In Honour of Andrew Levitt, celebrating the legacy of a Professor Emeritus dedicated to teaching on care, and with care.
Please join us online for Surveillance, violence, and truth an online lecture featuring panelists:
Shourideh C. Molavi, Forensic Architecture
Alison Killing, Killing Architects
Moderated by: Anwar Jaber, University of Waterloo School of Architecture
This is the fourth in a series of five lectures on the topic of communication.
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.
FALL 2022: COMMUNICATION
In our ongoing Speaker Series, this semester we investigate communication within a praxis of care. As Berenice Fisher and Joan Tronto point out, care involves two-way interaction between care-givers and care-receivers and this communication is fraught with imbalances of power. Architecture is a discipline that cares for the organization of material spaces designed for human use, but often there is insufficient care for the future inhabitants of a building as a result of poor communication. In order to make architecture that facilitates and supports caring relationships between its users, special attention must be paid to the exchange of information between architects as care-givers and building inhabitants as care-receivers. This communication can be overt and very loud, or it can be barely audible, expressing itself through other senses, such as touch or vision. It also can act directly between the designer and future user or it can be mediated by government regulations or market practices that place limitations and norms on the design of architecture, creating negative and even violent effects on its inhabitants. Within this fall series we will discuss protest, advocacy, empowerment, investigation and listening as different forms of care communication, each necessary to create economically, socially, and ecologically equitable built environments for all.
The lecture series committee is: Tara Bissett, Adrian Blackwell, Amanda Dudnik, Jaliya Fonseka, Marie-Paule Macdonald, Beth Vince, Wendy Yuan, Joel Wan, Victor Zagabe. Former members involved in planning this series: Brenda Reid, Julie Dring, 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
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!