Associate Professor, Architecture + Associate Director, Graduate Programs at Carleton University
Visiting Researcher, University of Edinburgh, 2024-2025
My work responds to three key questions:
How do we design in a way that acknowledges the simultaneous weight and fragility of the earth’s atmosphere?
What might a regenerative tectonics look like and how would it perform?
As parts of the country warm at twice the global average, is Canada a global bellwether for climate change?
I approach these questions through the distilling lens of the architectural model — understood as both scale physical artefact and as mental ideal. Models not only reflect our world as it is, but also shape conceptions of what it could be. I design, prototype, and photograph models of environmental processes. The models, which incorporate phenomena such as flowing water, thawing ice, eroding soil, shifting smoke, moving air, and progressing fire, make environmental systems that are otherwise incomprehensible — due to expansiveness, duration, or invisibility — visible and legible to the senses. Making these processes material and legible enables them to play a more active and direct role in design speculation.
Many of my models visualise airflow, a moving material system with consequences across radical spatial and temporal scales. This is the subject of my book, Architecture’s Model Environments. More recent work explores tectonics of regenerative building materials including earth, hemp, straw, and flax through speculative scale material assemblies. Much of my studio teaching and current research focuses on remediation landscapes and sites of climate significance in Canada, parts of which are undergoing global warming at twice the rate of the global average.
Trained as an architect, but educated at an art school (RISD), I often use fine arts methods such as collage, painting, quilting, print-making, photography, and video as prompts in my work.