Two teams from McGill University’s School of Architecture shared first prize in the 17th Canadian Centre for Architecture Inter-university Charrette (November 10-13, 2011), Liquid City.  Team 78 (Hydro cosm: Lance Moore, Alexandre Hamel, and Maxime Leclerc) and Team 26 (Down with the Linear Functional: Gabrielle Poirier, Gabrielle Marcoux, Philippe Larocque, and Marc-Antoine Chartier-Primeau won first prize (ex aequo) in a competition in which a total of 68 teams took part. Organized by the CCA and the École de design of Université du Québec à Montréal, in collaboration with McGill University and Université de Montréal and with the participation of Université Laval, Carleton University, Ryerson University and the University of Toronto, the competition invited students and interns to posit a new relationship between water and city living.

Martin Bressani and Marc Grignon have just published “De la lumière et de l’ombre : les fantasmagories du gaz d’éclairage à Paris au XIXe siècle,” in Speilraum: Benjamin et l’Architecture, Paris : Éditions de la Villette, 2011.   With Nicholas Roquet, Bressani also authored, “Entropy in the Home: Reflections on the Nineteenth-Century Interior,” forthcoming in Architecture and Ideas. 

Ricardo Castro presented a paper entitled “Breaking the Limits: The Concept of Infinity in the Contemporary Neo-baroque World at The Neo-Baroque Revisited:An International and Interdisciplinary Conference on the Baroque held at the University of Western Ontario on 13-15 October 2011.

Avi Friedman has just published two books: Decision Making for Flexibility in Housing (Urban International Press) and The Nature of Place; A Search for Authenticity (Princeton Architectural Press).   Friedman delivered a keynote opening address at the Housing Now conference at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, BC, and authored a feature article on Tel Aviv’s Neve Tzedek neighborhood for enRoute Magazine. He also completed a design of a sustainable community for the Municipality of Middlesex Center, Ontario.

Nik Luka recently gave a keynote address entitled “Building better neighbourhoods: lessons and ideas from Montréal’s Green, Active, and Healthy Neighbourhood project” at the “Celebrating Sense of Place and Spirit of Community” conference in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, as part of the city’s year-long Cultural Capital of Canada activities. Among forthcoming pieces is a critical essay on opportunities for urban sustainability in cottage housing across Canada, part of Urban sustainability: reconnecting place and space (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, edited by Ann Dale, Bill Dushenko, & Pamela Robinson).