Kelly Doran will present the 2020/21 Jeffrey Cook Memorial Lecture.

Towards Half: Design for a Climate Positive Future. How can the built environment meet the 2030 target and halve the emissions of construction and operations this decade? MASS's Good, Clean, & Fair approach offers a language and approach to address this profound challenge - linking climate and socio-economic justice in the process.

Join us livestream, October 30^th at 1pm, or if you prefer, following the lecture on our YouTube channel

Kelly leads MASS Design Group’s London studio, overseeing work in East Africa and Europe. He joined MASS in 2014 to lead its Kigali office and grew the practice from eight employees to 80 over a five year period. Kelly has led the design and implementation of several of MASS’s projects across East Africa, notably the award-winning Munini District Hospital and Rwanda Ministry of Health’s Typical Hospital Plans; headquarters for both the One Acre Fund and Andela in Kenya; and the Rwanda Institute for Conservation Agriculture. Kelly is a graduate of the University of Toronto, a recipient of the Canada Council’s Prix de Rome for Emerging Practitioners, and has held teaching positions at the Bartlett School of Architecture, Harvard University, and the University of Waterloo. 

Jeffrey Cook Memorial Lecture
The Jeffrey Cook Memorial Lecture delivered by Kelly Doran, MASS, and a graduate of our school, receiving his MArch in 2008, is presented in the name of Jeffrey Ross Cook, as the Jeffrey Cook Memorial Lecture. The Faculty expresses its appreciation to the Jeffrey Cook Charitable Trust, which was established in 2005 to pay tribute to architect Jeffrey Cook, who was born in Canada and studied architecture at the University of Manitoba. In addition to being a registered architect, Jeffrey Cook was a member of the American Institute of Architects, an elected member of the International Committee of Architectural Critics, and an Honorary Fellow of the RIBA in London. Widely acknowledged as one of the pioneers of solar and bio-climatic design, he ran a Masters course in Solar Energy Design at Arizona State University, which due to his international reputation and dedication as a teacher, attracted students from temperate countries around the world.

The Trust, which continues with Jeffrey Cook’s lifework and legacy, 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.

Oscillating between the past and present, original and referent, reconstructions are historiographic representations, yet inevitably also something new. Here, the propositional practice of constructing (and reconstructing) history is intimately linked to how we address challenges of the present. Drawing on diverse practices of reconstruction in fields from architecture and landscape to geology and archaeology, Aisling O’Carroll will share research and speculative design studies from her practice to explore the politics, truth, and affective nature of reconstruction and representation in framing knowledge and ideas of landscape.

Aisling O'Carroll is currently completing her PhD in Architectural Design at The Bartlett School of Architecture, funded by the UCL Graduate Research Scholarship and Overseas Research Scholarship. She has previously taught design studios at Harvard Graduate School of Design and The Bartlett School of Architecture and has practiced internationally in architecture and landscape architecture. Her work has been funded by Harvard University, the Landscape Research Group, Canada Council for the Arts, the Danish Arts Foundation, and UCL, among others. She is co-founder and co-editor in chief of The Site Magazine.

The professional packaging of the design discipline - intent on creating, projecting and transforming - may overlook the pertinence and relevance of being first and foremost curious observers and empathetic listeners, capable of celebrating and recognizing what already exists. This lecture will reflect on community engagement strategies and the crafting of an inclusive approach to design through the work of Enlace Arquitectura in the barrio (informal settlement) La Palomera in Caracas Venezuela, which will be part of the 17th Architecture Biennial in Venice 2021. 

Elisa Silva is principal and founder of Enlace Arquitectura and Enlace Foundation, established in Caracas, Venezuela. The two entities work in tandem to advance the integration of cities including informal settlements through participatory design processes and cultural programs. Their work has received awards in numerous design competitions and international architecture and urban design biennials. The San Juan María Vianney Church in Media Legua, Venezuela was awarded in the XI BIAU 2019 and the project Integration Process Caracas in the barrio La Palomera is part of the XVII Venice Architecture Biennial 2021. Elisa received the Rome Prize from the American Academy in 2005, the Wheelwright Fellowship from Harvard in 2011, Graham Foundation Grant 2017 and the Lucas Artist Fellowship 2019. She is co-author of CABA: Cartography of the Caracas barrios (2014) and Pure Space: Expanding the Public Sphere through Public Space Transformations in Latin American Spontaneous Settlements (Actar, 2020). Elisa has a Master degree in Architecture from Harvard University Graduate School of Design. She has taught at Princeton University School of Architecture, Harvard University Graduate School of Design and the Simón Bolívar University in Caracas, Venezuela. At present, she is teaching an elective course and research studio at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Design at the University of Toronto  

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.