PhD, UCLA (architectural history and theory)
SMArchS, MIT (design computation)
BArch, University of Waterloo
Professeur invité, Université de Montréal
Course Lecturer, McGill University
Professor Emeritus, Woodbury University
PhD, UCLA (architectural history and theory)
SMArchS, MIT (design computation)
BArch, University of Waterloo
Professeur invité, Université de Montréal
Course Lecturer, McGill University
Professor Emeritus, Woodbury University
McGill University 2024
Co-instructors: Howard Davies, Kim Pariseau. In this comprehensive building design studio, students were asked to design a facility for racquet sports on a site in Parc Angrignon in Montréal. The site included a large, abandonded single-storey concrete building that housed a former zoo. Each project proposed a re-use strategy. In addition, students studied the relationship between building form (primarily massing) and environmental performance using parametric analysis and design tools with the goal of using that understanding to produce strong formal and aesthetic outcomes.
Université de Montréal 2024
This studio explored a theme that I have been researching for several years: how unruly industrial and other generic windowless buildings might play an important role in the development of a civic space in a dense urban environment. We explored the expressive potential of minimal architectural forms developed using parametric tools and AI, and the relationship between passive climate design and building form. We focused on the building's outdoor spaces that form its external microclimate. The overarching formal problem could be called ‘iconic infill’: How can a building that fills most of its site also project a powerful architectural image and assert its status as object?
McGill University 2024
In this course we explored ways to critically use and abuse AI models to generate unexpected results. We studied theories of abjection and indeterminacy and applied them to standard generative processes. Methods included deliberate introduction of error into text prompts, introduction of noise and dot screens into input images, deep recursion in image output-input loops, and physical erasure and other analog manipulations.
Université de Montréal 2023
In this studio, students proposed a medium-sized storage building (art storage, library, self-storage, data storage) in a dense urban environment. The architectural themes built upon those of the same studio offered last year, namely how to produce iconic imagery in anonymous building types. Students were asked to think about the relationship between use and form beyond obsolete concepts of form/function and instead in terms of contemporary themes such as suburb/city, machine/building, generic/specific, and the role of digital representation in the design process. At the start of the semester, students used generative AI to create a single image that represented an end goal that drove the work throughout.
McGill University 2023
In this seminar, we used reading and drawing to survey theories of design computation from the past forty years. Our working hypothesis proposed that recent image-based generative systems invite us to recover the concepts and methods of collage explicitly rejected by the foundational digital formalism of the 1990s. We focused on the parti and the diagram through workflows that combined older techniques such as optimization and evolutionary algorithms with newer methods based on machine learning.
Université de Montréal 2022
In this studio, students were asked to study the aesthetic potential of an anonymous storage building of their choosing. The central problem was the part-to-whole relationship, commonly seen in suburban warehouses and industrial parks, in which a dense, relatively small part of a building -- often located on a corner -- is asked to perform the majority of the work of creating an iconic and communicative architectural image. We started with case studies of instances of this type, from which students built parametric models to generate variations on the theme. Students used generative AI (at this time still relatively new) to visualize and generate the material effects of the surfaces of the larger generic elements of the building.
My primary research project centres on the Centre Pompidou in Paris seen from the perspective of the client. It examines the rationalization of architecture that took place in response to the social disruptions of 1968, along with the development of a corresponding set of graphic and formal techniques. In the mid-2010s I participated in a larger research project on Southern California architecture in the 1970s.
From 2017-2020 I was the Multimedia Reviews Editor for the Journal of Architectural Historians. My goal was broadly expand the definition of multimedia and to treat buildings as media in themselves.