TIME: 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Description
Fanshawe College’s Innovation Village is a vibrant campus hub designed to foster cross-disciplinary collaboration and industry partnerships, reflecting an academic approach rooted in experiential learning. Shaped by student and Indigenous engagement, Innovation Village offers a safe, inclusive space, while environmental sustainability is embodied in a custom BIPV cladding. This project demonstrates how innovative architecture can empower cities to meet urgent social and environmental challenges.
Learning Objectives
- Explore how collaborative design can dissolve disciplinary silos.
- Understand the use of BIPV façades in reducing carbon footprint.
- Learn how Indigenous consultation shapes inclusive design.
- Examine evolving models of academic architecture.
Presenters:
Sydney Browne, Principal, Diamond Schmitt Architects
Environmental, technological, and social forces are challenging everything from art to education to commerce to healing and beyond. Architecture has the capacity to navigate this change—through invention, beauty, and a shared sense of collective purpose. Over more than three decades of architectural practice, Sydney has championed this approach through thoughtful, informed building in the public realm.
Sydney was educated through the University of Waterloo School of Architecture’s cooperative study/work program and at University College Dublin, via an international foundation scholarship. A principal at Diamond Schmitt since, she has led the design of cultural, academic and social infrastructure projects across Canada and the United Sates. In parallel, she has served as a peer assessor for the Canada Council for the Arts, and as a visiting critic, lecturer and mentor.
Architecture is the work of many hands. Sydney’s practice is rooted in collaboration—with colleagues and partners at Diamond Schmitt, skilled fabricators, trades and artists, and - critically – with clients who recognize the value of architecture as a shared civic endeavour. Each project brings new lessons, advancing beauty, social purpose, and technical understanding in connected ways.
This collective work has been recognized with numerous awards for design and environmental stewardship including Canadian Green Building Council’s highest award for sustainable new construction, the Ontario Architects Association Excellence in Design Award, and other provincial design awards, Fast Company’s Innovation by Design Awards, and CODAawards for the integration of art and architecture.
Sydney is a Fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada.
Elcin Unal, Associate, Diamond Schmitt Architects
Elcin Unal has 25 years of professional experience as an architect, with a diverse portfolio of projects that span academic, cultural, residential, and institutional projects. Her work is grounded in the belief that buildings should contribute meaningfully to both the people that use them and the broader communities that they serve. She is particularly interested in how architecture can extend beyond its immediate program to shape culture, contribute to its context, and enrich public life.
Her practice is focused on designing buildings that are environmentally responsible through the integration of innovative building systems and high-performance strategies to support ambitious goals for energy efficiency, future resilience, and occupant wellbeing.
Elcin was one of the lead architects on the National Arts Centre Rejuvenation in Ottawa, a transformative project which introduced a prefabricated mass timber structure to the original Brutalist building. The intervention brought warmth and transparency to the renewed civic landmark while also helping reduce embodied carbon and minimize onsite work significantly. She also played a key role on the Innovation Centre at Fanshawe College, a new campus hub that is designed to support cross disciplinary collaboration and is enveloped in a custom Building Integrated Photovoltaic cladding system which contributes renewable energy to help power the facility.
For Elcin, successful architecture is the result of a sustained dialogue among the many people involved in a project—clients, consultants, builders, users and communities. She sees collaboration as fundamental to translating complex project requirements into thoughtful, responsive design solutions.
Elcin received her Bachelor of Architecture at the University of Toronto and is an associate at Diamond Schmitt Architects.
Pricing:
Licensed OAA Members: $42.50 + HST
OAA Interns and Students: $32.50 + HST
Non-Members: $63.00 + HST
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