Lisa Moffitt is an Associate Professor of Architecture and Associate Director of the Graduate program at Carleton University. From 2010-2020, she was Senior Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, where she also completed her PhD Architecture by Design. She is founder of Studio Moffitt, a design research practice with a portfolio of speculative and built projects. She is also a research faculty member of CSALT, Carleton Sensory Architecture and Liminal Technologies Laboratory.

Lisa’s research focuses on the distilling lens of the architectural model — understood as both scale physical artefact and as mental ideal.  She designs, prototypes, and photographs models of environmental processes. The models, which incorporate phenomena such as flowing water, thawing ice, eroding soil, shifting smoke, moving air, and spreading fire, make environmental systems that are otherwise incomprehensible — due to expansiveness, duration, or invisibility — visible and legible to the senses. Making these processes material and legible enables them to play a more active and direct role in design speculation, a process of imagining ideals for our collective future.

Many of her models visualise airflow, a moving material system with consequences across radical spatial and temporal scales. This is the subject of her book, Architecture’s Model Environments (UCL Press, Design Research in Architecture Series, 2023) and associated travelling solo exhibition. She also prototypes scale material assemblies of earth, hemp, straw, and wool to hone a regenerative material tectonic. Her SSHRC funded project, EarthWorks, Architecture’s Regenerative Material Models, uses physical models of rammed earth assemblies to test its formal capacities and to aid in its mainstreaming across Ontario. Much of her studio teaching and current research focus on remediation landscapes and sites of climate significance in Canada, parts of which are undergoing global warming at twice the rate of the global average.