Initiatives
The department has actively been diversifying the range of speakers and subjects in our lecture series such as lectures by Indigenous architect Alfred Waugh and female architect Johanna Hurme. Further, the communications team has extensively promoted external and online workshops, discussions and lectures that address issues of diversity and justice in architecture.
In 2022-2023 the DAS Lecture Series theme highlighted architects working creatively at the margins, working in different ways, challenging norms around disciplinary silos, scale, and mode of practice. We sought to use the Series to promote engagement and enthusiasm for on-campus, in-person programming by integrating four talks with three public exhibitions at the Paul H. Cocker Gallery, to boost attendance by professionals, public, and members of the larger TMU community after two years of online programming. We encouraged student engagement by combining one of the talks with an interactive initiative which was a student design workshop led by one of the speakers. We also provided pre-lecture pizza for our students to encourage them to stay after a long day at the studio. Our seven events brought in speakers from Vancouver, Winnipeg, Tokyo, Amsterdam, Toronto, and Brussels to present multi-disciplinary approaches including landscape design, Indigenous design approaches, urban placemaking, architectural curation, and social and political advocacy.
The Lecture Series organizing committee included assisant professors Terri Peters and Will Galloway, and students Karlie Nguyen, Jana Stojanovska, Jeannette Wehbeh, Stefan Giro, Leshin Chew, Letzamani Lopez-Castillo, Navneet Riyat, and Samantha Wu.
Joseph Fry (external link) is the founder of Hapa Collaborative, an award winning landscape office in Vancouver. The studio focuses on placemaking, promoting multi-cultural literacy, and practising cross disciplinary collaboration. This talk was designed to complement the public exhibition at our Paul H. Cocker Gallery: the “Cornelia Hahn Oberlander: Genius Loci” exhibition about the work of the pioneering Canadian landscape designer as Hapa worked on some of Oberlander’s signature projects.
Alfred Waugh (external link) is the founder of Formline in Vancouver, an award winning design office that specializes in culturally and environmentally sensitive projects and has extensive experience with Indigenous cultural societies and educational institutions. Waugh is the first Indigenous Architect to receive Canada’s Governor’s General Medal in Architecture.
Waugh highlighted how the office utilizes sustainable strategies, building form and material use in a variety of projects and their work with Indigenous groups focusing on their relationship with community, culture, and the environment.
Johanna Hurme (external link) is a co-founder of award winning architects 5468796 in Winnipeg. The lecture presented recent work that engages with multi-family housing in various social, climatic and economic contexts. Johanna presented the firm's practice ethos which spreads far beyond the traditional practice model, necessitating an understanding of how the architect's role in challenging contexts must increasingly intersect with politics, economics, social activism, and cultural and scholarly research.
Martino Tattara (external link) is a co-founder of Brussels based design studio Dogma. His talk focused on recent projects in the office that challenge the concept of a home challenging programmatic, social, political and economic needs, norms and family structures. This talk was designed to complement the public exhibition at our Paul H Cocker Gallery: “The Longhouse” an installation of global typological drawing investigations of indigenous longhouse structures by Dogma featuring a scale model made by DAS students for the show.
Nima Javidi and Behnaz Assadi (external link) are founders of Toronto-based JA Architecture Studio. Iranian-Canadian architect Nima Javidi and landscape designer Behnaz Assadi formed the office to rethink the relationship between live and work, architecture and landscape; buildings and ecologies using a One to One frame.
Menno Kooistra (external link) is the founder of Elephant, an architecture studio based in Amsterdam. His talk focused on how data-driven design processes can lead to new and more sustainable building typologies. He presented a series of recent projects, highlighting the reuse of existing structures, to show how the firm uses data to enable the shift from traditional static buildings to sustainable and profitable architecture. This talk was generously sponsored by the Dutch Consulate.
Hiroto Kobayashi (external link) is a founder of Kobayashi Maki Design Workshop in Tokyo. His talk focused on the social contribution of architecture and urban design and he shared projects for disaster response and rural revitalization. Prior to the lecture, he involved students in an interactive design workshop called “Do It Anyway,” focused on using digital fabrication and making to promote social engagement.
In 2021-2022 the DAS Lecture Series was held online due to COVID-19, and the theme was social, political and environmental disruptions in architectural practice. Our five events featured global speakers from NYC, Montreal, Accra, and Rotterdam into the department to present diverse experiences, including an emerging practitioner, an architectural historian, and founders of a small office. Given the current state of a global health emergency, economic challenges, The events highlighted multi-disciplinary design methods featuring architects engaging with robotics, industrialized building methods, exhibition curation, urban infill designs, design publishing, and social and political advocacy.
The 2021-2022 lecture series was co-chaired by Will Galloway and Terri Peters, with support from students Marwa Sanad Abdul Hameed Al-Saqqar, Kira Phillips, Sadberk Agma, Julia Di Giorgio, Saroash Haider, Andrea Estarez, and Soma Khan.
Pascal Sablan is a US based Architect at Adjaye Architects in New York. She spoke about architecture as advocacy and her role as Founder and Executive Director of Beyond the Built Environment, a group that identifies contributions of women and BIPOC designers through exhibitions, lectures, and documentaries that testify to the provided value of their built work and its spatial impact.
Magdalena Miłosz (external link) is a trained architect and PhD Candidate at McGill in Montreal. Her area of expertise is the relationships in Canadian residential schools and settler architecture. Her talk looked at the role of the architecture profession in the genocidal history between the settler state and Indigenous peoples. Her work investigates how the design of residential schools mediated between a centralized bureaucracy and the communities and territories in which they were built, operating as a crucial component of settler colonialism.
Erandi Da Silva (external link) is a Sri Lankan-British-Canadian Architect and editor based in Accra, Ghana. Her lecture was about the role of architectural publishing and curation in architectural design practice. She spoke about the print journal Loké which she founded that examines the art of publishing, curating and making as an inclusive, cross-cultural, and global pursuit.
Leon Spikker (external link) is an emerging Dutch computational designer with a background in industrial design and architecture. He is co-founder of the architecture firm Studio RAP in Rotterdam and its spin-off RAP Technologies. In his talk he showed recent projects using new tools and workflows to utilize digital design and robotic fabrication in the creation of sustainable, affordable, mass produced homes.
Thomas Balaban and Jennifer Thorogood (external link) are architects and founders of Montreal studio T-B-A. The office was Canada’s official representation at the prestigious 17th Venice Biennale in Architecture in 2021 with Impostor Cities, a project about Canada’s architectural identity. Their talk discussed recent projects in the office, highlighting a series of small-scale contextual urban buildings and explored larger questions of what Canadian architectural identity can be, for whom, in what setting, now and in the future.
The Paul H. Cocker Gallery presented an exhibition on the history of social justice and protest People, Power, & the Park (organized by the Student EDIJ Gallery Committee) with a talk and demonstration by Indigenous Artist in Residence Michel Dumont. Research by the Belgian office Dogma on longhouses from many cultures and geographies, including the local Haudenosaunee longhouse, was shown in the gallery. In addition, the gallery co-hosted an exhibition with the Canada Excellence Research Hair in Migration and Integration. The exhibition, This is Evidence: Re-Picturing South Asian Migrant Men in Greece, focused on the stories and spaces of migration.
- The 2023 Collaborative Exercise focused on the architecture building and gathered student ideas on how to improve the spaces focusing on student wellbeing and connections.
- A spring workshop by Japanese architect and educator Hiroto Kobayashi, elaborated on the designs by working through prototypes for seating.
- Design-builds are also underway to turn the former 4th floor greenhouse into a student lounge.
DAS is working to increase and diversify its collaborations and partnerships with global universities to offer a more diverse range of travel and exchange opportunities for students, including the recently established exchange program with CEPT University, based in Ahmedabad, India.
- In 2022-23 the department welcomed exchange students from France, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, and Norway.
- A travel abroad fourth year option studio from DAS, in collaboration with the Politecnico di Bari, allowed students to travel to Bari and asked students to design housing for immigrant families.
The Curriculum Committee has put together a proposal that was approved by the Department Council to reduce the workload for first year students by removing the previously required courses ACS 104 and PCS 107. Three courses, including ASC 206, ASC 306, and ASC 406, have new course descriptions focusing more on non-western histories and building traditions. ASC 306 and ARC 821 have new content to reflect EDI objectives, and a town hall gathered student feedback about the rollout of these two courses.
Extracurricular projects provide experiential learning opportunities for students to collaborate with community groups on a range of initiatives.
- In 2022, students worked on a design-build at Camp Winston, addressing accessible spaces for neurobiologically diverse children while creating an animal paddock to support animals used in therapeutic activity for children with behavioural needs.
- In a fourth year studio, students worked with a community in Brampton on the design of a hospice facility.
The department held an open conversation and training session with faculty and instructors during the August 2022 faculty meeting on unconscious bias, and microaggressions.
The 2023 Collaborative Exercise included a workshop for all participating students on microaggressions hosted by the TMU Office of the Vice President, Equity and Community Inclusion (OVPECI).