Canada

Imagine Architecture is an online career exploratory studio for grade 10-12 students who are interested in architecture, design, and building a portfolio. These fun and intensive workshops will introduce students to the creative culture of design studio, which is at the core of the Architectural Studies curriculum.

The Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design is pleased to announce that the 2020-21 Frank Gehry International Visiting Chair in Architectural Design is Douglas Cardinal, OC, FRAIC, a renowned Canadian architect known both for his inspiring designs and for his advocacy for the rights and dignity of Indigenous peoples. Cardinal will give a series of four public lectures, in collaboration with the Daniels Faculty, throughout his appointment as Gehry Chair.

In this talk, Pamila Matharu and Lauren Fournier will be in conversation on the occasion of the launch of Fournier’s new book Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism (The MIT Press, 2021). The two will discuss ideas that Fournier takes up in the book, including the state of the “autotheoretical turn” in recent feminist art, the role that histories of intersectional feminist activism play in contemporary conversations and trends, the ethics of disclosure and exposure, and the relationship between autotheory, autofiction, and other terms, like auto-ethnography. The two will draw from their backgrounds as artists, writers, and curators involved in feminist organizing in Toronto and elsewhere to discuss the use of autobiographical materials in critical and conceptual work. Books will be available for purchase.

The Settler Colonial City Project is a research collective focused on the collaborative production of knowledge about cities on Turtle Island/Abya Yala/The Americas as spaces of ongoing settler colonialism, Indigenous survivance, and struggles for decolonization. Trained both as architects and as architectural historians, SCCP co-founders Andrew Herscher and Ana María León will discuss the work of the collective as an intersection of practice, research, and pedagogy. In light of current prompts for change in architectural curricula, they will problematize how institutions have embraced and conflated depoliticized notions of decolonization and anti-racism.

Marina Tabassum will share her research on the Meghna estuary and its impact on climate change coupled with a complex land inheritance system introduced by British Colonial rule that to date governs the dynamic landscape of the Ganges Delta. Marina will share the development of a modular mobile home unit to be distributed to landless families living in coastal areas.

The presentation will focus an indigenous approach to architecture that is based on a synthesis of cultural sensitivity and environmental responsibility. The purpose of the presentation is to describe a methodology to designing buildings that focuses on a holistic view of man's interconnectedness with the environment based on an Indigenous philosophical approach.

According to recent studies, there are currently more than 1,750,000 active podcasts available via myriad streaming platforms. Once occupying a small niche of the media, podcasting is now thoroughly mainstream; its meteoric rise has only accelerated thanks to the solitary production and consumption of media under the social isolation brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Co-moderated by Mitchell Akiyama and Neil Verma, Hearing Stories: Narrative Audio in Isolation invites two leading practitioners, Jana Winderen and Kaitlin Prest, to speak to what it means to create sonic art in this moment. We will discuss how sonic practices can be used to create community, to tell stories, and to address pressing political issues.