Location: Laurentian Main campus, room C-114
1.5 ConEd Learning Hours
1.5 AIA LU
8:30 a.m. – 10:00 a.m.
At MASS (a Model of Architecture Serving Society), there is a belief that design’s influence reaches far beyond individual buildings, and the built environment has a critical role to play in ensuring a collective future is more equitable, just, and flourishing.
MASS believes every project has a mission, and collaborates with its partners throughout the design process—from early visioning and beyond completion—to develop and implement a shared vision for transformational impact. Based in both Rwanda and the United States, MASS has a distinctly global and diverse perspective. It knows that diversity enables us to better address complex challenges across the communities we serve.
This session presents MASS’s work with a specific focus on the lessons learned through engagement with communities in East Africa and Indigenous communities in the United States and Canada.
Learning Objectives
- Hear about MASS’s Planning for Indigenous Impact toolkit, developed with Indigenous Services Canada.
- Gain an overview of Sustainable Native Communities Design Lab’s (SNCL) approaches for the creation of culturally responsive housing developments.
- Understand MASS’s One-Health design approach and its application to architectural design processes.
- Learn about whole-life carbon.
Kelly Alvarez Doran, OAA, is senior director of performance and provenance at MASS, where he supports principals and designers to embed environmental objectives into all of the practice’s projects, as well as leads climate-focused research and the training of the entire team. Previously, Kelly led MASS’s Kigali office overseeing the growth of the practice from a team of eight to 80 over a five-year period. He led the design and implementation of several of MASS’s projects across East Africa, notably the award-winning Munini District Hospital and Rwanda Ministry of Health’s Typical Hospital Plans, Nyarugenge District Hospital, headquarters for both One Acre Fund and Andela in Kenya, and the Rwanda Institute for Conservation Agriculture. Kelly holds professorships at the Bartlett and at the University of Toronto where his Ha/f Research Studio is focused on the whole life carbon of the built environment. The outcomes of this research has informed the ongoing development of embodied carbon policy for the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area.
Joseph Kunkel is the principal and director of MASS’s Sustainable Native Communities Design Lab in Santa Fe, New Mexico. A citizen of the Northern Cheyenne Nation, he is a community designer and educator, whose work explores how architecture, planning, and construction can be leveraged to positively impact the built and unbuilt environments within “Indian Country.” Joseph’s early work focused on the research of exemplary Native American Indian housing projects and processes nationwide. This research work has developed into emerging best practices, leading to an online Healthy Homes Road Map for affordable tribal housing development, funded by HUD’s Policy, Development, and Research Office. In 2019, Joseph was awarded an Obama Fellowship for his work with Indigenous communities. He also received a 2018 Rauschenberg SEED grant from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and a 2019 Creative Capital Award. Joseph is a Fellow of the inaugural class of the Civil Society Fellowship, a partnership of ADL and The Aspen Institute, and a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network. Most recently, Joseph was awarded the 2021 inaugural Elaine Johnson Coates Award, by the University of Maryland’s Alumni Association.