The event video will be published here and on YouTube on 29 July. We will host a live Q&A on Instagram on 30 July, at 6:30pm Montréal time. Questions for the Q&A may be submitted to public@cca.qc.ca or left as comments on YouTube.

The word ‘collaborative’ should make you as suspicious as the word ‘sustainable’ since both are used to vindicate projects and relationships. But appearing collaborative, like appearing to be happy in the office, is a condition of professional employability, and so the word seems unavoidable and even empty, especially for architects who can’t make a project on their own anyway. At the same time, we hear more and more about ‘collectives.’ Both concepts reflect a society anxious that its mounting crises have something to do with unchecked individualism.

Architects are traditionally uncomfortable with acknowledging their dependence on other actors, so My Invisible Friend invites them to present projects made with non-architects and to reveal the invisible friends without whom their work would be impossible. Each speaker completes three tasks:

1: Tell the story of a decisive encounter with a figure from outside architecture and of how it created a new kind of practice.
2: Pick any dead or fictional non-architect to collaborate with, and explain why.
3: Pick another contemporary architect and a collaborator to inflict upon them, and explain why.

office ca is a design research collaborative led by Galo Canizares and Stephanie Sang Delgado, who are fascinated by the absurdities of constraints, codes (in every sense), and histories of architecture. Founded in 2014, they research curious objects such as software. Canizares teaches at Ohio State University’s Knowlton School of Architecture and is the author of Digital Fabrications: Designer Stories for a Software-Based Planet (2019), and Sang Delgado is an architectural designer and a Teaching Fellow at the School of Architecture at Taliesin.