M1 2024-2025 studio descriptions

This studio builds on last year’s Trickster-themed inquiry into Indigenous homemaking and housing futures by shifting focus to fabrication as a holistic, cultural, and ecological act. Rooted in Métis ways of knowing and guided by Indigenous values of reciprocity and relationality, the studio explores how architecture (and how we make architecture) can address the interwoven crises of housing, climate, and alienation.

The studio is grounded in an ongoing collaboration with the Spence Neighbourhood Association (SNA), a community-led organization located in one of Winnipeg’s most economically and culturally complex urban neighbourhoods. Spence is home to a high concentration of Indigenous residents, including many First Nations, Inuit, and Métis people who move to the city seeking education, healthcare, employment, or refuge.

In response to systemic housing barriers (including racism, poverty, and lack of access to safe, affordable dwellings), SNA has become a critical advocate for Indigenous-led housing initiatives and urban transition supports. Their 2021 report, From House to Home: Safe Spaces for Us, outlines the acute challenges faced by Indigenous people relocating to the city, especially in the absence of support and culturally aligned services.¹

Within this context, the studio will work with SNA on two urgent urban projects:

1. A 10+ unit transitional housing development, and
2. WE24 / Bear Den, a 24-hour emergency support and care centre for vulnerable youth.

These design challenges offer students the opportunity to engage in real-world, community-driven design that is materially experimental, socially responsive, and deeply place-based.

To support this exploration, the studio partners with Cornerstone Timberframe, a Manitoba-based timber fabrication firm known for their craftsmanship, innovation, and commitment to sustainable mass timber design.² Students will learn from their expertise in traditional and modern timber construction, while also pushing the boundaries of that knowledge through a reciprocal exchange of ideas, experimentation, and design inquiry. Rather than accepting industry norms as limits, this partnership will explore how ecological, cultural, and craft-based values might reorient how we fabricate and assemble architecture.

Additional inspiration comes from the UK-based Material Cultures, whose research explores the social, political, and environmental dimensions of low-carbon construction and regional craft.³ Students will also participate in a field-based study trip to AA’s Hooke Park, where they’ll encounter experimental approaches to design-build, biogenic materials, and forest-based fabrication.⁴

The fall term focuses on research, programming, and material studies, while the winter term centers on technical development, detailing, and speculative prototyping. Assignments will include drawing, writing, fabrication, and conversation, and will emphasize making as meaning - interrogating how tools, materials, and narratives shape our built futures.

This studio is part of the national “End Housing Alienation Now!” Superstudio, a cross-Canada initiative uniting over a dozen architecture schools to critically reimagine the political, economic, and cultural conditions of housing.⁵ Coordinated by Canadian architecture faculty and community leaders, the Superstudio invites students to situate their housing proposals within broader systemic frameworks (colonial land regimes, speculative finance, extractive construction practices) and to challenge the alienation many feel from home, land, and community. Through shared readings, workshops, online exhibitions, and national dialogue, students will collaborate across institutions to develop provocations, prototypes, and policies that redefine what housing can be.

By placing Indigenous values at the center of architectural fabrication, and positioning architecture as a tool for de-alienation and re-connection, this studio asks:

1. Can fabrication become a site of resurgence?
2. How might building practices become reciprocal, relational, and reparative?
3. What stories do our materials carry, and what stories do we want to tell?

References

1. Spence Neighbourhood Association. From House to Home: Safe Spaces for Us. Winnipeg, 2022. https://spenceneighbourhood.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/From-House-to-Home.
2. Cornerstone Timberframe. “Mass Timber Construction – Cornerstone Timberframe.” Accessed August 2025. https://www.cornerstonetimberframes.com/.
3. Material Cultures. “About.” Accessed August 2025. https://www.materialcultures.org/.
4. Architectural Association. “Hooke Park.” Accessed August 2025. https://hookepark.aaschool.ac.uk/.
5. End Housing Alienation Now! | A Cross-Canada Superstudio.” Accessed August 2025. https://endhousingalienation.com/.

STUDIO MY PAL FOOT FOOT

A HOUSING MANIFESTO IN THREE SONGS

My PAL FOOT FOOT
The three sistered band, the SHAGGS, wrote and played a song about their twice amputated cat Foot Foot, who ran away one day and was never found [although the song ends with Foot Foot coming home] Whilst one of the strangest and greatest songs ever, Foot Foot mythologizes embracing difference and hope for an existential drive to take in and reify the strangeness that life is.

SOMETHING BETTER CHANGE
DOA were a late seventies Vancouver band, not of any particular talent, except playing live they were chilling and possessed an urgency that was palpable. Theirs was a shivery call to action. Don’t wait for the man to screw you or save you, do what you need to do yourself and do it now.

JOE MCCARTHY’S GHOST
The MINUTEMEN used to play cover tunes until PUNK rock came along and then they were liberated to write their own songs. First day, they wrote a dozen. They lived and believed and died with strong beliefs and convictions.

Are you gonna fight when they call out your number
can you tell a lie
Can you repeat what you been told
can you see the enemy
Can you prove your loyalty

Housing in Canada is in a crisis.
There needs to be a call to action, A call to a new paradigm,
STUDIO FOOT FOOT will embrace narratives, strangeness, generators from other disciplines.
and is set on speculations of what housing might be in 2025 and beyond.

Examine what foot foot means to each of us and might mean to an architecture that we author. Fall term will commence with exposing a students own biases and determining what matters in relation to their own FOOT FOOT and then developing a proposition that can be expanded into a living realm. Housing and other stuff.

Fieldtrip to land of hope and life in ITALY.

Why Guatemala ??? Where is it anyway ??? What you will learn

Guatemala is a small country with a big history. It is located in Central America, just below the Mexican provinces of Chiapas and Yucatan. Architecturally, it spans from 3000-year-old temples of the preclassical Maya to contemporary highrises that are as sophisticated as any building in New York, Hong Kong, or London. In between is the architecture of Spanish colonial baroque, art deco, Latin American expressionism, high modernism, post-modernism, and informal settlements.

Geographically the country ranges from white sand Caribbean beaches to black sand Pacific beaches. Guatemala has thick tropical jungles, highland pine forests, deep mountain lakes, and many volcanoes, most of which are active. It is a primordial landscape; one increasingly impacted by climate change. Linguistically the country is Spanish and Mayan; twenty-two distinct Mayan languages are spoken throughout Guatemala. Demographically Guatemala is roughly twenty percent
white, forty percent mestizo, forty percent Mayan. Canada’s self-identifying Indigenous population totals five percent; Guatemala’s is more than forty percent !!!

Mayan culture is ancient and modern; its continuity offers a coherent worldview, its resistance to five centuries of colonization extraordinary. Together with its physical context, the cultural history of this resistance over the past century is central to Studio Guatemala. Social, political, and environmental justice are guiding principles of Studio Guatemala. Urban and architectural design are the requirements of Studio Guatemala.

Full Studio Guatemala details found here

Studio: soft as bone
*Title of this studio is borrowed from the memoir of Chyana Marie Sage.

Arch Studio 5 ARCH 7050 (M1) 
Instructor: Liane Veness

(Thematically) Our studio begins in the middle—in that infrathin space between here and there, now and then.

The "infrathin" was Marcel Duchamp's playful name for the most minute shade of difference.

We will explore the spaces that slip between definitions, where architecture becomes less about the object and more about the relationships between things: the void between two walls, the emptiness within them, the gap between rooms, or the distance between sites.

This studio will approach space and time as blurry, layered, and always overlapping. We will move circuitously through ideas, processes, and uncertainties, finding comfort in contradictions and unresolved questions.
We’ll look to artists like Alvin Lucier, who dissolves speech into the resonant frequencies of a room, and Marcel Duchamp, who approaches meaning from behind or from the side, subverting clarity in favor of the intimate and the strange.
Our readings will bring architects, artists, ecologists, and theorists into the same entangled conversation - Robin Evans, Jonathan Hill, Perry Kulper, Penelope Haralambidou, and Timothy Morton, among others, reminding us that we are woven into a mesh of relations: ecological, material, and perceptual. We are never in isolation.

(Programmatically) We will navigate this blur of space, time, and perception by working at the edges of spatial and situational boundaries, assembling them into hybrid architectural propositions that both delight and disrupt our preconceptions of spatial limits. Students will be invited to investigate themes such as nature vs. artifice, temporary vs. permanent, and experiential vs. territorial, approached through cultural and ecological frameworks.

This studio will be inquiry-based, motivated by speculation and direct material engagement. Students in this studio will be encouraged to rely on their intuition and individual curiosities as “generators” for critical thinking and dialogue.

Ultimately, this studio asks you to attune to your environments, both the extremely intimate and the vastly scaled, not as observers, but as participants in a continuous, relational unfolding. As threads in a dense, contextual web, your perception becomes a form of ethical attention. In this act of attention, we soften; we become porous and receptive. We become soft as bone.