In 2019, The Site Magazine is focused on the concept of the device: small interventions that alter our interactions with space and effect how we experience our environment. A tool with which to navigate the world, a device may also be a ploy, a “trick with particular aim,” a tactic. Devices are not merely utilitarian: they can operate on physical or figurative levels, producing new meanings through their machinations and calibrations. Imbued with intent, what do they enable us to see, optically or mentally? In the Spring/Summer issue of Site, architects, artists, and designers offer ways to create and calibrate environmental experience, providing multiple access points to redefine our world.

Site editor Ruth Jones will be joined in conversation by Linda Zhang and Thi Phuong-Trâm Ngyuyen.

Ruth Jones is a Toronto-based writer, editor, and curator, and co-editor in chief of The Site Magazine. Her writing has appeared in The Boston Globe, C Magazine, the Literary Review of Canada, Canadian Architect, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She holds a PhD in French and Francophone Studies from University of California Los Angeles.

Thi Phuong-Trâm Nguyen is a trained architect in Canada, and holds an MA in Architectural History and Theory from McGill University, Montreal. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Architectural Design at The Bartlett School of Architecture, London. Her research addresses the temporality and spatiality of the gesture of looking through the study of anamorphic construction. Her design work explores the possibilities of drawing, filmmaking and writing to occupy the space of perception.

Linda Zhang is an Assistant Professor at Ryerson University School of Interior Design, Toronto, and a principal at Studio Pararaum. She is the 2019 Multicultural Fellow at the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts, a 2020 Artist in Residence at the European Ceramic Workcentre, the 2017–2018 Boghosian Fellow at Syracuse University School of Architecture, as well as a 2017 Fellow at ZK/U Center for Art and Urbanistics, Berlin. Her research areas include memory, cultural heritage, identity politics, material processes (namely casting and ceramics), and digital reproduction technologies.