My first encounter with George Baird was at my final MArch thesis review in December 2005 at the McGill University School of Architecture. My project to redesign the village center of Ste-Famille on Québec’s Île d’Orléans was inspired by Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “space of appearance.” I was seeking to avoid caricatural tropes of the historical village in favor of a more abstract yet meaningful form of public realm. While Baird, then dean of the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Architecture, was a regular guest at McGill, his presence of my jury that day was motivated by his own longstanding engagement with Arendt and the concept
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