Education of Architects in Sustainable Design
New School of Architecture to Focus on Northern Communities
Sep 23, 2009
It has been decades since a new school of architecture opened in Canada. Design activists in the region of Sudbury and staff at both the City of Greater Sudbury and Laurentian University have come together to create the Laurentian School of Architecture.
Formerly called the Northern Ontario School of Architecture, Laurentian Architecture will offer a four-year Bachelor of Architectural Studies (B.A.S.) combined with a two-year Master of Architecture (M.Arch), both of which will allow students to work in either of Canada’s official languages. An additional three and a half-year Master of Architecture professional degree, to be offered completely in French, will soon be developed.
In a province with four existing architecture schools, the new school is staking out its own terrain with a focus on design for northern communities. This focus will go hand in hand with courses to prepare students for professional careers in architecture.
Downtown Campus and Community Revitalization
Organizers for the new school are adamant that students be educated within a downtown urban environment rather than a traditional university campus. A satellite campus is being planned for downtown Sudbury, a city centre that would benefit from more economic development and renewal.
Over the course of their studies students will alternate four months in school with four month stints in an architectural or design practice. This is a model that has proven to be very successful at other Canadian universities like Waterloo and Dalhousie.
The city of Sudbury has 158,000 people and the wider region about 550,000. The region abounds with opportunities for design projects for smaller centers, including aboriginal and Franco-Canadian communities. Course curricula will expose students to working in regional, national and global northern communities and to using participatory techniques for engaging residents.
A request for proposals will eventually be issued for the new facilities. In the interim, the school’s temporary facilities will be located in existing buildings in the downtown area. Currently organizers are focusing on garnering financial support and hiring the right people to head up the school.
As an indication of its support for the new school, the City of Greater Sudbury has already committed $10 million (CAD) toward the capital portion of the project, which totals $35 million.
Sustainable Design in a Resource Based Economy
Northern Ontario’s economy has been founded on the extraction of raw materials like iron ore, precious metals and wood. Laurentian Architecture is seen as an important complement to other regional efforts to diversify the economy and encourage the development of a creative culture.
The school’s mandate represents a challenge to conventional ways of building in northern communities. Questions it will address include:
- How do we build in culturally sensitive ways in small northern communities?
- How does a new school of architecture help create a culture of creativity for the wider region?
- How can the new school contribute to the revitalization of the downtown in a northern center?
Blaine Nicholls, a retired architect who has been a driver behind the new school, has stated the northern economy in Canada needs a paradigm shift: from hewers of wood and extractors of minerals, to creating value-added products. Scandinavia offers examples worth emulating.
Laurentian Architecture might become the catalyst for new thinking about economic development in the north. At the very least, it could establish prototypes for sustainable design and development in northern communities.
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