Blueprint for a Hack

Susane Havelka is a researcher, architect, and educator who specializes in sustainable housing and community building and planning. She studied science, art and design at MIT and architecture at Columbia University. After completing her Master's degree, Susane continued to practice architecture in New York and Europe before undertaking a doctorate in Architecture at McGill University. During this time, she designed and tested a self-build prototype inspired by her friends in Nunavut and the Monolithic Domes Institute as a potential building system for extreme climates and remote northern communities. Susane also co-curated a design charrette at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) and the Kuujjuaq Hackathon with Prof. Vikram Bhatt, which won the RAIC 2018 National Urban Design Award. She is also a contributor to the Minimum Cost Housing Group (MCHG) projects and while working with a community on developing the groundwork to an experimental cluster of dome houses as the first working prototype of the Monolithic Dome in an Arctic region is currently doing research on housing and well-being and working as a postdoctoral research fellow at Memorial University in Geography on Indigenous housing and homelessness. Her focus is on alternate housing delivery strategies for remote northern communities that can enable people to design and self-build their own houses by using simple building systems and the internet to share design and ideas.