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Jean-Pierre Chupin and David Theodore participated in a round table at the launch of the book “Canadian Modern Architecture”, January 15, 2020, at the Canadian Center for Architecture. This detailed reference work highlights how architectural practice in Canada has changed since 1967, and how Canadian architects have interpreted international fashions and regional and Aboriginal architectural trends, with a focus on Toronto, Montreal , and Vancouver. The conversation focused on Canadian methods of competition and commissioning in an international context.

Louise Pelletier is co-curator of the exhibition “Concrete in all its forms – Mark West’s architectural experiments”, inaugurated on February 20, 2020. Until April 11, 2020, the Design Center presents visionary and enigmatic drawings concrete constructions by artist and architect Mark West, brought together for the first time in one place. This collection of works imprinted by the surrealist universe brings together works, which go from dreamlike drawing to the design of architectural elements, in an installation where their remarkable unity becomes explicit. These works demonstrate the symbiosis of rational and non-rational thought through methods that explore and discover the poetic potential and the structural intelligence hidden in everyday materials.

On February 6, 2020, Anne Cormier represented LEAP at the Sidewalk Labs in Toronto. As part of the Canadian Architectural Forums on Education (CAFE) series, she has participated in various discussions that support the search for a national architectural policy for Canada.

The second edition of the Intersections du design symposium will take place on May 4 and 5, 2020, during the 88th Acfas congress in Sherbrooke. Entitled “Caring through design”, it seeks to examine what kind of insight the concept of care can offer to research and practices currently carried out in the design disciplines. Organized over two days, its purpose is to bring together speakers from the different fields of research and practice in design, including researchers and researcher-creators (emerging or confirmed), practitioners and designers (established or at the start of their careers), graduate students. In a spirit of mutual fertilization and diversity, the presentations of the students will be mixed with those of the researchers, researchers-creators and practitioners. This conference is led by a plural organizing committee made up of representatives from four Quebec Schools of Design, associating Concordia University, Laval University, the University of Montreal and the University of Quebec in Montreal. In partnership with the journal Sciences du Design, the research group Design, innovations and humanisms, the research group Design and society, the Interdisciplinary research center in operationalization of sustainable development (CIRODD), the Concordia Integrated Design Research Chair, Ecology And Sustainability for the Built Environment (IDEAS-BE), and the UQAM Research Chair in Design for E-Mental Health (DIAMENT).

In 2017, seven years after the earthquake that destroyed the historic building of the National Palace in Haiti, a major international architecture competition was launched and the winners were announced on January 12, 2020. But some of the contest participants denounce the opacity of the process.

Despite the renown of the winning team of Cassandre Méhu, supported by the great British architect David Adjaye, the fact that the Haitian people do not have access to the jury’s report and therefore to the issues of qualitative judgment poses many democratic problems.

Journalist Widlore Mérancourt, of the online media Ayibopost, a critical platform for popularizing public issues, consulted Jean-Pierre Chupin on certain aspects of this process. For Jean-Pierre Chupin, the communication of the jury’s report is essential. “In a competition, the jury literally embodies the company for which we want to design and build the best project […] There is therefore no reason to hide this or that aspect of the judgment”.

As part of his mandate as head of exhibitions of the Faculty of Planning presented annually at the Exhibition Center of the University of Montreal, Georges Adamczyk, offers an exhibition of monuments and sites inscribed on the World Heritage List of UNESCO, photographed by Kazuyoshi Miyoshi. This exhibition is a project supported by the School of Architecture and the School of Town Planning and Landscape Architecture.
This is the third exhibition devoted to Japanese architecture, urban planning and the landscape which is presented by Georges Adamczyk at the Exhibition Center of the University of Montreal, three exhibitions produced by the Japan Foundation and which also contributed financial assistance for these projects. In 2014, the exhibition on architectural reconstruction and adaptation after the terrible earthquake of March 2011 was presented. The aim was to take stock of the incredible resilience of the communities hit by this disaster and above all the immediate contribution and imaginative of universities and schools of architecture. Parallel Nipon, Architecture and Urbanism in Japan from 1996 to 2006, presented in 2018, was a remarkable example of the social and environmental directions taken by Japanese architecture after the formalist break of post-modernism.
To better understand contemporary architecture in Japan, that of today, especially that of Kengo Kuma and that of Sou Fujimoto, nothing better than to go back to basics. This new exhibition presents 67 photographs of Kazuyoshi Miyoshi. The list of natural and cultural properties of exceptional and universal values ​​of UNESCO world heritage, includes 23 sites and built complexes of Japanese heritage which is immense. 8 ancient built sites, 4 natural sites and the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, 1 of Le Corbusier’s 17 buildings, a group spread over 7 countries which marks its contribution to the heritage of modern architecture. This building is not included in the works of photographer Kazuyoshi Miyoshi. A small window is dedicated to him, allowing to discover other architectural photographers: Cemal Emden, Richard Pare and Takashi Homma.
The exhibition is also a discreet tribute to André Corboz who signed the preface to the volume on the architecture of Japan in the Universal Architecture collection, published by the Book Office in 1969, when he was a professor at the ‘School of Architecture of the University of Montreal. The exhibition runs from January 23 to February 15, 2020.

Cynthia Hammond is organizing a student conference as part of the exhibition “Feminist Spatial Stories”, at the Center for Oral History, in collaboration with 4th Space, at Concordia University, on March 5 and 6, 2020.

Cynthia Hammond is organizing the conference “Incarnated Stories: Gender, Body and Oral History” as part of a university exchange with the COHDS-SOHC Summer Institute, Center for Oral History and Digital Narration, Concordia University, from June 10 to 13 2020.