McLennan Joins Board of McEwen School

A McEwen School design student project: a warming hut on the ice, complete with ice skaters

image courtesy of The McEwen School

Canada’s first architecture school to open in forty years calls Sudbury home

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.

Students meet with an Elder on a visit to the Dan Pine Healing Lodge

image courtesy of the McEwen School

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 good work quietly and modestly. Elders also help students realize that to be great designers, or good persons, they need to reach deep inside to find their inner voices so they can express who they are through their work.”

McEwen School students construct a traditional birch bark canoe in their second year

image courtesy of The McEwen School

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 McEwen School curriculum includes the design and build of warming huts, built on sleds

image courtesy of The McEwen School

This ethos, though born of and grounded in a distinct place, is a way of grounding design in any place, uniquely preparing McEwen School graduates for the emerging needs of society in the face of climate change and other global stressors with an intuitive sense of the ways in which place-based design can create change.

The McEwen School of Architecture’s Advisory Board

image courtesy of The McEwen School

Our CEO Jason F. McLennan, born and raised in Sudbury, has been honored with an invitation to join the McEwen School Advisory Board alongside over a dozen other distinguished leaders from both in and outside the profession. Together, the board are contributing their varied expertise and ideas to continue to grow the program. “My experience growing up in Sudbury and the North shaped my world-view, my sensibilities and my deep commitment to a different way of living and being focused on regeneration and beautiful design” says McLennan, who visited the school at the end of November to participate in the first meeting of the board. “I am honored to come home and provide counsel and ideas to this wonderful new icon of the north.”

MSoA’s first Master of Architecture class will graduate in the spring of 2019.