EDIFY
WINTER 2018-2019
McLENNAN JOINS BOARD OF McEWEN SCHOOL
Canada’s first architecture school to open in forty years calls Sudbury home
CLICK HERE TO VIEW ARCH DAILY’S GALLERY OF THE MCEWEN SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE, DESIGNED BY LGA ARCHITECTURAL PARTNERS.
Canada’s first new architecture school to open in forty years has done so in what might seem an unlikely place: Sudbury, Ontario. Known more for mining and environmental degradation than design, Laurentian University’s McEwen School of Architecture (MSoA) is charting a new path in a town whose tired identity as a resource extraction hub is overdue for reinvention. The school’s curriculum revolves around Sudbury’s distinctive Indigenous and Northern cultural influences, blending the two to create a first-of-its-kind pedagogy firmly rooted in place. Above: The McEwen School of Architecture’s Advisory Board. Facing page, clockwise from upper left: McEwen School students construct a traditional birch bark canoe in their second year; curriculum also includes the design and build of warming huts, built on sleds; students meet with an Elder on a visit to the Dan Pine Healing Lodge; another warming hut on the ice, complete with ice skaters. All photos courtesy of The McEwen School of Architecture 32
The attributes of this place – Indigenous culture, climate, geography, abundant natural resources (specifically the boreal forests), English, French and First Nation languages spoken – converge to create this unique identity, one that is decidedly northern in influence and shares more with the vast expanses and communities of the North than with the southern influence of Toronto. This distinction was especially important to former Laurentian Economics Department Chair David Robinson who writes, “Sudbury is a jumble of buildings that were designed by Toronto architects and Florida design companies that sell plans to contractors…I would argue that we have been colonized by the aesthetic of a different world and that the issues of identity are intimately connected to the economy.” The McEwen School rights this “aesthetic colonization” by defining and evolving a style that is uniquely of place. The core of the learning experience at MSoA revolves around the studio, where students work collaboratively with each other, Indigenous Elders and other instructors, designing and building projects - including a birch bark canoe fashioned in the traditional way, and ice shelters - alongside more expected design school inquiries. Terrence Galvin, founding Director of MSoA, writes, “While some of what the students learn from the Elders can be of a practical nature…much of it is not tangible, and reflects more a way of thinking and being in the world. Students absorb attitudes about sustainability, materials, care for the land, the people and the animals that inhabit it, and how to do
