Kelly Doran

Hills and valleys with a linear white apartment complex.
Photo credit: Iwan Baan

Less is Less

How do we halve the emissions of the built environment this decade?  How can architects, landscape architects, planners and interior architects be agents of mitigation and systems change?  Kelly, a graduate of U of M (2003) will speak to the unique agency and advocacy architects and designers have to address the challenges we face.

man standing smiling with a blurry background.

Kelly Doran

Kelly Doran is a father, architect, educator, and activist. His holistic approach to the design of the built environment has been shaped by his experiences working across the world first in the resource development sector and at MASS Design Group’s East African office where led the design and implementation of several of MASS’s projects, notably the award-winning Munini District Hospital and the Rwanda Institute for Conservation Agriculture. Working in these contexts brought about a profound sense of a building’s provenance and the scales of social and environmental impacts inherent to the built environment.

In 2020, Kelly established the Half Research Studio at the University of Toronto to catalyse a conversation around the embodied carbon and life cycle impacts of buildings in Canada. The graduate level studio has engaged over 40 leading Canadian architectural offices, trained over 50 graduate students, and has published internationally acclaimed research demonstrating how and where a building’s upfront impacts reside. The Studio’s research underpinned the embodied carbon policies co-authored by Kelly that were adopted by the City of Toronto in 2023.

Kelly is an internationally recognized speaker, writer, and advocate for the integration of life cycle assessments into design thinking. He is a Senior Fellow of Architecture 2030, a member of the Royal Architectural Institutes of Canada’s Committee of Regenerative Environments, and founding member of the Northeast Bio-based Materials Collective.