Vikram Bhatt
Director
Vikram Bhatt, FRAIC, is a Professor of Architecture, McGill University, where he teaches courses in urban design and housing. Born and raised in India, Bhatt graduated from the prestigious Ahmedabad School of Architecture, Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology (CEPT University) in 1973. During and after completing his professional studies he worked for the renowned architect Balkrishna Doshi. He obtained his Masters of Architecture from McGill University in 1975. Following his graduation, he joined the research team of the Minimum Cost Housing Group (then under the direction of Professor Witold Rybczynski). After, briefly working for the International Development Research Centre (977-78), he rejoined the School of Architecture at McGill, where since 1988, he has also led the MCHG activities focusing attention on the shelter problems of poor. His research is focused on field of human settlements planning, urban design, housing and urban agriculture. It specifically addresses questions related to where and how people live interactively via the creative engagement of designers in the process. Currently, he is working on the question of food security and urban sustainability both in North America and abroad. (email)
David Harlander
Research Assistant
David holds a professional Master's of Architecture from the University of British Columbia and a post-professional Master's of Urban Design and Housing from McGill University. His research explores housing and community development in Northern Canada and has seen him contribute to projects based in the Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavik. His work has received various accolades including, the Cornelia & Peter Oberlander Prize in Urban Design, the Louis B. Magil Fellowship in Housing and a HLNQ research grant, among others. He played a leading role in the Kuujuaq Hackathon, which was awarded a 2018 National Urban Design Award by the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada. Since 2017, David has been working at McGill University as a Research Assistant at the Minimum Cost Housing Group and at the Trottier Institute for Sustainability in Engineering and Design, where he has contributed to various educational initiatives that work to advance sustainable thinking throughout the Faculty of Engineering at McGill. David has worked in architectural offices in Vancouver and Beijing and has experience working on a range of single and multi-family residential projects.(email)
Susane Havelka
Research Assistant
Susane is a researcher, architect, educator, and occasional writer, who specializes in sustainable housing and community building and planning. She studied science, art and design at MIT and Architecture at Columbia University. After completing her masters degree, Susane continued as a practicing architect in New York. She then moved to Europe and worked on restoring heritage buildings around the old city of Prague before undertaking a doctorate in Architecture at McGill University in 2012.
During this time, she designed and tested a self-build prototype inspired by her friends in Nunavut and the Monolithic Domes Institute as a potential building system for extreme climates and remote northern communities.
At McGill University, Susane split her time between graduate school and working with a community on developing the groundwork to an experimental cluster of dome houses as the first working prototype of the Monolithic Dome in an Arctic region. She is working on how to enable Inuit to design and build autonomously with local materials (sand and gravel) using simple techniques and the internet to share their designs and ideas. (email)