The second Architecture as Public Concern Lecture supports the recent creation of the CCA Research Network, an entity bringing together alumni from almost four decades of research programs at the CCA. This annual lecture explores the theme of the 2024 Architecture as Public Concern Fellowship, which asks “where does the work land?”. It also aligns with the ambition of the CCA Research Network to continue the conversations our Fellows began during their residencies at the CCA, and to chart collectively the issues related to the global built environment that are at the forefront of our work.

Participants in any of our Research programs since the founding of the CCA are automatically enrolled in the CCA Research Network. The annual Architecture as Public Concern Lecture will take place online and is open to the public.

This second lecture is a dialogue between Jane Mah Hutton and Thandi Loewenson investigating reparation as a concrete and conceptual practice that can centre land and the claims it makes on behalf of communities. Their conversation will foreground how communities can participate in the questions we craft as researchers, examining the politics and places of these communities from a more ground-level perspective by looking at sites where assumptions about institutional privilege, colonial survivance, and structural racism often coalesce. Following Olúfẹ́mi O Táíwò’s recent call in Reconsidering Reparations to engage with reparation as a “construction project,” the 2024 Architecture as Public Concern Lecture considers how research practices are intimately and sometimes unconsciously tied to land-based paradigms of enclosure, refusal, extraction, and repair, ones that that demand critique, renewal, and occasional revaluing.

The event will open with Mah Hutton and Loewenson sharing their current research projects, followed by a conversation moderated by CCA Research Network Steering Committee Members Arièle Dionne-Krosnick, Georgios Eftaxiopoulos, Nokubekezela Mchnu, Sara Stevens, and Huda Tayob.

Jane Mah Hutton is a landscape architect whose research focuses on the expanded relationships of the act of building – from material flows to labour movements. One stream of Mah Hutton’s work examines the movement of materials as they pass from production landscapes (plantations, quarries, factories) to designed constructions (buildings, landscapes, infrastructure) through demolition and disposal or re-use. She recently completed the book Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements (Routledge, 2019), which traces five emblematic landscape materials that ended up in New York City over the past century. Other publications include an edited volume Landscript 5: Material Culture – Assembling and Disassembling Landscapes (Jovis, 2017), and Wood Urbanism: From the Molecular to the Territorial (Actar, 2020), co-edited with Daniel Ibanez and Kiel Moe. Her writing has been published in venues such as the Journal of Architectural Education, Journal of Landscape Architecture, Harvard Design Magazine, Landscape Architecture Magazine,  and Scapegoat: Architecture, Landscape, Political Economy, which she co-founded.  Mah Hutton was a 2019 Research Fellow at the Canadian Centre for Architecture.

Born in Harare, Thandi Loewenson is an architectural designer and researcher who mobilizes design, fiction, and performance to stoke embers of emancipatory political thought and fires of collective action, and to feel for the contours of other, possible worlds. Using fiction as a design tool and tactic, and operating in the overlapping realms of the weird, the tender, the earthly, and the airborne, Loewenson engages in projects that question the status-quo, while working with communities, policy makers, unions, artists, and architects to act on those provocations. A senior tutor at the Royal College of Art, she holds a PhD in Architectural Design from The Bartlett. Loewenson is a co-founder of the architectural collective BREAK//LINE—an “act of creative solidarity” that “resists definition with intent”—, which was formed at The Bartlett in 2018 to oppose the trespass of capital, indifference towards inequality, and the myriad frontiers of oppression in contemporary architectural education and practice. She is also a contributor to EQUINET, the Regional Network on Equity in Health in East and Southern Africa, a co-founder of the Fiction, Feeling, Frame research collective at the Royal College of Art, and a co-curator, with Huda Tayob and Suzi Hall, of the open-access curriculum project Race, Space & Architecture. She was recently awarded the Havard GSD’s 2024 Wheelwright Prize, and participated in the CCA-Mellon Multidisciplinary Research Program, The Digital Now: Architecture and Intersectionality.