Prof. Anne Bordeleau appointed Director of the Azrieli School of Architecture & Urbanism
June 10, 2022
Professor Anne Bordeleau has been appointed Director of the Azrieli School of Architecture & Urbanism for a five-year term commencing on January 1, 2023.
Before taking up duties as Director, Dr. Bordeleau will join the school on October 1, 2022, to facilitate a period of familiarization and transition.
“I look forward to joining the community at Carleton University and contributing to the exciting work underway at the Azrieli School of Architecture & Urbanism,” she says.
She is joining the Azrieli School after 15 years at the School of Architecture at the University of Waterloo Architecture, where she also served as O’Donovan Director since 2016.
Bordeleau is an architectural scholar and educator with a longstanding interest in many “‘invisible” facets of architecture, whether it is time, social interactions, voices that might have been silenced, a building’s past, or what lies in the shadow of a city’s monuments.
As part of ASAU, she is interested in the broadening of the discipline, which she sees already in process at the school, contributing to a more inclusive architectural education.
Expanding from the existing research assets and building on the interdisciplinary initiatives that are underway, she is looking forward to being part of a stimulating framework from which to think about the urgent questions that we need to address as architects – from the right to housing and social justice, to conservation, adaptive reuse, and their relation to sustainability more broadly.
Above all, she is excited to get to know the community of students, staff, and faculty to work creatively and collaboratively, leveraging this amazing grasp of the world that an education in architecture and urbanism offers across political, environmental, and technological realms.
Bordeleau’s research moves across historical and theoretical writings and various forms of design and service as research. She is a historian with publications on the temporal dimensions of drawings, maps, buildings, and architecture more generally.
In Charles Robert Cockerell, Architect in Time: Reflections around Anachronistic Drawings, she considered the multiple facets of architects’ engagement with temporality and historicity. As a co-author of the book and exhibition The Evidence Room (created for the 15th Venice Biennale in 2016 and presented at the Royal Ontario Museum and Hirshhorn Museum since), she pursued casting as a practice that foregrounds the power of materials and processes to speak to an individual or people’s memory.
In different ways, these works provide opportunities to acknowledge the weight of invisibility, reminding architects that our constructions are as important as the gaps we leave or ignore.
In her roles within the university as well as across multiple organizations in Canada and beyond, she has been looking at the ways in which our education and organizations frame our idea of the architect as well as architecture’s role in society more broadly.
As chair of the Canadian Council of University Schools of Architecture, she has been promoting collaborations across accredited programs of architecture with initiatives that included the Pan-Canadian Lecture Series on Global Perspectives, contributions to the Canadian Architecture Forum on Education, workshops on how questions of justice and equity come into our teaching, research and service, and a collaborative project addressing how accessibility is integrated within architecture schools’ facilities and curricula.
Bordeleau has a deep commitment to students, and at the core of her aspirations lies the desire to empower students to be thoughtful citizens in a more-than-human world.
The previous Director Jill Stoner’s term ended in July 2021. Since then, Dr. Federica Goffi has served as Interim Director.