Cross-posted from No Mean City, Alex’s personal blog on architecture
Tonight (Friday) I’ll be attending the opening of what should be hugely interesting conference. It’s in honour of George Baird, the former dean of U of T’s architecture school and one of the most influential people in Canadian architecture, ever.
Through a long period of teaching at U of T and Harvard, he was a student of British and Dutch modernism, a skeptic of the postmodern movement, and a crucial advocate in Toronto’s efforts to protect and renew its downtown. He schooled generations of Toronto’s leading thinkers from the sixties onward. Many came to work with him at the architecture firm Baird Sampson Neuert, who have produced some very fine buildings and the downtown Cloud Gardens park:
He’s onstage tonight with Kenneth Frampton and Michael Hays – two other deeply important architectural historians. The session tonight at Bell Lightbox is sold out, but tomorrow at the Daniels faculty there’ll be round tables including Ken Greenberg, Brigitte Shim, Yoshiharu Tsukamoto of the Tokyo firm Atelier Bow-Wow (!), Phyllis Lambert…
Basically, if you have any interest in architecture and urbanism, you want to be there. Free. Info here.
Also, check out the show about his career that is still on at the faculty’s Eric Arthur Gallery.
