Emerging from DocTalks’ participation in our 2023 Toolkit for Today seminar on Collectivity, these sessions bring together the cohort of students who participated in our Doctoral Research Residency Program in the summer of last year. Four groups across two sessions centre questions related to how architectural historical inquiry can be undertaken in common through dialogue and mutual support. By surfacing encounters with the CCA collection, they collaboratively intertwine their experiences of interrogating archive-driven research.

Housing
Eunjong Kim, Melanie R. Ball, Inês Leonor Nunes
Respondent: Michael Moynihan, Syracuse University

This presentation explores the expanding domain of housing expertise in different global contexts, tracing the development of housing discourse and planning. Delving into the roles of expert-driven schemes in housing, we scrutinize the intertwining of housing development, urban economies, and cross-national exchanges. Moreover, we confront how these interventions interface with local populations, threading through environmental considerations and cultural sensibilities. By bridging regions and narratives, we reveal the complex network of ideas and practices reshaping dwelling spaces, particularly in our selected regions. Our investigation culminates in a reflection on how these elements coalesced and conflicted, urging a re-evaluation of the formulation of housing problems and solutions in the face of diverse human and spatial ecologies.

Environment making
Sophie Higgerson, Laura Pannekoek, Justine Holzman, Anna Renken
Respondent: Jordan B. Kinder, Wilfrid Laurier University

This talk investigates how notions of “environment” are ideologically, politically, and spatially constructed. With this in mind, we ask, in what ways are environments made manifest in the archive? How do statecraft and colonial techniques both construct and mobilize environmental ideologies and architectural responses? Or, how can we read registers of governance and environmental controls through architectural archives? These questions are explored through the library and archival holdings of the CCA, including: the Minimum Cost Housing Group at McGill University, PGL’s work in the Canadian Arctic, tactics and technologies of land surveying, and the relationship of modernism to vernacular Alpine architecture.

Free and open to the public.
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