Alberto Pérez-Gómez was born in Mexico City in 1949, where he studied architecture and practiced. He did postgraduate work at Cornell University, and was awarded an M.A. and a Ph.D. by the University of Essex (England). Since January 1987 he has occupied the Bronfman Chair of Architectural History at McGill University, where he founded the History and Theory Post-Professional (Master’s and Doctoral) Programs. Pérez-Gómez has lectured extensively around the world and is the author of numerous articles published in major periodicals and books. More recently, Attunement, Architectural Meaning after the Crisis of Modern Science (MIT Press, 2016), draws connections between phenomenology and recent enactive cognitive science towards the implementation of attuned atmosphere in architecture and the urban environment.

Lola is a founding partner, with Mason White, of Lateral Office, a Toronto based practice, and she is Associate Professor at the University of Waterloo. Lateral Office is an architecture practice that operates at the intersection of architecture, landscape, and urbanism. The studio describes its practice process as a commitment to design as a research vehicle to pose and respond to complex, urgent questions in the built environment, engaging in the wider context and climate of a project– social, ecological, or political. Lateral Office have been pursuing research and design work on the role of architecture in remote regions, particularly the Canadian North, for the past eight years.

Dr. Orit Halpern is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University and a Strategic Hire in Interactive Design and Theory. Her work bridges the histories of science, computing, and cybernetics with design. Currently she is writing three books. The first is a history and theory of smartness and machine learning territories, the second is a genealogy of resilience and the historical transformations that have occurred in the relationship between economy, ecology, and computation since the 1970’s, and the third is an atlas of intelligences. She is also the director of the Speculative Life Research Cluster, a laboratory situated at the intersection of the environmental sciences, architecture and design, and computational media.

Alessandra Ponte is Full professor at the École d’architecture, Université de Montréal. She has also taught at the schools of architecture of Princeton University, Cornell University, Pratt Institute New York, the ETH Zurich, and at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia. She has been adjunct professor at School of Design of Built Environment and Engineering, Queensland University of Technology (Brisbane, Australia), taught workshops in collaboration with the AA School London and the Catholic University of Santiago de Chile, and seminars at the University of Costa Rica.For ten years she has been responsible for the conception and organization of the Phyllis Lambert International Seminar, annual colloquia held at the Université de Montréal, addressing current topics in landscape and architecture. She curated the exhibition Total Environment: Montreal 1965-1975(Canadian Center for Architecture, Montreal, 2009) and collaborated to the exhibition and catalogue God & Co: François Dallegret Beyond the Bubble(with Laurent Stalder and Thomas Weaver, London: Architectural Association Publications, 2011). She has published extensively including recently a collection of essays on North American landscapes titled The House of Light and Entropy(London: AA Publications, 2014). She contributed to the Canadian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale Architecture in 2014 (Arctic Adaptations) and 2016 (Extraction). From 2013 to 2016 she has been a member of the research group Future Northa partnership between the School of Landscape and Urbanism AHO (Oslo) and the Barents Institute and she has recently been invited to collaborate to one of projects of the Office for Urbanization (Graduate School of Design, Harvard University) titled Landscape as Urbanism in the Americas. In 2014, 2015 and 2016, together with master students in architecture and collaborators, she has investigated mining activities and settlements in three geological regions in the province of Quebec: the Labrador Through (iron), the Cadillac Fault (gold, copper, and nickel) and the district of Thetford Mines (asbestos, slate and granite). For the last two years, always in cooperation with master students and collaborators, she has conducted research on information technologies and architecture. The research work has been collected in two volumes titled Architecture et information 2.0(2017, 2018).

Theodora Vardouli is Assistant Professor at the Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture, McGill University. Her research broadly examines algorithmic techniques of describing, generating, and simulating architectural form and performance -- their histories, cultural meanings, and operational implications for creative design. Her recent scholarship has revolved around processes of mathematization that preceded, and paralleled, the introduction of computers to architectural design, along with knowledge cultures of the settings in which these unfolded. Current research projects include investigation of activity in design methodology and its intersections with computer aided design research in postwar North America, genealogies of formalism in the interface of architecture and mathematics, and histories of dynamic modeling in postwar British architectural theory. Alongside these critical historical projects, Vardouliinvestigates, through teaching, collisions between perceptual shape, material things, and structural abstraction while designing and making with digital tools. Vardouli's articles have been published in Leonardo, Design Studies, and several edited collections. She is co-curator of the forthcoming exhibition Vers Une Imagination Numérique (UQAM, 2020) and co-editor of Computer Architectures: Constructing the Common Ground, 1945-1980 (Routledge, forthcoming 2019) a collection of essays by scholars of design, media, and technology probing keywords that catalyzed dialogues among architects, engineers, and mathematicians in the postwar. Before McGill, Vardouli was Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt and Lecturer at the Boston Architectural College. Vardouli holds a PhD and a SMArchS in Design and Computation from MIT, where she was Presidential Fellow, and a Master of Science in Design-Space-Culture from the National Technical University of Athens, where she also completed her first architectural training leading to her MArch. Vardouli's research has been supported from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Onassis Foundation, the A.G. Leventis Foundation, and the Fulbright Foundation.

Carl Lostritto lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island. He is the Graduate Program Director and Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture at Rhode Island School of Design. At RISD he teaches throughout the architecture professional curricula and in the Computation, Technology and Culture undergraduate concentration.

Led by Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy, Design Earth examines the geographies of urban systems—such as energy, trash, water, and agriculture—to prompt the debate on the techno-environment in the age of climate change.

Angela Silver’s work examines notions of absence through the residue of language. Through her research, archaeologies of inscription, she examines and repurposes communication artifacts from writing systems seeking to restructure and reorder language systems. Drawing on performance, she re-tools obsolete writing objects as a strategy to reconsider speech, writing and communication itself. In September 2018, the city unveiled the winner of the concept proposed by the Lemay + Angela Silver + SNC-Lavalin team selected among four other finalists. For this talk, Silver will discuss our winning project proposal for the Place des Montréalaises, the international multidisciplinary landscape architecture competition for the development of this new public square.

Sophie Wilkin joined the Provencher_Roy team in 2015 and has since participated in multiple projects, studies and architectural competitions. She has worked as project designer on various projects, including the Port of Montreal’s Grand Quai cruise terminal and observation tower, the Sainte-Catherine street rejuvenation project and the Vendôme metro station renewal. She distinguishes herself through her experience with complex urban infrastructures, her ability for conceptual development and her dynamic collaborative approach.

Mélanie Binette is a multidisciplinary artist, performer and researcher based in Montreal. She is the co-founder and director of Théâtre Nulle Part (soon to be Milieu de Nulle Part), a site-specific art collective exploring the city as an imagined, practiced, contested, conquered and reconquered space. She graduated in 2014 from an interdisciplinary Master's degree in the Individualized Program at Concordia University--in the fields of architecture, art history, and performance and communication studies--her thesis questioning the political potential of spectatorship in immersive performances.