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The COVID-19 pandemic puts health and safety in homes and workplaces to the test. Improved ventilation and sanitation have taken on special urgency among the many performance aspects of building design. ESD Global executive chairman Raj Gupta and International WELL Building Institute president and CEO Rachel Hodgdon will present examples of office towers being adapted for safe re-occupancy, such as Chicago’s 150 North Riverside, and explain the growing use and relevance of the WELL Building Standard (a certification akin to LEED for energy efficiency) in the healthy buildings movement. Chicago Architecture Center President and CEO Lynn Osmond moderates a discussion to follow, during which speakers will delve into the challenges and opportunities of implementation and competitive advantages for healthy buildings. What will it take to transform our work environments?

The Chicago Architecture Center’s ongoing series of Architect Talks continues with a conversation and guest lecture with 2020 Pritzker Prize laureates Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara of Grafton Architects, co-presented with the Irish Consulate General in Chicago. Founded in 1978, Grafton lays claim to noteworthy projects from Lima to London and is known for embedding each building within its own unique context. The studio’s forward-looking, influential designs have helped elevate modern architecture, cementing Ireland’s reputation as a design capital. Farrell and McNamara will spotlight several civic and institutional works including Milan’s Bocconi University, awarded the inaugural World Building of the Year Award at the World Architecture Festival; UTEC University in Lima, Peru, which received the RIBA International Prize in 2016; and ongoing projects for the City of Dublin, London School of Economics and the University of Arkansas, in addition to recounting their experiences as curators of the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. A discussion afterward will further illuminate the architects’ process, work and lifelong commitment to mentorship.

feminist architecture collaborative (f-architecture) is a three-woman* architectural research enterprise aimed at disentangling the contemporary spatial politics of bodies, intimately and globally. Their projects traverse theoretical and material registers to locate new forms of architectural work through critical relationships with collaborators across continents and an expanding definition of Designer. They think, write, and design about blood, teenage dreaming, sovereignty, fakeness, and protest—among other supposedly extra-disciplinary fixations.

BAIDA, the Black Architects & Interior Designers Association, is a non profit organization of planners, interior designers, architects and students that aims to support diversity, equity and inclusion in the profession of architecture and interior design. One of the only organizations within Toronto connecting Architects and Interior Designers, BAIDA seeks to create opportunities for other minorities through advocacy, mentorship, networking and outreach.

In 2014, social theorist Brian Massumi authored What Animals Teach Us About Politics?, "an extended thought experiment in what an animal politics can be". Seven years later, humanity's belonging to the natural realm has never been so asserted, as human-induced climate change renders the entanglement of causes and consequences even more visible and epidemics expose how intimate are the transactions that continuously take place across different life forms. If the logic of "us" [humans] learning from "them" [animals] needs to be questioned alongside other extractivist legitimisations, it may also be time to widen the reflection on other-than-human politics to understand what other politics and ethics can living and non-living beings shatter, inaugurate and reveal. In this talk, I will explore the possibilities and limits of viral political wisdom and discuss what they disclose of our present and near future.

Sputniko! (Artist/Designer, Tokyo University of the Arts)
Respondent Georgina Voss (London College of Communication)

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