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

Midday Talk: Forestry and Design Series

Dr. Sandy Smith, Daniels Faculty, “Urban Forests”

Dr. Sandy Smith is the newly appointed director of the Daniels Faculty's forestry graduate programs. She specializes in forest health and urban forests, specifically using natural controls to address invasive species, with research focused on biological control of forest insects, earthworms, and plants such as dog-strangling vine and Phragmites. She has published over 140 papers and reports, served as guest editor and reviewer for numerous refereed journals, NSERC panels, and on scientific panels for managing invasive insects such as the Asian Long-Horned Beetle and Emerald Ash Borer.

Sandy is best known for her contributions augmenting native natural enemies for biological control in forested systems, widely cited work still definitive in the field, however, her current research explores hypotheses around displacement of native species in order to better understand our ability to manage the invasion process in forest ecosystems. Her specific interests are in the population and community ecology of natural enemies following the introduction of exotics or disturbance.

Midday Talk: Forestry and Design Series
Mass Timber Institute

Craig Applegath (Dialog Design)
Robert Wright, Daniels Faculty
“Mass Timber Buildings”

Robert Wright has a BSc from the University of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada in Open Space Planning, with a minor in Ecology and an MLA from the University of Guelph, Ontario Canada. Professor Wright’s work is design centered and extremely eclectic in nature. His notion of design does not privilege the traditional professional disciplines of Architecture, Landscape Architecture or Urban design. He places his work within a more contemporary and trans-disciplinary framework. As Both an educator and as a design practitioner, he holds a strong belief that “Design is built theory” meaning that the translation from thought and concept to built works is primary and essential to design discourse. Having had training in both Ecology and Landscape Architecture places design as a practice that must at its essence deal with context. As a self confessed “Modernist” with Minimalist and Situationalist tendencies. The art of design is not merely “object” making but rather the interplay of Nature, Person, Community, City and Place. Rob is the Principle of iz an open and exploratory design practice. His practice seeks to develop creative design experimentation not only in Architecture, Landscape Architecture or Urban design but also in fashion, furniture, art and the industrial arts. He collaborates with all manner of artists, designers and practitioners over the full range of the creative arts.

Mr. Wright is also the Director of the Centre for Landscape Research. His efforts on behalf of the CLR focus on bringing the University’s expertise together with Community, Industry and government research Interests. He is a full member of the OALA and a Fellow of the CSLA. Mr. Wright has also been in the past, the Director of the Landscape Program (8 yrs.), Associate Dean (4 yrs.) and Director of the Knowledge Media institute (4 yrs.)

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Craig Applegath is the founding principal of DIALOG’s Toronto Studio, and a passionate designer who believes in the power of built form to meaningfully improve the wellbeing of communities and the environment they are part of. Since graduating from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University with a Master of Architecture in Urban Design Craig has focused his energies on leading innovative planning and design projects that address the complex challenges facing our communities, as well as on his advocacy of sustainable building design and urban regeneration and symbiosis. Craig’s area of practice includes the master planning and design of institutional projects, including cultural and museum, post secondary education, and healthcare facilities, as well as the design of innovative industrial and manufacturing facilities.

Craig was a founding Board Member of Sustainable Buildings Canada, a Past President of the Ontario Association of Architects, and the current moderatorof SymbioticCities.net. Craig has lectured or taught at Harvard, the University of Toronto, the University of Waterloo, as well as at many professional and sector related conferences around the world. In 2001 Craig was made a Fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada for his contributions to the profession of architecture.

Midday Talk: Forestry and Design Series

Dr. Danijela Puric-Mladenovic, Daniels Faculty " The Southern Ontario Forest"

Danijela is a faculty member working for the Ministry of Natural Resources, Science and Research Branch, Natural Heritage Information Center. Her research and professional work is focused on forests in settled and urban landscapes. Her research has a specific focus on conservation, restoration and integrated spatial planning and management of forests in urban, peri-urban to rural landscapes and their interfaces. Within this research framework she has a special focusses on: development and application inventory and monitoring protocols; spatial conservation and  landscape planning; spatial design of green systems and networks; quantifying values of forests and green systems in the contest of green infrastructure; determining thresholds and landscape and vegetation reference conditions; spatial prioritization of restoration; predictive modeling and mapping under current, future and past (pre-settlement vegetation) environmental and climate conditions; vegetation analysis and assessment; development of monitoring criteria and indicators, and application of spatial analysis and decision tolls to forest and landscape conservation. In collaboration with Dr. A. Kenney Danijela co-developed Neighbourwoods, a single tree inventory and monitoring protocol, and Vegetation Sampling Protocol, inventory and monitoring protocol applicable to forests and other vegetation.  Dr. Puric-Mladenovic collaborates with partners from different levels of governments, NGOs, academia and community groups engaged in forests and natural resources conservation across urban and settled landscapes.

Midday Talk: Forestry and Design Series

Jane Hutton, Waterloo Architecture Faculty, “Wood Urbanism"
followed by Book Launch

Jane Hutton is a landscape architect, whose research looks at the extended relationships of materials in design, examining links between the landscapes of production and consumption of common building materials. From 2011-2016, she was an Assistant Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and previously taught at the University of Toronto. Her design research has focused on material flows and urban change, and has been published and exhibited in venues in Canada, the US, the UK, and China. She is a founding editor of the journal Scapegoat: Architecture, Landscape, Political Economy, and is co-editor of Issues: 01 Service, 02 Materialism, and 06 Mexico D.F./NAFTA. She has practiced with Toronto-based PLANT Architect Inc. as a Senior Designer as well as with architectural firms in China and Mexico City. Hutton holds a Master of Landscape Architecture degree from the University of Toronto, where she received the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects Medal for Design Excellence, and a Bachelor of Science degree in Biology and Environmental Sciences from McGill University, Montreal, where she studied the ecology of culturally and economically significant palms in Eastern Panama.

Midday Talk: Forestry and Design Series

Dr. Sean Thomas, Daniels Faculty, "Forestry, Architecture, and Sustainability"

Dr. Sean Thomas has been preoccupied with the comparative biology of trees and forest responses to the intentional and accidental impacts of humans for some 25 years. Sean has been at the University of Toronto since 1999, and is currently appointed as an NSERC Industrial Research Chair in Biochar and Ecosystem Restoration. Dr. Thomas’ research focuses on how trees and forests respond to human impacts – intentional impacts through forest management, and unintentional impacts via local, regional, and global changes in the environment. In this effort, he tries to link an understanding of functional ecology and ecophysiology of trees (“how trees work”) to patterns of growth, mortality, recruitment, reproduction, at the population scale, to patterns community composition, and to ecoysystem processes, in particular carbon flux (“how forests work”). Sean Thomas’ lab is currently involved in projects in temperate and boreal forests in Canada, and tropical forests at a variety of sites.

Midday Talk: Forestry and Design Series

Dan Handel, Tel Aviv, "Forest Primers"

Dan Handel is an architect and curator whose work focuses on research-based exhibitions with special attention to underexplored ideas, figures, and practices that shape contemporary built environments. He was the inaugural Young Curator at the at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, has developed exhibitions for the Venice Biennale and the New Institute in Rotterdam, and was curator of architecture and design at the Israel Museum. Handel holds an MArch from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and PhD from the Technion Israel Institute of Technology. His writing has appeared in Harvard Design Magazine, e-flux Architecture, Thresholds, Frame, San Rocco, Pin-Up, Bracket, and the Journal of Landscape Architecture (JOLA), among others. He is the editor of the publications Aircraft Carrier (Hajte Cantz, 2012), Yasky and Co. (Tel Aviv Museum. 2016), and Manifest, a journal of American architecture and urbanism. He is the recipient of grants from the Graham Foundation for Manifest (2012, 2014) and Carpet Space (2019)

Jason Long is a partner at OMA, based out of the New York Office. Since joining the firm in 2003, Jason has been involved in OMA’s architecture and urbanism practice and its think tank, AMO. He has brought a research-driven, interdisciplinary approach to a wide range of OMA’s projects internationally. From concept design to completion, Jason served as the project manager for a new national museum in Quebec City and the Faena Forum, a multi-purpose venue in Miami. Jason leads the office’s portfolio in Washington DC, which currently includes numerous urban planning projects that provide an innovative approach to recreation, public health and equitable development: the 11th Street Bridge Park, an elevated public park; a sport and recreation masterplan for the RFK Stadium-Armory Campus; and the revitalization of the streetscape around the Walter E. Washington Convention Center. He is also developing new approaches to public space in California with a mixed-used development in Santa Monica and a new programmed park for Downtown Los Angeles. Currently, he is also overseeing the construction of a high-rise tower in San Francisco’s Transbay district. Read More...