Michael Cumming
- Born October 1956 Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
- Parents: Donald Cumming of Toronto and Margaret Duncan Cumming of Pittsburgh
- Citizenship: dual Canada and USA
- Attended Dalhousie University, Faculty of Architecture and Planning, Halifax, NS, 1977-1981. BArch 1981
- Attended Carnegie Mellon University, School of Architecture, Pittsburgh, PA. 1994-2001. PhD 2005 in Computational Design
- Lives in Hamilton, Ontario
I am an Ottawa-born writer and photographer who spent formative years in many cities. I earned a Bachelor of Architecture degree in 1981 from the Technical University of Nova Scotia (now part of Dalhousie University). I then got a job in West Berlin, Germany at the Internationale Bauaustellung (IBA), an organization that tried to fill in some of the holes in West Berlin with new and renovated buildings by internationally-known architects.
After a several months in Berlin I moved to London, UK on a Working Holiday visa. I worked for several years as an architect with the large commercial firm of Covell Matthews Wheatley. I really liked the texture and history of London. The architectural and urban density of London were much greater and richer than this provincial boy from Canada had previously experienced.
Learning at a late stage that my visa could not be extended I was forced to move from the UK and ended up in Toronto. Toronto at the time was not quite the multicultural metropolis it is now but it was growing and active in interesting ways. In Toronto I worked for several architects including Diamond + Schmitt, Cravit Ortved and Rod Robbie (architect of the Skydome, later the Rogers Centre).
I must say I have been very impressed with the transformation of Toronto from being a Waspy, frigid place to a city that is so fun and multicultural at times it hurts. I wouldn’t have thought it possible but I’ve seen it happen! We hope to see a similar transformation in Hamilton from rust-bucket town to being the new Brooklyn-on-the-Lake.
In 1988 I married Cornelia Peckart, an artist and arts educator from Hamilton, Ontario. Much later we had adorable twin boys Benjamin and William (Liam) who were born in Pittsburgh in 1999.
The fall of the Berlin wall on 9 November 1989 was an emotional event for me. I have many good memories of living both in West Berlin during the Wall (in Charlottenburg and Moabit), and in East Berlin after the Wall (in Pankow). For those interested in East Berlin just before unification I suggest the Oscar-winning film The Lives of Others. It captures the atmosphere and colours of East Berlin from that time perfectly.
With the excitement caused by the reunification of Germany in the early nineties, my wife (who is of German parentage) and I decided to leave Toronto and move to Berlin. We found the city to be extremely exciting, growing quickly and overflowing with wonderful things to see. From what I understand Berlin is still like that, only more so. However, we did get a bit homesick for Canada. We returned to Canada to find this country in recession with little work available. Career-wise it probably wasn’t the best move. If we had been a bit more mature at the time we would have stayed longer in Berlin. We moved back to Ottawa for three years where I worked for the architect Brisbin Brook Beynon.
In 1994 I returned to school in Pittsburgh (my mother’s home town) to attend Carnegie Mellon University in their well-known Computational Design program at the School of Architecture. There I studied under the supremely wise tutelage of Professor Ömer Akin. In Pittsburgh, I began to understand how to program computers and do academic research. We made many friends in Pittsburgh and this city remains our second home. After great effort I received my PhD from Carnegie Mellon in 2005.
My PhD thesis topic concerned the democratization of process modeling within architecture. It is based on the idea that if you want to know how to do things it helps to involve diverse viewpoints in the construction of process models. It was, in effect, an application of the idea of distributed participatory design, or crowdsourcing. My thesis can be viewed here.
After Pittsburgh, I got a post-doc job working at Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands. By this time our twins had been born. We found this to be trying time despite the fact that the Netherlands is a gorgeous country with a phenomenally sophisticated art and design culture. The main source of our discontent was that we didn’t make quite enough money there to make ends meet. However, we enjoyed greatly the painting collection at the Mauritshuis in Den Haag and of bicycling along the Rotte River in Rotterdam. I also had the opportunity with my Dutch job to travel to many interesting cities in Europe. My favourites from this time include Graz, Austria and Istanbul, Turkey.
After the Netherlands we moved first to Burlington, Ontario, then later Hamilton. In Hamilton we bought a solid brick house with a lovely garden, but with a distressingly inadequate heating system. We continue to make friends in Hamilton and enjoy attending the James St North Art Crawl once a month.
Things I have learned
- People are friendly and kind everywhere
- Don’t assume that people in different parts of the world think the same way you do
- If you want to move to a place, first visit the place to see if you like it
- Sometimes, unlikely places have high standards of living, such as steel-towns experiencing de-industrialization (e.g. Hamilton and Pittsburgh)
- Open systems are much more interesting than closed systems
- Sustainability is a noble goal in architecture and urban planning
- Words combined with images may have a synergistic effect
- Places where artists congregate tend to be interesting places
- Having a backyard with a garden is a wonderful thing
- Kids sometimes say the darndest things
