In late October, the Azure Human/Nature conference celebrated its inaugural edition in downtown Toronto. Hosted at the waterfront campus of George Brown College, over 250 attendees and speakers from across North America and around the world transformed a slice of the city into a wellspring of inspiration, thought leadership and multi-disciplinary knowledge exchange. Throughout two days of keynotes, panels and workshops, our team was privileged to witness an evolving global conversation, where dialogues were increasingly informed and enriched by the context. As the conference unfolded, speakers and panelists referenced what they’d learned from their peers hours before, creating new points of connection, and opening up new paradigms for design practice. Below, our editors round up our first — of many to come — learnings from two unforgettable days.

From nebulous carbon offsets to misleading recycling claims, the world of design and manufacturing is far from immune to greenwashing. And why would it be? After all, sustainability claims can be good for business. But so can the real thing. As Kongjian Yu stressed in his keynote, the political viability of his “sponge city” landscapes is in significant part rooted in their tangible economic benefits. “When talking to mayors and governments, I always demonstrate clear benefits and cost savings,” Yu explained, citing the reduced maintenance costs of hydrophilic plantings compared to concrete barriers, as well as the commercial and cultural vitality induced by welcoming and generous green spaces. Closer to home, MJMA’s Ted Watson zeroed in on the Western North York Community Centre, which is on track to be Canada’s first aquatic-based recreation centre to achieve Net-Zero Energy and Carbon certifications, combining an ambitious sustainability program with substantial energy and up-front carbon savings.

Gensler’s Philip Galway-Witham opened the “Rethinking the Future of Interior Materials” workshop with a sneak peak of version 2 of his company’s Product Sustainability Standards, a tool that helps to gauge the carbon-footprint of interior materials and products. So far, it has helped to vet 2,800 products, and has been used to train 1,500 designers and 1,000 manufacturers. One of the companies that Gensler brought onto the stage was the office furniture dealership Envirotech. Its VP, Andy Delisi, explained how the brand works with clients undertaking interior overhauls to specify gently used second-hand furniture. For one of its projects, Ecovadis, 95 per cent of the furniture that Envirotech sourced was certified pre-owned or refurbished, resulting in 42 per cent in cost savings (compared to purchasing new furniture) as well as a much-reduced carbon footprint. Asked what the next game-changer in furniture would be, Delisi referenced Europe’s growing culture of furniture leasing and sharing.

Our paths forward are contingent on historical and cultural knowledge. Julia Watson, Alfred Waugh and Dennis Thomas advocated for the embrace — and adaptation — of traditional Indigenous practices, while Kongjian Yu’s revival of Chinese landscape vernaculars is an increasingly influential global precedent. One of the most surprising fusions of innovation and tradition came from workshop presenter Tye Farrow, whose influential new book, Constructing Health: How the Built Environment Enhances Your Mind’s Health, integrates architectural thinking with new scientific paradigms and our evolving knowledge of the human body. It makes for a compelling paean to the salutatory benefits of design — particularly in healthcare settings, where access to greenery, light and organic materials is shown to ameliorate healing and health.

It’s an invigorating paradigm, and a seemingly universal recipe for design. Yet, as Farrow stressed, even scientific knowledge is shaped by history and cultural heritage. To demonstrate his point, Farrow showed the audience an image of a regal Second Empire institutional building. “What does this building represent to you?” he asked the audience. “To me, as a Canadian, it conveys an idea of stability and good government. But imagine you were South African? In that context, it’s the architecture of apartheid and oppression.” It was a stirring reminder that science and technology — and the architecture they inform — always exist within the umbrella of culture.

In her workshop, “Mass Timber: Care is Choreography,” Lindsey Wikstrom of Mattaforma presented a staggering statistic: The manufacturing processes of three building materials — concrete, steel and aluminum — emit more greenhouse gases than all global transportation combined. In other words, walking to work or avoiding long-haul flights will only help us combat rising temperatures if executed at massive scale (and even then, it’s a long shot). Considering that the world adds the equivalent of New York City in new built construction every month, we need to make a big change — and fast. When considering where to put our energy, a systems-based approach will yield the best results. It’s an idea that was echoed in our “Forecast for Hotter Cities” panel. As Toronto grows larger, it will only grow hotter and we need to plan for that as an inevitability instead of a possibility. Moderator Fadi Masoud presented Parks in Action, an initiative that maps out possibilities for heat mitigation across the city, and DIALOG’s Dorsa Jalalian dove deep into the Thermal Comfort study conducted in partnership with the City of Toronto, which looked at how to make urban public spaces more comfortable as temperatures rise. Ultimately, larger policy changes are vital to ensure that individual projects can make an impact: “I think the secret to success is successful collaboration,” said Kristina Reinders, program manager at the City of Toronto.

One idea that kept coming up was the importance of teaching people to value the inherent beauty of a material’s natural finish. During the “Circular Design for a Circular Economy” panel, Stephanie Lipp spoke about her mycelium startup, MycoFutures. She is currently working with artisans to develop prototype bags that showcase the natural earth tones and texture of mushroom leather. Yet soon after presenting one of these purses to an investor, she was faced with an unexpected question: “Does it come in pink?” Keynote speaker Tomasso Bitossi, an associate partner at climate engineering firm Transsolar, later referenced this exchange while discussing a project with rammed-earth construction — a feature that, in his mind, should never be obscured behind plaster or paint. Similarly, over in “Putting Bio-Based Materials to Work,” a workshop led by Arper and Paper Shell, the collaborators discussed the choice to have their new Catifa Carta chair reflect the natural properties of its material, a composite wood by-product. The chair arrives in a deep brown colour that can be maintained with oil, or allowed to gently grey over time.

It might not sound like a groundbreaking innovation but re-grading timber members for use as construction material could be a game-changer. During the Scales of Reuse workshop, Meredith Moore explained how her company, Ourouboros Deconstruction, worked with Evolve Builders to bring salvaged lumber up to code for construction purposes, expanding the application of waste materials beyond non-structural uses. Moore started Ouroboros in 2022 with the goal of creating a full circle approach to material recovery. “Our mission’s really simple: We want to make deconstruction cost-effective and accessible and to salvage materials and make them a resource in the community,” she said. Moore and her fellow presenters, who included Joey Giaimo of Giaimo and Robert Raynor of Tas, also stressed the importance of establishing material warehouses; a salvage audit (the creative possibilities of which keynote presenter Susan Carruth also showcased) performed on a demolition or refurbishment can result in tonnes of materials in search of a second (or third) life.

Montreal firm Lemay closed out its workshop (Reactivation, Biodiversification and Restoration) with a case study of its Bellechasse Transport Centre project, which is nearing completion. The client asked for a bus depot, but Lemay did them one better, burying the terminal underground and giving the ground plane back to the public as a lush urban park. The project is poised to make a real difference in the industrial district in which it’s located, giving incentive for people to spend time there and, in turn, creating a new micro-economy — not to mention the environmental benefits. It solidified a key takeaway: that while the architecture industry often operates with the mindset that the client knows best, designers can (and should) go beyond the call to push client aspirations to new heights. Architect Loreta Castro Reguera of Mexico City’s Taller Capital raised a similar point in the “Green Public Realm” panel when presenting the revitalization of a park in Ecatepec. “When we started working on public space, we were never asked to do water management. But every time we had to do a public space, we placed in the soft water management strategy not even telling the client that we were going to do that. In the end, it became the detonator of the entire project,” she explained. In both cases, going above and beyond made for a happy client and a precedent that will push its respective city forward.

Keynote speaker Tomasso Bitossi is begging the corporate world to ditch its ties — at least in the summer. As much as smart climate engineering can accomplish, Bitossi believes that not every problem needs a design solution. Indeed, office buildings would operate much more efficiently simply by allowing the interior temperature to rise a few degrees higher during the sweltering months of July and August. The solution to keeping employees (relatively) comfortable: set a dress code that’s more reflective of the season — for instance, allowing bankers to forgo suits in the summer. That said, Bitossi also shared a screenshot of himself during a Zoom call, sweaty and red-faced in a T-shirt while staying with his mother in Italy during a heatwave. As he noted, sometimes there are limits to how many layers you can strip away while staying professional. (We should note that he was dressed very smartly for his keynote address.)

 The xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) are working with Kwasen Enterprises on ʔəy̓alməxʷ/Iy̓álmexw / Jericho Lands – a massive residential development in Vancouver. Dennis Thomas, elected Councillor of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation, spoke on how these First Nations came together to collaborate on a project that signifies a bright future for them (despite a contingent of locals who reacted to the Jericho Lands plan by drawing up their own staid and much less densified version). To these and other critics: “You’ve had 150 years, it’s our turn now,” said Thomas. Architect Alfred Waugh, Thomas’s co-presenter and an early contributor to the Jericho Lands vision, showed completed projects that demonstrate the importance of remembering the past while forging the future. Among them, the Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre, also in Vancouver, features cedar (“the blood of the Salish culture”) that is charred in places to reference “the resilience of people who’ve gone through cultural genocide and come out the other side.”

Speaking to the ingenuity of Indigenous ways of knowing globally, keynote presenter Julia Watson elucidated the meaning of Lo-TEK through projects including the Swinomish Clam Garden of the Coast Salish in the U.S. and the Chinampa Islands of the Nahua Xochimilca, Mexico. She ended with a call to action for non-Indigenous people: We need to champion Indigenous wisdom in our institutions, and we need to centre Indigenous Peoples. One of the tools we can use is the The Smart Oath of Understanding, a protocol for working ethically with Indigenous communities in ways that ultimately benefit them.

There was no shortage of clever catch phrases coined during our speakers’ presentations (see also: SLA landscape architect and “Forecast for Hotter Cities” panelist Rasmus Astrup’s rebranding “asphalt” into “ass fault”). One of the most memorable mantras came from keynote speaker Kongjian Yu, who talked about water being a holistic part of an area’s ecosystem. In the same spirit as acupuncture, just by touching one section of a river, you can have a big impact on its entire surroundings — hence, “eco-puncture.” He later introduced another health-inspired metaphor: the idea that you shouldn’t be boxing with water, but rather, engaging in gentle tai chi with it. In other words, instead of trying to fight against water, let it flow around you. Otherwise, in a war of wills, water always wins.

Working as a landscape architect in Mexico, Taller Capital’s Loreta Castro Reguera imbued a public park with a water management strategy — all without informing her client. Here, a design-driven landscape brief presented an opportunity to quietly integrate an infrastructural benefit. At the other end of the scale, fellow “Green Public Realm” speaker and gh3* founder Pat Hanson has developed an impressive portfolio of Canadian infrastructural projects — from bus bays and fire halls to wastewater management stations — which are elevated by an unexpected design sensibility. Taken together, their work illuminates the fertile intersection of infrastructure and design, demonstrating that novel typologies and clear civic benefits emerge by embracing hybridity. Design can also do the dirty work — and make it beautiful along the way.

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Human/Nature keynotes were sponsored by Keilhauer, Stone Tile and Italgraniti. Plenary panel sponsors were Ciot, Formica and Architek. Workshop sponsors are Ligne Roset, Scavolini, TAS, Ege Carpets, Mitrex, Andreu World and Arper. The TSA-led field trips were supported by Nienkämper. The social gathering sponsor was Urban Capital.

The conference was presented in partnership with George Brown College / Brookfield Sustainability Institute, MaRS, Lemay, Flash, GFI Investment Council Ltd., Instituto Italiano di Cultura Toronto, and Small Change Fund. It was supported by the City of Toronto.