The journey of designing places with and for communities, of all kinds, is like an ever-adapting living document. The wisdom of plants inspires the telling of this story of an evolving landscape architectural practice. Sheila Boudreau will share her creative portfolio and personal reflections, and challenge us to replace the adage 'practice makes perfect’ with ‘practice makes patience’.

Sheila Boudreau, OALA, CSLA, RPP/OPPI, MCIP, is the founder, owner, and Principal of SpruceLab (a Toronto-based social enterprise), and is proudly of Acadian, Mi’kmaq and Celtic descent. She is a landscape architect and Registered Professional Planner with over 25 years of professional experience, divided between the private and public sectors. Her education includes undergraduate degrees in landscape architecture and fine art from the University of Guelph, and a Masters of Arts (Planning) from the University of Waterloo. Sheila combines her collaborative, community and nature-based practice with advocacy, teaching, and creative research. Previously, she led the landscape architecture team at Toronto and Regional Conservation Authority (2017-2019), where she initiated and cofounded the Nikibii Dawadinna Giigwag Indigenous youth employment and training program (now hosted at Daniels). As an urban designer at the City of Toronto (2011-2017), she was responsible for a wide range of civic projects and initiated and co-led the Green Streets initiatives. Prior to that, at DTAH she worked on a variety of precedent setting projects such as Waterfront Toronto’s Water's Edge Promenade, and Evergreen Brick Works. Currently an instructor with University of Toronto's John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, and Ryerson University’s School of Urban and Regional Planning.  Sheila also sits on the Board of Advisors for Ryerson Urban Water, and Urban Minds. 

NOTE: This event has been cancelled.

Kolb and Diamantopoulou will share thoughts on what they have learned through their service work. If architectural practice has a direct relationship to the market and consumer desires, where can we start to tease and stretch systems of value to accommodate new kinds of work and different formal orders? How can we use those systems to push what we do "out of service"? Work in service and out of service becomes a mutually inflecting cycle, one always informing the other.

The pair will present some projects that look to reorient practice around considerations of use, re-use, and un-use — scavenging from the world around us and building something familiar, anew.

New Affiliates is an award-winning New York-based design studio. The practice engages in a range of work — from residential to commercial, ground-up to exhibition — and initiates projects and collaborations that focus on intersections of form, infrastructure, and reuse as they relate to current standards of practice.

Note: This event has been cancelled.

"Critical Messages" will present the framing polemic and the recent work of the Critical Broadcasting Lab, founded in 2018 at MIT by Ana Miljački. The Critical Broadcasting Lab is a space and a platform for the production of discursive interventions in architecture culture. Its key medium is the architectural exhibition, broadened to include experiments with the entire contemporary ecology of broadcasting media. As its inaugural work, the Critical Broadcasting Lab launched two initiatives: the Agit Arch series of workshops and I Would Prefer Not To, an ongoing, two-chapter oral history project.

Ana Miljački is a critic, curator and associate professor of architecture at MIT, where she teaches history, theory and design. Miljački directs the Master of Architecture program and the Architecture and Urbanism Group at MIT. She holds a PhD (2007) in history and theory of architecture from Harvard University, an MArch from Rice University and a BA from Bennington College. She was part of the three-member curatorial team, with Eva Franch i Gilabert and Ashley Schafer, of the US Pavilion at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, where their project, OfficeUS, critically examined the last century of US architects’ global contribution. Her Un/Fair Use exhibition with Sarah Hirschman was on view at the Center for Architecture in New York in the fall of 2015 and at Berkeley University’s Wuster Gallery in 2016. In 2018, Miljački launched the Critical Broadcasting Lab at MIT, whose work Sharing Trainers was included in the São Paulo Architecture Biennale in the fall of 2019. The lab also presented the work of the option studio it hosted, Collective Architecture Studio, at the Seoul Architecure Biennale in the fall of 2019. Miljački is the author of The Optimum Imperative: Czech Architecture for the Socialist Lifestyle 1938-1968 (Routledge, 2017), and the editor of Terms of Appropriation: Modern Architecture and Global Exchange with Amanda Reeser Lawrence (Routledge, 2018). The Under the Influence symposium proceedings she edited were rereleased in December 2019 (Actar, 2019).

Top images: Photographs of "Sharing Trainers," a project mounted by the Critical Broadcasting Lab at the 12th International Architecture Biennale of São Paulo.

Covering a range of projects from computational images, to furniture, to a museum interior, "A Loose Collection of Objects, Images, and Texts" selectively flattens the archive of a project, exploring the material preconditions of contemporary collective living.

Zeina Koreitem is founding partner, with John May, of MILLIØNS, a Los Angeles-based design practice. She recently joined the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) in Los Angeles as design faculty after holding a position as design critic in architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design for a number of years. Her writings on computational colour, computer graphics, and communality have been published in Project Journal, e-flux, and Harvard Design Magazine. MILLIØNS’ recent work includes the reimagining of the west wing of the Everson Museum designed by I.M Pei in Syracuse, NY. Construction will begin in the summer of 2020.

Marc Ryan, principal and co-founder of Public Work, will discuss an emerging theme implicit in the practice’s recent engagements in the transformation of the public realm: the idea of cities and urban spaces designed as places-in-progress. Recent works, including the Bentway in Toronto, explore a breed of public spaces that are deliberately conceived and designed to continually evolve over time, rather than exist as finished compositions.

Following Ryan's talk, there will be a post-lecture discussion with Adam Nicklin, principal and co-founder of Public Work.

Public Work is a Toronto-based office for urban design and landscape architecture focused on one of the foremost public topics today: the intelligent evolution of the contemporary city. Established in 2012, the studio aims to produce transformative works that invigorate the public realm, optimize and enhance the performance of urban and natural systems, and support public life by adding new layers of experience to the city.

Marc Ryan, principal and co-founder of Public Work, is a landscape architect and urban designer with two decades of practice in Canada, the United States and Europe, where he has provided leadership in the design and implementation of public realm projects able to capture a dramatic new sense of place. Educated in landscape architecture and architecture, his design practice focuses on the intersection of these disciplines. Marc’s project experience includes park and public space design, bridge and infrastructure design, and urban design visions often related to waterfront redevelopment.

Adam Nicklin, principal and co-founder of Public Work, is a landscape architect and urban designer with 20 years of experience in the UK, the United States, and Canada. Over his career Adam has successfully led numerous large, multi-disciplinary teams in the execution of complex urban renewal and landscape projects. Adam’s project experience includes community design, public realm and parks design, major transportation, and marine infrastructure projects.

Andrew Batay-Csorba will present an in-depth look into the design process and thinking of Batay-Csorba Architects.

Andrew Batay-Csorba is one of the founding partners of Batay-Csorba Architects, established in 2010 with Jodi Batay-Csorba. He received his Master of Architecture degree from the University of California, Los Angeles and a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from Lawrence Technological University, Michigan, in 2000.

Kin & Company's Joseph Vidich joins the Daniels Faculty's Midday Talks to speak about his firm's research into folded metal, heat tempering, and the perfect patina. His perspective is grounded in a deep knowledge of metalworking, which Kin & Company uses to highlight the capabilities and push the limits of the often overlooked material. Joseph will present recent work highlighting the deformation of simple sheets of metal to create kinetic and expressive objects. He'll also discuss a body of research into oxidation and patinas as a distinct surface treatment.

Joseph Vidich is a designer and educator based in New York City. He is a partner and founder of Kin & Company, LLC, a furniture and interior design practice in Brooklyn, NY. Joseph is currently a visiting assistant professor at the Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Design at Pratt Institute, where he teaches an advanced course in architectural detailing, digital fabrication, and material research. Joseph is also an adjunct lecturer at the City University of New York, College of Architectural Technology, where he teaches advanced architectural design studios, as well as introductory and advanced digital fabrication seminars. Joseph was named to Sight Unseen’s 2017 American Design Hotlist and was recently awarded the Maison & Objet’s Rising Talent Award for furniture design.

In the summer of 1975, NASA brought together a team of physicists, engineers, and space scientists — along with architects, urban planners, and artists — to design large-scale space habitats for millions of people. This Summer Study was led by Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill, whose work on this topic had previously been funded by countercultural icon Stewart Brand’s Point Foundation. The artist and architect Rick Guidice and the planetary science illustrator Don Davis created renderings for the project that would be widely circulated over the next years and decades and even included in testimony before a congressional subcommittee. A product of its time, this work is nevertheless relevant to contemporary modes of thinking about architecture. This lecture examines these plans for life in space as serious architectural and spatial proposals.

Fred Scharmen teaches architecture and urban design at Morgan State University’s School of Architecture and Planning. He is the co-founder of the Working Group on Adaptive Systems, an art and design consultancy based in Baltimore, Maryland. His work as a designer and researcher is about how we imagine new spaces for future worlds, and about who is invited into them. His first book, Space Settlements — on NASA’s 1970s proposal to construct large cities in space for millions of people — is out now from Columbia Books on Architecture and the City. He received his master's in architecture from Yale University. His writing has been published in the Journal of Architectural Education, Log, CLOG, Volume, and Domus. His architectural criticism has appeared in the Architect's Newspaper, and in the local alt-weekly Baltimore City Paper.

Climacteric (noun): a critical period or event.

Climacteric (adjective): having extreme and far-reaching implications or results; critical.

If the climate is at a crisis — an acute, key, crucial, decisive, and significant moment — what role can design truly play in dealing with the climate climacteric? This talk investigates how notions of resilience, adaptation, and mitigation have shaped contemporary discourse around climate-responsive design and urbanism. The lecture is structured around three main themes: terrains, assemblies, and codes.

Fadi Masoud is an assistant professor of landscape architecture and urbanism at the Daniels Faculty, and the director of the Platform for Resilient Urbanism at the Centre for Landscape Research. His teaching and research focus on the links between design, environmental systems, and planning policy instruments. He currently sits on the Waterfront Toronto Design Review Panel and Resilient Toronto’s Urban Flooding Working Group.

EXISTENTIAL ARCHITECTURE EDUCATION

Architecture’s focus on the lived conditions of existence places the discipline in a unique position to address urgent contemporary problems. As Paolo Friere notes, however, education regulates the way that the world ‘enters into’ the students. What is at stake is that students can only understand what is a part of their existential experience, which depends on the way both architecture and students are embedded in the world spatially and temporally.

This lecture will explore the techniques, technologies, materials, and especially the spaces and social relations that make the production of architectural knowledge possible. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s power-knowledge analysis and Karen Barad’s notion of intra-action, we will attempt to clarify the way particular relations produce the objects of study and the subject-position of the ‘knower’.

Using a range of contemporary and historical examples, from Daniels, to Notre Dame as a pedagogical space, to Willowbank, this lecture will speculate on the way alternate relationships to the world produce novel ways of thinking, feeling, and perceiving.

Marcin Kedzior is a Sessional Lecturer at Daniels, founding editor of Scapegoat: Architecture, Landscape, Political-Economy, and director of the Willowbank Centre.

Craig Crane is the Managing Director of Willowbank and co-founder of SITUATE | DESIGN | BUILD

Image: Benedictan Monestary drawn by Marcin Kedzior and Will Fu