Ute Maya-Giambattista
Ute Maya-Giambattista is an urban designer and architect with more than 17 years of experience. She is a member of the Ontario Professional Planners Institute and the Canadian Institute of Planners and a passionate advocate of good urban design. Ute currently serves at the board of the Council for Canadian Urbanism and chairs the Urban Land Institute’s Mentorship program in Toronto.
As an urban designer, Ute approaches her work with the understanding that design can be a vehicle for creating healthy places and communities while being aware of the complexities of urban spaces and the potential of infrastructure to transform the vitality of a place. Integral to all her management and design work is her commitment to the integration of social, economic, and environmentally sustainable practices from the early stages of the process.
Brendan Stewart
Brendan Stewart joined the University of Guelph in 2017 after more than a decade of practice in Toronto, including his most recent role as an Associate with ERA Architects. He received his Bachelor of Landscape Architecture from the University of Guelph, attended Edinburgh College of Art, and received a Masters of Landscape Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley.
Brendan is the University of Guelph’s appointed educator on the Ontario Association of Landscape Architects Council and is a director of the Friends of Allan Gardens, a park stewardship group in Toronto. His research is currently focused on two projects: plazaPOPS, which proposes pop up public spaces in the privately owned parking lots of Toronto’s inner-suburban strip malls, and Planning for Golf’s Decline, which looks at the over supply of golf courses in the Greater Golden Horseshoe and generates pro-active planning and design strategies to guide their future adaptation to other uses.
Ralph Giannone
Ralph Giannone has led Giannone Petricone Associates Inc. Architects since 1995 in fulfilling a vision for a diverse practice whose work, no matter what type or scale, is infused with exceptional rigor in design details and an extraordinary passion for urbanism. The range of awards and international recognition for his work is testament to the strength in diversity of his practice, and how one type of project can significantly inform another.
Ralph Giannone graduated with a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Toronto in 1987, is a member of the Ontario Association of Architects and the Alberta Association of Architects and in 2013 was made a Fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada. Since 2007 Ralph Giannone has been a member of the City of Toronto Design Review Panel and has been invited to present the firm’s work at conference for ULI, Ontario Planning Forum, Strategy Institute as well as for several municipalities. He has been a panelist at the prestigious Designing Transit Cities Conference in Toronto and participated as a speaker on the City of Toronto’s Chief Planner’s Roundtable “The Next Generation Suburbs”.
Craig Applegath
Craig Applegath is an architect, urban designer, and a pioneer in the planning and design of zero-carbon buildings and campuses, climate adaptation, and regenerative cities. He is a principal and founding partner of DIALOG’s Toronto studio.
Trained as a biologist, and then as an architect and urban designer, Craig is passionate about finding planning and design solutions that make sense in a world challenged by climate change and environmental deterioration. Since graduating from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University with a Master of Architecture in Urban Design, Craig has focused on leading complex, sustainable planning and design projects, and is internationally recognized for his design and advocacy of zero-carbon regenerative buildings and cities, as well as mass timber building design. Craig’s area of practice at DIALOG includes the master planning and design of institutional and mass timber projects.
In addition to his professional practice responsibilities, Craig speaks about his research and design explorations at conferences and workshops internationally, as well as hosting the Twenty First Century Imperative podcast. Craig was recently appointed Acting Chairman of the Mass Timber Institute and is now working with the MTI Council to reshape the MTI into a National Organization.