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September 8, 2025
A word from the Partnership Director
As the fall 2025 school year begins, we are entering the final phase of our partnership adventure. In this newsletter, you will first find the deadlines we must meet for the online convention in November. We invite teams to work in thematic clusters to present, in the most public and “political” way possible, an action for quality that politicians can no longer ignore. The challenge is to come up with a single action to enhance quality, presented in three minutes to the public in clear, convincing, and inviting language.
We can finally present the composition of the international advisory panel. Six complementary personalities and six critical and benevolent points of view to guide us until the official end of the project in spring 2027.
After several long years of IT design, with the help of the Canada Foundation for Innovation, we invite you to actively contribute to and use the partnership's digital platform. Its name may sound like a childish magic formula, ArchiQualiData, but it is set to become a reliable resource for the common good thanks to your research, analysis, and contributions, whether you are an academic, a community or professional partner, or, of course, a student. Everything we have produced and will produce in the coming months can and should be found in this database system, which will interconnect our questions, analyses, proposals, results, and, of course, our action plans, roadmaps, courses, conferences, and projects.
Those who were unable to attend the convention in Toronto last May will be able to watch videos of presentations by Nathalie Dion on architecture policy in Quebec and Oliver Martin, head of a large European organization formed in the wake of the 2018 Davos Declaration: the Davos Baukultur Alliance. Mr. Martin has agreed to join our new international advisory committee, and we are considering ways to build bridges between Canadian and European initiatives, if only to publicize the progress made by the various teams in the partnership.
News of the presentations by several teams at the EDRA conference in Halifax in May and excellent news about the international competition on invisible accessibility are already prominently featured on the Living Atlas home page.
In closing, let us remember that our two digital showcases complement each other: First, the living atlas of quality is becoming the showcase for the partnership and a kind of public forum that will need to be expanded to make it more inviting to an audience that is wondering how to shift the boundaries of quality. Second, ArchiQualiData is called to become the partnership's major digital resource and database, the one we have promised from the outset to inform citizens and decision-makers, and the one that will be built up over time, beyond our partnership experience.
Jean-Pierre Chupin, PhD, FRSC, FRAIC, Professor, MOAQ Architect
Canada Research Chair in Architecture, Competitions and Mediations of Excellence, UdeM
Coordinator of the SSHRC Research Partnership on the Quality of the Built Environment in Canada |
