Amid the climate crisis, how can we balance ecological concerns with the need for housing? What alternatives to demolition exist for reusing and upgrading existing buildings? To coincide with the opening of our exhibition To Build Law, we invite you to a roundtable on renovation and rehabilitation policies in Canada.

Olaf Grawert (bplus.xyz), Alina Kolar (HouseEurope!), Alexandre Landry (L’Ensemble), Conrad Speckert (LGA Architectural Partners), and Juliette Cook (Ha/f Climate Design) will discuss the economic, environmental, and legal challenges of renovation.

We will explore the lifecycle of buildings, the urgent needs and barriers to renovation, as well as current and potential policies and incentives to encourage the reuse of existing buildings. Join us in conversation about the alternatives around us.

This discussion kicks off our series of public events related to our Groundwork project, exploring the evolving role of architects today.

This event is free and open to the public. No registration is required.

Olaf Grawert is an architect, advisor and a partner at bplus.xyz (Berlin). Together with a close network of collaborators, he works on architectural projects that bridge theory and practice, from campaigns and exhibitions to publications and films. His work focuses on the political and economic conditions of spatial production, with a particular interest in the potential of architecture to effect social change. Grawert was co-curator of 2038 - The New Serenity, the German Pavilion at the 17th Venice Biennale, and is co-editor of “What is architecture?”. He has been teaching with station+ at ETH Zurich since 2017.

Alina Kolar is a recuring collaborator of bplus.xyz, on the projects HouseEurope and stationplus at ETH. Alina Ana Kolar (AT, 1990) is a communication scientist, creative strategist, and curator specializing in visual cultures and political semiotics. She works at the intersection of art, activism, and social change, with a particular focus on the visuality of political events and representations of the public. An expert in diverse and inclusive management across organizations, Alina has built global partnerships and specialist consultancies that move fluidly through the public and private creative sectors. Between 2017-2022, she co-founded and led the international street newspaper, publishing house, and philanthropic organization Arts of the Working Class. Kolar is researching and teaching with station+ at ETH Zurich since 2023.

Conrad Speckert is an intern architect at LGA Architectural Partners (Toronto) with degrees from McGill University and the University of Waterloo. He is leading a Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation-sponsored research project to develop alternative solutions to the building code requirement for two staircases in small multi-unit residential buildings and has proposed a corresponding change to the National Building Code of Canada (https://secondegress.ca/). He joined LGA as project manager for ‘ReHousing,’ a collaboration with the University of Toronto to visualize gentle densification and zoning reform for “missing middle” housing. He is the recipient of the 2024 Prix de Rome in Architecture, Emerging Practitioners Award.

Alexandre Landry is an architect MOAQ, from Québec. He also teaches at the Faculté d’aménagement at UdeM. Alexandre Landry is the founder of Alexandre Landry Architecte. Since its founding in 2019, his firm has been developing architectural and research projects with a positive social and environmental impact, and led many projects of housing renovations integrating circular economy of building material. He is also the founder and director of L’Ensemble, a non-profit organization whose mission is to mobilize architectural and urban innovation for the benefit of sustainable and inclusive development with municipalities from the region of Québec for affordable housing and densification in urban centres. With L’Ensemble, he is currently leading a pilot project at MRC Brome-Missisquoi.

Juliette Cook is a partner at Ha/f Climate Design, which she co-founded with Kelly Alvarez Doran. Juliette is an intern architect, a lecturer at University of Waterloo, and a researcher. Her research and expertise spans from lifecycle lens to design thinking across a diverse portfolio of projects - evaluating these from the perspectives of embodied carbon, operational performance, cost, reuse potential, toxicity, labour, and more. Juliette leads a collaborative project through the Circular Opportunity Innovation Launchpad that will showcase the economic viability and environmental necessity of deconstruction and material reuse across Ontario. She has worked with the City of Toronto on a benchmarking study on embodied carbon, helping to inform a future system of tiered targets and developing a standard reporting template for whole building life cycle assessments. Juliette has experience as a material research specialist at MASS Design Group, and as an architectural designer and sustainability consultant at White Arkitekter, where she created a palette of non-conventional, low-carbon materials for a large-scale cancer treatment centre.