The Architect and The Public: On George Baird's Contribution to Architecture is a collection of essays and interviews on the work of George Baird, and serves as evidence of the architect's public engagement with contemporary society. With the rise of mass media, traditional modes of producing and communicating architecture have been transformed, as many practitioners choose to express the cultural and societal relevance of buildings, and to ground architectural design beyond personal agendas. George Baird's work and research reflects this practice, and Baird—along with Colin Rowe, Kenneth Frampton, and Peter Eisenman—has served as a model for North American architectural debate. From his early theoretical writings as a doctoral student, to his involvement with Toronto city planning, to his commitment to teaching at the University of Toronto and Harvard, Baird played a key role in shaping the relationship between architecture and its multiple publics, many of which emerged in the second half of the twentieth century.

Roberto Damiani is a lecturer at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto, where he teaches design studios and seminars in the Architecture graduate and undergraduate program. He earned his doctoral degree in history and theory of urbanism from the University of Pescara with a dissertation on Colin Rowe’s, Oswald Mathias Ungers’s, and Aldo Rossi’s contribution to urban design pedagogy in the 1960s. He is the organizer and chief curator of Italy under Construction, a series of exhibitions and public lectures on contemporary architecture in Italy, sponsored and promoted by the Italian Cultural Institute in Toronto.