cities: the deterioration of mid-century apartment building communities resulting from decades of neglect, policy interference and socio-economic marginalization. He is arguably the single reason “Tower Renewal” is a term familiar to Canadian architects.

Stewart’s contributions to Tower Renewal began through graduate school research and continued through professional practice, policy development and implementation in partnership with CMHC, the Government of Ontario, various Canadian municipalities, NGOs, Canadian universities and international partners. He led the creation of Toronto’s first “Tower Renewal Zoning” (Residential Apartment Commercial/RAC), established Toronto’s Tower Renewal program, and through ERA and CUG+R continues the advancement of the initiative through public policy advocacy and overseeing the retrofit of over 1,500 housing units in Toronto and beyond.

Ya’el Santopinto OAA FRAIC is an architect and Director of Research for the Centre for Urban Growth and Renewal. In this role, she leads the Tower Renewal Partnership, an initiative to catalyze reinvestment and community building in apartment tower neighbourhoods. Her work includes primary research and best practice development in housing renewal, ranging from energy retrofit standards to tenant rights and green financing.

Santopinto leads ERA’s decarbonization and affordable housing practice, where she oversees complex, holistic and resilient energy retrofits to convert postwar apartment towers into high-quality affordable housing, impacting thousands of households. She was the lead architect on the Ken Soble Tower, certified by the Passive House Institute as the world’s largest residential Passive House (EnerPHit) retrofit. With ERA’s specialized team, she oversees retrofits to enable health, comfort, aging in place and climate resilience.

Kofi Boone (North Carolina State University, College of Design) 
Co-moderated by Liat Margolis and Fadi Masoud (University of Toronto, Daniels Faculty) 

In Revisiting the Commons, Kofi Boone presents the idea of “The Commons” and "commoning" as a framework to alter equitable practices in landscape architecture and environmental planning, especially with Black communities. Although not a uniquely Black cultural phenomenon, commoning has been a hallmark of Black landscapes historically including cooperatives and community land trusts to enable labor, land and property rights. Digital versions of commoning emerged during the twin pandemics and helped people remain connected and leverage dispersed resources. Moving forward, a focus in landscape architecture on developing knowledge and tools to enable commoning could increase the equitable impacts of our work.

Kofi Boone, FASLA is a University Faculty Scholar and Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at NC State University in the College of Design. Kofi is a Detroit native and a graduate of the University of Michigan (BSNR 1992, MLA 1995). His work is in the overlap between landscape architecture and environmental justice with specializations in democratic design, digital media, and interpreting cultural landscapes.

Kofi’s teaching and professional work have earned awards including student and professional ASLA awards. He serves on the Board of Directors of The Corps Network as well as the Landscape Architecture Foundation where he is President-Elect. Kofi serves on the advisory board of The Black Landscape Architects Network.  He has published work broadly in peer-reviewed as well as popular media. including The Conversation, Journal of Landscape and Urban Planning and Landscape Architecture Magazine. Read More.

Image Credit: Charles Harris

Stephen Gray  (Harvard University, Graduate School of Design) 
Co-moderated by Fadi Masoud and Michael Piper (Daniels Faculty) 

“Shared Space, Shared Vision, Shared Power: Advancing Racial Justice in American Cities,” is a lecture for designers and planners interested in racial justice. Stephen Gray will present his research on the social and spatial manifestations of systemic racism in the United States, and then will share design projects from his practice, Grayscale Collaborative, that explore solutions. Grayscale challenges the binary of designers operating with either formal or social-impact imperatives.  

Image Credit: Grayscale Collaborative LLC

Stephen Gray is an Associate Professor of Urban Design at Harvard's Graduate School of Design and founder of Boston-based design firm Grayscale Collaborative. Operating at the intersection of research and practice, Gray’s interests center on political and cultural justice in cities, socio-ecological urban design approaches to resilience, and the intersectionality of humanitarian aid and design. His work acknowledges the relationship between race, class, and the production of space, interrogates design’s contribution to and complicity with structural and infrastructural racism, and develops methodologies and interventions that address inequity, exclusion, social justice, and precarity at the scales of infrastructures, communities, metropolitans, and the globe. 

This event has been postponed until Thursday, May 27th, 2021 at 12:00pm. 

Sky Analytics Inc. will be giving a live demonstration of drone LiDAR data capture technology and its applications for urban planning and design. Daniels MLA grad and Sky Analytics CEO Jamie Reford and his colleague Adrian Kudzma will provide an overview of drone LiDAR data collection and processing workflows, highlighting some of the critical factors involved in conducting drone operations. Following this brief introduction, the Sky Analytics team will conduct a live drone LiDAR operation, providing a full safety and mission planning briefing before mapping 1 Spadina Crescent. Expect the demo to take approximately 20 minutes. A Q&A session will follow the demo, where students and staff will have the opportunity to ask the Sky Analytics team questions about drone data capture and its various use cases. The resultant dataset will be made available to the Daniels Faculty once it has been fully processed. We hope to see you there! 

Sky Analytics Inc.  -  Jamie Reford launched Sky Analytics Inc. after graduating from the U of T Daniels MLA program in 2019. Leveraging the accelerating data capture potential of UAVs and associated payloads, Jamie and the Sky Analytics team are focused on optimizing the resilience, efficiency, and value of digital design tools through the integration of scalable UAV/AV spatial data capture, processing, and output workflows. Adrian Kudzma is a partner at Sky Analytics Inc. and a co-founder of Altitude Geospatial Inc. Adrian has over a decade of experience working with global leaders in the LIDAR space. He has travelled around the world in this capacity, helping clients streamline their LiDAR collection and processing workflows. Adrian now works predominantly with UAV LiDAR platforms, seeing this as the future of detailed mapping applications.

The presentation will focus an indigenous approach to architecture that is based on a synthesis of cultural sensitivity and environmental responsibility. The purpose of the presentation is to describe a methodology to designing buildings that focuses on a holistic view of man's interconnectedness with the environment based on an Indigenous philosophical approach.

Alfred specializes in culturally and environmentally sensitive projects and has extensive experience with First Nations, cultural societies, and educational institutions. His firm is dedicated to developing solutions that reflect the culture, community, and geographic regions specific to each project. The designs are a direct response to site context, topography, climate, and regional materials. And as part of a sustainable design philosophy, Alfred aims to maximize comfort, longevity, functionality, and energy efficiency. Alfred is Status Indian and part of Treaty 8. He was born and raised in Yellowknife, North West Territories, Canada , and was the first Aboriginal person to graduate with honours from UBC School of Architecture in 1993 and become LEED certified and a registered architect. Prior to his architecture degree Alfred acquired a Bachelor of Arts majoring in Urban and Regional Analysis at the University of Lethbridge in 1989. He is influenced by native culture, the northern climate and frontier architecture and his connection to, and respect for, nature is inherent in his work. In 2005 Alfred established Alfred Waugh Architect, a 100 per cent Aboriginally owned architecture practice. In 2012 Alfred incorporated the firm and change the name to Formline Architecture. The firm has developed a reputation for finely crafted cultural and sustainable buildings including the UBC Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre, the Squamish Lil’wat Cultural Centre and the First Peoples House at the University of Victoria.

Graphic by Mariah Meawasige (Makoose)