Selected Student Work
Fall 2021+Winter 2022 // Directed Research Studio: Drift
This Directed Thesis Studio (DRS) hosted 13 students whose work foreground projects of movement (and movements: narratives, political, spiritual, mystical, alchemical, urban, ecological). The studio welcomed projects that engaged with questions of care and neglect, dissonance and empathy, and projects of liberation and resistance and work that crosses boundaries and edges (across geopolitical borders, disciplinary practices, centers and peripheries, stories and manifestos). Selected work can be seen on the M.Arch Thesis portfolio page here, with selected student work by Daniel Effah, Rudo Mpisaunga, Mira Burghed and Anthony Youssef.
Fall 2021 // Graduate Seminar II: Tether.
This graduate seminar (paired with the “Drift” thesis studio) was themed around ideas of repatriation (giving/taking), possession and dispossession (power/resistance) through a spatial exploration of the politics of staying in place. Students investigated (first individually, then collectively) a single item from a museum and its collection and the related placements and displacements that occur when an artefact (and its history, location/dislocation, place/non-place, curation/display, enchantments/dis-enchantments) is tethered to an old/new location. The seminar was supplemented with guest lecturers from Canada, the United States, South Africa and the United Kingdom. Students “stole” as Fred Moten and Stefano Harvey note, in order to ground “new forms of assembly.” Student work featured here includes Andrea Macintosh, Lorraine Okungbowa, Melissa Fink, Chloe Cooke, Alice Won, Saman Soltani, Rudo Mpisaunga, Cristina Hoang and Anthony Youssef.
Winter 2021 // Graduate Options Studio: Deep Dust/The Killing Dark (Version 2)
This second version of the Deep Dust/Killing Dark Studio studio continued to investigate Johannesburg, South Africa’s mining landscape as a site of reparative relations. Building on the previous year’s offering of the studio, the course added a new exercise that used the work of South African photographer Santu Mofokeng as a way to ground local subjectivities as part of studio learning. This year’s course also drew on the expertise of South African architects and designers, including Dr. Mpho Matsipa (Johannesburg and Harvard), Heinrich and Ilze Wolff (Wolff Architects, Cape Town), Mokena Makeka (Cape Town) and Thireshen Govender (Urbanworks, Johannesburg). The gallery below includes work from Thompson Nguyen, Rudo Mpisaunga, Mira Burghed, Alice Won, Saman Soltani, Anniek Wheeler, Eric Goldstein and Minette Murphy.
Winter 2020 // Graduate Options Studio: Deep Dust/The Killing Dark (Version 1)
Recipient of a 2020 Architects Magazine Studio Prize Award, for student work by: Camille Ringrose, Angela Chiesa, Kristen Oyama, Sally El Sayed, Joel Tremblay, Shannon Clark, Vedad Haghighi, Stéphanie Chrétien, Nicholas Bava, Adrian Hong, Tasia Craig, Robin Hoytema, Freed Gomes, Walter Fu, Michael Jaworski.
Sited in Johannesburg, South Africa, this studio took the geological, elemental and mineral (diamonds, gold, platinum) histories of Johannesburg’s “Elusive Metropolis” as a provocation to explore – through mapping, technical and narrative representation – the spatial and social implications of an extractive terrain. The studio emphasized design-research and included critical mapping, the development of a spatialized tool atlas, and culminated in the production of a single drawing – a deep section – that situates a speculative, ethical future for future Johannesburg landscape. Projects, as a result, were situated in the geologic, as well as in the socio- cultural, and fraught, history of this post- apartheid city. The studio was structured as a studio/seminar, with regular reading and film discussions (including texts and films by South African writers and filmmakers)and each week included a series of critical readings and viewings that helped form the intellectual framework of the studio. Student work featured in this gallery includes: Joel Tremblay, Angela Chiesa, Camille Ringrose, Kristen Oyama, Sally el Sayed, Stephanie Chretien, Vedad Haghighi, Adrian Hong and Nick Bava.
Winter 2020 // Graduate Options Studio: Story/East – The Miniaturist’s Folio
This graduate studio focused on questions of non-wester modes of representation (namely, the Ottoman miniature painting) as a device to explore, critique and investigate how we might tell stories of architecture and infrastructure. Sited in Istanbul, students explored mega-projects and mega-infrastructure, and took part in a two week study abroad component that included a part of Serkan Taycan’s Between Two Seas walk, a visit with Turkish artist Murat Palta, with local architects and designers from TAK and more. Disrupted by the onset of COVID-19, the studio was completed on-line. The gallery below shows work from Shaylyn Kelly, Ian Ngan, Rehab Salama, Katie McBain, Brooke Zacharuk, Shelby Hagerman and Khadjia Khadija.
Winter 2020 // Cities on Water Study Abroad (University of Minnesota): Hack/Splice
This 10-day Drawing workshop was conducted in Spain, in the cities of Seville, Cordoba and Granada, with a group of graduate Landscape Architecture Students from the University of Minnestoa’s Department of Landscape Architecture. Themed around provocations of hybrid drawing in-situ, students were issued a series of field-study drawing and archiving exercises at selected historic sites, and in the historic centers of these cities (including the Real Alcazar and Plaza Espana in Seville; La Mezquita, the Alcazar de Los Reyes Cristianos and the Madinat al-Zahra in Cordoba; and the Alhambra and Generalife in Granada). The workshop was part of the “Cities on Water” program, lead by Professor Vince Debritto, at the University of Minnesota. The gallery below includes work from Erin Schregardus, Brett Stoplestad, Sonali Devrajan, Kendra Lenz, David Hedding, Kyle Franta and Chris Ototo.
Winter 2019 // Vertical Urbanism Seminar: Block/Mutations
This vertical seminar includes undergraduate urbanism students and graduate M.Arch students. Focused on Seoul, South Korea, the course was a combined seminar/workshop that investigated and explored the speculative urbanisms of Seoul, South Korea. Students collectively developed a series of experimental urbanisms (“Wild-Urbanism,” “K-Pop Urbanism,” “Cosmeceutical Urbanism,” “Bucki-gram Urbanism,”) inspired by local research. Final seminar work was included as part of the Global Studio Exhibition at the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism. Our studio was invited to participate by Jae-Sung Chon, faculty in Architecture at the University of Manitoba, in a collective exhibit that included the University of Toronto’s Professor Adrian Phiffer). Conducted in partnership with Carleton’s Urban Research Lab, this project was supported by Research Fellow Felix Mayer and M.Arch student Kristine Prochnau (who traveled to Seoul for the install of the Carleton work). Students in the slideshow include Kristine Prochnau, Mitchell Jeffrey, Jasmine Sykes, Brendan Schoug, Kristen Smith, and Celeste Correia.
Fall 2018 // M.Arch Graduate Design Studio 1 (co-taught with Professor Catherine Bonier)
This foundation graduate studio (co-taught by Professor Catherine Bonier) introduced a group of 24 students to questions of architectural assembly, program, material and expression. Students worked through a series of investigative material, siting and programming explorations. Their final project was the design of a training facility for firefighters, in partnership with the Ottawa Fire Department. (Student Gallery Coming Soon).
Winter 2018 // Graduate Options Studio: Millenary Sands / Desert Imaginaries
This graduate options studio explored the fraught landscape of the Naqab/Negev Desert in Palestine, with a critical foregrounding and emphasis that the desert is never empty, barren, or uninhabited. The studio looked at the contested water and hydrological politics of Palestine, and used the work of Malkit Shoshan, Michael Sorkin, Fazal Sheikh and Eyal Weizman as conceptual prompts for studio projects. A 6 week studio, it asked students to engage with the hydro-politics of the landscape through a series of critical mapping, chimera-drawing, plaster-casting and speculative design exercises. Students featured in the slideshow below include Melanie Li, Paola Vega, Kate Coulthart, Nick Choi and Stephanie Dawn Murray
Winter 2018 // Graduate Options Studio: Adaptive Archipelagos
This 6-week graduate studio took a speculative design approach to investigate the potential implications and transformations of urban sites in the Great Lakes basin. Students began with critical mapping of each of the Great Lakes, followed by the development of a critical design proposal on/near or in a lake of their choosing. The studio benefitted from the expertise of Professor Karen Lutsky (Great Lakes Design Labs, University of Minnesota Department of Landscape Architecture) and Professor Sean Burkholder (Weitzman School of Design, Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania); authors of 5 Bay Landscapes: Curious Explorations of the Great Lakes Basin (Pittsburgh University Press). Work featured in this gallery includes student maps and drawings by Kristen Smith, Rachel Rodd, Michel Pilon-Briggs, David Anderson and Martin MacDonald
Ozayr Saloojee 