NASA Visible Earth, Great Lakes, 1999. Courtesy SeaWiFS Project, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center and ORBIMAGE.

Join the Graham Foundation for a panel discussion and reception to celebrate the launch of Third Coast Atlas: Prelude to a Plan. This recent grantee publication describes the conditions for urbanization across the Great Lakes region and assembles a multi-layered, empirical description of urbanization processes within the drainage basins of the five Great Lakes and the Saint Lawrence River. This publication encompasses a range of representational forms including maps, plans, diagrams, timelines, and photographs, as well as speculative design research projects and critical texts. Postponing diagnosis, let alone treatment of these conditions, Third Coast Atlas aspires to simply describe. It proposes a new geographic gestalt for urban analysis. Superimposed upon the North American continent, and with easily recognizable yet divergent political and geological borders, this megaregion traverses portions of eight US states and two Canadian provinces, as well as the world’s largest collection of surficial fresh water. Third Coast Atlas characterizes the littoral edge as a distinct field of urbanization, and constructs a reading of the region both specific and speculative.

Daniel Ibañez is a practicing architect and urbanist, and founder and co-director of the design firm Margen-Lab. He is currently an instructor and doctor of design candidate at the Harvard GSD, editor of New Geographies, and researcher at the Urban Theory Lab. Ibañez’s research critically seeks to frame the design disciplines in relation to broader socio-ecological interdependencies through cross disciplinary research on the field of urban metabolism. Daniel is editor several book publications, including New Geographies, no. 6: Grounding Metabolism (HUP, 2014) and the Wood Urbanism: From Molecular to Territorial (forthcoming Actar, 2017). Also, since 2015, Daniel is editor at urbanNext.

Clare Lyster is an Irish architect, educator, and writer based in Chicago, Illinois, where she is associate professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Architecture. She is principal of CLUAA, a research-based design office in Chicago operating at the intersection of architecture, landscape, and planning. In addition to her design practice, Lyster writes about architecture and urbanism from the perspective of contemporary theories in landscape, infrastructure, and globalization. She is author of Learning from Logistics: How Networks Change Cities (Birkhauser, 2016); co-editor of 306090_09, Regarding Public Space (PA Press, 2005); and Envisioning the Bloomingdale, (Chicago Architecture Club,2009). She is the 2017 Gillmor Lecturer at the University of Calgary.

Charles Waldheim is a Canadian-American architect and urbanist based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Waldheim’s research examines the relationships between landscape, ecology, and contemporary urbanism. He is author, editor, and co-editor of numerous books on these subjects, and his writing has been published and translated internationally. Waldheim is John E. Irving Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design where he directs the school’s Office for Urbanization. Waldheim is recipient of the Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome; the Visiting Scholar Research Fellowship at the Study Centre of the Canadian Centre for Architecture; and the Sanders Fellowship at the University of Michigan.

Mason White is a Canadian-American architect and urbanist based in Toronto, Ontario. White is founding partner of Lateral Office, a Toronto-based experimental design practice that operates at the intersection of architecture, landscape, and urbanism. In addition to his practice, White is associate professor at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto. He is recipient of the Emerging Voices and Young Architects Prize from the Architectural League of New York; the Wheelwright Fellowship from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design; the Friedman Visiting Professorship at the University of California, Berkeley; and the Lefevre Fellowship at The Ohio State University. White is co-editor of Bracket, vol. 1 and co-editor of Pamphlet Architecture, no. 30: Coupling—Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism.

Philip Enquist is Partner in Charge of Urban Design and Planning SOM and the leader of its Global City Design Practice. The scale of Enquist’s design perspective encompasses from innovating sustainable urban forms that enhance city living with walkable, transit-enabled districts humanized by their natural amenities to rapidly changing urban clusters within regional ecosystems like North America’s Great Lakes basin and China’s Bohai Rim. He has taught at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, and as the Charles Moore Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. He was honored with the 2010 Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Architectural Guild of the University of Southern California's School of Architecture for his dedication to strengthening the physical, social, and intellectual infrastructure of cities and in 2009 Chicago Tribune named him and his studio as one of the "Chicagoans of the Year in Architecture."

Martin Felsen co-founded UrbanLab in 2000 and is an Associate Professor in the Illinois Institute of Technology’s (IIT) College of Architecture. Martin received the Dubin Family Young Architect Award in 2007 from the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Chicago. Also in 2007 UrbanLab was named as the national winner of the History Channel’s “City of the Future” competition for a proposal titled “Growing Water.” UrbanLab won the American Institute of Architects (AIA) College of Fellows Latrobe Prize in 2009, and UrbanLab’s architecture and urban design projects have won several design awards from the AIA. In 2010 UrbanLab was included in the Emerging Voices lecture series sponsored by the Architectural League. In 2012, UrbanLab exhibited work at the Venice Biennale in "Common Ground" curated by David Chipperfield, and in 2015, UrbanLab exhibited "Filter Island" at the Chicago Biennial. Publications presenting UrbanLab’s design and research work include Architecture, Architectural Record, the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. He is co-author, with Sarah Dunn of the book, Bowling: Water, Architecture, Urbanism, which investigates the symbiotic relationships between architectures of quality and infrastructures of quantity in Chicago, New York, and the Sun Belt.

James Wasley is a Director of the Institute for Ecological Design and the former Chair of the Department of Architecture at UWM. Professor Wasley’s current research is in the creation of ecological urban waterscapes at a variety of scales. Since 2011 he has led the school-wide Milwaukee Inner Harbor Project, which has explored the redevelopment and ecological restoration of the 200+ acres of brownfields surrounding the Port of Milwaukee. This has in turn led to a suite of ten demonstration projects on the harbor at the UWM School of Freshwater Sciences that are moving towards implementation. Professor Wasley teaches architectural design studios and professional practice seminars from an ecological perspective.

Related Graham Foundation supported projects:

2015 Publication Grant to Daniel Ibañez, Clare Lyster, Charles Waldheim, and Mason White for Third Coast Atlas: Prelude to a Plan of The Great Lakes Region

2014 Publication Grant to Clare Lyster for Learning from Logistics: How Networks Change Our Cities

2014 Publication Grant to Lola Sheppard and Mason White for Many Norths: Spatial Practices in a Polar Territory

2014 Publication Grant to InfraNet Lab (Neeraj Bhatia and Mason White) for Bracket 4 [Takes Action]

2014 Publication Grant to Harvard Graduate School of Design for New Geographies 07: Information Geographies and New Geographies 08: Islands

2013 Exhibition Grant to Harvard Graduate School of Design for Airport Landscape: Urban Ecologies in the Aerial Age (Sonja Dümpelmann and Charles Waldheim, curators)

2001 Grant to the University of Illinois at Chicago for Chicago Architecture: Histories, Revisions, Alternatives (Katerina Rüedi Ray and Charles Waldheim, authors)

1999 Grant to Georgia Daskalis, Charles Waldheim, and Jason Young for Stalking Detroit