Indigenous Success Forest School | Faculty of Architecture

What is Forest School?

Forest School is an approach to land-focused design education, research and making that grows through relationships with land, communities, students, researchers, artists, craftspeople and others who become part of the work.
At its centre is the idea that knowledge is relational. Projects begin by spending time together; listening, observing, gathering, talking and making. The hope is to transition Land as not simply understood as a site for design, but as something we enter into relationship with and through which different ways of knowing can emerge.

Forest School brings together architectural and engineering education, material practice, craft, technology and diverse forms of knowledge. It creates opportunities to learn through direct experience and making at full scale, while questioning how the tools and technologies we use influence the ways we see, understand and engage with the world around us.
Activities may include gatherings, conversations, workshops, design-build projects, material investigations, research and teaching. They can occur in different landscapes and communities, developing in response to the particular people, relationships, materials and conditions encountered there.

Forest School is finally an evolving way of learning and working together. The intention is to inspire conditions for something to emerge through relationships, participation, making and sustained attention to land and what might be discovered.

Forest School projects

An Offering

In Summer 2026, An Offering was a collective, land-based design-build journey inspired by the Travesía at Open City Chile; where architecture and engineering come together as an unfolding event rather than a fixed object.

Developed in partnership with Makate Waagamichiwanang Gakinaa’amaatiwin Youth & Family Wellness Camp, a land-based cultural and healing site grounded in Anishinaabe knowledge, the studio engages directly with community, Elders, youth, and knowledge keepers.

Working across disciplines, students moved between observation, analysis, drawing, prototyping, and construction; testing ideas through material, structure, and poetics. Through immersion on site, learning happens through doing: drawing, cooking, building, measuring, and gathering. Central to this work is food sovereignty; the understanding that food systems are inseparable from land, infrastructure, and the relationship between environment, body, and community. Grounded in seven-generational thinking, the studio frames making as an act of offering - to the land, to community, and to those who follow. The outcome will be a real, constructed intervention (potentially temporary or evolving) but grounded in care, collaboration, and shared responsibility, positioning design and engineering as relational, embodied, and lived practices.

tipi and covered structure on vast plains

A Space for Gathering

In 2023, a Poetic Act on the Land was a summer design-build course that brought together architecture and engineering students, Elders, Knowledge Keepers, and educators to collaboratively design and construct a shelter for gathering, feasting, and ceremony.

The course took place between the University of Manitoba’s Fort Garry campus and a woodland near Longbow Lake, Ontario. Moving between the university and the building site allowed students to experience design as a process that extended from drawing and discussion into material experimentation, construction, and occupation at full scale.

Working across architecture and engineering created an opportunity for students to move outside the conventions of their individual disciplines. Elders and Knowledge Keepers contributed Indigenous knowledges and perspectives throughout the process, creating conversations around land, materials, gathering, ceremony, and the responsibilities involved in making something together.

The project also challenged conventional approaches to sustainability. Rather than considering sustainability primarily through technical performance, students were encouraged to think more holistically about the relationships between materials, people, land, culture, and the life of a building.

Over the course of the studio, these conversations were translated into the design and construction of a permanent gathering shelter. Students participated directly in the process of making, confronting the practical realities of structure, materials, tools, weather, collaboration, and construction.

The completed shelter is both the physical outcome of the course and a place that continues to support gathering, feasting, teaching, and ceremony on the land.