McGill University Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture
Macdonald Harrington Building, 815 Sherbrooke Street West H3A 0C2 Montreal, QC, Canada

Please join us for the final lecture of our Winter Lecture Series with Ayanna Dozier and Nina Cooke-John, who will be presenting on a project and installation they have co-designed called 'Cities of the Dead'. Today, New York City’s Hart Island is primarily known as a potter’s field for the burial of unclaimed bodies. With renewed public awareness around its use as a burial ground for those who have died from COVID-19, Hart Island has taken on an additional layer of historic...al significance given the more severe impact of the pandemic on communities of color. Throughout its storied history, the island has also housed an asylum, jail, and sanatoriumand was once the planned location for an amusement park meant to serve the Black population of 1920s Harlem. Cities of the Dead traces the imagined (re)construction of Solomon Riley’s park, dubbed Negro Coney Island, across an installation of photos, speculative monologues from imagined park attendees, and an architectural rendering of Riley’s abandoned plans co-designed by architect Nina Cooke-John. Cities of the Dead establishes an imagined near future in which the park approaches its 100th anniversary in 2024 and unites seemingly disparate threads of Hart Island’s histories together. Hart Island is a site for reflecting on the absence in Black life of architectural spaces for mourning and the way in which gross economic and social inequities frame Black death and plague it in its afterlife. The school gratefully acknowledges support for our lecture series from Provencher Roy Associés Architects Inc. and NEUF Architects.

Please join Albena Yaneva, Professor of Architectural Theory at the University of Manchester for The New Ecology of Architectural Practice, an actor-network-theory perspective on the effects of COVID-19, taking place April 9th from 9:30-11 am. Of what concerns does a virus hold for architectural scholarship? How does it affect architecture and the socio-spatial machinery of architecture making? What kind of new reflexivity on the profession does it trigger? Addressing thes...e questions, the lecture will explore the impact of the global pandemic on the wider ecology of architectural practice. Unpacking the multiple ways Covid-19 has affected and continues to affect the day-to-day reality of design practice, the problems and the potentials that arise from shifting working patterns will be highlighted and the possible long-term consequences of these changes on the architectural profession will be evaluated. To join please sign up at [email protected]

Please join us for the final lecture of our Winter Lecture Series with Jay Pitter, MES, who is an award-winning placemaker. Her practice mitigates growing divides in cities across North America. She spearheads institutional city-building projects specializing in public space design and policy, forgotten densities, mobility equity, gender-responsive design, inclusive public engagement and healing fraught sites. What distinguishes Jay is her multidisciplinary approach, located at the nexus of urban design and social equity, which translates community insights and aspirations into the built environment.

Join the Society of Architectural Historians April 1317 for paper sessions, keynote talks, awards and more + free roundtables in May. Register for the SAH 2021 Virtual Conference now. https://www.sah.org/2021-virtual-conference