Design Matters
Update: The March 12 Design Matters lecture Is There an Indian Way of Thinking? with Sameep Padora will now be held on April 17.
Exploring how we could create a better future through design
Design Matters is a thought-provoking lecture series, organized by the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, which seeks to inspire transformative change. The series brings to Calgary a range of designers, innovators, and thought leaders exploring the edge of design and city building.
Lectures are delivered from September to May, and feature provocative speakers who examine the latest ideas in architecture, regional and urban planning, and landscape architecture. The lectures challenge attendees to broaden their thinking on a myriad of issues related to design. Design Matters engages students, public officials, industry professionals and interested citizens — people who want to learn, understand and address design issues affecting our community.
The lectures spark conversations about societal issues by engaging with innovative thinkers. Attendees are encouraged to recognize the important role design plays in our daily lives.
Join industry professionals, faculty, students, alumni and people in the community who care about design and building a great city at an upcoming lecture!
SAPL Block Week / Design Matters Lectures
To launch our Winter 2025 Block Week in collaboration with the Design Matters lecture series, SAPL is excited to welcome four guest speakers to the City Building Design Lab for two days of attention-grabbing discussions. These lectures, held on February 11 and a special double feature on February 12, will bring together leading voices in architecture, planning, and landscape design to explore pressing issues shaping our built environment. Join us as we engage with innovative ideas, research, and inspiring perspectives from experts at the forefront of design and city-building.
February 11, 2025: Sommerville Design Charrette 2025 Lecturer
MOS is a New York Based architecture and design studio undertaking projects diverse in scale and type. With work in North America, Europe and Asia they have established a portfolio of national and international award-winning projects and publications. The work of MOS is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, Harvard University’s Frances Loeb Library, and Columbia University’s Butler Library. Sample, along with Michael Meredith, is a recipient of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Museum’s National Design Award in Architecture (2015), the United States Artists Award (2020), and the Rome Prize (2022–23).
About the Speaker
Hilary Sample is the IDC Foundation Professor of Housing Design and coordinator of the Core III Studio at Columbia GSAPP and Co-Founder of the New York-based architecture and design studio MOS. Sample recently published Maintenance Architecture (MIT Press, 2016) and has taught at Columbia GSAPP, Harvard GSD, Yale SoA, and the University of Toronto. She has held the John G. Williams Teaching Chair at the University of Arkansas and the Reyner Banham Chair at the State University of Buffalo. More Info at https://mos.nyc/
February 12, 2025: Design Matters + Block Week Double Feature
COMPAS: Computational Framework for Research and Collaboration in AEC
Researchers from the Block Research Group based in Zurich, Switzerland, will present some of their work in open-source computational tools for research and collaboration in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction industries. BRG is dedicated to pioneering novel design and engineering approaches for efficient structural forms and proposing economical construction methods that leverage advanced computational tools. They will be presenting a framework that bridges the gap between academic research and professional practice. Petras Vestartas and Li Chen are joining us as lecturers for the Taylor Seminar and representing BRG for this lecture.
About the Speakers
Petras Vestartas is a post-doctoral researcher at Block Research Group from 2023. He holds BA and MA degrees in architecture from VAA (Lithuania). His PhD was completed at the Laboratory for Timber Constructions IBOIS, EPFL (Switzerland), where his research focused on digital timber fabrication, scanning methods, robotic tool-path planning (ABB), development of advanced timber structures and project-based applications. He has developed various software applications, including compas_wood (joinery generation), NGon (polygonal mesh processing), OpenNest (2D nesting), Raccoon (CNC fabrication), and Cockroach (pointcloud processing).
Li Chen is a doctoral researcher and previously a software engineer at Block Research Group. After graduating from Architectural Association Design Research Lab (AADRL) in London, he worked as a lead computational designer and founding member of several startups in fields of 3D printing, computational design and machine learning for computer vision in New York City. Li is one of core developers of COMPAS, and is on the board of directors at the COMPAS Association. More details at https://brg.ethz.ch/
Gilmore Theory Seminar 2025
Bureau Spectacular imagines other worlds and engages the design of architecture through telling stories. Beautiful stories about character development, relationships, curiosities and attitudes; absurd stories about fake realities that invite enticing possibilities. The stories conflate design, representation, theory, criticism, history and taste into cartoon pages. These cartoon narratives swerve into the physical world through architectural installations, buildings, studies, objects and publications.
About the Speaker
Jimenez Lai was born in Taiwan, came of age in Canada, and lives in Los Angeles. Before establishing Bureau Spectacular, Lai lived in a desert shelter at Taliesin and resided in a shipping container at Atelier Van Lieshout on the piers of Rotterdam. Lai's first book, Citizens of No Place: An Architectural Graphic Novel, was published by Princeton Architectural Press with a grant from the Graham Foundation. Lai has won various awards, including the Architectural League Prize for Young Architects, the Debut Award at the Lisbon Triennale, and the Designer of the Future at Art Basel. Lai represented Taiwan at the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale. Lai's work is in the permanent collection of MoMA, SFMOMA, Art Institute of Chicago, and LACMA.
2024-2025 Lectures
Cities for Children & Olders: Equitable, Sustainable, Playful
Gil Penalosa Founder & Chair 8 80 Cities | Founder, Cities for Everyone
Over the past 70 years, Canadian cities have often been designed without prioritizing mental and physical health, sustainable mobility, or equitable access. Gil Penalosa’s lecture will explore how a 30–60% population growth in many cities presents a golden opportunity to transform urban spaces into healthier, happier, and more inclusive environments.
Drawing on his experience working in over 350 cities worldwide, Penalosa will share compelling examples of innovative city planning—from adapting successful initiatives to avoiding pitfalls—and discuss the critical role of architects, planners, and interdisciplinary professionals in this transformation.
2023-2024 Lectures: Global Citizenship and Design
This year’s Design Matters lecture series focuses on global citizenship and design in conjunction with the launch of the new Bachelor of Design in City Innovation (BDCI) undergraduate degree program. This year’s speakers will be addressing topics such as gender and planning, informal settlements, the missing middle, and urban architecture.
Fine-Grained Urbanism
Philip Speranza | University of Oregon | Speranza Architecture + Urban Design
Urban dwellers are guided by mobile app directions, business reviews and networked social and ecological data, including the momentary locations of protests, celebrations and even air pollution. As mobile computing and geospatial information becomes more accessible and cities are increasingly impacted by climate change, Fine-Grained Urbanism offers data collection, analysis, and design methods that provide the most detailed spatial and temporal information ever about the constantly-changing urban environment.
Rethinking Digital Fabrication
Yusuke Obuchi, PhD | Associate Professor of Architecture | The University of Tokyo
In a world shaped by the rapid expansion of the global economy and digital technology, our ways of designing and building architecture have transformed significantly. Efficiency and productivity have become central to addressing these socio-economic shifts. But can we challenge these conventions? Can we build a pavilion guided by our ears instead of our eyes? Can we print a structure using chopsticks as construction materials?
New Ecologies and Radical Kindness; Landscapes in Service of the Whole
David Godshall, Los Angeles
Through investigating the nature of our relationships to the tools with which we create (land, labor, plants and materials), TERREMOTO is ongoingly evolving its modes and methods of landscape making. By asking “Why, How and For Whom is the Garden?” we find ourselves drifting towards aesthetically and ecologically fertile new territory. David Godshall leads this discussion and conversation about these novel ways of practice.
Working With: A Relational Practice
David Malda, Seattle
David Malda explores the potential of landscape to connect people to the land and to each other through the land. By focusing on building relationships among the people and places that already exist, our work can support broader initiatives for belonging rather than simply adding another new thing.
Thank you to RAIC for sponsoring this event.
Platform MIDDLE: Architecture for Housing the 99%
Johanna Hurme, Winnipeg
Housing affordability in North America has reached a crisis point. Against the backdrop of rapid urbanization and an accelerating environmental emergency, we need solutions for city building that are more socially and economically sustainable, as well as multi-family housing that is more equitable and livable.
Architecture is a Verb
Ana de Brea, Buenos Aires
No Labels/Design is a Tool of Action/Architecture is a Verb is a broad and effervescent speculative reservoir designated to undertake ventures related to modern reflections and contemporary works of spatial and cultural matters.
Coded Light: Digital Explorations in the Continuum of Ceramic Craft
Isabel Ochoa, University of Waterloo
The lecture will explore the synthesis of traditional craftsmanship and emergent technologies in shaping the landscape of contemporary ceramic craft.
Sustainable Favelas: The Key to Climate Justice and Thriving Cities
Theresa Williamson, Rio de Janeiro
Residents across Rio de Janeiro's favela communities have been adapting to climate change and coming up with development solutions in the absence of public investment for a century. Come hear how hundreds of grassroots organizers have come together as the Sustainable Favela Network, to develop, recognize, strengthen, consolidate and reproduce these solutions at scale.
Unwalling Citizenship
Teddy Cruz, San Diego
The Tijuana-San Diego border region is a hotly politicized area representing some of North Americas most debated issues, including deepening social and economic inequality, dramatic migratory shifts, urban informality, and climate change. Teddy Cruz will share the work of Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman at the US-Mexico border region. He will discuss their work on “citizenship culture" and the network of civic spaces they have co-developed with border communities to cultivate regional and global solidarities.
Gender Responsive Planning
Sara Candiracci, Milan
Gender responsive planning strategically considers the different needs and priorities of all genders by integrating the differing perspectives into all stages of planning. We welcomed Sara Candiracci, remotely from Shanghai, to discuss the importance of gender responsive planning in urban centres.
Le Corbusier: Global Architect
Miquel Adria, Mexico City
The first lecture in SAPL’s 2023-24 Design Matters lecture series served as the opening night event for the LC150+ traveling exhibition, which was hosted by SAPL for the month of September at the CBDLab. The lecture built on themes of modern architecture, its legacy, colonial dynamics, and the global scale of its impact.
2022-2023 Lectures
Abolition Geographies of New York
Ashley Dawson
Ashley Dawson is Professor of English at the Graduate Center / City University of New York and the College of Staten Island. Recently published books of his focus on key topics in the Environmental Humanities, and include People’s Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons (O/R, 2020), Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change (Verso, 2017), and Extinction: A Radical History (O/R, 2016). Dawson is the author of a forthcoming book entitled Environmentalism from Below (Haymarket Press), and is co-editor of a volume of essays called Decolonize Conservation! (Common Notions Press).
Panel Discussion: Rethinking Urban Growth
Jyoti Gondek, Mayor of Calgary; Joe Case, Vice President, Mattamy Homes; and June Williamson, Professor, Author, Architect, and Fellow at the Urban Design Forum, Alkarim Devani, president, RNDSQR; and Alex Ferguson, senior VP, sevelopment, Anthem Properties Group Ltd.
As a city, we have recognized the importance of taking action to combat climate change. As a result, city council has declared a climate change emergency, and leaders in our industry understand and support this decision. This panel addresses the big question, how will Calgary move from its past actions, and shift practice to enable more sustainable growth patterns?.
Preferred Futures, Indigenous Approaches to Planning
Steve DeRoy
Steve DeRoy is a thought leader, co-founder, director, and past president of The Firelight Group. On Nov. 30, he discussed the different approaches for integrating Indigenous mapping into planning exercises and how these can serve to support Indigenous rights and interests.
Design as an Ecology
Kristian Lars Ahlmark
Discover current methods and approaches to sustainable architecture and design with thought leader, Partner, and Design Director, Kristian Ahlmark from Danish architecture studio Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects. Hear him share unique design methods of sustainability processes that the studio has developed and implemented in their practice, covering topics including but not limited to adaptive transformation, material circularlity and the use of timber in high-rise structures exemplified through the recently ground-breaking project, “Rocket&Tigerli”.
Four Courtyards: Place and Identity in Italian Photography
Luca Nostri
How do the places we inhabit shape who we are? What stories emerge in the ways places and spaces intersect and relate to one another? Four Courtyards, a lecture presented by lauded Italian Photographer Luca Nostri, answers these questions through unique insight and inspiring photography. This thought-provoking lecture challenges spectators to broaden their perspectives and gain an increased awareness of the built environment and their place within it.
Design + Stewardship for the Next Civilization
Jenny Jones
Jones is a partner with California landscape architecture firm TERREMOTO. She visited the University of Calgary's School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape to discuss landscape and garden-making with an experimental, hands-on approach, and with an eye to strengthening land stewardship ethics and culture.
Sponsorship
Design Matters is made possible through the partnership with generous sponsors who have shared aspirations. Sponsorship presents a wonderful opportunity for companies to not only heighten community profile, but also to engage with talented students who will be leaders and practitioners.
Looking forward to learning with you!
