About

Studio Moffitt is run by Lisa Moffitt, Associate Professor at Carleton University. My practice was initiated in 2008 with a commission to complete a design-build, off-grid house in rural Ontario, the House on Limekiln Line, following several years working at PLANT Architect, Inc. in Toronto, Canada.  I have been a full-time academic since 2010; from 2010-2020, I was based at the University of Edinburgh, where I also completed a PhD Architecture by Design.  

All of my work is prompted by a deep compulsion to make things... paintings, photographs, buildings, models, drawings, material studies, techniques, installations...that question how architecture materially alters, impacts, and constructs new environments. These makings, whether they are site installations or speculative design projects or instruments that register environmental conditions or models of material systems are often paired with teaching or written research, enabling productive exchanges between the two.

My design research takes two primary forms: first, the development of instruments such as wind tunnels, water tables, and filling tanks, which materialise environmental processes for use as forensic tools to explore modes of architectural environmental mediation; second, design of speculative  and built work that instrumentalise existing material and environmental conditions to design “thick” contextual projects.

My written research places contemporary sustainable design concerns within a broader historic context, often by reflecting on the makings of others. For example, Etienne-Jules Marey’s wind tunnels, Victor and Aladar Olgyay’s thermoheliodon, and David Boswell Reid’s convection experiments, have acted as prompts for reflection on contemporary concerns related to building climate control and methods of environmental simulation and visualisation. Much of this research incorporates original design work.  

I have taught undergraduate and postgraduate design studios that align techniques of making with modes of understanding scientific and technical principles of building environmental performance. I incorporate environmental models into design pedagogy for use as tools of environmental verification and analysis, as tectonic artefacts that focus detailing on environmental exchange, and as material assemblies that enable visualisation of complex environmental effects.