Communities worldwide were threatened by fire on an unprecedented scale this year. In this talk by expert Jonah Susskind, currently a senior researcher at SWA, increasingly urgent mitigation and protection issues will be examined, including critical feedback loops between urbanization and environmental risk in fire-prone landscapes, key disciplinary knowledge gaps among practitioners, and the introduction of applied strategies for community-scale wildfire resilience.

Jonah Susskind is a senior research associate at SWA. His work addresses issues related to climate change and urbanization, with a special focus on wildfire risk and resilience. Susskind has held teaching appointments at Harvard University and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has taught courses in architecture, landscape architecture and urban planning.

Understanding the limitations of design can be productively reframed as a way of opening up possibilities. This talk by architect and academic David Fortin will offer a series of discussion points surrounding current housing challenges, how they are impacting both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians, and why they beckon for reflection on what design is and who it serves. The talk will feature the Architects Against Housing Alienation project Not For Sale, currently on view in the Canada Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale. Fortin is a member of AAHA, which curated the pavilion for 2023.

Architect David Fortin is a Professor at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture and the first Indigenous person to direct an architecture school in Canada. His research investigates the instrumentality of the design process in influencing how we see our futures, with a particular focus on Indigenous voices and agency. A member of the Métis Nation of Ontario and of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada Indigenous Task Force seeking ways to foster and promote Indigenous design in Canada, Fortin also leads a small design firm working closely with communities to realize their visions. In addition to this year’s Venice Biennale project, he was co-curator, with Gerald McMaster, of UNCEDED: Voices of the Land, Canada’s entry to the Biennale in 2018.

As an art historian focused on art since the 1960s, Dr. Tina Rivers Ryan has become one of the leading voices shaping the public discourse around art and technology today. In this talk, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum curator, frequent Artforum critic and active social-media presence will provide an overview of her recent and forthcoming exhibitions and publications, which together serve as the basis for her reflections on the state of the future, present and past of video and digital art.

Dr. Tina Rivers Ryan is a widely-recognized art historian and critic specializing in the field of art and technology, as well as a Curator at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. Her honors include an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and being named to Artnet’s “Innovators List.” In this talk, she will refer to her recent and upcoming exhibitions and publications to reflect on the future, present, and past of video and digital art.

Join Harvard GSD professor Charles Waldheim for a discussion based on Technical Lands: A Critical Primer, which he co-edited with Jeffrey S. Nesbit. The book, published this year by Jovis, assembles authors from a diverse array of disciplines, geographical specializations and epistemological traditions to interrogate and theorize the meaning and increasing significance of technical lands—spaces that are united by their “exceptional” characteristics, such as remote locations, delimited boundaries, secured accessibility and hyper-vigilant management.

Charles Waldheim (pictured below) is the John E. Irving Professor of Landscape Architecture and Director of the Office for Urbanization at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. His research examines the relations between landscape, ecology and contemporary urbanism. His latest published work, Technical Lands: A Critical Primer (Jovis, 2023), was co-edited with Jeffrey S. Nesbit.

Join acclaimed Canadian architect Bruce Kuwabara as he discusses the influence of professor emeritus and former Daniels Faculty dean George Baird (by whom he was taught and for whom he once worked) on his approach to architecture and the public realm and on how it has informed the practice and work of KPMB Architects, the firm Kuwabara co-founded in the 1980s. In his lecture, Kuwabara will present KPMB buildings and projects that demonstrate how architecture contributes to the formation and vibrancy of the city while addressing the most pressing issues of our time, including climate change, affordability, mental health and reconciliation.

Bruce Kuwabara acquired his Bachelor of Architecture degree from the University of Toronto in 1972, is a founding partner of KPMB Architects and chairs the Board of Trustees of the Canadian Centre for Architecture. As co-founder of KPMB, he has worked on a wide array of acclaimed projects, including the National Ballet School in Toronto and the Remai Modern in Saskatoon. In 2006, he was awarded the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada’s Gold Medal. In 2012, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada for “shaping our built landscape in lasting ways.”

Portrait by Karri North

By re-contextualizing the history of architecture through the discourse of disability, David Gissen’s 2023 book The Architecture of Disability: Buildings, Cities, and Landscapes beyond Access challenges current modes of architectural practice, theory and education by proposing architecture that fully integrates disabled persons into its production. Both the author and book look beyond traditional notions of accessibility and show how certain incapacities can help to positively reimagine the roots of architecture. A Q&A session will follow Gissen’s presentation.

A disabled designer and historian of architecture, David Gissen is professor of architecture and urban history at Parsons School of Design at the New School in New York City. His 2023 book, The Architecture of Disability: Buildings, Cities, and Landscapes beyond Access, is published by University of Minnesota Press.

Join architect Nzinga Biegueng Mboup, principal of the Dakar-based practice WOROFILA, for a lecture on designing and building in the Senegalese context, with references to its climate, culture, traditions and unique “concrete modernity.” Mboup will address working with biomaterials, passive design strategies, her various cultural projects, and her research and collaborations. A Q&A session will follow.

Nzinga Biegueng Mboup is a Senegalese architect and principal of Dakar-based WOROFILA, a practice that specializes in bioclimatic architecture and construction using locally sourced earth and biomaterials. In addition to co-running WOROFILA, Mboup has piloted research projects and is a participant in the 2023 Venice Biennale of Architecture. She was recently appointed curator of the Canadian Centre for Architecture program CCA c/o Dakar, a series of public programs and research projects in the Senegalese capital.

Join Lyndon Neri of Shanghai-based Neri&Hu Design and Research Office for this lecture on the subject of ruins, the conception of which has long shaped Western architectural historians’ origins narrative dating back to antiquity.

Largely skewed by a distinct visual culture and the optics of the “ruin gaze,” the ruin has predominantly been associated with romantic imagery possessing its own metaphysical charm.

In this talk, Neri will present relevant projects from his studio, seen through the critical lens of Chinese art history, to offer alternative representations of the past, readings of site, building and visual memory.

Lyndon Neri co-founded Neri&Hu Design and Research Office, an interdisciplinary architectural design practice based in Shanghai, China, with Rossana Hu in 2004. He received his Master of Architecture at Harvard University Graduate School of Design and his Bachelor of Arts in Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley.

Alongside his design practice, Neri has been deeply committed to architectural education and has taught and lectured in numerous universities. He was appointed the John Portman chair at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 2019 and 2022, the Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor in 2022 and Norman R. Foster Visiting Professor Chair in 2018 at the Yale School of Architecture. 

In this talk, Alexis Kyle Mitchell presents an experimental and essayistic collage of archival footage, personal writing, scientific research, hand-processed film and specially commissioned sound scores that are part of her forthcoming feature film The Treasury of Human Inheritance.

Presented here for the first time, these diverse materials are attuned to the complex legacies of auto-ethnography in filmmaking, and to forms of embodied knowledge within alternative kinship structures.

The Treasury of Human Inheritance uses the body as both resource and material, performing ritualized repetitions as a method and mode of research into the inherited traits of familial genetic disease and disability.

Mitchell's talk is the last event in this term’s MVS Proseminar series.

Based between Canada and the UK, Alexis Kyle Mitchell often works collaboratively alongside artist Sharlene Bamboat as Bamboat | Mitchell. Mitchell recently completed a PhD in Human Geography at the University of Toronto, where she held an SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship. She was artist-in-residence at Akademie Schloss Solitude (2015-2017) and at the MacDowell Colony (2018) and was a fellow at Sommerakademie Paul Klee (2017-2019).

Recent screenings and exhibitions include Mercer Union in Toronto, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival & International Film Festival Rotterdam and an upcoming solo exhibition (Bambitchell) at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle. Recent writing and research can be read in Digital Lives in the Global City (UBC Press) and in Queer at Camp (Fordham University Press). In 2020-2022, Mitchell will hold a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Center for Disability Studies at New York University under the supervision of Dr. Faye Ginsburg.

Still from The Treasury of Human Inheritance courtesy of Alexis Kyle Mitchell

Join us for a talk by Palestinian curator and writer Nasrin Himada on the subject of Cinema, Friendship, and the Epistolary. 

Himada’s practice is heavily influenced by their long-term friendships and by their many ongoing collaborations with artists, filmmakers and poets.

Their recent project For Many Returns experiments with writing as an act dictated by love and typifies their current curatorial interests, which foreground embodiment as method, desire as transformation and liberation through many forms.

Nasrin Himada currently holds the position of Associate Curator at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.

Their talk is part of the MVS Proseminar series and is co-presented with Images Festival.