An immersive digital installation by a trio of Daniels Faculty alumni will be among the projects on view this weekend during Toronto’s popular all-night Nuit Blanche festival.

Called Distance to Mars, the installation consists of an illuminated mesh canopy that emits a soft, otherworldly glow as a band of numbers displaying data from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory marks our real-time position relative to the Red Planet. 

As the numbers change, humanity’s collective cosmic journey is conjured, “inspiring unity and purpose as we navigate the complexities of our time.”

The installation is the brainchild of three recent BAAS and MARC grads: Siqi Wang, Yi Zhang and Xinyue Gu.

“We are thrilled…that our project, Distance to Mars, has been selected for this year’s Nuit Blanche Toronto art exhibition,” says Wang. “I…am excited to share this project with the community.” 

Wang, Zhang and Gu operate as Manifesto Lab, a multidisciplinary creative studio based in Toronto and New York. Their work encompasses architecture, interiors, installations, exhibitions, communication and experience-driven projects. 

Distance to Mars, which “seamlessly blends technology, art and human connection to create an engaging experience,” is characteristic of their oeuvre.

It will be on display in Toronto’s HTO Park West (375 Queens Quay West) from 7:00 p.m. on Saturday (October 5) to 7:00 a.m. on Sunday (October 6). 

The installation is part of the exhibition The Weight of Levity, which “examines the physical and emotional distance between up and down.” The overall theme of this year’s festival is Bridging Distance.

For the full roster of works on view at Nuit Blanche, click here.

The John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto is excited to present its Fall 2024 Public Program. 

Through a curated series of lectures, exhibitions, book talks, discussions, and symposia, this semester’s program raises questions and delves into contemporary issues facing the built and natural environment. From housing typologies and modern legacies to Indigenous storytelling and the intersection of climate science, geopolitics, and artistic perspectives, we explore a diverse range of topics aimed at fostering dialogue and exchange across our disciplines. 

All events are free and open to the public. Register on Eventbrite in advance and consult the events calendar for up-to-date details. Many events will be live-streamed and available on the Daniels Faculty’s YouTube channel. 

Register

September 12, 6:30 p.m. 
Gehry Chair Lecture: Urban Domesticity 
Featuring Jing Liu and Florian Idenburg (SO–IL) 

September 12-October 25 
Exhibition: Urban Domesticity 
Larry Wayne Richards Gallery 

September 26, 6:30 p.m.
Future Ancestor 
Featuring Chris T Cornelius (Oneida) (University of New Mexico; studio:indigenous) 

October 17, 6:30 p.m. 
Architecture of Health: The Annual Zeidler-Evans Lecture
Designing for Older Persons in a Transforming World 
Featuring Dr. Diana Anderson, Molly Chan (NSDA Architects) and Stephen Verderber (Daniels Faculty, University of Toronto) 

October 18, 12:30 p.m.
Radio-Activities: Architecture and Broadcasting 
Featuring Alfredo Thiermann (EPFL) 

October 24, 6:30 p.m.
George Baird Lecture
Housing_Medium Please! 
Featuring Elizabeth Whittaker (Graduate School of Design, Harvard University; MERGE Architects)  

November 4, 6:30 p.m.
MVS Proseminar Artist Talk 
Featuring Pio Abad 

November 7-8 
Shaping Atmospheres  
Symposium organized by Ala Roushan (OCAD University) and Charles Stankievech (Daniels Faculty, University of Toronto) with support from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) 

November 7, 6:30 p.m.
Symposium Keynote: Shaping Atmospheres
Featuring Holly Jean Buck (University at Buffalo) and David Keith (University of Chicago) 

October 2-December 21 
Exhibition: Shaping Atmospheres 
Architecture + Design Gallery 

November 21, 6:30 p.m.
Where the Wild Things Are 
Featuring Omar Gandhi (Omar Gandhi Architects) 

November 22-23 
Preservation? Modernist Heritage and Modern Toronto 
Symposium organized by Aziza Chaouni and Robert Levit (Daniels Faculty, University of Toronto) 

November 22, 6:30 p.m. 
Preservation? Modernist Heritage and Modern Toronto 
Keynote Presentations and Discussion

The annual Master of Visual Studies Proseminar at the University of Toronto’s John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design offers graduate students in curatorial studies and studio art the opportunity to connect and exchange with field-leading international and local artists, curators, writers, theorists and other scholarly practitioners and researchers.   

The 2024/2025 MVS Proseminar Series examines how contemporary art intersects with societal contexts, from exploring identity and cultural memory to challenging conventional narratives. Through studio visits, masterclasses and workshops with our students, alongside public evening lectures, our invited practitioners spark interdisciplinary dialogue and prompt inquiry among our community.  

This group of speakers was brought together to reflect the diverse practices and research interests of our graduate students. The guests will speak from their experiences and research in various subject areas, such as repressed historical events and the creation of counter-narratives; counter-publics and the imagining of new social futures; weather and Indigenous cultural practices; food and extractivism; various forms of visual and social transformation; artists-moving image and bad animation; and curatorial politics and representation. 

The 2024/2025 MVS Proseminar is curated by Assistant Professor Gareth Long, Director of the Faculty's Visual Studies Programs. All events take place in Main Hall at the Daniels Building at 1 Spadina Crescent. Registration is not required.  

Fall 2024 

September 10, 5:30pm ET  
Erika Balsom 
Scholar and critic 

October 3, 6:30pm ET 
Prem Krishnamurthy 
Designer and curator 

October 8, 6:30pm ET  
Tanya Lukin Linklater 
Artist and choreographer 

November 4, 6:30pm ET  
Pio Abad 
Artist 

November 19, 6:30pm ET 
James McAnally 
Curator, critic, and editor 

The Winter Series features Shanay Jhaveri (Head of Visual Arts at the Barbican, London), Cooking Sections (the multidisciplinary practice of Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe) and Jamillah James (Manilow Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago), and others. Dates will be announced on the Daniels Faculty website in the fall.  

About the Master of Visual Studies (MVS) Program

The Master of Visual Studies (MVS) is an intimate, two-year program in either Studio Art or Curatorial Studies. These two streams of study operate at a field-leading intersection of liberal-arts academic research, studio and curatorial professional practices and methodologies, and a unique program identity grounded in a critical approach to discursive practices in exhibition. 

The artistic research and scholarship that emerges from both program pathways reflects increasingly complex modes of art and exhibition-making, filtered through philosophy, cultural theory, criticism and diverse material practices. Situated within one of the world’s leading research institutions, the MVS programs focus on art and its presentation as research, fostering interdisciplinary exchange within the greater Daniels Faculty and across the University of Toronto. 

Image credits: 

1) Pio Abad, To Those Sitting in Darkness. Exhibition view, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 2024. Image courtesy Pio Abad.

2) Tanya Lukin Linklater with Tiffany Shaw, Indigenous geometries, 2019, cold rolled steel, laminate ash, paint, matte polyurethane, hardware, 84 x 107 x 107 in. (213 x 272 x 272 cm). Installation view, Inner blades of grass (soft) / inner blades of grass (cured) / inner blades of grass (bruised by the weather), Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, USA, 2024. Photo: Luke Stettner. Courtesy Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver.

3) Black Quantum Futurism, SLOWER-THAN-LIGHT SHRINE: IN REMEMBRANCE OF THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD commissioned by James McAnally for Counterpublic 2023. Image courtesy of Chris Bauer. 

4) Image courtesy Prem Krishnamurthy.

For Fernanda de Carvalho Nunes, an architect and urban planner who recently completed the Master of Landscape Architecture program at the Daniels Faculty, city building today falls short unless it also encompasses sustainability, resilience and inclusivity. 

The new alumna’s education and designs, consequently, focus as much on fostering social justice and ecological balance as they do on planning problems. 

Her MLA thesis project—which was recognized with the Faculty’s John E. (Jack) Irving Prize, established by the Isles Foundation to support thesis projects that achieve integration between the fields of landscape architecture and ecology—addresses the preservation and expansion of climate-resilient mangroves in Florianópolis, Brazil, an island city grappling with, as de Carvalho Nunes puts it, “the tension between development and environmental conservation.”

In this struggle, she has written, “mangroves [in Brazil] often fall victim to private interests,” despite “their immense cultural and ecological value.”

This trend, she points out, “mirrors a global decline; between 1990 and 2020, mangrove areas shrank by 1.04 million hectares.”

By advocating for a paradigm shift—i.e., the integration of ecological preservation into urban planning as a rule—de Carvalho Nunes (pictured below) prioritizes the long-term health of natural landscapes over profit-driven development, going beyond the conservation of mangroves to create a blueprint for sustainable urbanization that can be replicated in other regions facing similar challenges. 

The strategic interventions she proposes, such as stormwater management and cultural preservation, aim to maximize ecological potential while fostering a harmonious relationship between urbanization and the natural environment.

Her work is also a testament to what can be achieved when passionate individuals are supported by those who have faith in their potential. 

“I believe that progress signifies the continuous journey toward a more just world,” de Carvalho Nunes says.

“For me, that means embarking on a career shaping inclusive urban environments that prioritize social equity and environmental stewardship.”  

Banner image: Recent Master of Landscape Architecture graduate Fernanda de Carvalho Nunes’s research into mangrove expansion in Brazil focuses on a specific infill site spontaneously colonized by mangrove species in the city of Florianópolis.

Renowned Toronto-based architect and distinguished U of T alumnus Bruce Kuwabara was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree during the Daniels Faculty’s 2024 Convocation ceremony on Thursday, July 20.

One of Canada’s most acclaimed practitioners, Kuwabara has designed some of the country’s finest structures, including Kitchener’s award-winning City Hall, the National Ballet School in Toronto and the Remai Modern in Saskatoon. He has also been a valued campus-builder at his alma mater, helping to shape the development of U of T’s physical space over the years and contributing to the success of the Daniels Faculty in various capacities.

Born in 1949 in Hamilton, Kuwabara earned his degree in architecture from U of T in 1972. After graduating, he joined the teaching studio of architect George Baird, whose interest in public spaces and city building influenced how Kuwabara thought about his work. (Decades later, Baird would serve as Dean of the Daniels Faculty.)

Following the apprenticeship with Baird, Kuwabara joined Barton Myers Associates, where he worked for 12 years. When Myers left Canada in 1987, he handed over his Toronto practice to Kuwabara and three of his fellow associates at the firm—Tom Payne, Marianne McKenna and Shirley Blumberg. Together, they created the new firm KPMB. (Payne ventured out on his own in 2013, but the remaining principals retained the “P” in the practice’s name.)

In 2006, former Daniels Faculty Dean Larry Wayne Richards wrote in Canadian Architect that “Kuwabara’s agenda is not just about making objects and places of great beauty, but something more active, more profound. Something that is simultaneously both culturally stabilizing and transforming.”

Before he received his honorary doctorate at the Convocation ceremony in Convocation Hall, Kuwabara was introduced by Acting Dean Robert Levit.

“Bruce Kuwabara has played a leading role in successive fundraising campaigns at the University, including serving as Co-Chair of the Daniels Faculty’s Design the Future campaign, during which he led the establishment of the Frank Gehry International Visiting Chair in Architectural Design,” Acting Dean Levit noted. “He has served on Provostial Advisory Committees for the appointment of the Dean of the Daniels Faculty and is a valued contributor to accreditation reviews and academic plans. He is also an industry leader in design governance, sitting as the inaugural Chair of Waterfront Toronto’s Design Review Panel and serving as Co-Chair and Appointed Member of the University’s Design Review Committee.”

In 2006, Kuwabara was awarded the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada’s Gold Medal, the country’s highest honour for architects. In 2012, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada for “shaping our built landscape in lasting ways.”

For the full U of T News story on the granting of Kuwabara’s honorary degree, click here.

Jean-Paul Kelly (Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream) is among the 25 intergenerational artists, duos and collectives showing work at Greater Toronto Art 2024, the second edition of the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto’s recurring triennial show.

Other members of the Daniels Faculty community featured in the exhibition include sessional lecturers Sukaina Kubba and Oliver Husain. Alumnus Mani Mazinani, who graduated with an Honours B.A. in Visual Studies in 2008, rounds out the Daniels contingent.

MOCA Toronto’s triennial exhibition was conceived in 2021 “to look more closely and consistently at artistic practices with a connection to the Greater Toronto Area (GTA).” 

This year’s edition, which “looks back as much as it looks forward,” presents work made between the 1960s and the present, “allowing the co-mingling of art created in different decades to provide new ways of understanding the current moment and imagining the future.”

The director of the Visual Studies department until this year, Kelly is a prizewinning artist who makes videos and exhibitions that pose questions about the limits of representation by examining complex associations between found photographs, videos, sounds and online media streams. 

For GTA24, he created a new installation, How cruelty disgusts the view, while pity charms the site (pictured above and below), which is composed of six line drawings in graphite. The drawings are inspired by 18th-century English artist and social critic William Hogarth’s modern moral prints The Four Stages of Cruelty.

The exhibition will also include B.A.A.D.C. (Bonjour aux amis de calamité), a 2016 wall-based sculpture that references writer and political activist Jean Genet’s sensual short film from 1950, Un chant d’amour (A Song of Love).

A multidisciplinary artist who joined the Faculty as a sessional lecturer in 2021, Kubba is represented in the triennial with a series of new wall-based sculptural drawings made from PLA filament. Her series is traced from a Persian rug that has been in Kubba’s family for generations. The fractured vignettes highlight narratives of travel and trade, of migration, and of relationship to land.

Sessional lecturer Husain, an artist and filmmaker, often collaborates with other artists and friends on his projects, which frequently have “a fragment of history, a rumour, a personal encounter or a distant memory” as jumping-off points.

At GTA24, Husain and collaborator Kerstin Schroedinger, an artist working in performance, film/video and sound, are showing DNCB, a 2021 three-channel video installation that ruminates on the complex history of Dinitrochlorobenzene, a chemical substance that is used in the processing of colour film and was also explored as an experimental alternative AIDS treatment in the 1980s and 1990s.

Husain and Schroedinger will also present Hypericin Yellow Movie, a new lecture performance based on this body of research. The free showing (one of their 2021 films is pictured below) will take place at MOCA on Friday, May 31 at 7:00 p.m.

Alumnus Mazinani, lastly, is an interdisciplinary artist who makes work that connects scale and sensation, improvisation and ancient thought. His practice encompasses installation, lens-based media, sculpture, sound and music. 

For GTA24, Mazinani was commissioned to develop a major new work, Solar Scale, an immersive five-channel sound and light installation structured around pentatonic music and harmonic pulsation.

At 7:00 p.m. on July 19, Mazinani and a group of collaborators will present a musical performance that extends the Solar Scale soundscape to a live experience. The concert will feature the Solar Organ, an electronic pentatonic instrument created by Mazinani, playing improvised and composed music on MOCA’s ground floor. A variety of invented and traditional pentatonic scales will be used by the musicians, covering a spectrum of approaches to pentatonic sound generation.

This year’s triennial runs at MOCA through July 28. For more information on the exhibition and other works on display, click here.

Image credits from top to bottom:

“How cruelty disgusts the view, while pity charms the sight,” No. 1-6, 2024. Six graphite drawings on laid paper, painted wood frames and fabric wrap mats, painted and oxidized steel posts. Installation view, Greater Toronto Art 2024 at MOCA Toronto. © and courtesy of Jean-Paul Kelly. Photo by LF Documentation.

“How cruelty disgusts the view, while pity charms the sight,” No. 4, 2024. Graphite drawing on laid paper, painted wood frame and fabric wrap mat, painted and oxidized steel post. Installation view, Greater Toronto Art 2024 at MOCA Toronto. © and courtesy of Jean-Paul Kelly. Photo by LF Documentation.

Oliver Husain and Kerstin Schroedinger, "THE GARDEN – Cinematics of the Soil." Installation view, 2021. Courtesy of the artists and Silent Green Kulturquartier. Photo by Husain/Schroedinger.

The lineup for the University of Toronto’s 2024 Alumni Reunion has been revealed—and it includes an intrigiung lecture at the Daniels Faculty.

On Friday, May 31, the Faculty will host “Constructing Health: How the Built Environment Enhances Your Mind’s Health,” a lecture and book talk by alumnus Tye Farrow, whose new volume of the same name will be published next month by University of Toronto Press.

A globally recognized expert in how the intentional shaping of our environment can support our physical and neurological well-being, Farrow acquired his Bachelor of Architecture degree at U of T in 1987 and was the first Canadian architect to earn a Master of Neuroscience Applied to Architecture (University of Venice IUAV), and has a Master of Architecture in Urban Design from Harvard University.

He is a currently a senior partner at Toronto-based Farrow Partners Inc., a full-service architecture and master planning firm known internationally for “creating architecture that lifts the human spirit.”

Among the firm’s projects is the SZMC Helmsley Cancer Center in Jerusalem, Israel’s flagship facility for cancer treatment. Realized in partnership with Rubinstein Ofer, the 7,500-square-metre complex (pictured above and on the cover of Farrow’s new book) provides physical, psychological, social and spiritual care services in addition to patient assessment and treatment.

Farrow’s lecture, which will explore how recent discoveries in cognitive psychology and neuroscience can help form “health-giving person-to-place relationships that are similar to healthy and meaningful person-to-person relationships,” will take place from 11:15 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. in the Main Hall of the Daniels Building at 1 Spadina Crescent.

To register for this free event, click here.

Copies of Farrow’s book will be available for purchase at the University of Toronto Bookstore (at 214 College Street on the St. George Campus) as well as at the lecture, where the author will be available for signings.

For the full roster of 2024 Alumni Reunion events, click here.

Dallas Fellini, graduating this semester from the Master of Visual Studies in Curatorial Studies program, has been awarded the 2024 Middlebrook Prize for Young Canadian Curators.

Established in 2012, the prize is awarded annually to a Canadian curator or curatorial team under the age of 30 with the goal of supporting an inclusive national arts sector while recognizing the vital role of exhibitions in expanding awareness and art histories.

Exhibitions proposed by prize recipients are subsequently presented at the Art Gallery of Guelph, which announced Fellini’s win earlier this week.

Fellini (pictured above) is a Toronto-based curator, writer and artist whose research is situated at the intersection of trans studies and archival studies, interrogating the compromised conditions under which trans histories have been recorded and considering representational and archival alternatives to trans hypervisibility.

Their winning submission for the Middlebrook Prize, a proposed exhibition called Some kind of we, features works that approach or incorporate t4t sensibilities.

The term t4t is shorthand that emerged in the early 2000s in Craigslist personals ads, where it was used by transgender and transsexual people prioritizing relationships with other trans people.

Emphasizing networks of trans relationality, self-representation, cross-generational inheritance and desire and love between trans people, the exhibition will feature video works by B.G-Osborne with Benjamin Da Silva (pictured below) and by Mirha-Soleil Ross in collaboration with Xanthra Phillippa MacKay, as well as a print project by Cleopatria Peterson.

It’ll be paralleled by a “distributed exhibition” that speaks to trans histories of pre- and early-Internet activism and community building in Canada.

Fellini’s winning submission was selected by a three-person jury of esteemed curators: Alyssa Fearon (Director/Curator at Dunlop Art Gallery), Tarah Hogue (Curator of Indigenous Art, Remai Modern) and Renée van der Avoird (Associate Curator of Canadian Art, Art Gallery of Ontario).

While Fearon noted the importance of the exhibition’s emphasis “on t4t relationality and visibility,” van der Avoird was struck by its highlighting of an “urgent topic with artworks that are compelling, moving and impactful.”

Hogue, meanwhile, noted the significance of the “distributed exhibition as a means of reaching trans audience members and reiterating the networks of support trans communities have created.” 

Some kind of we will be on view at the Art Gallery of Guelph later this year, from September through December.

For more information about the Middlebrook Prize and on past winners, visit middlebrookprize.ca.

Fellini portrait by Phillip Lý. Video still (7:22) from POLISHED, 2016, by B.G-Osborne in collaboration with Benjamin Da Silva, courtesy of the artist.

Professor Mason White, Sessional Lecturer Kearon Roy Taylor and Assistant Professor Karen Kubey have been recognized by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) with 2024 Architectural Education Awards. The trio won for two separate projects in the category of Faculty Design. The Faculty Design Awards acknowledge work that advances the reflective nature of practice and teaching through creative design and design investigation and by promoting work that expands the boundaries of design. 

Colleagues at the Toronto-based practice Lateral Office, co-founder White (pictured above at right) and associate Taylor won for “Contested Circumpolar: Domestic Territories,” an installation that examines domestic life in eight Arctic nations by situating it within broader sociocultural, economic and geopolitical contexts. Their partners on the winning team include Lateral Office co-founder Lola Sheppard of the University of Waterloo and Matthew Jull and Leena Cho of the University of Virginia. 

Exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2021, “Contested Circumpolar: Domestic Territories” presents eight narratives of inhabitation from each of the countries that lay claim to the Arctic—Canada, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the U.S.—to reveal deep and complex connections between domestic space and the larger territory.  

A series of rooms within eight houses juxtaposes the distinct artifacts and architectures of everyday life in the Arctic with territorial narratives that expose the interlinked far-flung contexts shaping the domestic scenes. 

In the process it addresses issues of transnational politics, Indigenous self-determination and radical socio-environmental adaptation in one of the 21st century’s most complex and contested regions.  

The installation “Contested Circumpolar: Domestic Territories” was exhibited as part of the Across Borders series at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale. Models were arranged as a roundtable assembly representing different regional challenges. Photos by Giorgio Lazzaro

An urbanist specializing in housing design and social justice, Kubey (pictured at left in the banner) won her ACSA Award, along with Neeraj Bhatia of the California College of the Arts and Ignacio González Galán of Barnard College, for “Aging Against the Machine,” a research project that looks at aging not as a problem to be solved but as a life stage facing a range of barriers—physical, social, financial and cultural—that make it difficult to grow older with dignity and in community. 

Part of a 2022 Center for Architecture exhibition entitled Reset: Towards a New Commons, the project builds on past and ongoing work in the California community of West Oakland, a culturally diverse and historically activist neighbourhood where older residents nonetheless face precarious living conditions, insufficient public amenities and limited caregiving options.  

It was developed by examining, connecting and expanding on existing initiatives there and by consulting with and amplifying the voices of its residents, who contributed through a series of roundtables and conversations. 

“Aging Against the Machine,” a commissioned research project overseen by the Daniels Faculty’s Karen Kubey and others, was part of a 2022 Center for Architecture exhibition entitled Reset: Towards a New Commons. Photos by Asya Gorovitz and Miguel de Guzman

Among the project results were proposals in a range of scales, from interior home renovations to collective land-ownership models and intergenerational housing projects. In particular, diverse spaces for commoning and networks of care at the scale of the building and the neighbourhood are integrated with public social programs and mutual aid initiatives, ultimately contributing to an intersectional, community-based approach to aging. 

According to ACSA, award winners are selected for their ability to inspire and challenge students, to expand the architectural profession’s knowledge base and to extend their work beyond academia into practice and the public sector. 

Winners of the Faculty Design Award are chosen in particular for how their work expands the boundaries of design through formal investigations, innovative design processes, addressing justice, working with communities, advancing sustainable practices, fostering resilience and/or centering the human experience. 

For a full list of 2024 ACSA Award winners, click here. 

The national theme for Black History Month 2024 is Black Excellence: A Heritage to Celebrate, a Future to Build. 

This month is an opportunity to celebrate the contributions that Black individuals and communities have made to Canadian society, history and heritage—and for the Daniels Faculty to demonstrate its ongoing commitment to inclusion.  

The Faculty is marking Black History/Black Futures Month with public lectures that explore Black identity and the built environment, and by highlighting ongoing initiatives such as the Faculty’s Building Black Success through Design program, a curated book display in the Eberhard Zeidler Library, and an art installation that reflects interpretations of Black Flourishing.

Mark your calendar for public lectures

The Daniels Faculty’s Winter 2024 Public Program continues on February 1 with “I heard you were looking for me,” a lecture by architect and academic Germane Barnes (pictured above) exploring themes of community-oriented design, the expansion of architectural representation and alternative design authorship.  

Barnes’s award-winning research and design practice, Studio Barnes, investigates the connection between architecture and identity by examining architecture’s social and political agency through historical research and design speculation. Mining architecture’s social and political agency, he examines how the built environment influences black domesticity.  

Two weeks later, on February 15, architect Kholisile Dhliwayo of afrOURban Inc. will be at the Faculty to present “Black Diasporas Tkaronto-Toronto.” Dhliwayo (pictured above) leads the afrOURban project Black Diasporas, a community-led, geolocated oral-narrative mapping initiative that examines the experiences, spaces and places having meaning to Black people.

This lecture will outline how oral narrative, filmmaking and exhibition are both archival and aspirational—archival in their celebration of the spaces and places created by Black communities in Toronto and aspirational in the articulation of hopes and dreams and how these manifest in the built environment. 

Dhliwayo is a founding member of afrOURban Inc., an Adrian Cheng Fellow at the Social Innovation Change Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School and a 2023 resident at the Center for Architecture Lab in New York City.

Visit an installation of student artwork 

Head to the Historic Stairwell between the second and third floors of the Daniels Building to view Black Flourishing: Six Student Artworks, a temporary installation that reflects diverse interpretations of Black flourishing and Blackness in design and community. 

In response to an open call by the Daniels Art Directive and the Daniels Faculty during the Winter 2023 term, the six artists represented offer their creative expression of Black traditions and futures of excellence. In alignment with the broad objectives of the University of Toronto’s Anti-Black Racism Report (2021) and the Scarborough Charter on Anti-Black Racism and Black Inclusion in Higher Education: Principles, Actions and Accountabilities (2021), this installation celebrates and promotes Black art and representation in university spaces. 

Check out a curated display in the Library

Stop by the Eberhard Zeidler Library all monthlong to check out a display of books about Black architects who made history, like Norma Sklarek and Paul R. Williams, and those who are making history today, like Afaina de Jong and Tosin Oshinowo.

Curated by Master of Architecture students Jessica Chan and Justina Yang, the recommendations are grouped into books on the general history of Black architects and books about specific Black architects. 

Learn more about Building Black Success in Design 

Since 2021, the Faculty has taken a proactive approach to addressing the lack of diversity in the design industry through its Building Black Success through Design (BBSD) program: a 12-week mentorship program for Black high school students interested in architecture and design.

BBSD partners high school students with current Black students or alumni from the University of Toronto serving as mentors. The current cohort includes 36 high-school-aged mentees and 13 mentors. Participants hone their skills across various mediums and software, while also delving into topics that resonate with their experiences and identity. At the end of the program, mentees will take away practical technical design skills, be able to research and use community feedback to inform their designs, and confidently present their ideas to their peers and mentors.

Now in its third year, the program was originally founded by three Black undergraduate students, Clara James, Renee Powell-Hines and Rayah Flash, while in the Bachelor of Arts in Architectural Studies program together. James continues to lead the program as the Faculty's Public Programming and Outreach Coordinator, while Powell-Hines is now a second-year Master of Architecture student and Flash is slated to graduate this year.

Follow along @bbsd.daniels and keep an eye on Daniels News & Events for future updates on the program.