• Dionne Darling
  VP, Brand Partnerships
  Architect's Newspaper

  Dionne Darling

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  Dionne Darling has been with The A|N Media Group for over six years. As A|N’s Associate Publisher, she manages A|N’s Texas headquarters and handles accounts in the West, Southwest and Europe territories. Dionne has over 28 years of direct B2B sales, management and business development experience.

• Anne Koven
  Executive Director
  Mass Timber Institute

  Anne Koven

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  Koven has spent decades working in government and business, primarily in the areas of environmental and resource management. She was appointed to the Ontario Provincial Forest Policy Committee in 2008, was a trustee and secretary treasurer of the Trees Ontario Foundation, and represented the Foundation on the Natural Spaces Leadership Alliance. She served as President and Executive Director of the Ontario Forestry Association. Koven is an professor at the University of Toronto’s Graduate Department of Forestry, and assisted the Faculty in obtaining accreditation of the Master of Forest Conservation program by the Canadian Forestry Accreditation Board in 2014.

• 
  Speaker
  Juan Du
  Dean and Professor
  Daniels Faculty University of Toronto

  Juan Du

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  Professor Juan Du is Dean of the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto. She joined the Daniels Faculty in July 2021 following extensive experience in teaching, research, and academic leadership in Asia and the United States. Du is a committed educator and has established curriculums and courses in architectural design, history and theory, urban research, community building, as well as supervision of graduate thesis and Ph.D. students.

  Du is a recognized scholar on Asia’s rapid urbanization, and her works have been featured by international press and academic journals such as the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Wired Magazine, Foreign Affairs, and Nature. Her research and writings on architecture and urbanism have been published internationally, including in The Architectural Review, Volume, Domus, Journal of Architectural Education, e-flux, Architectural Journal, Time+Architecture, and Urban China. Her book “The Shenzhen Experiment: The Story of China’s Instant City” (Harvard University Press, 2020) has been featured and reviewed by a wide range of public and scholarly media across diverse disciplines, and received the 2020 Book of the Year Award for Interdisciplinary Research by the Institute for Humanities Research (ASU).

  Du has practiced extensively in the U.S., Europe, and China, establishing her Hong Kong-based office IDU in 2006. Projects range from human-scale built forms such as bookshops and community centres to large-scale urban plans and the social and ecological processes of a city. Her works have been exhibited and published internationally with recognitions such as Best New Practices in Hong Kong (PLOT, Argentina) and The Luminary Award (INDE, Australia), and featured in “New Chinese Architecture: Twenty Women Building the Future” (Thames & Hudson, London). She also contributes to the field through curatorial works, including as the chief curator of “Quotidian Architectures,” Hong Kong’s participation in the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale, “Housing an Affordable City Exhibition” at the 2011 Shenzhen Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture, and the “Rethinking Shenzhen” exhibit at the Shenzhen Museum of Contemporary Art and Urban Planning.

Within the current enthusiasm for mass timber building, there are core conceptual and methodological blindspots—rifts—between claimed attributes of timber buildings and the dynamics of forests and forestry. These rifts demand attention and when addressed they challenge received assumptions and common practices. To see the forest for the building expands the scope of timber building design, demanding more intricate knowledge about the relations of forests and timber buildings.

• 
  Keynote
  Kiel Moe, AIA, FAAR
  Architect/Professor
  McGill University

  Kiel Moe, AIA, FAAR

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  Kiel Moe, AIA, FAAR, is a practicing architect and professor of architecture. He has published several books on architecture including Empire, State & Building; Wood Urbanism: From the Molecular to the Territorial; Insulating Modernism: Isolated and Non-Isolated Thermodynamics in Architecture; Convergence: An Architectural Agenda for Energy.

• Jeff Morrison
  Business Development Manager

  Jeff Morrison

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We know that active forest management (or forest thinning) mitigates forest fires, reduces carbon emissions, replenishes waterways in the area, expands wildlife habitat, and creates jobs in rural areas. However, many questions have been raised about the sustainability of wood and wood buildings. The challenges of the contemporary world in relation to the exploitation and excessive consumption of resources have forced us to rethink many long unchallenged truths. But, despite issues of deforestation, wood can still be an extremely sustainable material, as long as it is extracted and treated in a conscious and respectful manner. This panel explores forestry in the global and North American context, the forest industry's history and its social license to operate, and what that means for architects interested in building with wood.

• 
  Speaker
  Kelly Alvarez Doran
  Associate Director – White Arkitekter / Adjunct Professor
  University of Toronto

  Kelly Alvarez Doran

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  Kelly is an Associate Director with White Arkitekter and an Adjunct Professor at the The Daniels School of Architecture at The University of Toronto. Kelly’s practice and research has focused on the built environment’s embodied impacts and has been recognized as a global leader in the climate-positive design. Prior to joining White, Kelly was Senior Principal at MASS Design Group where he lead their Rwanda office – overseeing the design and implementation of several MASS projects in Rwanda, Kenya and Congo.

• 
  Speaker
  Eli Gould
  US Representative
  Wood Export Bureau

  Eli Gould

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  Eli graduated with one of the first dual Architecture/Forestry degrees from Yale in the early ‘90s, with a conviction that the two fields would eventually be more linked. After a quarter century, this seems more true and even mainstream. For most of his career, this was an entrepreneurial effort in the small vertical wood prefab companies he ran from southern Vermont, and in the Canadian automated timber construction field where his mixed degree allowed specialty work permits. For the last three years, Eli has brought those experiences into a nonprofit market development role for the Quebec Wood Export Bureau, educating architects in the US and LatAm, supporting projects, and leading the builds of free design tools in the BIM environment. The success of wood structure trends in the north have also inspired recent efforts to develop new solutions for using tropical agroforestry timber on a bold enough scale, to serve housing and climate resiliency needs across the Caribbean and Latin America. When he’s not trying to transform the AEC industry into a positive climate force, he enjoys small town and farm life in Vermont with his family.

• 
  Moderator
  Anne Koven
  Executive Director
  Mass Timber Institute

  Anne Koven

  ×

  

  Koven has spent decades working in government and business, primarily in the areas of environmental and resource management. She was appointed to the Ontario Provincial Forest Policy Committee in 2008, was a trustee and secretary treasurer of the Trees Ontario Foundation, and represented the Foundation on the Natural Spaces Leadership Alliance. She served as President and Executive Director of the Ontario Forestry Association. Koven is an professor at the University of Toronto’s Graduate Department of Forestry, and assisted the Faculty in obtaining accreditation of the Master of Forest Conservation program by the Canadian Forestry Accreditation Board in 2014.

• 
  Speaker
  Mark Kuhlberg
  Historian
  Laurentian University

  Mark Kuhlberg

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  Mark Kuhlberg is a Full Professor of History at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, and his expertise is Canada’s forest history. He was a historical researcher on several successful First Nation timber claims and has published over two dozen peer-reviewed articles and several books. Mark spent 20 seasons in the treeplanting industry in northern Canada and is actively involved in contemporary forestry issues.

• 
  Speaker
  Jeff Spiritos
  Principal
  Spiritos Properties

  Jeff Spiritos

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  Jeff Spiritos is the principal of Spiritos Properties, LLC, a commercial and residential developer that develops projects in New York and the Northeast. Spiritos worked for 25 years with Hines before starting his firm in 2004 and for the past five years has turned to build only with mass timber structural systems. Mass timber buildings are revolutionizing the real estate industry – providing environmentally progressive, prefabricated, fast, energy efficient, safe, less expensive and healthier ways to build, live and work. Spiritos has a BSCE from Duke University and an MBA from the University of Michigan.

Coupling indigenous forms and building techniques with high-performance design, Mike Laverdure offers a compelling story of working with tribal leaders to create a thoughtful and vibrant new place for the community to gather. Rooted in culture and history of the three distinct tribal nations that comprise the Three Affiliated Tribes— the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara— the facility is centered around a design mimicking a traditional earth lodge. Hear the story of the development and design of the project and the particular opportunities of working with indigenous communities.

• 
  Speaker
  Michael Laverdure
  Partner
  DSGW Architects

  Michael Laverdure

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  Mike Laverdure, Migizi Miigwan (Eagle Feather) is an Anishinaabe (People From Whence Lowered) from the Makwa Doodem (Bear Clan) and an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, Mikinaak Wajiw, located in Belcourt, North Dakota, USA.

  Mike is the first member of his Tribe to become a registered architect. He is a partner at DSGW Architects and is president of the Indigenous owned firm, First American Design Studio. Mike was the past President of the American Indian Council of Architects and Engineers and is also a board member and Sequoyah Fellow of the American Indian Science and Engineering Society.

  Working with Indigenous nations throughout the United States, Mike has designed a wide variety of design and architectural projects including schools, community centers, clinics, casinos, multi-family housing, museums and more. Mike was the principal architect on the first Net Zero school located on tribal lands in North America, located on the Spirit Lake Sioux reservation in North Dakota, USA.

  Recently, Mike was a contributor to the book Our Voices: Indigeneity and Architecture by ORO press, along with 22 other Indigenous Architects from around the world.

  His mission in life is to promote architecture and engineering as a valid and vital STEM career for tribal youth and to have Indigenous architecture create real change in Tribal communities.

• 
  Speaker
  Amelia Baxter
  CEO & Founder
  Whole Trees

  Amelia Baxter

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  Amelia Baxter believes that the 21st century built environment is filled with opportunities for trees. Baxter co-founded WholeTrees in 2007 to develop and sell products and technologies that would scale the use of waste-trees in commercial construction, increasing forest revenues, and offering green construction markets a new material for the 21st century. Amelia has led project teams in over $2M in USDA research grants working toward the commercialization of the tree’s natural engineering. By raising equity investment for her company, attracting national executive talent, and pinpointing nascent urban markets for trees as structure, Baxter has participated in the growth of a truly conscious and regenerative company.

  She has hiked the entire Appalachian Trail, speaks Spanish, and has worked internationally with thought leaders in the Responsible Business movement. When left to her own fancies, she can be found gardening, biking, and mushroom hunting.

Wood is reframing the narrative about sourcing, supply chains, and carbon neutraility. This naturally extends beyond buildings to include our infrastructure, much of which is crumbling as concrete comes to the end of its lifespan. This panel will explore

• 
  Speaker
  Vanessa Wan
  Structural Engineer
  Stantec P.Eng., M.Eng.

  Vanessa Wan

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  Vanessa Wan has more than 11 years of bridge experience at the intersection of engineering, design, and art. Recently, she has worked on timber structures including heliports, covered bridges, and technical assistance for the Mistissini Bridge. Since 2017 Vanessa has worked on the feasibility of a 194-meter engineered timber bridge in Ontario. Her team is now working on its design.

• 
  Speaker
  Robert Matthew Noblett, AIA, NCARB
  Partner
  Behnisch Architekten

  Robert Matthew Noblett, AIA, NCARB

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  Robert Matthew (Matt) Noblett is a partner in Behnisch Architekten’s Boston office. Immersed in the world of drawing and model-building, Matt has over 20 years of experience directing highly complex civic, institutional, academic, and commercial projects. Upon joining Behnisch Architekten in 2007, Matt became director of the one-million-square-foot ILFI- and LEED Platinum-certified Harvard University Science & Engineering Complex. Other projects he has led include the John and Frances Angelos Law Center at the University of Baltimore, and the Portland State University School of Business Administration expansion and renovation. Prior to his time at Behnisch, Matt was a project manager at Rafael Viñoly Architects. He received his M.Arch at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

• 
  Speaker
  Michael Szabo
  Principal
  Diamond Schmitt

  Michael Szabo

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  “Mike Szabo thinks big. Many of his projects at Diamond Schmitt are large-scale, multi-year undertakings that transform institutions and communities. Master planning and designing the 18-million-square-foot Vaughan Metropolitan Centre represents a new paradigm for transforming suburbs into dense, mixed-use urban place making.

  Mike is a passionate advocate for green buildings and led the integrated sustainable design for the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT) campus master plan and buildings, which received the RAIC Award of Innovation Excellence and the SCUP award for campus design. He was instrumental in developing ecoMetrics, a data-driven tool for comparative energy-use modelling.
  “

• 
  Speaker
  Walton Chan
  Senior Associate
  Diamond Schmitt

  Walton Chan

  ×

  

  Walton Chan brings a unique perspective to all projects with his education in electrical engineering and architecture and archaeological experience as a surveyor and architect in Cairo. Since joining Diamond Schmitt in 2001, Walton has had diverse experience working on residential, academic, performing arts and institutional projects. His experience includes the Centre for Green Cities at Evergreen Brick Works and the Hudson Condominiums in Toronto, the Southbrook Winery in Niagara-on-the-Lake, the Algonquin Centre for Construction Excellence at Algonquin College in Ottawa, and two award-winning heavy timber projects: the law school at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, BC, and the SmartVMC Bus Terminal in Vaughan. Currently he is leading a team working on the Confederation Line LRT Extension in Ottawa.

• 
  Moderator
  Samuel Medina
  Executive Editor
  The Architect’s Newspaper

  Samuel Medina

  ×

  

  Samuel Medina is the executive editor of The Architect’s Newspaper. He was previously the editorial director of Metropolis magazine. As a writer, his work has been published in art and architecture magazines such as Artforum, the Art Newspaper, and Domus, among others. He recently edited a monograph on the architect Eric Owen Moss, due out this year.