Dr. Lisa Moffitt
Associate Professor, Associate Director, Graduate
Lisa Moffitt is an Associate Professor of Architecture and Associate Director of the Graduate program at Carleton University. From 2010-2020, she was Senior Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, where she also completed her PhD Architecture by Design. She is founder of Studio Moffitt, a design research practice with a portfolio of speculative and built projects. She is also a research faculty member of CSALT, Carleton Sensory Architecture and Liminal Technologies Laboratory.
Lisa’s research focuses on the distilling lens of the architectural model — understood as both scale physical artefact and as mental ideal. She designs, prototypes, and photographs models of environmental processes. The models, which incorporate phenomena such as flowing water, thawing ice, eroding soil, shifting smoke, moving air, and spreading fire, make environmental systems that are otherwise incomprehensible — due to expansiveness, duration, or invisibility — visible and legible to the senses. Making these processes material and legible enables them to play a more active and direct role in design speculation, a process of imagining ideals for our collective future.
Many of her models visualise airflow, a moving material system with consequences across radical spatial and temporal scales. This is the subject of her book, Architecture’s Model Environments (UCL Press, Design Research in Architecture Series, 2023) and associated travelling solo exhibition. She also prototypes scale material assemblies of earth, hemp, straw, and wool to hone a regenerative material tectonic. Her SSHRC funded project, EarthWorks, Architecture’s Regenerative Material Models, uses physical models of rammed earth assemblies to test its formal capacities and to aid in its mainstreaming across Ontario. Much of her studio teaching and current research focus on remediation landscapes and sites of climate significance in Canada, parts of which are undergoing global warming at twice the rate of the global average.
Research
Research areas: regenerative building materials, earth and fiber construction, models/prototypes/material experiments, climate adaptation, landscape remediation, Canada’s changing climate, visualising environmental complexity, history of building science and technology
Publications
Bernbaum, Piper and Lisa Moffitt. “Canada’s Changing Climate: Visualising Wildfires in Lebel-sur-Quévillon.” Journal of Landscape Architecture, forthcoming 2025.
Moffitt, Lisa and Cameron Penney. “Toronto’s Terrestrial Reef: Biorock’s Infrastructural BioGeoChemical Futures.” Journal of Architectural Education 78, no. 2 (2024): 556-572.
Moffitt, Lisa. “Disrupting Scientific Flow Visualisation Protocols: Photographing Architecture’s Atmospheres.” Clara Architecture / Recherche 9 (2024): 100-113.
Moffitt, Lisa. “Designing with Wind: Architecture’s Model Environments”, Venti Journal Air – Experience – Aesthetics, no.2:3 (2023).
Moffitt, Lisa. Architecture’s Model Environments, UCL Press / University of Chicago Press, 2023.
Moffitt, Lisa. “Wind Grid”, Journal of Landscape Architecture, no. 16:2 (2021): 54-60.
Moffitt, Lisa. “Victor and Aladar Olgyay’s Thermoheliodon: Controlling Climate to Reduce Climate Control,” Architectural Research Quarterly, no. 23:3 (2019): 255-266.
Moffitt, Lisa. “Materialising Convection,” Architecture and Culture, no. 7:1 (2019): 1-14.
Moffitt, Lisa. “From Instrument to Architecture: Environmental Models as Architectural Design Tools,” Technology | Architecture + Design (TAD) Journal, no. 2:2 (2018): 229-239.
Moffitt, Lisa. “Sand, Silt, Salt, Water: Entropy as a Lens for Design in Postindustrial Landscapes,” Landscape Research, no 42:7 (2017): 769-781.
Education
PhD Architecture by Design, University of Edinburgh
David Willis Prize for Doctoral Research
MArch, Rhode Island School of Design, summa cum laude, Henry Adams Gold Medal
BA Architecture, Washington University in St. Louis, summa cum laude, Fitzgibbon Scholar
Recent Courses
ARCS 5105 – MArch – Graduate Studio 1 / Gateway Studio
ARCH 5002 – MArch – Architecture Seminar 2 / Miniaturising the Gigantic
ARCN 5302/ARCS 6002w-PhD and MArch- Daedelic Exercises II / (un)Rapid Prototyping
ARCS 4107- BAS Design – Studio 7 / Tank Worlds Hamilton Harbour and Tank Worlds Port Hope