Simon Rabyniuk is an architectural researcher and designer based in Toronto. His research and teaching develop historical and theoretical perspectives about technology and urbanization. An architectural history and theory Ph.D. candidate at Eindhoven University of Technology (NL), his dissertation studies the terrestrial impacts arising from the introduction of next-generation aviation vehicles and their attended infrastructures.

As a member of the Curatorial Research Collective, recent architectural exhibitions he has co-curated include Mass Supports: Flexibility and resident agency (Spitizer School of Architecture 2023) and Building Bodies: (Plaza Vertigo 2022). From 2010-2015, he was a principal at the research, art, and design studio Department of Unusual Certainties, where he actively exhibited, published, and developed innovative public engagement events. His individual and collaborative work has been exhibited across Canada, as well as at the Venice Architecture Biennale (2012), Shenzhen Biennale (2014), and Seoul Biennale (2018). He holds a professional graduate degree in Architecture from the University of Toronto (2019), where he received multiple awards. 

Angus worked for Alan Baxter and Associates (London) and Kohn Pedersen Fox (London) from 2006 until 2010. His projects included the Public Realm Strategy for Greater London, and the Covent Garden Master Plan. He established LLAMA Urban Design with Mariana Leguia in 2010. As part of LLAMA, Angus has led major urban projects for various entities including Peruvian ministries and local governments, on projects including the pedestrianization of the historic centre of Lima. Working with the World Bank, Angus has led two transit-oriented development master plans: one in Quito, Ecuador, and another in Lima, Peru. Also with the World Bank, he has recently finished tactical urban design guidelines to facilitate social distancing in Peruvian cities during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Photo by Meaghan Peckham Photography

Anne-Marie Armstrong is an architect and educator. As a principal and co-founder of AAmp Studio, Anne-Marie’s professional practice has a diverse portfolio of projects in the U.S. and Canada. AAmp’s work has been widely published in recognized design journals, such as Architectural Record, Dwell, and AN Interior, and has received awards from the American Institute of Architects (AIA), Architect Magazine, The Architect’s Newspaper (AN), AN Interior, and Twenty + Change, amongst others. AAmp recently received an AN Award for Best Small Practice in Canada in 2025. 

Through her practice, teaching and research, Anne-Marie is committed to increasing diversity, access, and inclusion within the field of design. Anne-Marie is a founding member of Black Architects and Interior Designers Association (BAIDA), and formerly on the Board of Directors of People for Education. 

Anne-Marie holds a Bachelor of Architectural Studies (BAS) from University of Waterloo and a Master of Architecture (MArch) from Yale University, where she studied on a U.S.-Canada Fulbright Award.

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Jason Nguyen is an historian of architecture, landscape, and urban planning in the early modern world, with particular interests in the relationship between architecture and commerce, the history of science and technology, and environmental history and theory. He is completing the manuscript for his first book, Theory & Expertise: Architectural Practice in Old Regime France. The project charts the professionalization of the architectural trade during the 17th and early 18th centuries in France. It examines how, in the wake of the state’s centralization of building practice, architects consciously engaged the modern sciences, law, and real estate speculation in an effort to claim expertise over the craftspeople and contractors who until then managed construction. The book outlines how the effort to codify a legal category of expertise that was rooted in labour, finance, and property development contributed to a profound reframing of the architect as a civic actor at the dawn of the modern age. 

More recently, Nguyen’s interests have centred on architecture’s relationship to global commerce and the environment during the early modern period. He is working on a book-length study of European-supported entrepôts in Asia, Africa, and the Americas as they relate to shipping networks and the formalization of the stock exchanges in Amsterdam and London. The project ties these complexes to contemporaneous technologies in cartography and navigation, corporate institutions of trade, coastal and marine ecologies, and the deterritorialization of Indigenous seascapes in the development of global capitalism and empire. On this topic, he co-chaired a 2022 international symposium at the Daniels Faculty on the subject of “Sea Machines,” which studied naval technology and infrastructure for the history and theory of architecture. 

Nguyen received his PhD in the history and theory of architecture from Harvard University. His work has appeared in journals such as Grey Room, Journal 18, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, The Journal of Architecture, Livraisons d’histoire de l’architecture, Oxford Art Journal, and Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes. His research has been supported by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the Institut national d’histoire de l’art, the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Southern California, and the Getty Research Institute. He has taught at Harvard, the University of Southern California, and the University of California-Los Angeles. He sits on the Board of Directors for the Society of Architectural Historians and the editorial board of H-France. Prior to his scholarly career, he practiced architecture at Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates in Philadelphia. In addition to his early modern research, he has interests in contemporary architectural practice, material culture, and ecocriticism in art and architecture.

Maria Yablonina is an architect, researcher, and artist working in the field of computational design and digital fabrication. Her work lies at the intersection of architecture and robotics, producing spaces and robotic systems that can construct themselves and change in real-time. Such architectural productions include the development of hardware and software solutions, as well as complementing architectural and material systems in order to offer new design spaces. Maria’s practice focuses on designing machines that make architecture — a practice that she broadly describes as Designing [with] Machines (D[w]M). D[w]M aims to investigate and establish design methodologies that consider robotic hardware development as part of the overall design process and its output. Through this work, Maria argues for a design practice that moves beyond the design of objects towards the design of technologies and processes that enable new ways of both creating and interacting with architectural spaces. Maria has been commissioned and exhibited by institutions including Milan Design Week, Ars Electronica (Linz), Kapelica Gallery (Ljubljana), the Cooper Union, and the Moscow Institute of Architecture. She has also collaborated internationally on research with both universities and companies, including Autodesk Pier 9 (San Francisco), ETH Zurich, WeWork (New York), and the Bartlett School of Architecture (London).

Roberto Damiani is a designer, curator, and scholar whose work investigates the intellectual discourses and spatial manifestations of the public and the common in architecture and urbanism through an approach that brings together history, theory, and design perspectives. 

Damiani’s interest in the public is the most evident in the recent book he edited The Architect and the Public: On George Baird's Contribution to Architecture (Quodlibet, 2020) which gathers multiple voices on the Canadian architect and Daniels Professor Emeritus George Baird’s theoretical work and teaching. The volume was awarded a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. 

Damiani holds a Ph.D. in History and Theory of Urbanism from the University of Pescara with a dissertation on Aldo Rossi's, Colin Rowe's, and Oswald M. Ungers's contribution to the teaching and practice of modern urban design. Some excerpts of his doctoral research have been exhibited at the 14^th Venice Architecture Biennale and will be published in the forthcoming volumes Radical Pedagogies (MIT Press, 2022) and Histories of Architecture Education in the United States (Routledge, 2022). Other shorter writings on the teaching and practice of urbanism have appeared in the journals JAE, OASE, Scapegoat, and San Rocco.  

Damiani’s design work on contemporary public space has been recognized in the international competition Toronto: Middle City Passages, 2015 and the exhibitions Call to Order (2015) at the University of Miami and Unfolding Pavilion (2018) in Venice and published in the Bauhaus’s journal Horizonte. In Toronto, he is the organizer and curator of Italy under Construction, a series of public lectures and exhibitions on contemporary architecture in Italy sponsored by the Italian Cultural Institute in Toronto (iuctoronto.it).

Damiani held teaching and research positions at Cornell University, the University of Waterloo, and the Daniels Faculty, where he is now teaching in the undergraduate and graduate programs. 

OAA, MArch (U of T); BA, Philosophy (McGill)
 
Dan Briker is an architect and a teacher. His architecture practice, dbdbdb, engages in a variety of project types, with an interest in spatial narrative, sequence, and tactility.

Prior to establishing dbdbdb, Dan practiced at LGA Architectural Partners, working on a range of institutional, residential, non-profit, and mixed-use projects, including the Laurentian School of Architecture in Sudbury, and the Bathurst Street Center for Social Innovation. His background in information graphics, data visualization, and experiential design are highlighted by professional experiences at Pylon Design and Bruce Mau Design, including work on Frank Gehry’s Biodiversity Museum in Panama.

Dan’s research interests around the issues of authenticity, identity, and authorship in architecture have been highlighted by several publications and lecture invitations, as well as a solo installation at the Art Gallery of Alberta, titled “West Edmonton Mall and the Subconscious Space of the City” (2009).

Dan has been teaching design since 2009, and joined the Daniels Faculty in 2015.

Scott has terminal professional degrees in Engineering (UWaterloo) and Architecture (UToronto) as well as a post-graduate degree in Design Research (UMichigan). His transdisciplinary practice concerns itself with the moments when form and matter engage the political forces that produce the city. Current teaching interests at the graduate level include strengthening social relations among architecture and urbanism in the Anthropocene at the boundaries where concepts such as resilience begin to give way to concepts such as survivalism.

His data graphic, Common Sense Revolution (documenting homeless deaths due to service cuts) received a Graphical Excellence Laurel from datavis.ca as well as being named one of NOW Magazine’s top ten art shows of the year. The paper, The Political Aesthetics of Police Kettling, remains the seminal source on this socio-spatial tactic, and was first presented at the International Critical Geography Conference in Ramallah, Palestine. Scott served on the Nathan Phillips Square Community Advisory Committee and Chaired the Peace Sub-committee and the Indian Residential School Survivors Legacy Project Sub-committee. And the short animation, GASP! (a satirical police pride parade) has screened at several queer film festivals internationally.

Scott began organizing while teaching at the UW School of Architecture the Spring term of 2017 when a pay cut of over ten percent was instituted retroactively without notice. This work merged with the TA/RA OrganizeUW drive in 2020 and became a COVID-19 pandemic project. With the invaluable support of CUPE National, Sessional Faculty were certified in January of 2023 and Scott was acclaimed president of CUPE Local 5524. He is currently focussed on bargaining our first contract with the employer.

Jon Cummings is an architect and teacher. His professional practice, Jon Cummings Architecture, is focused on finding expressive beauty and meaning in the low carbon, energy efficient and climate-adaptive technologies of the next generation of buildings. Jon’s professional, research, and teaching interests are engaged with the challenges of mixed uses, housing, and novel building typologies in urban and rural contexts, along with the economic, material, community, and political frameworks that exert influence on them.

Prior to founding JC-A, Jon worked for 10 years at architects-Alliance in Toronto, where he designed and managed mixed use, multi-unit residential, office, retail, cultural, and academic buildings at all project stages from design through construction. Previous to that, Jon’s varied experiences included work at offices in Los Angeles, New York, Boston, and Dublin.

Jon holds architecture degrees from the University of Waterloo (HBAS) and the University of Toronto (M Arch) where he was distinguished on graduation with both the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada and the American Institute of Architects School Medals.  Jon is a licensed member of the Ontario Association of Architects.

Bomani Khemet is an assistant professor of building science in the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design at the University of Toronto, and is a registered professional engineer in the province of Ontario. He earned his Bachelors degree in Applied Science in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Ottawa, a Master of Engineering in Mechanical Engineering at Howard University, a Master of Building Science at Ryerson University and a Doctor of Philosophy in Civil Engineering at Ryerson University.

Khemet has had several years of experience teaching both building science and HVAC courses to practicing architects and engineers within the School of Continuing Studies at the University of Toronto. He has also taught graduate and undergraduate students building science at the University of Toronto’s Department of Civil Engineering.  Moreover, he has delivered lectures in advanced building envelopes and sustainable environmental control systems to undergraduate architectural students at Ryerson University.  

Professionally, Khemet has over a decade of engineering experience as a designer or manager on a variety of fascinating construction and transportation projects. These projects include the design of emission reduction technologies in heavy vehicles, as well as Reduction of Hazardous Substances initiatives for industrial products. Most notably, he has had the opportunity to work on Toronto’s Union Station Revitalisation project under a comprehensive transit re-signalling construction contract.

Research interests include:

• Resilient architecture
• Low energy building enclosures
• Airtightness in residential buildings
• HVAC and environmental controls
• Building energy modelling