Safoura Zahedi (MArch Class of 2016) is a designer at Superkül with a background in architecture and interior design and experience on a diverse range of projects, including residential, commercial, institutional, cultural and civic buildings. Her award-winning independent work operates at the intersection of art and architecture exploring geometry as a universal design language and digital fabrication. She is highly committed to the design community and acts as Programs Coordinator at the DesignTO Festival and Executive Committee member at BEAT (Building Equality in Architecture Toronto), where she co-founded the annual BEAT Forum, devoted to addressing issues of diversity and inclusion in the design and architecture industry. In addition, Safoura is currently a part-time lecturer at the Ryerson School of Interior Design.

Sarah Rafson (BAAS Class of 2010) is an architecture writer, researcher, editor, and curator, founder of Point Line Projects, an editorial and curatorial agency for architecture, art, and design. A graduate of the University of Toronto’s Bachelor of Arts in Architecture Studies and Columbia University's Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices program, she has worked on books with Kenneth Frampton, Bernard Tschumi, and Barry Bergdoll, and collaborated on exhibitions at MoMA, Centre Pompidou, Center for Architecture in New York, and the Parsons School of Design. She was awarded the 2017-18 Ann Kalla Professorship in Architecture at the Carnegie Mellon School of Architecture, where she continues to teach and direct the school’s yearly exhibition and publication, EX-CHANGE.

About the What's Next Speaker Series

AVSSU, GALDSU and FGSA are excited to bring to you What’s Next, an alumni speaker series. Speakers will be presenting their work and career paths since graduating from the different programs at Daniels. 

You will hear about the various industries and areas of work, skills you can transfer from university to the workplace, networking and more!

The lecture will start with a short presentation by the guests, followed by a moderated discussion with student(s), and ending with an open Q&A with the audience.

If you are unable to attend, please send in any questions you may have, and we will be sure to ask them for you. The talks will be recorded and can be found on Youtube. If you are a student and are interested in moderating a discussion, please reach out to your respective student union representative (see below).

AVSSU - Randa Omar
GALDSU - Juliette Cook
FGSA - Nicole Tratnik

What's Next Graphic Credit: Randa Omar

This lecture is a presentation on the Great Lakes dunes, Southern Ontario prairies and savannahs, Northwestern Ontario prairies and savannahs, and alvars. The presentation will include habitat photos, and the plants that grow in these areas.

Wasyl Bakowsky is the Community Ecologist for the Natural Heritage Information Centre. The centre manages data about the location of species of conservation concern, plant communities, wildlife concentration areas, and natural areas in Ontario. Wasyl complies information on rare plant communities, as well as exemplary examples of communities which are not rare, such as old growth forests. Compiled information includes plant community descriptions, species lists, and digitized polygons. This information is used for biodiversity conservation planning, environmental assessments and natural resource management. 
 

BES (planning), MArch (2011), OAA, RAIC
 

Drew Adams (M.Arch 2011) is a designer with a background spanning architecture, landscape architecture and urban design. He is an Associate at LGA Architectural Partners in Toronto with nearly 10 years experience leading innovative and high-profile public interest design projects. This includes affordable housing projects like Eva’s Phoenix to the Evergreen Brick Works carbon neutral Kiln Building while his own speculative work has been distinguished in numerous international design competitions. This work has received recognition ranging from the Mies Crown Hall America’s Prize nomination to material innovation awards and publication features ranging from Fast Company to Architectural Record. Drew recently co-authored a series for Azure on design and climate change, is a frequent speaker and guest critic, and occasional adjunct professor. He received the Irving Grossman Prize in 2011 for his final thesis on innovative and sustainable housing design. In 2020, Drew was named recipient of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada’s Emerging Architect Award.

About the What's Next Speaker Series

AVSSU, GALDSU and FGSA are excited to bring to you What’s Next, an alumni speaker series. Speakers will be presenting their work and career paths since graduating from the different programs at Daniels. 

You will hear about the various industries and areas of work, skills you can transfer from university to the workplace, networking and more!

The lecture will start with a short presentation by the guest, followed by a moderated discussion with student(s), and ending with an open Q&A with the audience.

If you are unable to attend, please send in any questions you may have, and we will be sure to ask them for you. The talks will be recorded and can be found on Youtube. If you are a student and are interested in moderating a discussion, please reach out to your respective student union representative (see below).

AVSSU - Randa Omar
GALDSU - Juliette Cook
FGSA - Nicole Tratnik

What's Next Graphic Credit: Randa Omar

Filipe Magalhaes, Ana Luisa Soares and Ahmed Belkhodja of fala present "Methodic Optimism". 

"The method doesn’t always pay off, and comes with a good deal of frustrating moments and necessary plot twists. Projects we love are regularly thrown in the trash bin. But more often than not, they leave place for even more lovable ones. In short, we have to be resilient and stubborn. Being optimistic is an enjoyable burden."

Fala is a naïve architecture practice based in porto, founded in 2013. Led by Filipe Magalhães, Ana Luisa Soares and Ahmed Belkhodja, the atelier is hedonistic while restrained, taking lightness and joy very seriously.

Fala has lectured at different universities and institutions, including the architectural association, the RIBA and the Barbican in london, the GSAPP in New York, the Graham Foundation in Chicago, the Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels, the Versailles’ Faculty of Architecture in Paris and the Casa dell'Architettura in Rome; besides the current positions in Toronto, Geneva and Lisbon, among others, fala has taught at the faculties of architecture in Venice, Munich, Porto and London. The atelier’s work has been exhibited at the Architecture Biennials in Venice and Chicago, the Serralves Foundation and the Pavillon de l’Arsenal in Paris, and in single exhibitions in Panama, Italy, Macedonia, France and Portugal. Fala's work has been widely published in international media platforms, including DOMUS, L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui and the Architectural Review. The atelier published ’01’, a collection of early projects by the atelier and AVproyectos #098 is dedicated to its work; the international architecture magazine 2G dedicated its monographic issue #80 to fala’s work. Among other honors, fala was awarded the spotlight award by the Rice University and selected as one of the 50 most relevant young offices in the world by domus magazine in 2020.

Graphic by Mariah Meawasige (Makoose)

Image Description & Credit: 069, houses within lines and dots; fala

Space Popular directors Fredrik Hellberg and Lara Lesmes will discuss their latest projects in both the physical and virtual realms with a focus on how new technologies are changing both how we think of and experience architecture.
 

Space Popular creates physical and virtual architecture, concentrating on how the two will fuse in the near future. Founded in Bangkok in 2013 by architects Lara Lesmes (Spain) and Fredrik Hellberg (Sweden) the studio has since completed buildings, exhibitions, public artworks, furniture collections, and interiors across Asia and Europe, and virtual architecture for the Immersive Internet. Space Popular is currently based in London. Lesmes and Hellberg are both graduates from the Architectural Association School of Architecture, where they also teach a master studio exploring the future of virtual gathering spaces. From 2020 Lesmes and Hellberg also teach a master studio at University of Toronto.

Image: The Venn Room 2019. Immersive film and installation depicting a series of possible scenarios of cohabitation in which issues of integration, interface, exposure, overlap, representation, storage and ownership in the augmented future for our domestic environments are put into perspective through everyday narratives. First exhibited at the Tallinn Architecture Biennale 2019.

Julia Smachylo is an urban designer as well as a registered urban planner in Ontario and the United Kingdom. As a doctoral candidate at Harvard, she is a member of the Urban Theory Lab, a Canada Fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and has completed a doctoral specialism in Critical Media Practice. Julia’s research is situated in urban and landscape theory and political ecology, and aims to render visible the impacts of policy that connect resource territories to urban processes. Within this context her recent work traces the rise of incentivized environmental conservation in southern Ontario, focusing on forest landscapes. Using film as a method of investigation, alongside mapping, interviews and archival analysis, her research documents incentivized forest management to reveal the extent to which these landscapes are tied to the social, economic and political histories of production and conservation within the region. Within this framework she brings a particular focus on environmental stewardship as a form of collective praxis through which to engage the production of more environmentally sane and socially just cities and landscapes.

Jackie Hamilton, MFC, RPF (she/her) is a forester, arborist and admirer of trees and all the people that live with them. A 2015 graduate of U of T's MFC, she has worked on and led urban and peri-urban forestry and applied research projects in the GTA and continues to work on forest conservation in and around cities. Jackie has experience working in environmental science and forestry in the UK and eastern Ontario.

Jackie will discuss her career path from arboricultural consulting and backyard tree planting to research on urban forest monitoring and planning. Insights will include weird skills she learned at U of T that have proved useful, why she likes to work with Daniels and how to network
as an introverted tree nerd.
 

About the What's Next Speaker Series

AVSSU, GALDSU and FGSA are excited to bring to you What’s Next, an alumni speaker series. Speakers will be presenting their work and career paths since graduating from the different programs at Daniels. 

You will hear about the various industries and areas of work, skills you can transfer from university to the workplace, networking and more!

The lecture will start with a short presentation by the guest, followed by a moderated discussion with student(s), and ending with an open Q&A with the audience.

For the winter of 2021, we have an exciting line-up of speakers from the MFC, MUD, MVS, MLA, BAAS, and M.Arch programs, so be sure to mark the dates in your calendars. If you are unable to attend, please send in any questions you may have, and we will be sure to ask them for you. The talks will be recorded and can be found on Youtube. If you are a student and are interested in moderating a discussion, please reach out to your respective student union representative (see below).

AVSSU - Randa Omar
GALDSU - Juliette Cook
FGSA - Zoe Bedford

What's Next Graphic Credit: Randa Omar

Dr. Abid Mehmood, a senior research fellow at the Sustainable Places Research Institute, at Cardiff University, will be leading this lunchtime lecture.

He writes: "Considering cities as complex adaptive systems, the talk will critically examine the (re)emergence of nature-inspired trends in urban planning and design as a way of exploring new relationships between people and places. Although the use of metaphors is not new when describing the state of a city, the recent turn is more concerned with achieving optimal efficiency and overall sustainability of the built environment through observations and experiences from nature. I would further argue that such approaches should aim for integrating citizens’ needs, inclusion, and empowerment for a holistic view to the science of cities."

This event is hosted by the Urban Genome Urban Challenge Initiative.

Click here to register

As the domain where different vectors of the current climate crisis meet and interact, and where conflicts around its regulation are emerging, the atmosphere also produces multiple localities where these transformations can be observed and understood—and sites of mediation can be imagined. Far from being understood in all of its complexity, the atmosphere continues to elude our ability to model its dynamics—or to compute future scenarios. 

In Thinking with Landscapes: The Fourth Atmosphere, ongoing research (conducted together with Marco Ferrari and Jingru (Cyan) Cheng at the Royal College of Art, London) examines how established and emerging plans—including large-scale weather modification proposals such as China’s Tian He (Sky River) and Pleistocene Park in Siberia, both seeking to govern water in various forms, is leading to the rise of a new planetary imaginary, extending well-known concepts of land sovereignty into the domain of the atmosphere. 

Elise Misao Hunchuck is a Berlin-based landscape researcher, editor, and educator trained in landscape architecture (MLA, Daniels, 2016), philosophy and geography (University of Toronto). She is a Visiting Lecturer at the Royal College of Art School of Architecture (London), a Senior Researcher and Teaching Fellow in the landscape architecture programme at The Bartlett School of Architecture, an Assistant professor, teaching stream, at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto, a member of the editorial board of Scapegoat: Architecture/Landscape/Political Economy, and editor for transmediale (2021–2022). 

Surfacing Work presents recent projects by Spinagu, a Los Angeles-based research and design studio that explores architectural ideas and processes through spatial, experimental, and exhibitionary formats.  

Jia Yi Gu (b. Shanghai, China) is an architectural historian, educator, and curator who works on, thinks about, and occasionally writes about minor institutional spaces, ethics of care, and labor in architectural practices. She is currently a PhD candidate in UCLA Critical Studies in Architecture. Her doctoral research investigates the instrumentality of models in the postwar architecture office as a site of demonstration for architectural expertise. She holds a B.A. in Visual Arts from the University of California San Diego with Honors and a Master of Architecture degree from the University of California Los Angeles where she graduated with distinction and received the Alpho Rho Chi medal. Prior to Los Angeles, she has worked internationally in Berlin, Barcelona, and Anyang with Raumlaborberlin, Something Fantastic, and Kyong Park. She is currently curator and director of Materials & Applications and is Visiting Faculty at California College of Arts. She is co-director of Spinagu with Maxi Spina, a research and design studio that explores architectural ideas and processes through spatial, material, and exhibitionary projects. Her work has been recognized and supported by UCLA, Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and the Canadian Center for Architecture.

Landscape landscape urbanism is an inclusive approach to the construction of the human ecosystem. It translates the hidden potential of places and pursues a new relationship between living creatures, humans among them. This methodology seeks to understand climate and geology—their performance, constraints and gifts—as the foundation for learning from the primary matter of landscapes over time. Landscape landscape urbanism makes no distinction between urban and rural. It proposes new artificial ecologies that understand landscape as an integrated productive system responding to multiple intentions: enhanced biodiversity, dynamic cycles of water and carbon, a living soil, and growth over time—culminating in new architectural entities. These hybrid structures generate new languages that integrate living systems into the construction of the urban realm. Landscape Landscape Urbanism is a redefinition of the relationship between humans and nonhumans where multiple individual milieux overlap in a shared environment. 

Teresa Gali-Izard is a professor of landscape architecture and director of the new Master of Sciences in Landscape Architecture program at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. Previously she was an associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She also served as a chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture at University of Virginia from 2013-2015, taught in the master’s program in Landscape Architecture and Environment at the Escuela Técnica Superior in Madrid, and has lectured at the School of Architecture of Oslo in Norway, the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Austria, the Academy of Architecture of Mendrisio in Switzerland, the School of Architecture of Grenoble University in France, and the Oporto School of Architecture in Portugal.
 
Galí-Izard is principal of the firm Arquitectura Agronomia, a landscape architecture firm founded in 2007 and based in Barcelona. Arquitectura Agronomia has built a large number of projects in Spain, including the San Telmo Palace garden in Sevilla, the restoration of Arriaga Lake in Vitoria, Odesa Park in Sabadell, and the High Speed Train Station Park in Logroño. Over the last 20 years, Galí-Izard has also been involved in many other important contemporary landscape architecture projects, including the Parque de los Primeros Pasos in Caracas, Venezuela, Giner de los Rios garden in Madrid, the new urbanization of Passeig de Sant Joan, and the restoration of the Sant Joan landfill in Barcelona, which won the European Urban Public Space award in 2004.

Galí-Izard has been selected as a finalist in major landscape competitions in Spain, such as Cañaveral Park in Madrid and Central Park in Valencia, and has won many competitions, including the Energy Waste Recycling category at the World Architecture Festival in 2008. She was trained as an agricultural technical engineer, and earned her postgraduate degree in gardening and landscape at the Escuela Superior de Agricultura  de Barcelona, Polytechnic University of Catalonia. She is author of The same landscapes. Ideas and interpretations (2006, ed. Gustavo Gili) and editor with Daniela Colafrancesci of  Jacques Simon: The other landscapes. Ideas and thoughts on the territory (2018, ed. Libria).