Design Matters

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.

Sommerville Design Charrette 2025 Lecturer 

Hilary Sample, MOS Architects

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). 
 

Lecture recording is unavailable.

COMPAS: Computational Framework for Research and Collaboration in AEC 

Petras Vestartas and Li Chen, Block Research Group

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.

Lecture recording is unavailable.

Gilmore Theory Seminar 2025

Jimenez Lai, Bureau Spectacular

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.

Lecture recording is unavailable.

Design Value

Melissa Burton, ARUP Canada

Value is the regard that something is held to deserve – its importance, worth or usefulness. Expanding our collective thinking as designers, architects, engineers, builders, developers and educators around how we define value is critical as we strive to understand both the measurable and immeasurable worth of our work to the communities we serve.

In this presentation, Burton will touch on eight values and beliefs that could be proposed to underpin our approach to design.

Lecture recording coming soon.

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.

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.

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.