Featuring a diverse series of CEU-accredited Keynotes, Panels and Workshops, the Human/Nature conference talks will be complemented by social gatherings and networking opportunities, an immersive field trip organized in partnership with the Toronto Society of Architects, as well as exciting co-programming with the Architecture and Design Film Festival.

Julia Watson

Susan Carruth

Four world-leading designers will deliver keynote presentations. Our opening speaker is an acclaimed New York-based landscape designer and and author. Julia Watson is a leading proponent of what she describes as “LO–TEK,’ a design philosophy (and a best-selling book of the same name) that embraces site-specific, highly local strategies — adopted by Indigenous peoples around the globe — as a wellspring of contemporary design thinking.

To cap Day 1, Susan Carruth, a partner at 3XN/GXN, will deliver a talk examining the Copenhagen-based firm’s world-leading portfolio of low-carbon and recycled buildings. A leading specialist in behavioural design, Carruth will also explore GXN’s innovative research practice, which integrates material and environmental sustainability with a distinctly human-centred ethos.

Kongjian Yu

Tommaso Bitossi

On Day 2, the visionary founder of Beijing landscape firm Turenscape, Kongjian Yu will share insight from his globally renowned “Sponge Cities” concept of regenerative landscape design. Guided by a rigorous triple bottom line — which integrates environmental, economic and social benefit into every built project — he boasts a portfolio that includes the award-winning Fish Tail Park in Nanchang City and Tongnan Dafosi Wetland Park. He is also the winner of the 2023 Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize.

Finally, Tommaso Bitossi of Transsolar — the climate engineering company that has collaborated with firms including Renzo Piano Building Workshop, KPMB and MASS Design Group, to name a few — will explore how a synthesis of design and engineering can reshape our shared environments and our daily lives.

Our multi-perspective plenary panels bring together Canadian and international expertise for a global design audience. Acclaimed Vancouver-based Indigenous architect Alfred Waugh, together with Tsleil-Waututh Nation Councillor Dennis Thomas, will discuss a landmark project to redevelop the 90-acre ʔəy̓alməxʷ/Iy̓álmexw /Jericho Lands site in Vancouver’s West Point Grey neighbourhood as part of the ʔəy̓alməxʷ/Iy̓álmexw /Jericho Lands: Indigenous Urban Futures panel. In Forecast for Hotter Cities, meanwhile, our international panelists — including Rasmus Astrup of Danish landscape firm SLA, and Dorsa Jalalian of DIALOG — will share design-driven (and socio-political) strategies for mitigating rising urban temperatures.

La Quebradora Water Park in Mexico City, a landmark project by panel speaker Loreta Castro Reguera of Taller Capital. PHOTO: Aldo Díaz

How do we develop furniture and textiles for a cleaner planet? Featuring Caroline Cockerham of Cicil Rugs, Justin Beitzel of Common Object and Stephanie Lipp of MycoFutures, Circular Design for a Circular Economy will present ways of closing the loop through design, manufacturing, shipping, storage and end-of-life strategies.

Finally, The Green Public Realm, featuring Pat Hanson of Toronto’s gh3*, Loreta Castro Reguera of Mexico City’s Taller Capital, SpruceLab’s Sheila Boudreau, and Paul Kulig of Perkins&Will, will spotlight projects that make the most of our shared outdoor spaces.

Complementing our plenary keynotes and panels, 12 immersive and collaborative workshops will deep dive into specific projects and practices. Architects including affordable housing champion SmartDensity, net-zero civic design specialists specialists MJMA, and adaptive reuse innovators Giaimo will share their expertise across a range of typologies and context. Perkins&Will and KPMB will explore emerging tools for assessing carbon, and LGA Architectural Partners and MabelleArts will discuss the integration of community wellbeing and food security into design practice.

MJMA’s Churchill Meadows Community Centre is among the impressive case studies presented as part of the Human/Nature workshops. PHOTO: Scott Norwsorthy

Led by Gensler, a look at healthy, low-carbon interiors will explore strategies for combining wellbeing and sustainability in fit-outs, while the innovative duo of Arper and PaperShell will share their experiences using bio-based materials in furniture design. Tackling the public scale, the Lemay team will offer a look at Montreal’s public realm and transit infrastructure, which holds vital lessons for the rest of North America. What’s more, authors and thought leaders including American mass timber specialist Lindsey Wilkstrom and healthcare design visionary Tye Farrow will share the thinking that informed their acclaimed recent books.

***

More information about the AZURE Human/Nature is available here. Tickets are on sale now!

Human/Nature keynotes are sponsored by Keilhauer, Stone Tile and Italgraniti. Plenary panel sponsors are Ciot, Formica and Architek. Workshop sponsors are Ligne Roset, Scavolini, TAS, Ege Carpets, Mitrex, Andreu World and Arper. The TSA-led field trips are supported by Nienkämper. The social gathering sponsor is Urban Capital.

The conference is presented in partnership with George Brown College / Brookfield Sustainability Institute, MaRS, Lemay, Flash, GFI Investment Council Ltd., Instituto Italiano di Cultura Toronto, and Small Change Fund. It is supported by the City of Toronto.

The post Two Weeks To Go! AZURE’s Human/Nature Conference appeared first on Azure Magazine.

“What makes it important?” It was a simple question, and one that came from a place of seemingly genuine curiosity rather than doubt or skepticism. It threw me for a loop. I didn’t know how to answer, running through a rambling mental rolodex. The architect, Moshe Safdie, was just 24 years old, still a grad student, when he won the commission, a stark contrast to today’s conservative procurement culture. But come on, who wants to hear about procurement? Eventually, I stammered out something along these lines: The project was a capstone of Expo 67, distilling the era’s watershed sense of civic optimism within a futuristic form. And as anyone can see, it’s a unique-looking building — and a natural conversation-starter. 

I got a polite nod in return. I tried reaching for more: The project was also an attempt to integrate the form of a post-war American house (complete with a private green space) within a dense urban paradigm. As Safdie himself had put it, “for everyone a garden.” I felt a sense of relief — at least this was something. I can’t remember if we talked about anything else, but that was the end of architecture. It was a fleeting exchange, a conversation with a stranger I’d never see again. 

As time passed, the encounter increasingly felt like a metonym for a broader professional failure. I’d been an architectural journalist for almost a decade, but one of the rare occasions when someone invited me to explain design, I came up flat. Most of the time, people don’t ask. With answers like these, who can blame them? And to be honest, I wasn’t writing about architecture so much as around it. Measured in online readership, my most successful pieces tended to focus on the spatial and political organization of the built environment — whether via the revival of public housing, zoning codes, the rise of community land trusts, or the geography of online shopping. To be published in a magazine, it all had to look good, of course. But beyond immediately tangible material realities — like the carbon savings of adaptive reuse or ease of circulation — or the edict that form follows function, the question of what it all meant seldom involved aesthetics. And anyway, it’s a lot easier to get people excited or incensed about a new bike lane than about how a building looks.

Then I read Fredric Jameson. Best known for his seminal 1991 book Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism — expanded from a 1984 essay of the same name — the critic and political theorist was renowned for his analysis of art and literature through a historical lens, situating cultural expression within a macro-economic context. For Jameson, understanding a painting or a novel also meant understanding the economic order it came from, a process that then revealed — often surprising — political ideologies of the system that produced it. In particular, Jameson focused his attention to the aesthetic break from modernism that characterized the latter decades of the 20th century, arguing that the turn to historical pastiche, irony and fragmentation reflected the era’s post-industrial, neoliberal economy.   

The best known analysis is hinted on the book’s cover — and first articulated in the 1984 essay. Jameson establishes a dialectical comparison between Vincent Van Gogh’s Shoes and Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes. Van Gogh’s 1886 painting depicts a pair of worn-out work boots, bent out of shape, laces strewn, and deposited on a floor. We can practically picture “the whole object world of agricultural misery, of stark rural poverty, and the whole rudimentary human world of backbreaking peasant toil,” Jameson writes. Whatever backdrop we conjure, the artwork invites what Jameson describes as “hermeneutical” readings. The shoes aren’t just shoes, they are “a clue or a symptom of some vaster reality.” 

Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes tells a different story. Jameson describes the composition as “a random collection of dead objects,” shorn of the contextual depths of Van Gogh’s brush. And where Peasant Shoes can — like much of the artist’s oeuvre — be interpreted as a straightforward ode to the working class, the black background of Warhol’s 1980 painting resists such spatial politics. Floating as disembodied entities in space, the postmodern Diamond Dust Shoes are little more than objects to be admired. Inasmuch a material context can be gleaned in the darkness, it is the technological form of the film negative — the material of representation itself — rather than any lived world. Like the mechanical reproduction of film, the cluster of shoes is depicted as a collage of copies, becoming little more than an infinitely replicable representation. We can intuit nothing about the wearers or their lives.

Shoes, Van Gogh, 1886.

According to Jameson, stylistic differences between the two paintings are reflections of deeper socio-economic realities. While postmodernism frequently remains regarded as an ahistorical and playfully disembodied aesthetic, Jameson situated its roots in the system of “late capitalism.” Today, the term is popularly used as a synonym for neoliberalism — and its attendant erosion of the social welfare state — but it more specifically refers to the distinct but closely related rise of the post-industrial knowledge economy. For us consumers, visible wealth — if not real economic value — was increasingly accumulated through the trading desk and fax machine rather than the wheat field and the factory floor. At the same time, expanding global shipping networks fueled a new consumer economy, built on cheap labour in the global south and driven by debt, credit cards and computers here. (Jameson, incidentally, was himself a charmingly late adopter of technology, reportedly using both hands to navigate a mouse across the screen like a Ouija board). 

What about architecture? For Jameson, the built environment is a unique locus of ideology. Compared to a painting or novel, the architectural profession is more explicitly beholden to capital and finance, underscoring its connection to economics and ideology. And just as art moved from modernist minimalism and abstraction to Warhol commercialism, architecture evolved from Miesian simplicity and the International Style into eclectic symbolism and postmodern collage. But beyond the canon, the postmodern movement was more acutely reflected in the vernacular architectures famously celebrated by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown in their 1971 manifesto Learning From Las Vegas. For Venturi and Scott Brown, the legibility — and the sheer fun — of kitsch made it a salve against an elitist architectural culture. If Warhol could elevate everyday products like Campbell’s soup cans into art, then why shouldn’t exuberant truck stops and fast food tourist traps be celebrated as populist architecture?

In Jameson’s analysis, both soup cans and roadside spectacles reflect the same vapid celebration of consumer culture. The simulacra of a Las Vegas Sphinx or Eiffel Tower offer no incisive political parody — or statement about their predecessors — only the empty pastiche of playtime. Although he recognized the harms of modernist dogma and the originality of Venturi and Scott Brown’s arguments, Jameson warned that the disassociation of postmodern aesthetics was a hindrance to political consciousness. The theme park architecture of Las Vegas may be fun to behold, but the experience can be disorienting. 

The Westin Bonaventure Hotel in 2022. PHOTO: Another Believer (Creative Commons).

The criticism wasn’t reserved for vernacular — the metier of Jameson’s 1984 essay and 1991 book ranges from Disneyland to Frank Gehry. An analysis of John Portman’s Bonaventure Hotel in downtown Los Angeles translates the argument into a spatial logic. Completed in 1977, the high-rise hotel is arguably the Platonic epitome of Portman’s atrium typology. Inside, transparent glass elevators and dramatic escalators create a mechanized ballet. To fully experience the building, the visitor yields to its spatial logic — being at the heart of the action requires standing still and letting the moving parts do their work. “[T]he Bonaventura aspires to being a total space, a complete world, a kind of miniature city,” writes Jameson, likening the complex to Toronto’s Eaton Centre. Moreover, there is no clear circulation to the place, a fact reflected by its unsuccessful retail program. And while the building has four entrances, each feels tucked away and almost hidden. On the street, meanwhile, passersby are met by a glass wall that reflects the city back on itself. 

The Westin Bonaventure interior in 2022. PHOTO: Another Believer (Creative Commons).

Like so many Las Vegas attractions, the Bonaventure proved an enduringly popular tourist destination. It appeared in film, too, from 1990s dad thrillers like In the Line of Fire and True Lies to Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar and the recently released A24 cult horror film MaXXXine. Yet, the Los Angeles hotel seemingly replicated the same urban hostility of its despised International Style predecessors. Here, Jameson elucidates a crucial difference. Le Corbusier’s doctrinal brand of modernism asked us to cede the older “fallen city” in exchange for a promised utopia, but the postmodern world lacks such overt ideology, and is instead “content to ‘let the fallen city fabric continue to be in its being.’”

The seemingly unstructured form of postmodern culture is a political reality in itself. If the artwork is detached and placeless or the building is disorienting, its genesis can be found in our broader inability to navigate the “great global multinational and decentred communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects,” writes Jameson. 

Over 30 years after the book’s 1991 publication, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism remains a touchstone of literary and critical theory. Released a year later, Francis Fukuyama’s massively influential The End of History saw the conclusion of the Cold War as an emphatic terminus: Western liberal democracy won. It is tempting to read postmodern thought in this vein, too, with all of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomes and differences spreading out into randomized infinities in a world no longer bound by dialectical struggle. Yet, Jameson effectively wrestled the postmodern genie back into the bottle of history. Though seemingly liberated from ideology and order, postmodern form was itself the product of a socio-economic system. History keeps coming. 

For Jameson himself, the critique of postmodern culture forms a mere chapter in an astonishingly rich body of work. Earlier in his career, Marxism and Form (1971) and The Political Unconscious (1981) established the groundwork for a Marxist reading of aesthetics; the latter book famously opens with the admonishment to “always historicize,” and argues that the political meaning of art — and architecture — typically resides beyond the creator’s conscious intentions. Though Jameson did not pioneer historicism as a mode of criticism, he arguably pushed it further than any other architectural thinker. Together with Manfredo Tafuri, Jameson shaped a Marxist understanding of built form for the 21st century. And while both critics saw architecture as a reflection of history and capitalism, Jameson — foremost a literary philosopher — saw the potential of art to offer hints of a better world. 

It all changed the way I think about design and culture. Reading Jameson’s descriptions of Portman’s hotel and Frank Gehry’s Los Angeles home, my thoughts turned to my childhood in 1990s Prague. Then and now, Gehry’s Dancing House was the building of the decade. Initiated in the wake of the Velvet Revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the complex was built as an office for a Dutch insurance company and completed in 1996. Instantly recognizable for its asymmetric shape and kinetic rhythm, it was always obvious that the building was a symbol of a new world order and Czechia’s hopeful place within it. Not for nothing, the Soviets never built anything like it.  

The Dancing House in Prague. PHOTO: Danny Alexander Lettkemann (Creative Commons).

Together with local partner Vlado Milunić, Gehry explained that the dance between the building’s two volumes — nicknamed Fred and Ginger — represents the transition from a more static Communist existence into a dynamic western one. Yet, a broader historic view reveals deeper ideological truths. Reflecting the scale and window rhythm of its Baroque and Art Deco neighbours, the design creates a sense of continuity with its pre-Communist surroundings. There is an obvious aesthetic departure, but one that clearly picks up on the context of historic Prague. 

It is a dialogue between the handsomely restored relics of centuries past and a form that beckons the new millennium. To my mind, cohesion between the varied neighbouring buildings — Dancing House sits on a prominent corner lot — implies a natural and even inevitable evolution, suggesting that Czechia was always destined to be part of the West, and that newly introduced forms of capitalism find a local precedent in the pre-Communist era. Not coincidentally, it is a visual dialogue that omits the Soviet-era apartment blocks that house the majority of the city’s population. If the 19th century was always destined to evolve into the 21st, what happened in between was an aberration. Compared to Gehry’s own symbolic reading, a historicist view of aesthetics offers a politically and culturally richer understanding of the building and what it means. Form can tell us something — even something surprising — about the world we live in. 

Crucially, following Jameson’s school of thought allows us to translate aesthetic and cultural paradigms into a more broadly intelligible language. Although the complexity of theory is often viewed as an obstacle to public understanding of design, it can also reveal a bigger picture. You don’t need to know much about architecture — or even be interested in it — to appreciate material political implications.

After trying to parse the meaning of Dancing House, I found myself fixated on Canadian chef Susur Lee. When my family moved from Prague to Toronto, Lee was at the height of his powers, leading the trend of fusion cuisine that swept the city. Was the food great? I couldn’t tell — just like so many of us can’t tell if a building is any good. I’ve never known much about fine dining, and I don’t have a particularly refined palette. I didn’t really understand it in a culinary sense. Yet, after reading Jameson, I tried to grasp it as a cultural logic within a historic framework. Combining elements of East Asian street food and traditional French techniques in a relaxed North American setting, Lee’s gastronomy reflected Toronto’s emergence as a proudly diverse, cosmopolitan city. For the first time, I felt like I got it.

Fredric Jameson.

Even at the end of his life, Fredric Jameson remained endlessly productive, releasing three new books, including a forthcoming posthumous title, in 2024 alone. He died at the age of 90 on September 22, leaving behind a rich and influential legacy of thought. Even though a Jameson essay will almost inevitably leave me brushing up on my Adorno and Althusser, his work unfailingly retained a sense of wit and honesty, combining an elevated academic language with conversational and humorous moments, all supported on a deftly intricate scaffold of storytelling. “He would always use this lecture-like technique, which I imitate a lot, of introducing some concepts or texts at the beginning of the essay and then sticking a pin in them, trusting the reader to hold that thought — it’ll come back, often like a magic key, later,” writes Kate Wagner in The Nation.  

So anyway, back to Habitat 67. What do we see through the lens of history? Built at the height of the Cold War, the project can be understood as the expression of dialectical struggle. In the post-war decades, the Soviet Union launched a momentous building campaign, delivering a scale of housing that lifted millions out of poverty. It was incumbent on the American-led west to imagine a response — one that combined the scale of the Soviet Project while celebrating the culture of individualism and freedom that defined American life. These competing imperatives are synthesized in the form of Habitat 67, which meets the scale of a Soviet housing block while expressing the individual presence of every family home. Although it never spurred a viable paradigm for mass construction, its form elucidates a complex ideological narrative — one that tells us something important, and something surprising, about the state of the world it came from.

The post Fredric Jameson and the Meaning of Architecture appeared first on Azure Magazine.

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According to media outlets such as USA Today, the inclusion of breakdancing in the Olympics was a strategy to “appeal to younger fans and add an urban flair to the Summer Games.” In focusing on including breakdancing to reach new demographics, a fundamental question went unasked: Can a public space ritual and performance, emerging from a specific ethno-racial, class, and cultural context, become an Olympic sport? 

The answer may have been absolutely. After all, most sports emerge from specific place-based and cultural contexts. For example, cricket finds its roots in south-east England and is now one of the most popular sports played in India and Pakistan, both former colonies of the British empire. Basketball was invented by a Canadian residing in the United States of America, and today, the sport is largely dominated by African American players, in part due to the accessibility of a ball and hoop. The historical connections between sport, place and culture are well documented. However, negating the spatial and cultural aspects of breakdancing at this year’s Olympic competition created the conditions for chaos. 

In the fall of 2021, my placemaking practice — located at the nexus of urban planning and social justice — was contracted by the City of Toronto to develop a proposal and high-level program framework to guide the development of the City’s first-ever cultural district program. I opened the proposal by referencing Hip Hop because I wanted to highlight the complex dimensions of culture beyond a traditional performative sense, and because I am a part of the Hip Hop generation. I wrote: 

Hip Hop emanates from the inner city in the early 1970s during the post-industrial era amid economic decline and seismic political shifts, disproportionately impacting racialized inner-city communities. Youth, like DJ Kool Herc who is lauded as the “Father of Hip Hop,” flooded the New York City streets, searching for a platform for collective expression and opportunity. With its emphasis on the drumbeat and elongated break, Hip Hop created a musical breath for rapping, and other interrelated elements such as breakdancing, graffiti, entrepreneurism, community values and a new urban dialect. It transcended the bounds of artmaking — its breakbeat was a political breath within the margins.

The people who infused life into breakdancing, and Hip Hop more broadly, were primarily of African descent along with Latinx people who co-shaped its culture alongside them within their communities. Like all Hip Hop elements, breakdancing was more than a sport or performance. In some instances, breakdancing battles diffused conflicts that could have become physical, and some young men, like the guys from my ‘hood, breakdanced on the streets for money to purchase lunch or help out their mothers. 

Back when I was growing up, breakdancing was a kinetic language and precious gift between people who lived in public housing communities, and it was a way of being seen and boldly asserting personal value beyond the confines of those same communities. Whether we danced or not, it was a part of our place-based identity and pride. 

Since that time, breakdancing, and Hip Hop more broadly, have become regarded as a universal artform, which is fitting given its early message of love, unity and community. However, it has always been place-centred, whether at the hyper-local block level or bi-national level, with explicit regional distinctions. Also, the most respected and authentic artists practicing Hip Hop or any of its inter-related expressions, tend to have lived experiences of the margins — low-income ‘hoods, trailer parks and Indigenous reservations. Rachael Gunn claims to have an academic understanding of the “cultural politics” of breakdancing. However, regardless of racial identity, having an embodied, community-centred understanding of breakdancing is paramount. 

But again, this issue isn’t about Rachael Gunn. 

The Olympics’ narrow framing of breakdancing as simply sport is indicative of a much larger institutional and individual pattern with decoupling Black cultural expressions from Black bodies and Black communities. This phenomenon is older than redlining and as current as the forces of gentrification erasing Black people from their culturally rich communities. Due to the transatlantic slave trade and the proprietorship of the plantation, Black people are often deemed placeless. As a result, individuals of all identities regularly erase and fail to respectfully attribute Black cultural practices and the places that make them possible. There isn’t a broader understanding that these practices — and even the fraught places they are created within — are why Black culture wields such distinct popular potency. 

While it is exciting to share, experience and embrace each other’s cultures, acknowledging places of origin and the people who poured their lifeblood into cultural expressions is crucial. Failing to extend this basic form of respect to all people has consequences far greater than online vitriol and embarrassing memes. Specifically, the consequences for Black communities include significant Black cultural sites being excluded from heritage designations, disproportionate displacement of Black businesses amid urban revitalization projects and lack of investment in Black cultural hubs. While a horrendous — and for some comedic — Olympic performance seems trivial and perhaps unrelated to these prevalent placemaking issues, they are symptomatic of the exact same systemic pattern. 

Just as most municipalities lack the systemic processes and policies to counteract centuries of spatialized anti-Blackness, the Olympics also lacked systems to address the same. From the woefully incomplete framing of the introduction of breakdancing as an inaugural Olympic sport to the glaring lack of representation among the judges — during both the qualifiers and the main event — there was inadequate cultural infrastructure to support success. The care wasn’t taken to build a unifying bridge between the ‘hood and the Olympic stage. What resulted was an all too predictable invisibility and display of unhealthy spatial entitlement. This was the real problem behind this year’s Olympic breakdancing debacle. 

***

Jay Pitter, MES, is an award-winning placemaker, adjunct urban planning professor and author whose practice mitigates growing divides in cities across North America. Her forthcoming books, Black Public Joy and Where We Live, will be published by McClelland & Stewart, Penguin Random House Canada.

The post The Olympic Breakdancing Scandal Through a Spatial Lens appeared first on Azure Magazine.

While Chen and León’s work with the TSA makes them an ever-present part of the city’s architectural scene, their new firm Make Good Projects draws on the duo’s eclectic career paths and life experience to redraw the boundaries of design practice. Chen, a multiple Juno Award-winning filmmaker and producer turned Certified Passive House Designer, and León, an erstwhile political staffer and public servant who was recently named one of the youngest-ever RAIC Fellows, make for a refreshingly unconventional pair of architects. Appropriately, Make Good Projects is an emphatically unconventional studio.

The TSA’s Queer Spaces of Toronto at Pride.

Launched in 2023, the duo’s nascent firm integrates architectural and interior design with everything from storytelling and film production to graphic design, social media, research and writing projects — all with an emphasis on sustainability. It makes for a seemingly haphazard grab bag of services, but the multi-faceted identity is deeply intentional. Just as the TSA is committed to expanding the boundaries of architectural culture to engage broader publics, Make Good Projects leverages the pair’s unique skillsets to push design beyond the narrow confines of industry norms. How does that work? I caught up with Chen and León to find out.

I’ve known you both for years. For every talk or Toronto event I’ve ever been to over the past decade, the TSA has probably been involved with a good 70 per cent of them. But then, when you launched Make Good Projects last year, I was surprised and kind of embarrassed to realize I knew relatively little about you as practitioners. For architects, who love nothing more than talking about their own work, that’s pretty unusual. So how’d you get into design?

Chen’s film and photography work forms a crucial part of the firm’s practice. PHOTO: Yianni Tong.

Those are both atypical backgrounds for architects. The profession has a — probably somewhat toxic — mythos, where design is elevated to a sort of lifelong calling. And it’s pretty full of people who’ve never done anything else. How do your backgrounds shape your relationship to practice?

Developed in collaboration with Victoria Taylor Landscape Architect, a design by Make Good Projects received an Honourable Mention at the OAA Landscape Reconnect competition.

Before starting Make Good Projects, both of you worked for a variety of design firms. How did those experiences shape your outlook? And what prompted you to start your own practice?

León on site at a laneway house by Make Good Projects.

Maybe we’re taking small steps to get there. Make Good Projects broke ground on a laneway rental home at the turn of the year, and you’ve worked with artist Safoura Zahedi to create a short film about her “Journey Through Geometry” installation. The firm has also produced video work for the TSA’s portfolio and resume clinic, and was recently awarded an Honourable Mention for the OAA’s Landscape Reconnect competition. How do these projects reflect your ethos?

The firm is nearing completion on a laneway rental property in downtown Toronto.

***

Make Good’s Kurtis Chen will be speaking at a workshop on adaptive reuse and low-carbon retrofit strategies as part of our Human/Nature conference. AZURE is also partnering with the TSA for an immersive field trip across the Toronto waterfront during the two-day event.

Want to learn more? AZURE’s Human/Nature Conference takes place at the George Brown College Waterfront Campus on October 24-25. More information is available via our dedicated website. Tickets are on sale now!

The post Make Good Projects: Architecture as a Public Service appeared first on Azure Magazine.

This October, at AZURE’s Human/Nature climate conference, he will lead a workshop that dives deeper into these concepts through project case studies, including his proposals for a mixed-use archipelago park inspired by Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons and a Montessori school in Toronto.

***

Does the mind stop at the periphery of the skull? As we will discover, recent research shows that the mind extends well beyond this limit and through the boundaries of the skin and body, forming close interconnections with the surrounding environment. These relationships play a significant role in the health of our extended minds and inform the role architecture plays in enhancing mind health.

We commonly assume that thinking only happens inside the mind, as though the mind were disembodied. As we have seen, however, the mind is tuned in to the internal sensations of the body and senses the interoceptive messages the body communicates, the proprioceptive messages at the surface of the body and from its kinetic movement in space, and the exteroceptive messages of the surrounding environment in relationship to the body. While the brain is housed in the skull, its perceptual system, the mind, extends to include the entire body as well as past the edges of the body’s surface area. The mind perceives what is occurring around us and communicates this information back to the brain for interpretation and to determine next steps.

Andy Clark and David Chalmers, cognitive philosophers at the University of Sussex, first proposed the idea that the mind is embodied in a 1998 paper titled “The Extended Mind.” Contrary to the common belief that the mind stops at the “demarcation of the skin and the skull,” they argued that the mind extends throughout the body and beyond to the surrounding environment. They proposed “an active externalism, based on the active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes.”

Embreathment, an emerging concept in embodied cognition, is the use of one’s physiological breath during immersive experiences to enhance presence in the moment and body awareness, examples of which include body scan meditation and progressive muscle relaxation. This awareness can be used to reduce claustrophobia, anxiety, and other negative cognitions by enhancing agency, hopefulness, and interoception in situations where one’s ability to act is restricted, such as in medical MRI suites. Using breath awareness to increase one’s sense of calm and control has been shown to decrease one’s sense of the symptoms of anxiety disorders. We will explore the application of embreathment further in chapter 13.

Ramp-step stairs communicate various bodily affordances for the user. Robson Square, Vancouver, British Columbia, by Arthur Erickson.

The Extended Mind Thesis

Clark and Chalmers’s extended mind thesis was further developed by researchers in embodied cognition, a field that explores the role of the body in thinking. Exteroceptive situated cognition studies how our minds sense beyond our bodies and how the places we inhabit influence our thoughts. Distributed cognition studies how we think with and through others and how we maintain healthy social relationships with the people in our surrounding communities. We don’t just think in our heads; we think in and through our bodies by internalizing our social interactions and the surrounding built environment. This has important implications for how architecture and design relate to mind health.

Affordances

In 1966, American environmental psychologist James J. Gibson coined the term affordances, by which he meant the opportunities the environment provides or furnishes to the animal (and, by extension, to the human being). When we apply this to architecture, we understand that different building forms offer different natural bodily affordances – opportunities – by communicating messages through implicit suggestions of movement, actions, and behaviours. One way of doing this is by enhancing curiosity and encouraging the physical exploration and discovery of a space. Movement through a space also creates a reciprocal effect in our minds. For example, we visualize how we might climb a set of stairs, twist a door handle, move across a threshold, or walk down a curved corridor to discover what is around the bend. Some of the best experiences we have with built spaces involve much more than observing them from a fixed point. Great places nurture and encourage our bodies to explore them through haptic engagement – that is, touch – which allows us to mediate our lived experience with the wider world. As architect and author Sarah Robinson rightly observes, “We cannot touch without being touched in return.”

The movement of our bodies through the spaces we inhabit, together with our haptic interaction with environments, influences how we think and feel about ourselves. It spurs imagination, memories, and past associations in our minds and increases awareness. Paraphrasing French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s description of the paintings of Cézanne, Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa describes the task of architecture as the need “to make visible how the world touches us.”

Place and Space

When we discuss perception and the importance of our bodies moving in space in the act of perception, it is important to differentiate between the terms place and space. Space is a Descartian concept based on mapping Cartesian coordinates of objects in space, in which the relationship of one object to another never changes but is fixed and defined. It is locational, geographic. Place, on the other hand, is the phenomenological experience of space, in which the perception of objects in relationship to each other, and to one’s own body, is continuously in flux due to ever-changing conditions. Place gives space cultural and personal meaning – it is informed by human learning, memory, and emotional experience. Space exists independent of us and our interpretations, whereas we make place.

Clifford Tandy’s isovist concept, where the volume of any space is perceived from a given point of an individual. PHOTO: Ben Doherty

James J. Gibson, who developed the concept of affordances, was also an important thinker in the realm of visual perception. He explored the relationship between people and their surroundings, based on their perceptual cone of view linked to perspective and geometry. British landscape architect Clifford Tandy expanded on Gibson’s work in the late 1960s when he developed the concept of the isovist, which is the volume of space that is visible from a given point of known location in space by an individual. The isovist is one approach that can be used to describe spatial properties from a beholder-centred perspective.

Multimodal Bodily Experiences

Our perception of the places we inhabit, however, is not just based on visual perception. It is multimodal. The bodily experience of moving through a space affects all our senses. How we relate to an environment – and make sense of it – is a direct result of how we experience the world. How do we connect on a behavioral and biological level to our surroundings? The neurophysiological discovery in 1996 by Vittorio Gallese and Giacomo Rizzolatti, called neural mirroring, has shown that we model, or feel into, the same behavior or feeling we observe in another person. For example, if someone smiles, we are wired to reflect or mirror that same action back. Similarly, when we look at a painting with pronounced brushstrokes or a sculpture with prominent carving marks, our mind mimics the movements of the artist at work. The same is true when we watch the movements of a dancer or athlete.

Primary, Motor, and Metaphoric Affordances

Even as we perceive the materials and physical elements used to construct a building, we also connect with the human intentions of its architects, engineers, and builders that can continue to radiate for centuries. We physically manifest the sense of astonishment and exaltation we feel in the Pantheon in Rome through a tilted-back head, wide open eyes and mouth, and expanded chest cavity, which simultaneously reflect the thoughts, desires, and intentions of those who conceived and constructed this iconic building nearly 2,000 years ago. We sense all this because of the way the Pantheon’s design invites us to interact with and use it. In neuroscientific terms, this is known as the primary affordance of an object, whereas what it communicates can be both a motor affordance – a door handle that offers clues as to how the hand should push, pull, or turn it – or a metaphoric affordance, such as a lofty dome that communicates upward motion but doesn’t result in an immediate action beyond drawing our eyes and heads up toward it.

Affordances encourage an embodied simulation or experiential understanding of what we should do with an object or place through the motor and perceptual actions they prompt. In so doing, this also contributes to a sense of connection with our environment, expressed as a sense of coherence within us.

***

More information about AZURE’s Human/Nature conference – including our full roster of speakers, descriptions of talks, as well as the agenda — is available via our dedicated website. Tickets are on sale now!

Human/Nature plenary panel sponsors are Ciot, Formica and Architek.

Workshops are sponsored by TAS, Arper and Mitrex, and the social gathering sponsor is Urban Capital.

The conference is presented in partnership with George Brown College / Brookfield Sustainability Institute, MaRS, Lemay, Flash, GFI Investment Council Ltd., Instituto Italiano di Cultura Toronto, and Small Change Fund.

The post Where Does the Mind Stop and the Rest of the World Begin? appeared first on Azure Magazine.

Featuring a diverse series of CEU-accredited Keynotes, Panels and Workshops, the Human/Nature conference talks will be complemented by social gatherings and networking opportunities, an immersive field trip organized in partnership with the Toronto Society of Architects, as well as exciting co-programming with the Architecture and Design Film Festival. While further details about the programming — also detailed on our dedicated Human/Nature website — are set to be shared in the coming weeks, we take a detailed look at our full series of talks below:

Julia Watson

Susan Carruth

Four world-leading designers will deliver the plenary keynotes, helping set the stage for the myriad discussions that will animate the conference. Our opening speaker, Julia Watson, is an acclaimed New York-based landscape designer and and author. Watson is a leading proponent of what she describes as “LO–TEK,’ a design philosophy (and a best-selling book of the same name) that embraces site-specific, highly local strategies — adopted by Indigenous peoples around the globe — as a wellspring of contemporary design thinking. Susan Carruth, a partner at 3XN/GXN, will deliver a talk examining the Copenhagen-based firm’s world-leading portfolio of low-carbon and recycled buildings. A leading specialist in behavioural design, Carruth will also explore GXN’s innovative research practice, which integrates material and environmental sustainability with a distinctly human-centred ethos.

Kongjian Yu

Tommaso Bitossi

The visionary founder of Beijing landscape firm Turenscape, Kongjian Yu will share insight from his globally renowned “Sponge Cities” concept of regenerative landscape design. Guided by a rigorous triple bottom line — which integrates environmental, economic and social benefit into every built project — he boasts a portfolio that includes the award-winning Fish Tail Park in Nanchang City and Tongnan Dafosi Wetland Park. He is also the  winner of the 2023 Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize. Finally, Tommaso Bitossi of Transsolar — the climate engineering company that has collaborated with firms including Renzo Piano Building Workshop, KPMB and MASS Design Group, to name a few — will explore how a synthesis of design and engineering can reshape our shared environments and our daily lives.

Our multi-perspective plenary panels bring together Canadian and international expertise for a global design audience. Acclaimed Vancouver-based Indigenous architect Alfred Waugh and Tsleil-Waututh Nation Councillor Dennis Thomas, will discuss a landmark project to redevelop the 90-acre ʔəy̓alməxʷ/Iy̓álmexw /Jericho Lands site in Vancouver’s West Point Grey neighbourhood as part of the ʔəy̓alməxʷ/Iy̓álmexw /Jericho Lands: Indigenous Urban Futures panel. In Forecast for Hotter Cities, meanwhile, our international panelists — including Rasmus Astrup of Danish landscape firm SLA, and Dorsa Jalalian of DIALOG — will share design-driven (and socio-political) strategies for mitigating rising urban temperatures.

La Quebradora Water Park in Mexico City, a landmark project by panel speaker Loreta Castro Reguera of Taller Capital. PHOTO: Aldo Díaz

How do we develop furniture and textiles for a cleaner planet? Featuring Caroline Cockerham of Cicil Rugs and Justin Beitzel of COMMON OBJECT, Circular Design for a Circular Economy will present ways of closing the loop through design, manufacturing, shipping, storage and end-of-life strategies. Finally, The Green Public Realm, featuring Pat Hanson of Toronto’s gh3*, Loreta Castro Reguera of Mexico City’s Taller Capital, SpruceLab’s Sheila Boudreau, as well as Paul Kulig of Perkins&Will, will spotlight projects that make the most of our shared outdoor spaces.

Complementing our plenary keynotes and panels, 12 immersive and collaborative workshops will bring attendees up close to the grand and granular issues facing practitioners. These focused yet inspiring deep dives into problem-solving span the breadth of the design disciplines.

Architects, including affordable housing champion Naama Blonder, net-zero civic design specialists specialists MJMA, and adaptive reuse innovators Giaimo, will share their expertise across a range of typologies and context, as well as the emerging tools for assessing carbon (presented by KPMB and Perkins&Will), and the integration of community wellbeing and food security into design practice (presented in a workshop by LGA Architectural Partners and MabelleArts).

MJMA’s Churchill Meadows Community Centre is among the impressive case studies presented as part of the Human/Nature workshops. PHOTO: Scott Norwsorthy

Led by Gensler, a look at healthy, low-carbon interiors, will explore strategies for combining wellbeing and sustainability in fit-outs, while the innovative team at Arper will share their experiences using bio-based materials in furniture design. Tackling the public scale, the Lemay team will offer a look at Montreal’s public realm and transit infrastructure, which holds vital lessons for the rest of North America. What’s more, authors and thought leaders including American mass timber specialist Lindsey Wilkstrom and healthcare design visionary Tye Farrow will share the thinking that informed their acclaimed recent books.

***

More information about the AZURE Human/Nature – including our full roster of speakers, descriptions of talks, as well as the agenda — is available via our dedicated conference website. Tickets are on sale now!

Human/Nature plenary panel sponsors are Ciot, Formica and Architek.

Workshops are sponsored by TAS, Arper and Mitrex, and the social gathering sponsor is Urban Capital.

The conference is presented in partnership with George Brown College / Brookfield Sustainability Institute, MaRS, Lemay, Flash, GFI Investment Council Ltd., Instituto Italiano di Cultura Toronto, and Small Change Fund.

The post Keynotes, Panels, Workshops: Previewing AZURE’s Human/Nature Conference appeared first on Azure Magazine.

Setting the mood, MC Lucia Cesaroni – an opera singer who has performed on the world’s most lauded stages – serenaded the crowd. And our Guest of Honour, the landscape architect Julie Bargmann, spoke of the ideals that she returns to again and again in her groundbreaking projects.

And AZURE Editor Elizabeth Pagliacolo introduced the audience to our next big event: the Human/Nature conference, taking place October 24 and 25 at the George Brown Waterfront Campus.

Journey Through Geometry, this year’s featured gala installation, was created by Safoura Zahedi. The reflective fractal sculpture reflects the architect-artist’s yearlong research into the prevalent patterns of Islamic architecture.

The winners of the AZ Awards 2024 took home a trophy designed by juror Evan Jerry, of Studio Anansi, made with upcycled marble sourced from architecture project offcuts.

Throughout the Brick Works, the AZ Awards partners – Alumilex, Keilhauer and Cosentino – and sponsors Technogym and Colombo showed off new offerings, which guests could explore while enjoying special wines from Niagara-on-the-Lake’s Stratus Vineyards.

Among the guests of the AZ Awards 2024 Gala was Stanley Sun of Mason Studio (centre)

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Stratus provided the fine wines that guests enjoyed during the Gala.

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The team of Cosentino, an AZ Awards Gala partner.

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Artist-curator (and AZ Awards Gala volunteer) Lukus Toane and architect Anna Kao.

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Members of the AZURE team, from left to right: Sophie Sobol, Sydney Shilling, Kendra Jackson, Elizabeth Pagliacolo, Brian Wong, Conner Palomba, Tori Rapp, Mahasti Eslahjou and Stefan Novakovic.

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A guest photographing Journey Through Geometry, Safoura Zahedi’s installation.

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Architect-artist Safoura Zahedi with MCM’s Michael Kovalcik.

7/25

Technogym showed off its latest fitness machines.

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Colombo’s various hardware styles were also on view.

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A guest happily seated on Keilhauer’s Lull lounges.

10/25

Among the evening’s winners, Lateral Office, Teeple Architects and the Inuit Design Advisory Council took home the award for Best Concept; Lateral’s Lola Sheppard accepted the award.

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The team of Frontier accepted the award for Best in Experiential Graphic Design.

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University of Cambridge student Xidian Wang won the Best in Social Good category for her project, New Domesticity.

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Temitope Akinsiku, centre, led the team that won the A+ Student Award for Sabon Gida, Sabon Farko – “Home After Crisis”.

14/25

Partisans, represented by Teddy Shropshire, won the People’s Choice in Lighting Schemes for Toronto restaurant Gusto 501.

15/25

WXY’s Claire Weisz (middle) and Farida Abu-Bakare (right) received a People’s Choice award for their Palaver Bench; later in the evening, they won both the PC nod and the jury award in Environmental Leadership for RISE UP, a land stewardship project in Queens, NY.

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PUBLIC WORK took home the award in Urban Design, Unbuilt Developments for its Steelport vision for Hamilton.

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Nick Savage (Superkül and MCM) with architects Neno Kovacevic (Arcadis) and Uros Novakovic (Office OU).

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The team of Vogt, one of the Gala sponsors.

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The team of Dark Tools, one of the Gala sponsors.

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Tiktok’s Karen Kang, DesignAgency’s Allen Chan and his spouse, Allison McColeman.

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Lightform’s COO Bobby Buchkowsky and account executive Kaitlin Hegarty.

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Jenna Allain and Bahar Ghaemi, the Creative Director of Products at Yabu Pushelberg, which took top prize in the Single-Piece Furniture category.

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PR powerhouses Lisa Barnes and Lindsay Singer.

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Bellosound provided the tunes as the party continued into the night.

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The 2024 AZ Awards is presented by Alumilex, Cosentino and Keilhauer and sponsored by Colombo Design America and Technogym. Gala sponsors are George Brown College’s Brookfield Sustainability Institute, Dark Tools, Landscape Forms, Scavolini and  Vogt.

Media Partners: Archello, ArchDaily, Archilovers, Archinect, Archiproducts, The Architect’s Newspaper, Architonic, Bustler, Design Week Mexico, v2com newswire and World-Architects.

The post Scenes from the AZ Awards 2024 Gala appeared first on Azure Magazine.

In this recent interview, Vladimir Belogolovsky, who curated an exhibition on Ambasz’s oeuvre in 2018, reconnected with the architect about one project in particular: the indelible Casa de Retiro Espiritual. The private home meets land-art monument is shown throughout this conversation via the romantic, mainly sepia-toned photography of Michele Alassio.

Vladimir Belogolovsky: When you talk about your work, you use such words and phrases as “eternity, invention, fables, rituals, ceremonies and processions, a stage set, magical garments and gestures, celebration of human majesty, primitive and ancient, timeless appearance, giving poetic form to the pragmatic, and the search of spiritual home.” How else would you describe your work, and what kind of architecture do you try to achieve?

You designed your Casa de Retiro Espiritual in 1975. It instantly found fame through numerous publications a quarter of a century before it was finally built. How did its image come to you?

Sorry, I promised not to ask you personal questions.

A photographer, Michele Alassio documented the house poetically and in great detail. I spoke to him last year in Venice; he compared the casa to a lighthouse.

You have said that you always believed that architecture is a myth-making act and that your work starts with inventing fables. Was there a fable that originated the Casa de Retiro Espiritual or did you write one later?

They stand the test of time.

When the image of the house came to you, was it because you were thinking about designing a house at the time?

Was it the first house you ever designed?

You have said, “We must conceive an architecture that symbolizes a pact of reconciliation between nature and human construction; I understand architecture as the search for a spiritual home.” Why did you originally imagine your Casa de Retiro in Cordoba, Spain?

The site is enormous. How did you discover it?

What about the orientation of the house? Where does the balcony point?

Describing the house, you once said, “I wanted to ‘eliminate’ architecture.” What did you mean by that?

Now you are telling me a fable to describe the house better, right? [Laughs.]

What a beautiful way of putting it.

And the walls don’t support the roof either.

The two walls that mark the entrance to the house signify a gesture of a welcoming open-handed offering. Am I right?

There is symbolism that’s attached to them, nevertheless.

Another important reason for the two walls is to carry people to the balcony.

I was there, and the difference between how I felt on the ground and 10 metres in the air is essential. I would add that it was quite frightening, even though I am normally not afraid of heights. Also, you see the house under your feet.

The water was running, alright, and I had to hold on to those wet handrails really hard. [Laughs.] Just by looking at the marble pavement below, you suddenly realize how fragile your life is.

I understand that the front door, the balcony, and the beams along the veranda were all reclaimed from demolished houses in the area.

What did you mean when you said, “I desire that the buildings speak with a loud voice but with a closed mouth.”

When I look at the house, I sense some echoes of Alhambra as far as historical references are concerned, and then there are parallels to some of the projects by Le Corbusier, Louis Barragan, and John Hejduk. Are these conscious references?

It sounds like the design process is somewhat out of your control. Don’t you work on the images that come? They don’t come fully detailed, right?

There is not much furniture in the house. Why is that?

That’s what I mean: the furniture is made of glass. Isn’t it odd?

When I was in the house, it did not look like anyone had ever lived there. Wasn’t the intention to make it your home?

Have you lived in the house?

Why then did you need to build it?

By then you had built so many other buildings. You didn’t have to prove anything.

Have you ever climbed those steps to the balcony?

What did you think?

The post “The Place Where Architecture Was Invented.” Emilio Ambasz on His Casa de Retiro Espiritual appeared first on Azure Magazine.

Compared to Roly Poly (which is more a sculptural statement piece than a chair suited to long binge-watches), Toogood’s new seating has a unique distinction: It’s incredibly comfortable. Indeed, one of the burgeoning...

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