Lectures

Arriscraft Canada Brick Speaker Series | Winter 2023

Praxes of Care: Maintenance

In Honour of Andrew Levitt, celebrating the legacy of a Professor Emeritus dedicated to teaching on care, and with care.

Maintaining high-rise residential neighbourhoods
January 18^th, 6:30pm - 8:00pm | Laurence A Cummings Lecture Theatre, School of Architecture
Jana Levitt (LGA Architectural Partners)
Graeme Stewart (ERA)
Moderator: Monica Hutton (Parkdale Nieghbourhood Land Trust)
Watch the recording of this lecture.

Cultural Districts
February 2^nd, 6:30pm | Laurence A Cummings Lecture Theatre, School of Architecture, School of Architecture 
Tura Cousins Wilson, SOCA
Cheryll Case, CP Planning
Moderator: Linda Zhang, Waterloo Architecture
Watch the recording of this lecture.

Material Ecology and Deconstruction
March 9^th, 6:30pm | Laurence A Cummings Lecture Theatre, School of Architecture
Adam Cornell, unbuilders
Ruth Mandl, CO Adaptive
Moderator: Jane Mah Hutton, Waterloo Architecture
Watch the recording of this lecture.

Dark Matter U @ Waterloo: Co-teaching with community
March 16^th, 6:30pm | Laurence A Cummings Lecture Theatre, School of Architecture
Nupur Chaudhury, NYU Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service
Jerome Haferd, City College of New York / BRANDT : HAFERD
A.L. Hu, City College of New York
Moderators: Albert Chao, SUNY Buffalo, and
Victor Zagabe, Visiting Critic at Carleton University

Distinguished International Visiting Scholar Program
Event supported by the REEJ Standing Committee

Landscape Stories
March 23^rd, 6:30pm | Laurence A Cummings Lecture Theatre, School of Architecture
Jennifer Wemigwans, OISE, University of Toronto
Jane Wolff, Daniels, Univeristy of Toronto
Moderator: Andrew Judge, Algoma University

Praxes of Care asks, “what is an architecture of care?” Over four terms–Fall 2021 to Winter 2023–a series of conversations will bring together two or more architects, designers, researchers, artists, activists, and care workers to discuss care processes according to the themes of Attention, Action, Communication, and Maintenance. The series is curated by faculty, staff, and representatives of student groups: Treaty Lands Global Stories, Bridge, and the Sustainability Collective. Recent calls for change have shifted the discipline toward the underlying social and ecological processes enabled by the production of architecture. By listening to and learning about care practices from interdisciplinary perspectives, we can begin to reshape the discipline of architecture into a form of care.

WINTER 2023: MAINTENANCE

In our ongoing Speaker Series, this semester we investigate maintenance within a praxis of care. In her thesis, Care as Architectural Practice, Waterloo alumni Brenda Reid describes maintenance as the “ongoing practice of caring that fixes and mends along the way.” Yet she acknowledges that the act of repair is also an act of creation that introduces something new. Maintenance work is often unseen labour, operating on peripheries and within shadows. Yet it serves as the backbone of our society by providing the essential labour required for our social, economic, and logistical systems to function effectively. While the pandemic forced us to reconsider the notion of essential labour as care maintenance, it also asked us to find ways of maintaining our social programs, our structures that allow for horizontal collaboration, our identities and languages rooted in land-based knowledge systems, and our desire for stronger ties of solidarity. Working from an ethic of care, we are asked to consider the role of maintenance as architectural practice. In this series we address maintenance from this perspective and consider our role in the preservation of social systems, cultural districts, community engagement, material landscapes, and the narratives we create about our world.

The lecture series committee is: Tara Bissett, Adrian Blackwell, Jaliya Fonseka, Marie-Paule Macdonald, Beth Vince, Wendy Yuan, Joel Wan, and Victor Zagabe. Former members involved in planning this series: Brenda Reid and Mayuri Paranthahan.

Brenda Reid's recent graduate thesis, CARE As Architectural Practice, acts as the foundational framework for the series, including its four-part structure: attention, action, communication and maintenance. 

The four linked posters for the series are designed by Julia Nakanishi 

Paxes of Care is part of the Arriscraft Canada Brick Speaker Series