What Centering The Periphery is not:

It is not a lecture series on architecture
Don`t come here to watch an architect give a slideshow
It is also not a series on building systems
And certainly not on materials including roof membranes,
curtain wall,
or peel and stick.

We won’t be bribing you with a free lunch
go look for this somewhere else.

Then what, you ask, is centering the periphery?
It is about re thinking
It is about re understanding
It is about the re-contextualization of our everyday work.
It is about examining a typology
not just a pretty form.
It is about looking at different ways of creating,
about re-imaging the process through which we design.
It is about expanding our point of view
and eroding our biases.
It is about bringing in alternative ideas about something we are doing
and enriching the way we might understand it.
It is about evolving the way we think.
It is about the future of what we will do
and possibly skewing the way we might get there.
It is about the things we have yet to create
and imaging who we might work with to make that happen

Centering the periphery is about change,
it aims to bring the margins of architecture into critical focus.
The microscope is you.
The lens is our discipline.
The objects placed within its purview are as wide and varied as the universe.
Build a better microscope! Re-calibrate your lens for the joy of surprising artifacts.
Centering the Periphery is an omnivore.
Centering the Periphery is an athlete.

When we say “We are architects” it shouldn’t mean we only look at buildings.
Buildings are merely a result of our labour
Of time spent navigating mice and pushing keys.
The richness of our contributions lie in the ways we identify,
examine
and solve problems.
We aim to influence
and to raise the bar.

Consider if you will what we have brought before you in our 40 screenings:
creative practices including that of Olafur Eliason,
of Charles and Ray Eames,
Richard Serra,
and Thomas Heatherwick
We have presented individuals that expose the banal data of our lives in creative and provocative ways,
rethinking it
and re-presenting it.
We have presented individuals who take objects of the everyday,
and re-materialize in order that we might see them in a different light-
expanding our view.

We have seen typologies of our present that are destined to exist only in the past.
And now we look to the future.

We are hopeful that these film screenings will be exciting,
provocative,
and fun.
We ask you to risk visiting your own planet.
To be an ethnographer of your own culture.
To come and eat popcorn.