What’s happening to architecture?

“The discipline is expanding in a lot of ways,” Choi says. “You have some architects working as curators, others thinking about writing as part of their practice, still others experimenting with alternative formats as a conceptual or speculative exercise. There’s an expansion in that sense, but on flipside, there’s a de-materialization of architectural practice as we typically understand it.”

This paradox is behind the double entendre that forms the title of Architecture is All Over, a new book co-edited by Choi.

The book grew out of a conference in 2011 co-hosted by Toronto’s OCAD University, where Choi was an assistant professor, and the University of Toronto’s Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design. 

“We compiled a gradient of responses, techniques and strategies” from the conference participants, Choi says. These formed the basis for the book. “It was important to us to have a mix of emerging and established practitioners and scholars.” 

The book chapters are certainly varied. “One of our contributors, Sandi Hilal, an architect, wrote a play about her negotiations working in the Fawwar refugee camp in the West Bank,” Choi says. “The actual architectural work is not only that of the physicality of the plaza that was built, but the mediations that took place and the social engagement that she was embedded in.”

Teaching Change

Interdisciplinary work comes easily to Choi. She began her MFA at Concordia in 2004 with the intention of becoming a photo-based installation artist. Yet she realized that she was more interested in how research, history and theory informed her work.

“As an artist, I learned that making is an extension of intellectual activity,” Choi says. Under the encouragement of Geneviève Cadieux, her photography professor at Concordia, Choi nurtured her burgeoning interest in architecture and then headed to Harvard Graduate School of Design in Cambridge, Mass., to pursue a master’s degree in architectural history and theory.