The world’s industrial design processes are becoming more precise, more computerized and more perfect.  In contrast, buildings are still hand-made, imperfect and almost crude.  D’Arcy Jones will present recent studio work, highlighting their successes and failures in the pursuit of craft within the limits of contemporary construction. Visual artist, Germaine Koh’s public interventions and urban situations cultivate an active citizenry through play and conceptual provocation. She will present Home Made Home, her project for building small dwellings, which promotes DIY community building and creative strategies for occupying urban space.

Moderated by Adele Weder.

Germaine Koh is an internationally active Canadian visual artist based in Vancouver. Her work is concerned with the significance of everyday exchanges, familiar objects and common places. Koh has been a recipient of the Shadbolt Foundation VIVA Award and a finalist for the Sobey Art Award. Her current projects include League, a regular gathering to play invented sports and games as a practice of collective creative problem-solving, and Home Made Home, an enterprise for building innovative small dwellings. 

D’Arcy Jones heads the award-winning Vancouver D’Arcy Jones Architecture studio.  The studio’s  process is preoccupied with the creation of unique, contextual, and spatial solutions.  On projects of different scales and types, invention and craft are preferential to repertoire and luxury.  Through competitions, design panels, teaching, and lectures, Jones strives to create a practice that is a critical contributor to contemporary culture.

Adele Weder is a Vancouver-based architectural writer who contributes regularly to Architectural Record, Canadian Architect, The Walrus, and other publications across North America and abroad. She is also the curator and coordinator of the exhibition “Ron Thom and the Allied Arts,” which travelled across Canada from 2013 to 2015. Adele is a recipient of the President’s Award in Architectural Journalism and the Metro Vancouver Advocacy Award from the RAIC. She’s a co-author and contributing essayist to books on B.C. Binning, Selwyn Pullan, and others. Her next book project, on Montreal architect Dan Hanganu, will be published by Dalhousie Architectural Press later this year.