Tune in to a virtual lecture on April 1 with Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman as part of Selected Topics in Urban Design (ARC367).

Cruz and Forman are principals in Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman, a research-based political and architectural practice in San Diego, investigating issues of informal urbanization, civic infrastructure and public culture, with a special emphasis on Latin American cities.

Blurring conventional boundaries between theory and practice, and merging the fields of architecture and urbanism, political theory and urban policy, visual arts and public culture, Cruz and Forman lead a variety of urban research agendas and civic/public interventions in the San Diego-Tijuana border region and beyond.

ARC367, taught by the Daniels Faculty’s Mariana Leguia and Angus Laurie, asks students to take a critical look at some of the dominant ideologies of urbanism, seeing the city through different, often opposing lenses. More specifically, it approximates the city at different scales, from the regional to the human. At the same time, the course looks at the city through the lenses of different urban disciplines, using different lectures to focus on urban design, landscape, architecture, and mobility. Throughout the semester, students have heard from a series of international experts including Alfred Caraballo, Francesco Careri, and Gil Peñalosa.

Join Zoom Meeting

https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/87395716499

Meeting ID: 873 9571 6499

Passcode: 389777

Join the Daniels Faculty’s Lukas Pauer for a discussion of his integrated practice, research and teaching—an effort to recentre the study of how sovereignty is acquired and disputed as a practice-based matter of space and power. In recent years, Pauer has worked on a series of projects aimed at decoding and deconstructing built objects that political actors around the world have used to project power. As such, his academic practice seeks to empower marginalized, underrepresented and vulnerable individuals and communities.

This event is part of the Daniels Faculty’s Winter 2024 Public Program. Pauer has also curated a corresponding exhibition, How to Steal a Country, on view in the Larry Wayne Richards Gallery at 1 Spadina Crescent from March 6 to May 14, 2024.

Daniels Faculty Emerging Architect Fellow Lukas Pauer is a licensed architect, urbanist, historian and educator. His Vertical Geopolitics Lab, an investigative practice and think tank at the intersections of architecture, geography, politology and media, is dedicated to exposing intangible systems and hidden agendas within the built environment.

Join architectural and art historian Mark Crinson, Birkbeck (University of London), for a special guest lecture on Monday, March 11, hosted by the Daniels Faculty's Architecture, Landscape, and Design PhD program.

In this talk, Crinson will focus on the early years of a new understanding of infrastructure, and uses various forms of representation (brochures, a feature film, architectural drawings) to explore the phenomenon in the case of the international airport just after the Second World War when infrastructural projects came into existence not only as “signs of themselves, but as trope, rhetoric, image, poetics.”

London (Heathrow) airport became the main location for the film Out of the Clouds (1955), interpreted here as a training manual in how to learn the airport, namely how to negotiate infrastructure either/both because you don’t really know it is there or/and because you understand it as demonstratively sensitive to human craft and experience. The film’s treatment of infrastructure has continuing associations to contemporary conversations about forced labor, central state planning, territoriality, immigration, and citizenship.

All members of the Daniels community, and interested members of the public, are invited to join. No advanced registration required. 

Mark Crinson is emeritus professor of architectural history at Birkbeck, University of London, and previously taught at the University of Manchester (1993–2016). He served as vice president and president of the European Architectural History Network. Recent books include Shock City: Image and Architecture in Industrial Manchester (2022, winner of the 2024 Historians of British Art Prize); The Architecture of Art History: A Historiography (2019, co-authored with Richard J. Williams); Alison and Peter Smithson (2018); and Rebuilding Babel: Modern Architecture and Internationalism (2017). His current book, titled Heathrow’s Genius Loci, will be completed in summer 2024. He was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2023. 

One of the founders of SHoP Architects, Kim Holden established her own practice, Doula X Design, after her experience giving birth led her to become a doula. In this lecture, she will discuss how design can facilitate better birthing experiences, in particular by creating positive environments that support labour rather than inhibit it.

Kim Holden is currently the William Henry Bishop Visiting Professor of Architectural Design at Yale School of Architecture. A registered architect, trained birth/postpartum doula and certified lactation counselor, Holden is focused on the intersection of design and women’s health. Through her work and examination of the role that design plays in shaping the physical, physiological and psychological experience of birth, she seeks to improve outcomes and experiences for women, birthing people and their families. Championing safer, more respectful and more equitable care, her work seeks to reframe childbirth not as a women’s topic but rather as a societal one.

Banner images courtesy Pobby Tan and Katie Jin (1), Raven Xu (2) and Nicole Niava (3, 4)

London- and Los Angeles-based artist P. Staff will discuss recent exhibitions, influences and working methodologies, as well as read from their recent collection of poetry. Recent exhibitions include In Ekstase, Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland; Impact Play, Fundacio Joan Miro, Barcelona; and On Venus, most recently presented at the the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, titled The Milk of Dreams. Staff’s work spans installation, poetry and video, and is concerned with affect, biopolitics, queer and trans theory and disability and debility.

Born in the UK in 1987, P. Staff lives and works in Los Angeles and London. As a filmmaker, installation artist and poet, they draw from a wide-ranging assortment of inspirations, materials and settings, of which recent examples include Achille Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics, affect theory and the transpoetics of writers such as Che Gossett and Eva Hayward, as well as their own studies in modern dance, astrology and end-of-life care. In Staff’s interdisciplinary practice, these varying threads serve to emphasize the processes by which bodies—especially those of people who are queer, trans or disabled—are interpreted, regulated and disciplined in a rigorously controlled society. Staff has exhibited extensively, gaining significant recognition and awards for their work, which is held in private and public collections internationally. Staff received their BA in Fine Art and Contemporary Critical Studies from Goldsmiths University of London in 2009. They completed the LUX Associate Artists Programme and studied Contemporary Dance at The Place in London in 2011.

Banner image: In Ekstase, 2023 Kunsthalle Basel. Photo by Philipp Hanger

Join Zachary Mollica, Emerging Architect Fellow at the Daniels Faculty, for this lecture on the promise of re-diversifying the ways we build with wood. By using more than just a few species, as is currently the practice, builders and designers can help re-establish healthier processes, reversing the simplification of forest ecosystems worldwide. This talk is in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name (pictured above).

Inaugural 2022-2024 Emerging Architect Fellow Zachary Mollica is an architect, maker and educator whose work with trees has become a primary reference in alternative wood building futures. His work integrates innovative digital methods with craft and material knowledge in the pursuit of better natural, social and constructed environments.

Often “the public realm” is defined as publicly owned places and spaces that belong to and are accessible to everyone, but reality finds that these ostensibly inclusive environments tend to be open and accessible only to a privileged few.

Chelina Odbert, the co-founder and CEO of Kounkuey Design Initiative, will present strategies for making the public realm more public, demonstrating ways that designers, planners and communities can ensure that these shared spaces are as inclusive and accessible as their name suggests they should be.

As Founding Principal and CEO of Kounkuey Design Initiative, Chelina Odbert aims to bring good design to places where it isn’t often found and connect localized design interventions to large-scale policy change. Her work is driven by her belief in the power of community-engaged design to advance racial, environmental and economic equity in neighbourhoods and cities.

This lecture by architect and academic Kholisile Dhliwayo will describe the tenets and methodology of making Black Diasporas Naarm-Melbourne and the forthcoming Black Diasporas Tkaronto-Toronto—projects celebrating cultural practices and knowledge systems that support the creation of places where Black communities can thrive. In particular, the talk will outline how oral narrative, filmmaking and exhibition are both archival and aspirational—archival in their celebration of the spaces and places created by Black communities in Toronto and aspirational in the articulation of hopes and dreams and how these manifest in the built environment. It will be moderated by the Daniels Faculty’s Kaari Kitawi.

Architect Kholisile Dhliwayo is an Adrian Cheng Fellow at the Social Innovation Change Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School and a 2023 resident at the Center for Architecture Lab in New York City. A founding member of afrOURban Inc., a 501c3 dedicated to documenting and celebrating the spaces that have meaning to Black communities worldwide, Dhliwayo leads the afrOURban project Black Diasporas, a community-led geolocated oral narrative mapping project that examines the experiences, spaces and places having meaning to Black people.

Moderator Kaari Kitawi is a landscape architect and an urban designer with the City of Toronto. She is an alumna of and a sessional lecturer at the Daniels Faculty. Prior to moving to Canada, she ran a landscape company in Kenya.

Image 1 by Bonn Creative from the exhibition Black Diasporas Naarm Melbourne. Image 2 by Bonn Creative. Image 3 from the Black Diasporas film TRAMS TRAINS TKZEE + ME, directed by Scottnes Smith, co-produced by Phillipa J. Smith, with cinematography by Abdul Yusuf and starring Kgomotso Sekhu. Image 4 from afrOURban Black Diasporas.

For architect and academic Germane Barnes, founder of Studio Barnes and an Associate Professor at the University of Miami, architecture and identity are closely connected, with the built enviroment influencing community agency. Join him as he explores in this lecture the themes of community-oriented design, the expansion of architectural representation, and alternative design authorship.

Germane Barnes’ research and design practice investigates the connection between architecture and identity, mining architecture’s social and political agency to explore how the built environment influences black domesticity. The founder of Studio Barnes, he is currently an Associate Professor and the Director of the Community Housing Identity Lab (CHIL) at the University of Miami School Of Architecture. In 2021, Barnes was awarded the Harvard GSD Wheelwright Prize, among his many professional and academic accolades.

Join Vietnam-based architect Võ Trọng Nghĩa as he discusses the ways in which designers can contribute to healing the Earth, from increased mindfulness to the many sustainable practices he employs in his own work. This lecture will touch upon his use of bioclimatic materials and collaboration with local skilled labourers to merge traditional Vietnamese construction techniques with contemporary design. He will also expound on the value of meditation as an effective modern design tool: Võ spent years meditating intensively at Pa-Auk Forest Monastery in Myanmar, using the knowledge and experience he developed there to contribute to social and environmental wellness through his architectural projects.

A graduate of the University of Tokyo and of Waseda University, architect Võ Trọng Nghĩa established his eponymous practice, Hanoi-based VTN Architects, in 2006. Celebrated for infusing his work with lushly planted walls, hanging vines, structure-piercing trees, weathered stones and sunken landscapes, he incorporates traditional Vietnamese building techniques, such as complex bamboo trusses, perforated blocks, cooling water systems, shaded terraces and thatched roofs, into his uniquely innovative designs. In 2014, the World Economic Forum selected Võ as a Young Global Leader, and he was named Architect of the Year by Dezeen in 2019.

Jeffrey Cook Memorial Lecture
The Jeffrey Cook Memorial Lecture is presented in the name of architect Jeffrey Ross Cook. Born in Canada, Cook studied architecture at the University of Manitoba and was a member of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) and an elected member of the International Committee of Architectural Critics. Widely acknowledged as one of the pioneers of solar and bioclimatic design, he ran a Masters course in Solar Energy Design at Arizona State University that attracted students from countries around the world. The Faculty expresses its appreciation to the Jeffrey Cook Charitable Trust, which was established in 2005 to pay tribute to its namesake.

In addition to advancing Cook’s lifework and legacy, the Trust has as its focus the opportunities of the built environment and its interaction with the natural environment in securing human sustainability and enhancement. This includes passive and low energy design, respect for indigenous cultures, and the wise use of local resources in the built environment. We are grateful to the Jeffrey Cook Charitable Trust for its philanthropic grants to the Faculty to support research, the annually recurring Memorial Lecture, and its support of student travel related to selected design studios.