ED4 2025-2026 studio descriptions (winter)

This studio begins with the provocation that the built environment we have inherited is both a consequence of extraction and a repository of untapped potential. For more than a century, architecture has aligned itself with the engines of industrialization, drawing endlessly from material systems designed to be mined, manufactured, and discarded. In aligning itself with these logics, the discipline has not only accelerated ecological crisis but also distanced itself from its origins as a practice rooted in craft, in material intelligence, and in the ethical stewardship of the ecologies that make building possible.

But within this rupture lies a powerful opening. What if we designed not by specifying new materials, but by entering into a dialogue with the ones already embedded in our cities? What if buildings were not blank sites of invention, but living loops of energy, labor, and history—waiting to be reread, reinhabited, and reimagined?

This studio proposes a shift in architectural thinking: from design as the creation of new objects to design as the careful reassembly of existing matter.

loopSTUDIO challenges students to take up this responsibility: to reclaim the city’s aging building stock—not as waste, but as raw material for radical transformation. Each student will identify a historic structure in Winnipeg, particularly from the industrial or early commercial era, and engage in a deep, intimate act of design: not restoration, not demolition, but creative reuse. You will investigate what its materials can do structurally, spatially, atmospherically—how they weather, how they bear weight, how they hold memory—and envision how they might become the armature for new housing futures.

We ground our work in the critical themes of the recent publication Housing Loops : Precarity, Dignity, Prosperity, Fraternity, and Opulence (a+t Research Group), not as abstract concepts, but as design imperatives. These loops of cycles of displacement, belonging, collective care, and systemic failure, demand responses that go beyond form-making. They require architecture that is both radically imaginative and materially accountable.

To that end, we will engage tools such as life cycle analysis (LCA), embodied carbon accounting, and material inventories as creative constraints. We will pair these with speculative spatial strategies, exploring new models of shared living, temporary occupation, mutual aid, and domestic ritual. Through digital and physical modeling, you will test how materials can be reconfigured, how structures can be repurposed, and how housing can be reconceived to provoke and confront the cycles of need directly.

This is not a studio about optimization, it is a studio about care, imagination, and activism. Care about the ethical, material, and imaginative act of working with what we already have. It is about confronting architecture’s complicity in environmental degradation, and insisting that design must become an instrument of repair, reciprocity, and re-enchantment with what we already have, and what it might yet become.

Lithic Legacies addresses the ageing-out mid-century civic building, reimagining its material inheritance in light of 21st century resource exigencies. Many of these public buildings were built as singular works of civic investment, their design signaling monumentality, endurance, and a vision for the future tied to ideas of progress and renewal. However, a combination of poor design detailing, rigid spatial rhythms, a lack of attention to public needs and periods of disinvestment and austerity have resulted in a slew of demolitions and erasures.

The Lithic studio is centered around the proposition for an alternate future for Winnipeg’s recently demolished Public Safety Building, a divisive, crumbling urban fortress originally built in 1966 to serve as a headquarters for the city’s police force. During a remediative phase in the demolition process, the PSB stood as a stripped-back reinforced concrete frame – a highly regular orthogonal structure wearing a limestone jacket, itself a historical artifact of the post-war era in which concrete frame construction represented a tectonic breakthrough for architecture. This precarious moment – the “dangerous middle ground where form and matter are [again] in negotiation, and where error runs rife”¹ is the spatiotemporal site of the studio.  

The PSB’s fraught and controversial demolition was completed in 2021, with all traces of the building removed – crushed, buried, hidden out of sight after a mere 54 years. This represents a deep temporal misalignment: the building was almost entirely built out of materials that can last centuries. The studio asks: how can we resynchronize architecture with material rhythms? How can buildings be reimagined as temporary assemblies that hold materials for the future? Together we will explore the agency we have as designers to create buildings that resist destruction – buildings that can transform and adapt; buildings that hold; buildings that are fortresses against demolition.

Examining the PSB’s failures, students will design a proposal for a multivalent community centre that redefines civic investment through building by designing for the many publics that exist in Winnipeg’s downtown centre. By reframing buildings as material assemblies that exist in time, student proposals will define new forms of civic investment through renewed material cultures. Students will individually decide whether to adaptively reuse, demolish, or find a middle ground, but by working collectively as a class on the same site, we will produce a collection of alternative futures that function discursively.

This studio is not precious. It operates as a multi-scalar project-driven research endeavour that engages architecture in its messy and material form, finding openings for formal, tectonic and programmatic speculation. The research and design development process will be augmented by workshops that aim to advance the technical skills of the class, including computational strategies for material reuse, daylight simulation modeling and computational modeling, and lectures by material experts.

1. Francesca Hughes, The Architecture of Error: Matter, Measure, and the Misadventures of Precision. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2014.

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.

Winnipeg has a unique fabric among North American cities.  It is marked by a sort of loose, informal, and incidental range of relations between buildings, roads, rail, property, and infrastructure.  It is a varied, situational, and loose interrelationship of:
River
River Meander
Long Lot
River Road
Rail Road
Wood Lot 
Subdivision
City Block
Legal Lot
Winnipeg’s urban morphology is the amalgamation of a thousand flavours of Oblique.   The flow of parallel paths across the vast muddy Red River meander belt—River, Road, Rail—carry divergent operational geometries in the land but they share one organizational imperative; they remain vaguely parallel and cross each other at great complication and cost.  The cross-cutting river lot system buffers the meanders of the river generally perpendicular to the paths.  Slippage in parallel, bisection, width, lengths, adjacencies, and orientations between these paths land these river lots results to a distinct Obliqueness in the urban fabric.

(day one)
Each student will begin the term by selecting a swath of the city in which to test and tune this urban hypothesis.
(first three weeks)
Together, with each student making their swath, we will make a large Metropolitan model of Winnipeg testing the relationship of parts and geometries that make this Obliqueness. 
(week four)  
Within their swath of study each student will define a building site.
(rest of term)
Then each student will design in this location on this site:
a medium scale, multi-storey building to to manufacture, exhibit and maintain our large Metropolitan model and the offices, work, and public spaces of a hypothetical Metropolitan Urban Design (MUD) Commission utilizing contemporary steel frame and clad envelope technology or precast concrete construction systems.  

In this studio we will make models and we will study models.  Models are the dominant graphical medium in contemporary architectural practice.  We think through models far more than we think about them.   We will investigate how a drawing can be a model and how we can draw by hand with a computer.  Modelling today is an amplified graphical practice of geometric drawing notationally embedded with increasingly interconnected flows of data.  To remain in control of our practices we learn to both model construction and to construct models.

No Digital Models, No Perspective Views

Conceptually our studio elaborates on the idea of para-doxa, Greek term appearing in Aristotle that Paul Ricoeur refers to in his studies on metaphor. Para-Doxa in the contemporary context is here seen as polysemic concatenation of alternative doxas, and paradoxes (articulations of apparent contradictions with subtle but meaningful poetic affinity) that include:

Questions of creative method: metaphorizing and metamorphosing as praxis of seeing what is familiar and local in terms of what is distant and other, finding resemblance.

Time-space dislocation: making present the arc of history in experience in diverse configurations originating a form of poetic historicity.

Anachronism: as critical and imaginative contemporary creative strategy.

Thematically, this studio focuses on the design of one urban building in the context of:

A historically charged site in The Exchange District of Winnipeg: an urban palimpsest intended to be made one with the new building, above stylistic and chronological canons and in response to the multi-temporal lived experience of historical time that happens in the city.

An open, contemporary, interpretation of architectural tradition, or reciprocal future-past relationship that introduces the new and rejuvenates what precedes: what T.S. Eliot proposed for modern literature, and Juhani Pallasma has recently brought to architectural discourse. We will discuss about architectural culture, learn from architectural traditions (multi-temporally considered) with an emphasis in the modern (‘tradition of the new’) and contemporary, and imaginatively re-create in newness with our respective design projects. 
 
The term begins with an enticing collective urban design charrette, focused on the public space potential of the singular void formed by the intersections of Ellis, Notre Dame and Smith, its edges and urban infill possibilities. Individually along the term you will conceive and develop one mid-size, mixed used infill project, with awareness of design comprehensiveness, minding the site in context  as one “infinitely rich topographical, cultural, formal and material resource, within which the whole of the project can be found.”¹

1. Adam Caruso, OASE 109, 2021