Department of Architecture student reference material

History and Theory (3 credit hours)

In What Style Shall We Build

Wednesdays, September 9, 2026 - December 9, 2026
1:30 pm - 5:15 pm

Ralph Stern

In 1828 the architectural theoretician Heinrich Hübsch posed the question ‘In welchem Stil sollen wir bauen?’ (In What Style Shall We Build?). Two hundred years later, we still don’t really know: classicism, neoclassicism, eclecticism, expressionism, modernism, postmodernism, 
brutalism, deconstructivism, rationalism, regionalism, or, locally, Winnipeg Wholesale-ism. There are many more possibilities, even before AI begins its contributions to an everexpanding stylistic lexicon. What does all this mean ? What is an architecture student to do?

Using Berlin as our hunting ground, we will explore these various styles and the often-complex debates surrounding them. Some were grounded in political considerations, others in ideological, technological, material, urban or other contextual considerations. Therefore, each ‘style’ can be considered as an aesthetic event associated with specific individuals, 
theories and genealogies as well as a nexus of often competing (and at times contradictory) cultural interests. Understanding how these coalesce in creating an urban environment should greatly assist students in understanding and developing their own ‘stylistic’ voices.

For any questions, please feel free to contact me at ralph.stern@umanitoba.ca

Download In What Style should we build PDF

Climate Change and the Built Environment: Mitigation, Adaptation, and Low-Carbon Design

History + Theory (1.5 credit hours)

Wednesday, September 16, 2025 - October 14, 2026
1:30 pm - 5:20 pm

Maryam Amini

This course combines lectures, class discussions, case study analysis, guest speakers, and a field visit to connect theoretical knowledge of climate change and the built environment with current sustainable and climate-responsive architectural practices.

Students will complete three group presentations, including a climate change topic review, a carbon and climate analysis of a building, and a field visit case study, as well as one individual critical reflection essay. 

Evaluation will be based on presentations, written work, attendance, and class participation.

Advanced Technology Topics (1.5 credit hours)

The Peg and its Loops : Media Technologies for Analyzing City Fabric

Wednesdays, September 16, 2026 to October 14, 2026)

Brian Rex

Canada since World War II has become a “suburban” culture.  Architects typically see “suburban” as less than urban.  The profession today seems to have a diminished role in how cities are shaped and lived in.  In this course we’ll embrace “suburban” city fabric by looking through an architectural lens at an architectural technique of city making—the Loop.  Loops were first built 100 years ago as a component block in the first North American “Garden City”, Radburn, New Jersey.    Loops are important to us here in Winnipeg because no city seems to be more “loopy” than ours.  Radburn, in its design, embodied Garden City Movement principles by utilizing a network of both cul-de-sac and looped access around which houses are arrayed.  Most places in North America have embraced the cul de sac as the primary self contained (internalized) component of parcelization in subdivision.  Uniquely, in Winnipeg the Loop dominates the fabric of the post war city.

In this course we are going to look at what makes the Loop, what the Loop makes, and how the Loop makes city.  At the start of the first class each student will be assigned a subdivision in the city made up of a loop or loops from across the last century.  We will get to know these components in the city by making and assembling post clouds, by making statistics graphical with GIS, by drawing the terrestrial geometries of the place, by building taxonomies of construction.  How do the houses relate to the lots relate to the subdivision’s fit into the city fabric?  What do the parameters of deployment of Loop techniques say about the values put into its construction?  With architectural tools we can dissect Winnipeg in four distinct eras in Loop technique development:
  Experimentation
   Cabana Place (place)
  Genesis
   Wildwood (neighbourhood)
  High Modern Loops
   Windsor Park (district)
  Terraform Loops
   Island Lakes (region)

Each student will produce a point cloud, a historical record, a drafted plan, a taxonomy of construction, and statistical sets.  Then we will graphically combine them into a single document that explains the parameters of the place and the urban values they connote.  The sum of the parts of our analysis should be a richer understanding of how cities happen.  The Loop gives us a specific component of the contemporary city to see how urban techniques, like any other tool can be used for both civic-minded community building and extractive short-term financial gain.

Download The Peg and its Loops PDF
 

Advanced Technology Topics (1.5 credit hours)

INTRODUCTION TO BIOMIMETIC DESIGN

Wednesday, September 16, 2026 - October 14, 2026
8:30 am - 12:20 pm

Mercedes Garcia-Holguera

This is an introductory level course where students will explore the principles of biomimetic design and their application to design projects. Students will learn about current methods and tools used in biologically inspired design and will apply these through a self-directed biomimetic project.

History and Theory (1.5 credit hours)

TOPICAL VARIATIONS

Wednesdays, October 28, 2026 to December 2, 2026
1:30 pm - 5:20 pm

Kelly Crossman

“…Our architectural world cannot be understood as the coherent evolution of the Modern Movement, and furthermore, we cannot rely anymore on the principles that inspired it. We no longer have a clear idea of the attributes that ought to belong to a building”¹

The fading of the modernist architectural paradigm since its twentieth century apogee has been widely acknowledged and discussed. Nonetheless, if modernism is dead, it is not entirely clear what has replaced it. Perhaps investigations into the history and theory of architecture can be of assistance.

It is in this spirit of inquiry that this course of five lecture/seminars has been organised. Accordingly, it has been structured to mirror current debates over the institutional, ideological, philosophical and artistic bases of architecture. Over the course of five weeks, readings, class discussion and lectures will focus on various theoretical and historical themes of the present moment, many of which can be seen to have had their origins in the architectural culture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Links will be made with the work of contemporary practitioners.

In seeking to connect history with practice, the legacy of architectural production in the Red River valley will provide a second contextual backdrop for our investigations. Analysis of some aspect of this local culture (historical/contemporary/project/theme) within the larger frame of global debate will provide the basis for a final assignment. This will be in the form of a written text accompanied by a creative project of limited scope. Course evaluation will be based on class participation, a short in-class presentation and a final written assignment.

^{1. “Rafael Moneo on John Soane and building on history”, https://architectural-review.com.}

Advanced Technology Topics (1.5 credit hours)

SUPERPERMANENCE

Wednesdays, October 28, 2026 to December 2, 2026
1:30 pm - 5:20 pm

Inge Donovan

Why do some things last, while others go to waste?

SUPERPERMANENCE is a five-week design-build course that investigates the relationship between value, durability, reuse, and design.

The course project is a 5m long bench installation that experiments with a material juxtaposition of reclaimed hollowcore concrete, a highly durable material that can last centuries, and a lightweight, modular, and reconfigurable interface for gathering, which will be designed and built by course participants. The reclaimed hollowcore, recognized as superpermanent, forms a new ground for assembly and encounter. The project negotiates the enduring – concrete, which is a massive, high-carbon material – and the ephemeral, adaptable, and flexible, recalibrating architectural timescales to material timescales, and questioning how we value industrial materials. Students will learn how to design with found objects, developing the interface through pipe bending and textile methods.

In addition to the hands-on physical component of the installation, students will learn how to develop digital twins through 3D scanning and the creation of a shared class material bank. The class will collectively author material passports that narrativize the material past, potential futures and life cycles of all materials used in the installation. The course will have guest lectures from internationally renowned researchers and practitioners with innovative creative practices centered on reuse.

Moving between the digital and the physical, SUPERPERMANENCE asks how design and record-keeping can allow materials typically deemed worthless to cross the threshold from waste back into use.

History and Theory (1.5 credit hours)

IN SITU: Experience, Narrativity, and Imagination in Architectural History and Theory

October 29 - December 2
8:30 am - 12:20 pm

Carlos Rueda

“… No one ever thought that the book and the labyrinth were one and the same.” —Jorge Luis Borges

Combining seminar, on site experiential, and workshop formats, this 5-week Research Topics course highlights the relevance and explores the creative potential of combining narrativity with visual representation in architectural history and theory. In the beginning we will walk or go on an urban “dérive”. With the architecture of Winnipeg as research subject, after an immersive on site first session each student will select one relevant building and its spatial and historical setting or milieu for study and word-image exploration. The methodological and thematical approach for the next two sessions will be twofold, as it offers a introduction to theory as narrativity and visual representation, in parallel, that is integrated or synthesized in the conclusive two sessions of the course. First, students are introduced to the work of key place-writing authors, and the literary genres of autotheory and lyric essay. Then, they are familiarized with meaningful architectural theoreticians who employed hybrid forms of drawing and visual image— ‘paper architecture’—to convey critical and imaginative narratives or generate imagined realities. With the acquired toolkit, students will finally experiment fabricating their own hybrid of word-image narratives merging in situ immersion—the experienced—with text and image-based research.

This experimental course counts with the support of the Winnipeg Architecture Foundation (WAF), and the special guest participation of Dr. Sandy Pool (Associate Professor in creative writing at University of Winnipeg) and Sotirios Kotoulas (Adjunct Professor at Harvard University).

Download In Situ PDF

Advanced Technology Topics (3 credit hours)

SEND IN THE CLOUDS

Wednesdays, January 4 2027 to March 31, 2027
Time TBD

Paul Labossiere
Neil Minuk

In this interdisciplinary design course, architecture and engineering students will be able to participate in a simulated building development process based on a real site and potential actual project. The course is framed around a practical non-idealized real-life situation. Since every building design is unique the course will demand solutions that don’t rely on default solutions from textbooks and websites. Additionally, the course will focus on working cooperatively and in a manner integrated with other related professionals. Integrated design processes and integrated project delivery are increasingly become very common methods by which buildings are designed, constructed and commissioned. Real life practical opportunities are rare in the university context.

Architecture requires architects and engineers to work closely and cooperatively at the highest level. The intention is to create buildings of the highest excellence that are in this case: functional; spiritual; therapeutic; lo-cost, passive and sustainable.

History and Theory (1.5 credit hours)

The Wild in the Machine

Wednesdays, January 13, 2027 - February 10, 2027
2:30 pm - 5:15 pm

Lawrence Bird

Winnipeg is an odd city. It’s the product of collisions: between rivers, railways, and roads; between the Métis long-lot system, the colonial grid, and land grants to the Hudson’s Bay Company (and others). These formal collisions usually correspond to social ones: between settler and Indigenous, newcomer and established populations; between rich and poor, capital and labour; between speculators and bystanders. Like most cities, ours is a palimpsest. It presents our history to us every day, even when we don’t recognize it. This seminar is interested in how that history emerges into the present.

Our colliding infrastructures – bridges, rail lines, roads, street patterns – are components of a machinery with economic, social, and ideological functions. They are attempts at control, representing various kinds of colonization. Today this machinery includes digital mapping and surveillance systems. These are slighter and more diffuse than the older, physical infrastructures, but they are there. They impact the way we view and represent the city, as well as its form and how we use it.

One thing infrastructures old and new share is that, though they manifest a desire to control, something always escapes them. In fact, philosopher Bernard Stiegler has argued that our attempts at control actually provoke breakdowns, uncertainties, indeterminacies.  As he puts it: “the straight line becomes the bent.”

Contradictions in any system, and the delays and errors built into structures of representation, generate what we might call “the Wild in the Machine.” These include digital decays: glitches and glitch spaces generated by the failures of our archives, databases, and the visual systems that serve them. Similarly, in the city’s gaps and the cracks in its infrastructure, a more easily recognized form of “wildness” emerges: life, nature.

In this seminar, we will explore that bent line. Our work will collapse present into past: connecting the big urban moves of the past, the visual machinery we employ in the city today, and the indeterminacy generated by both. We will look at Winnipeg’s urban form from back in the 1870s, and its key changes over the 20th and 21st centuries. We’ll also explore some of the contemporary imaging infrastructures we use to visualize and navigate urban space. Readings will include excerpts from a number of writers on these subjects; candidates include Stiegler, Andreas Broeckmann, James Corner, and Charles Waldheim.

The output of the seminar will be short videos harvesting error, accident, and indeterminacy generated by the urban and visualization machines. To do this, we’ll deploy media art techniques, using ubiquitous media – from Google Earth to cell phone cameras. We’ll test our strategies during the course, alongside our readings, and by the end of the semester you’ll produce a final video appropriate for submission to short film festivals here and elsewhere. Your video will manifest the wild we seek. It is not wilderness – not the colonial fiction of an empty land awaiting improvement – but wildness: the ungovernable life already inside the machine.

History and Theory (1.5 credit hours)

Tectonics of Place

Wednesdays, January 13, 2027 - February 10, 2027
Time TBA

Shawn Bailey

This is an investigation of the architectural section as both a representational convention and an instrument for understanding the relationships that constitute a place.

The course builds upon an ongoing series of Fire Sessions - gatherings organized around a fire in which knowledge emerges through conversation, observation, participation, and shared experience. During the first Fire Session, the gathering was audio recorded and automatically transcribed. While the transcript captured human speech, it left out much of what was actually happening: pauses, gestures, movement, the crackling fire, water, animals, weather, sensory experience, ceremony, and relationships with land. Annotating the transcript became a way of drawing attention to what the technology had failed to recognize.

IN VISIBLE / INVISIBLE brings this same question to architectural drawing. A conventional section is designed to recognize forms of information such as walls, floors, structure, ground, dimensions, materials, and bodies……but what does it fail to register?

Working through field observation, measured drawing, annotation, and iterative representation, students will repeatedly return to a selected place. Beginning with a conventional architectural section, they will identify what the drawing leaves behind and develop methods for representing relational conditions.

The course culminates in a large-format sectional drawing that expands the conventions of architectural representation in response to what students encounter. Evaluation will consider observation and engagement, iterative experimentation, representational craft, and the conceptual clarity of the final work. Moving between the visible and invisible, the course asks students to consider the section as an instrument of attention and dreams.

Advanced Technology Topics (1.5 credit hours)

Masonry Module

Wednesdays, January 13, 2027 - February 10, 2027
1:30 pm - 5:20 pm

Rodney LaTourelle

Masonry is more than a construction technique: it is a material language shaped by place, culture, memory, craft, and community. This hands-on module explores the sensory, emotional, spatial, and architectural qualities of brick and masonry, alongside their histories and cultural meanings. Students will work directly with masonry materials and techniques while examining how patterns, joints, textures, mass, repetition, and scale can shape architectural experience and communicate ideas about place and identity.

Although masonry is often associated with traditional construction, renewed interest in material reuse, low-carbon building, and sustainable construction has brought it firmly into contemporary architectural practice. New interpretations of historical techniques, experimental materials, digital design, and fabrication are opening up vital possibilities for brick architecture. Through 1:1 making, experimentation, local site visits and the study of contemporary examples, students will investigate how masonry can be reimagined as a material for addressing today's architectural, environmental, and cultural questions.

Rodney LaTourelle, B.E.S., M. Land. Arch. is an artist and designer based in Winnipeg and Berlin. His work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, Remai Modern, Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg.
 

History and Theory (1.5 credit hours)

MISTS OF MEDIOCRITY: SLOP, TASTE & ARCHITECTURAL IMAGINATION

Wednesdays, January 13, 2027 - February 10, 2027
9:30 am - 1:20 pm

Rebecca Loewen

In a 1961 talk, the artist Marcel Duchamp declared that the art of the future must go ‘underground’ to avoid what he termed the ‘mist of mediocrity’. In our own age of artificial intelligence and online ‘slop’, art, architecture and visual culture become increasingly diluted and homogenous. The creators of such culture, Silicon Valley ‘tech bros’, have recently embraced the concept of ‘personal taste’ as the distinguishing trait of humanity, unreplicable by AI. In this course, students will engage in critical spatial research practices of reading, conversation and performance as means of exploring what concepts of dystopia, despair, pretentiousness and social agency might mean for the future of architectural design.

Rebecca Loewen is a Winnipeg-based architect, educator and writer. She holds a PhD in Architectural Design from the Bartlett School of Architecture.

Advanced Technology Topics (1.5 credit hours)

Tectonics of Place

Wednesdays, January 13, 2027 to February 10, 2027
9:00 am - 12:00 pm

David Pankhurst

“Taken alone, tradition stagnates and modernity vaporizes. Taken together, modernity breathes life into tradition, and tradition responds by providing depth and gravity,” 
-Octavio Paz - “Convergences: Essays on Art & Literature”

Against the backdrop of the climate crisis, architecture is searching for sustainable modes of building that can reduce its outsized impacts of energy consumption and embodied carbon. While it may be tempting to approach this singularly through technological means, it is important to recall the observation of architectural historian Kenneth Frampton that sustainability must be understood as an integrated cultural and technical question. In pursuit of appropriate responses to this challenge, architects can do no better than look to the vernacular for examples of sustainable building traditions that have evolved organically through the feedback loop between culture, environment, and technology.

This course will therefore undertake a study of the vernacular as a model for place-based, climate-responsive design, and as a lens through which to view the evolution of built form. To do this, we must first understand, or at least pose the question of, what the vernacular is; and secondly, articulate an appropriate method for engaging with it as a concept. Instructor-delivered lectures will provide historical and discursive context alongside selected case studies illustrating the evolutionary nature of vernacular form. In parallel, students will collectively develop a dossier of self-selected vernacular precedents while cultivating a broader understanding of vernacularity and its modes of operation.

Making will be central to the course, not merely as representation, but as inquiry. Each student will develop a cumulative dossier of analytical drawings and rigorous, multi-scalar models that reveal structural, environmental, and tectonic logics. The aim is to expose how form, material, environment, and culture operate in concert, producing architecture that is both environmentally and culturally sustainable.

The course will culminate in an exhibition of student work that synthesizes these investigations and provides a basis for speculation on both the nature of the vernacular and its applicability to contemporary practice, including the systemic and contextual barriers to its translation. Throughout, we will avoid romanticization, foreground the ethics of precedent use, and ask how vernacular knowledge, forms, and material cultures might be responsibly translated today.

David Pankhurst is an MIT-trained designer and researcher whose work advances context-driven design across scales in pursuit of cultural, economic, and environmental sustainability. His practice focuses on situating material assemblies within their broader landscapes and infrastructures to produce place-specific, low-carbon outcomes. He has worked with leading Canadian design practices and MIT’s Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism, and is a frequent collaborator with Future Assemblies, a research-design collective exploring cross-disciplinary approaches to decarbonization at the intersection of design, engineering, and the history of construction

History and Theory (3 credit hours)

Haunted Houses

Wednesdays, February 24, 2027 - March 24, 2027)
1:30 pm - 5:15 pm

Ralph Stern

Whether as mediaeval castles with deep and dank dungeons, ornate Victorian mansions with dark and stormy histories, Southern Gothic plantation houses as sites of personal tragedies, snowy alpine retreats or salty seaside resorts, suburban subdivisions built on Indigenous burial grounds, or simply as playgrounds for poltergeists and creepy things that go bump in the night, the haunted house is a central and recurrent figure in literature, film and architectural fact. The historical persistence of such concerns underscores deep human interests, needs, and desires; topics seldom properly examined in architectural history and theory.

With weekly readings, film screening, discussions and (maybe) seances, we will explore some of the many facets of this fascinating topic. As a guide to our explorations, we will use Mark Wigely’s important ‘The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt’ as a textbook.

For any questions, please feel free to contact me at ralph.stern@umanitoba.ca

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