Waterfront Partnership’s Healthy Harbor Initiative has set a goal of a swimmable and fishable Inner Harbor. What could this look like? The 41st annual AIA Baltimore and BAF Spring Lecture Series invites local practitioners and globally recognized designers and scholars to address “the edge”—where the land meets the water—from a variety of perspectives: health and ecology, resiliency in the face of climate change, and social equity.

The lectures will serve as inspiration for a local design competition. Multi-disciplinary teams of architects, landscape architects, and planners are encouraged to submit designs for a project that engages the water’s edge of a future swimmable and fishable Inner Harbor. Projects will be featured in the Baltimore architectural journal T3XTURE and in an exhibit sponsored by AIA Baltimore and the BAF this fall.

The Spring Lecture Series is free to the public. Lectures will be held at Falvey Hall in the MICA Brown Center (1301 W Mt Royal Ave). The goals of the 2019 Lecture Series and parallel design competition are to stimulate a robust discourse among the design professions and the public, promote new and forward thinking design ideas and highlight work by local designers, and encourage diverse disciplines to participate in a cross-disciplinary dialogue focusing on significant issues and solutions specific to Baltimore’s harbor and city edge.

March 20: Edge of Edge

Edward S. Casey, PhD, Professor, Stony Brook University
Travis Price, FAIA, Travis Price Architects/Spirit of Place-Spirit of Design, Inc.
Carmera Thomas, Chesapeake Bay Foundation
Moderator: Julio Bermudez, PhD, Professor, School of Architecture and Planning, The Catholic University of America

The first program of the 2019 Spring Lecture Series will initiate the overall dialogue of the series and design competition, and set forth the theme of “the edge” of the harbor and city. Presentations and a moderated panel discussion will address the nature and culture of conditions at the intersection of land, sea, and edge, explored from the perspective of philosophy, architecture, and ecology.

March 27: Engaging the Edge

Kent Bloomer, Bloomer Studio, Yale University
Christopher Streb, Biohabitats

The speakers at this program will discuss the visual and ecological grammar of the edge through means of ornamental and regenerative design. Kent Bloomer will discuss the original identity of ornament, which he argues is still remarkably cogent and useful for designing in today’s world, particularly in the fabric of modern cities. Christopher Streb will discuss his ecological engineering work including projects at the harbor and city edge in Baltimore and strategies that transform the waterfront.

April 24: The Intentional and Unintentional Edge

Daniel Campo, Morgan State University
Barbara Wilks, FAIA, W Architecture & Landscape Architecture LLC

The speakers will discuss design at the harbor and city edge in both planned and unplanned contexts. Daniel Campo will discuss the Baltimore and Brooklyn waterfront and reference his book, The Accidental Playground: Brooklyn Waterfront Narratives of the Undesigned and Unplanned. Barbara Wilks, FAIA, FASLA, Principal at W Architecture and Landscape Architecture, will discuss her firm’s waterfront work in various locations, including Baltimore, which addresses places where city and nature come together and forms new relationships, and how well-designed places can result in more sustainable relationships between ourselves, our communities, and the earth.

May 1: The Edge of Experience

Roger Tyrrell, CHORA, University of Portsmouth
Katie O’Meara, Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA)

The speakers at this program will provide a dialogue into the philosophical and the inevitable, discussing how we experience design, and how we can design for the future. Roger Tyrell, architect and professor at the University of Portsmouth, will discuss his research and teaching on architecture from a phenomenological (the experience of architecture) and tectonic (expression of construction) perspective, and particular ways of placemaking. Katie O’Meara, architect and professor at MICA, will discuss her work and teaching that brings together architecture and landscape and addresses resiliency in design at the edges of city and water.