ED4 2024-2025 studio descriptions (winter)

In our approach, we draw on the archetype of the Trickster—a figure present across Indigenous cultures on Turtle Island. In Métis culture, the Trickster reveals hidden truths and aspects of our nature that we might prefer to ignore.   As a shapeshifter and paradox, the Trickster transcends cultural and self-imposed stereotypes, embodying wisdom, folly, generosity, and selfishness.  Through unpredictable adventures, they warn of the dangers of unchecked desires and challenge our perceptions of reality, ultimately transforming themselves and encouraging us to do the same.   Through their adventures, the Trickster transforms, emerging as a disruptor who inspires reflection and growth.

“The challenges of equitable and affordable housing access will not be addressed through bricks and mortar alone; they are systems-based. And, until we recognize that current conditions are an intentional outcome of policies and programs, we will never be able to truly address these challenges. But, as designers, the built environment is our tool for making these invisible systems visible. It is a platform on which we can imagine alternate potential futures.” Andrew Freear & Rusty Smith, Rural Studio

Housing issues are complex and deeply systemic, requiring partnerships across multiple scales to make meaningful progress. Housing is a basic need, providing a foundation for people to raise families, pursue goals, care for their health, and build community.  For First Nations, Métis, and Inuit people moving to Winnipeg, housing is often a top priority, yet significant barriers—such as colonial legacies, poverty, discrimination, and a shortage of affordable housing—complicate access to quality options.  Metis author Jessie Thistle teaches us that to Indigenous Peoples, home is a composite lens of Indigenous worldviews, and explains that to Indigenous people, home is where one connects culturally, spiritually, emotionally, and physically through relationships to land, water, place, family, kin, animals, cultures, languages, and identities.   In 2021, the Spence Neighborhood Association highlighted the need for better support for Indigenous newcomers.  

This term, we will collaborate with the Spence Street Neighborhood Association and FAUM’s Community Design and Planning Centre (CDPC) to imagine mixed-use urban developments that are ecological, dynamic, culturally rooted, and connected to the land. The studio is tasked with imagining potential futures and creating architecture rooted in future-oriented, circular, bio-based principles that challenge current systems.

The studio will be structured around two primary assignments. The first, titled “The Alchemist and the Trickster,” will explore this narrative through experimental drawing and collage and will use shapeshifting to reveal hidden truths, blur boundaries, and construct unpredictability and indeterminacy. The second assignment, “The Tale of the Trickster,” will translate insights from the first assignment into architectural inquiries.  To supplement the studio, we will also attend two workshops strategically scheduled to align with student progress at the Grey and Ivy Inc. shop space at 856 Century. These workshops will allow us to experiment and build with biogenic materials and expand our understanding of ecological design practices and circular economies.

1.    Lawrence J. Barkwell, “Métis Mythology and Folklore: Mythological Figures” (Louis Riel Institute, 2012), 1, https://www.metismuseum.ca/media/document.php/13465.Metis%20Mythology%20and%20Folklore.pdf.
2.    Ibid., 1.
3.    Ibid., 1.
4.    Spence Neighbourhood Association, From House to Home: Safe Spaces for Us, by Sarah Cooper and Anna McKinnon (Winnipeg: Spence Neighbourhood Association, 2021), 3.
5.    Ibid., 4.
6.    Canadian Observatory on Homelessness, Definition of Indigenous Homelessness in Canada, accessed November 11, 2024, https://www.homelesshub.ca/IndigenousHomelessness.
 

In collaboration with the Prairie Climate Centre, this studio invites students to reimagine architecture as an active participant in ecological restoration, responding to the impacts of climate change across Canada/Turtle Island. Inspired by Robin Wall Kimmerer’s insight that “all flourishing is mutual” (Kimmerer, 2013, p. 20), students will explore architecture’s potential to restore balance between human and more-than-human worlds. Each student will select a specific climate change case study to ground their project, using real scenarios of disrupted ecosystems as a basis for creating designs that support and nurture the resilience of local ecologies.

Central to this studio’s approach is a commitment to our kinship with the natural world. As Leanne Betasamosake Simpson expresses, “I am part of the world; my bones come from the soil, my blood from the rivers, and my breath from the plants. This interconnectedness is both a responsibility and a relationship” (Simpson, 2017, p. 21). This concept of kinship encourages us to see the potential for architecture to serve as more than human-centered interventions, envisioning them instead as expressions of responsibility to the Land and the living systems that support it.

Through this lens, architecture becomes a partner in a shared ecological community, creating spaces that invite humans to recognize their role as stewards and allies to non-human life. In this project we will attempt to understand how we can be allies of our world by addressing specific harms caused by an unfolding climate crisis, and to ask honestly, how can architecture help? To explore this concept in a good way, we will move beyond theoretical discussions and propose tangible, informed, and impactful designs responding to the specific needs of a site, ecology, and community.

Guided by Ursula Franklin’s notion of “restorative technologies”—those designed to repair and heal rather than dominate (Franklin, 1999, p. 73)—students will develop projects that prioritize ecological resilience and biodiversity, employing design strategies that mitigate harm, foster habitats, and promote reciprocal relationships between architecture and natural systems. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) will serve as a tool to assess each project’s ecological footprint, encouraging carbon-neutral or carbon-negative material choices with a view toward long-term ecological balance and minimal harm.

Through models, drawings, situated research, and speculative exercises, students will create designs that embody this spirit of kinship, offering architecture as a medium that not only sustains but actively heals, cultivating spaces that promote interdependence, respect, and resilience within the natural world.

1. Franklin, U. (1999). The Real World of Technology. House of Anansi Press.
2. Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed Editions.
3. Simpson, L. B. (2017). As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance. University of Minnesota Press.

Our planet operates as a complex system where hierarchically organized structures coexist in a delicate balance. It is a resilient system, able to tolerate disruptions and return to a dynamic equilibrium. However, there are critical thresholds that, if crossed repeatedly or simultaneously, risk destabilizing this balance and triggering systemic collapse. Currently, we have transgressed at least three major thresholds: climate change, biodiversity loss, and the nitrogen cycle. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), some of the environmental changes humans have caused or intensified are now irreversible for centuries, if not millennia, affecting the Earth’s entire climate system.

In this context, drawing inspiration from nature’s resilient strategies offers a humbling yet powerful framework for rethinking our roles not only as a species but also as designers. The BIOM Studio is positioned within this territory, where architectural innovation is rooted in a deep consideration of nature’s lessons on adaptation and survival. This approach addresses environmental challenges while responding to the societal and technological demands of our profession.

With Earth’s disrupted landscapes becoming increasingly frequent, architects must be prepared to work in extreme environments—and more importantly, to collaborate with these environments. Extreme environments encompass not only severe climatic conditions but also complex social contexts (e.g., isolation, housing crises, social inequality) and even extraterrestrial settings (e.g., orbital habitats, lunar or Martian colonies). In each of these scenarios, architects are called to be true systems thinkers if we are to transcend conventional boundaries and foster solutions that are as resilient as the ecosystems we study. To this end, the BIOM Studio encourages students to explore biologically inspired pathways, expanding their creativity to tackle climatic challenges and produce radical architectural solutions for extreme environments. Through this lens, students will engage with adaptive, innovative approaches that redefine sustainable design for a changing world.

From its etymological roots, Latin URB refers us to the tangible physical, structural and formal aspects of the urban environment, while Civitas directs us to the city as social, cultural, and political entity, somewhat analogous to the Greek concept of Polis. Melding the two terms in one and playing with its utterance ‘urbanchivitas’ we want to stress a necessary holistic approach to the city and core urban topics, which considers the relevance of conceiving architecture in the context of good urban form that is inclusive of users and societal implications.

Our studio is part of collaborative interdisciplinary project, already in its eight version. Keeping disciplinary autonomy, with specific architecture related deliverables forms of evaluation and rules of engagement in consistency with the Department of Architecture Identity and practices, URB&CIVITAS benefits from interdisciplinary perspectives, critical and analytical tools, and multiscale approaches from the disciplines of City Planning (led by Richard Milgrom) and Landscape Architecture (led by Fritz van Loon and Yuhao Lu).  This collaborative project is one true coming together of sister disciplines engaged in the creative solution to similar relevant problems. The studio looks at downtown Winnipeg, its architecture, and urban environment in the complex interaction between multifarious socio economic and cultural factors, good urban form and architectural design. With support from the Office of the Dean and Storefront Manitoba we benefit from a downtown location, a furnished and fully prepared studio space in an ideal location at the Curry Bldg, Portage Avenue which will give us urban visibility, easy and direct access to our sites of intervention and opportunities for productive exchange with members of our Winnipeg community at large, and stakeholders such as the City of Winnipeg, professional practitioners and indigenous groups and representatives.

When analyzing, critical thinking and discussing, and proposing design solutions we will be working at three scales of intervention:

1. Downtown in its entirety, minding adequate introduction of density, and seen from various perspectives.  
2. The urban sector along Portage stretching from Memorial to Portage Place. meaningfully considering the impact of the current and projected redevelopment of the former Bay building and Portage Place shopping mall
3. Mid-size, mixed-use buildings

Our colleagues in the departments of City Planning and Landscape Architecture, and myself as primary instructor of this EVAR studio course firmly believe this will be a highly enriching educational experience and exceptionally relevant way to cap your Environmental Design Program.