Nikole Bouchard
Assistant Professor
University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, School of Architecture & Urban Planning

I like art, architecture and landscape. A lot. My research and design work focuses on how the intersection between these creative disciplines can stimulate ecologically sensitive and culturally relevant design interventions. I engage in projects of all scales and media that explore contextually driven methods of design where experiments embody a unique sense of fantastical pragmatism—where design ideas are playful, yet intentional, well-informed and environmentally conscious.

I spend much of my time in Milwaukee where I’m an Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture & Urban Planning at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. I’ve also had the pleasure of working with amazing students and faculty at Yale, Cornell, Syracuse, the University of Waterloo (just down the road) and right here at the University of Toronto back in 2010 while I was learning a ton working with Mason White and Lola Sheppard of Lateral Office. In 2015, I was incredibly fortunate to be Fellow at The MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, NH and an Artist-in-Residence at Baer Art Center in Hofsós, Iceland. In terms of degrees, I hold an MArch II degree from Princeton and a BArch degree from Cornell.

In my talk, titled Found in Translation, I’ll present a sliver of my research and creative work as demonstrated in my pedagogical and personal design endeavors. Found in Translation will include bits and pieces of student produced explorations from the wide variety of levels and types of curricula I’ve had the chance to construct—ranging from beginning design courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels, to upper-level investigative design studios and seminars centered around my design research, broadly titled From Waste to Wonder. This personal research and design work critically considers the ways in which we produce, collect, discard and reuse our waste, whether it’s materials, spaces or places. The From Waste to Wonder work asks how we might hack, sample and rearrange bits of historical and existing artifacts and materials to produce culturally relevant and ecologically sensitive forms, objects, architectures and environments.