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 Toronto, 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).

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.

In 1994 I returned to school in Pittsburgh (my mother’s home town) to attend Carnegie Mellon University in their well-known Computational Design (computer aided 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. 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 crowd-sourcing. My thesis can be viewed here.

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
• Kids sometimes say the darndest things