In Honour of Andrew Levitt, celebrating the legacy of a Professor Emeritus dedicated to teaching on care, and with care.
Please join us for Material Ecology and Deconstruction, thelecture will be held from 6:30pm - 8:00pm in the Main Lecture Hall at the Waterloo School of Architecture.
The lecture will feature panelists Adam Cornell, unbuilders, Ruth Mandl, CO Adaptive and Moderator: Jane Mah Hutton, Waterloo Architecture
This is the third in a series of five lectures on the topic of maintenance.
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
Accessibility: Waterloo Architecture is committed to achieving accessibility for persons with disabilities who are attending the event. Closed Captioning will be available during online events. For accommodation questions and requests, please contact us in advance of the event at adudnik@uwaterloo.ca.
For more information on this series and other events presented by Waterloo Architecture, please visit waconnect.ca or follow us @waterloo_architecture.
If you enjoy this lecture series and would like to help the School of Architecture continue to provide similar education activities and engagement opportunities, please visit our support page. Thank you for your dedication to our students and to our School!