UWSA’s own Professor Donald McKay will be giving a lecture entitled FINDING WAYS I & II on his past and recent work with WayFinding this Thursday, November 7 at 6:45pm in the main lecture theatre.
Team I (2010-11)
Lauren Barhydt
Maun Demchenko
Chloe Doesburg
Sarah Neault
Team II (2013)
James Clarke-Hicks
Lindsey Nette
Nicole Ratajczak
David Schellingerhoudt
Donald McKay is an Associate Professor in Architecture at the University of Waterloo, and principal of Donald McKay – studio. Before graduating (Toronto, B. Arch, 1973) McKay worked as a community organizer and planner, sharing in the establishment of a non-profit organization that took initiatives in community housing for almost a decade. After graduation, McKay worked in Toronto as a project architect and planner for George Baird and later for Barton Myers, and as management consultant, facilitating the unprecedented community directed renovation of several public libraries.
Since 1979 McKay has held a position as a fulltime faculty member at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture, as a studio teacher and as a lecturer in theory and history. In 1987 McKay began several cultural studies of post-war architecture, urbanism, and public space. Since the mid-nineties, he has studied the American countryside in a project documenting cultural space across the United States. Committed to teaching, Donald McKay has been a frequent lecturer, critic, and visiting faculty member at schools and institutions in Canada, the U.S., Britain, and Italy, and the recipient of numerous grants and awards. His papers on the culture of public space include Cosmopolitan Mechanics and the Dissolution of National Boundaries (1991), Sanctuary (1988), and Logistics and Friction, published in Metropolitan Mutations (1989). In 1997, with four colleagues – historians, architects, and planners – and several associated graduates from the University of Waterloo, he formed the Auschwitz-Birkenau Collaborative to prepare the plan for a conservation area to protect the enormous historic precincts of the notorious WW II death camp. This plan was adopted in principle by treaty in 1998.
Over the last three years, as head of the WayFinding Group, WATERLOO ARCHITECTURE, he has been most active planning a wayfinding and pedestrian street system for the University of Waterloo, a plan which has entered its second phase, but remains unimplimented.
Text by Donald McKay
Nicole Ratajczak, currently the Editorial and Graphics Director for BRIDGE, has been a contributor since January 2013. She is in her second year of undergraduate studies at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture.
