As we celebrate the Class of 2021, the Daniels Faculty invites you to explore the inaugural (virtual) End-of-Year Show. The End-of-Year Show represents a multi-disciplinary collection of student work in architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design.

Graduate students, as well as undergraduate students who completed thesis projects, were invited to upload their work and craft their own project pages. Search the show by student name and program, or see a rotating selection of all projects through the home page.

Take me to the End-of-Year Show

The banner image features work from (L-R): 
Jiazhi (Jake) Yin, Landscape Architecture, Advisor: Fadi Masoud
Rishi Tailor, Architecture, Advisor: Adrian Phiffer
Vanessa Wang, Architecture, Advisor: John Shnier
Kurtis Chen, Architecture, Advisors: Mariana Leguia, Angus Laurie
Zainab Wakil, Architectural Studies, Advisor: Jeannie Kim

Originally published June 9, 2021, as Honorary degree recipient Ken Greenberg chose Toronto as his home, then helped shape its development via U of T News by Scott Anderson. Ken Greenberg graduated from the University of Toronto with a Bachelor of Architecture in 1970.

For more than 40 years, Ken Greenberg has helped make cities better places to live. As an architect and urban designer, he has focused on rejuvenating downtowns and on creating vibrant public spaces.

Although he has worked in many urban settings across Canada, the U.S. and Europe, he chose Toronto as his home; he has lived here for more than half a century – and has played an important role in shaping the city’s development.

Today, for his “outstanding service for the public good as a tireless advocate for restoring the vitality, relevance and sustainability of the public realm in urban life,” Greenberg received a Doctor of Laws, honoris causa, from the University of Toronto – his alma mater.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1944, Greenberg lived with his family in many cities across the U.S. and Europe before coming to Canada in 1968.  He arrived in Toronto the same year as Jane Jacobs, a fellow New Yorker whose views on urbanism would have a big impact on the city – and on Greenberg himself. He would later count her as a friend, colleague and mentor.

“My arrival at the University of Toronto coincided with my arrival in Toronto as a new immigrant,” Greenberg recalled in his speech to graduating students. “My classmates and my professors were extraordinarily welcoming.

“The university opened the door to a rich and diverse community of interest.”

Greenberg saw enormous potential in Toronto. Unlike many American cities, Toronto hadn’t given in to expressways and its residents hadn’t abandoned the downtown core. “I had this tremendous sense of a second chance,” he told Torontoist in 2011. “There was a lot of new consciousness about the city and the value of the old neighbourhoods.” Shortly after his arrival, the city killed plans for the Spadina Expressway (largely due to public opposition) and began reconsidering the idea – prevalent across North America – that cities should be designed for cars.

This spirit of renewal and possibility made the late 1960s an interesting time to be an architecture student at U of T.  Greenberg was learning the skills he would need for work, but also reflecting on the values he would carry into his career as an urban designer.

Take a tour of downtown Toronto today, and you will see evidence of one of these values in particular: the importance of creating places available to everyone. Greenberg, who earned his bachelor’s degree in architecture from U of T in 1970 and later served as the city’s director of urban design and architecture, was involved with the creation of the Martin Goodman Trail, an advocate for the redevelopment of Regent Park as a mixed-income community and had a role in revitalizing the St. Lawrence district.

More recently, he played a leading role in the development of the Bentway, a previously derelict space under the Gardiner Expressway that is now an urban park. And he was a member of a team that has won multiple awards for its plan to reconstruct the mouth of the Don River. In 2019, he was named a member of the Order of Canada “for leading large-scale projects in various cities across Canada as an urban designer, teacher, writer and environmental advocate.”

As Spacing magazine noted in a review of Greenberg’s book, Walking Home: The Life and Lessons of a City Builder, Greenberg prefers urban designers to show restraint, and to allow for neighbourhoods to evolve. “Less is often more,” he writes, noting that Kensington Market is a great example of a place that has been allowed to change organically over time.  “I began to grasp that building places where people lived was … a matter of creating ‘platforms,’ – open-ended frameworks that people could build upon as they wished, with the underlying design as enabler or inhibitor,” he says.

Of course, urban planning, like everything else, has changed over the decades. Greenberg describes the current era as an “extraordinary period of transition” away from unsustainable city-building practices that assumed unlimited supplies of cheap energy and a heavy reliance on automobiles. In recent years, urban design has become much more about “fundamental problem-solving” around topics such as mobility, energy conservation and waste management, he told U of T News.

Lately, Greenberg has been concerned about the effects of rising income inequality – and of what he describes as “attacks” on the public realm. Over the past several decades, Toronto has cultivated a reputation for integrating people from all over the world into a thriving social fabric. The city is one of the most diverse in the world and arguably the best at being diverse. But this “great experiment,” says Greenberg, is based on a vision of Toronto being a city for all. “If you make it difficult for people to have housing, health care and quality [public] education, then you’re pushing in the opposite direction,” he told an interviewer at the Toronto Public Library in 2019 while discussing his latest book, Toronto Reborn: Design Successes and Challenges. “I had to sound the alarm.”

Greenberg has operated his own consultancy since 2005 and writes frequently for newspapers and magazines. He currently serves as a strategic adviser to the city of Brampton, Ont., and volunteers for several Toronto-based city-building initiatives, such as Ontario Place for All. Over the years, he says, he has continued to “go back to the well” at U of T, collaborating with faculty members, working with the School of Cities and the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design – and describes teaching during the pandemic as “an inter-generational sharing of ideas and perspectives with 11 students across the globe, all in different time zones.”

The Daniels Faculty is partnering with EON Reality, a global leader in augmented and virtual reality-based knowledge and skills transfer for industry and education, to incorporate immersive technology in the classroom. The use of EON-XR solutions for architecture students showcases the platform’s abilities to blend academic learning and real-world practical career training.

“With access comes possibility, and we are thrilled to imagine the possibilities that this new partnership brings to our Daniels Faculty community. Students will now have the ability to develop critical augmented and virtual reality (AVR) skills and apply them creatively to their architectural studies,” says interim dean Robert Wright.

The Daniels Faculty will first implement EON-XR solutions in Design + Engineering I – a multidisciplinary studio at the University of Toronto led by assistant professor Jay Pooley in collaboration with the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering. “Bringing architecture off the page means exploring new modes of composing three-dimensional information in the classroom,” says Pooley. “Augmented and virtual reality helps to close the gap in design thinking while elevating the equity of instruction for a broader spectrum of learning types.”

Image Caption: Student work example from Design Engineering I by Michaela Tsvetkova, Maria Chen Liang, Selina Al Madanat, Boyao Zhang, Janishan Jeyarajah, and Gabrielle Flavien (Instructor: Jennifer Davis).

In Design + Engineering I, student teams composed of architecture and engineering students work together on a semester-long design project for a real-world client. Introducing EON-XR solutions in this studio will allow students to present and review models in AVR, survey architectural sites virtually, and much more. “In terms of course delivery, AVR means utilizing a new kind of inclusive textbook while simultaneously launching a new generation of immersive sketchbooks,” added Pooley.

EON-XR solutions will provide a new depth of opportunity for students and teachers to incorporate immersive technology into their daily education routine, while also learning more about developing and creating content as a part of the rapidly growing industry. The partnership will also provide local businesses and entrepreneurs an opportunity to learn about the platform and see how it’s affecting the next generation of workers.

“Although EON-XR has long been a popular solution throughout Canada, it is great to add a renowned university like University of Toronto to our list of partners in the country,” says Dan Lejerskar, Founder of EON Reality. “There are few academic institutions in the world with the history and significance of the University of Toronto, and we are privileged to be able to work with them on making their future as great as their past. I believe this has the potential to be a lengthy and powerful partnership for everyone involved, and I look forward to seeing where it goes.”

Header Image: Screenshot of the EON-XR platform.

Architecture school isn't all drawings and models. This winter, graduate students in assistant professor Jason Nguyen's course, "Sites of Exchange: Architecture and Capital Flows," spent a semester studying the way architecture influences, and is influenced by, the global flows of capital that undergird modern civilization.

Over the course of 10 weeks of reading and discussion, Nguyen's students studied physical locations that have enabled global trade and capitalism over the past four centuries — places like plantations, ports, cargo ships, markets, and stock exchanges. Then they each produced a final project in which they picked one "site of exchange" to examine in detail in a scholarly essay.

"The classical Marxist way of studying capitalism is to focus on labour and production," Nguyen says. "I wanted to think beyond that framework to consider capitalism as a process of trade and exchange — a system of political and economic operations that generates different forms of value on a global scale. This understanding of capitalism allows us to better assess the systemic impacts of capitalism in architecture and society, including those tied to race, climate change, and the political economy of nation states."

Students were asked to consider not only the way architecture affects capital — for example, by providing a physical space where goods or securities can be exchanged — but also the way capital shapes architecture.

For instance, one student, Chaya Bhardwaj, chose to study the Aalsmeer Flower Auction, a sprawling auction site in the Netherlands with hundreds of thousands of square metres of storage space.

Bhardwaj traces the architectural origins of the auction site to the dawn of financial capitalism, in the 17th century, when Dutch tulip bulbs became the basis for the first modern asset bubble — a period of frenzied financial speculation now famously known as "tulip mania." The Dutch dominance of the flower market established during that time, Bhardwhaj argues, led to Aalsmeer becoming a physical locus of the flower trade in the 21st century.

Diagrams showing the layout of the Aalsmeer Flower Auction and flows of capital in and out of the Netherlands. Images by Chaya Bhardwaj. Click to see larger versions.

Even the internal structure of the auction site's storage spaces, she argues, were shaped by the demands of international commerce. "At the building scale, this site coordinates a highly choreographed sequence of events across 518,000 square metres of warehouse space," Bhardwaj writes. "Flowers arrive at loading platforms along the perimeter of the warehouse and then are transferred to cooling chambers where they are tagged, measured, and sorted. Flowers then travel to one of three auction halls where they are bought and sold on a global scale through electronic trading platforms."

For Nguyen, the Aalsmeer Flower Auction is a perfect example of the way architecture can become an intersection point for global economic forces. "The site brings a lot of important concerns into focus," he says. "There's a relationship between nature and culture — between a flower, which is quite fragile and doesn't have a long lifespan, and human consumers. Another layer is the relationship between the global north and global south. Many of the buyers are from North America, Europe, and East Asia, but the flowers by and large come from Africa and Latin America, so there are important issues to consider regarding environmental exploitation and the global economic balance, and imbalance, of power."

Another student, James Noh, studied the Salar de Atacama, a salt flat in Chile that is one of the world's largest and purest sources of lithium.

"Lithium extraction is used for the green economy," Nguyen says. "James looked at sites where lithium is actually extracted from the ground, which involves a huge amount of infrastructure development. Huge amounts of water have to be pumped in to process the lithium."

A diagram showing the flow of lithium from extraction site to consumer products. Image by James Noh. Click here to see a larger version.

In his essay, Noh discusses the way lithium extraction from the Salar de Atacama has enabled global production of consumer devices like cell phones and electric cars while at the same time creating adverse conditions for the Indigenous communities that live among the mines.

"Lithium extraction has led socio-environmental pressures on the site to overexploit water in hydro-social territories, resulting in significant damage to the ethno-culture and its ecosystem," Noh writes. "Local animals such as vicunas and flamingos are constantly losing more access to water. Local farmers are also losing more agricultural activities such as the cultivation of corn, quinoa, vegetables, and fruit, along with small-scale Andean livestock that develop in the Salar — mainly guanacos, llamas, and alpacas."

The course is an extension of Nguyen's research on the architecture and infrastructure of trade and exchange during the early modern period. "I'm interested in the construction of global capital networks within the context of European colonization and mercantile expansion," he says. "By studying sites of exchange, I hope to better understand architecture's multifaceted and often troubling role in the creation and distribution of modern wealth, including its connections to contemporary globalization and enduring systems of economic and racial inequality."

Architectural mock-ups are usually not given much, if any, thought. They're full-scale replicas of building elements, constructed for the purpose of letting everyone involved in a project get a sense of how different wall or window systems will look when completed. They're usually erected in out-of-the-way locations on construction sites and later demolished when they outlive their usefulness, or when a building is nearing completion.

But, for David Ross (MArch 2003), a Daniels Faculty alumnus who is now a visual artist, these mock-ups are more than mere throwaways. When he looks at them, he sees fascinating sculptural artifacts of the complex social and economic dynamics that underlie every architectural project.

That's why he devoted nearly five years to the creation of his newly released book, Archetypes, in which he uses photography to (literally) cast architectural mock-ups in an entirely different light. In addition to David's photographs, the book contains four essays on architectural mock-ups, two of which were written by Daniels Faculty professors: one by assistant professor Peter Sealy and another by professor Ted Kesik.

The cover of David Ross's book, Archetypes.

"Mock-ups are the engagement ring of the architecture world," Ross says. "They're a physical representation of the relationship between the designer, the client, and the contractor. They're acts of insurance and assurance. Insurance because they provide a way for all the parties involved in a project to feel comfortable with the materials, the construction, and the methods by which a project is going to be executed. Assurance, because mock-ups are the first things that are made. They act almost as a kind of prenup for the relationship going forward."

The book, edited by Reto Geiser and published by Standpunkte and Park Books, collects 39 colour photos Ross took at construction sites throughout North America and Europe, with funding from the Graham Foundation, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. Ross made arrangements with builders — many of them, he says, bemused by the idea that any artist would want anything to do with mock-ups — to visit construction sites at night. Using a flash and a special camera rig adapted for use on ladders, he photographed each mock-up in isolation from the typical construction site clutter, with only darkness in the background.

Left: Swiss Life Arena, Zurich. Caruso St. John Architects. Right: Andreasturm, Zurich. Gigon/Guyer.

The consistent nature of the photographic style makes it easy for a viewer to start imagining mock-ups as an architectural type, rather than as one-off misfits. "I photographed them all from the midpoint of the mock-up," Ross says. "There are funny things that happened with the scale. Because they're all framed in a similar way, it makes it difficult to tell not only where they are, but how big they are."

The essays from Sealy and Kesik, which appear at the back of the book, help contextualize the photography. Kesik's essay argues that mock-ups are (or at any rate should be) an essential step in the creation of any architecturally ambitious building. "Innovation in architecture that moves away from tried-and-true tectonic precedents necessarily relies on engineering and building science to fulfill its promise and performance," Kesik writes. "This is why the mock-up is an essential part of any robust design process that seeks innovative and original outcomes that do not just offer comparable quality to conventional approaches, but aspire to exceed all aspects of aesthetic delight and technical performance."

Left: Kendall Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts. NADAA. Right: John P. Robarts Library, University of Toronto. Mathers & Haldenby.

Sealy's essay draws parallels between Ross's work documenting architectural mock-ups and the 19th-century practice of photographing plaster casts of decorative architectural elements. Sealy recounts the way French architect Hector Lefuel used plaster-model photography to aid the process of carving ornamental details for the mid-19th-century expansion of the Louvre. "The twenty-first-century mock-ups photographed by Ross occupy a similar quasi-contractual status," Sealy writes, "one that is recorded in endless smartphone photographs sent back and forth between architects', clients', and builders' offices."

The book isn't the only place Ross is showcasing his mock-up photos. Over the next few months he'll be exhibiting his work at BALTSprojects in Zurich (starting May 29), Architekturgalerie in Munich (starting in July), and the Swiss Architecture Museum in Basel (starting August 27).

Archetypes can be purchased on Bookdepository.com, and will soon also be available at Indigo and Amazon.

Assistant professor Alstan Jakubiec has been named the latest beneficiary of the Mayflower Research Fund, an endowed research fund established at the Daniels Faculty in 2019. Jakubiec will use his grant to fund research into the effects of interior light on human psychology and physiology in Canada's subarctic and polar regions.

"Mayflower funding is going to be super helpful in pushing this project forward," Jakubiec says. "It's great because it allows me to focus specifically on design questions, which I think a lot of this type of work doesn't look at very rigourously."

The Mayflower Research Fund was established by a generous donor to encourage and stimulate research in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design. Each year, the Daniels Faculty's research committee recommends a top applicant for consideration and selection by the dean. Daniels faculty members with full-time appointments are eligible to apply for the annual $10,000 grant.

Jakubiec, who is the third faculty member to receive Mayflower funding since the fund's inception, plans to take the opportunity to fill what he sees as a glaring gap in the existing research on the relationship between far-north residents and light.

"The research that has been done has been mostly through the eyes of people working at climate monitoring stations or in the military, not long-term residents of the north," Jakubiec says. "I really want to understand how long-term residents perceive and react to light."

Jakubiec's Mayflower project will build on his earlier research into light and human biology. In 2017, Jakubiec worked with the software development firm Solemma, where he's the director of engineering, to create ALFA, a computerized tool that lets designers simulate the effects of various lighting conditions on human health and cognition. In 2020, he worked with a research assistant to scour the latest research on light, sleep, and human health.

An example of spectral daylight simulation in a dwelling, from Jakubiec's previous research.

From these investigations, Jakubiec has concluded that the presence or absence of light in buildings can have profound effects on the wellbeing of occupants. "We have this internal biological clock, which is regulated by some subcomponents of the hypothalamus," he says. "In places where there's very little light exposure for parts the year, it can have impacts on your mood and cognition. It can make you feel more sleepy throughout the day."

"Excessive light exposure, on the other hand, has been shown to have significant impacts on things like blood sugar. You can effectively have the symptoms of type-two diabetes."

The reason Jakubiec has chosen to focus his latest research on Canada's far north is that it's a part of the world where lighting conditions are especially variable — and therefore especially challenging to the human psyche. Iqaluit, Nunavut, for instance, gets more than 20 hours of daylight in summer and fewer than four hours of daylight in winter.

Working with a graduate student, Jakubiec will gather data on existing structures in Canada's subarctic and polar regions, and also conduct interviews with permanent residents of those regions, in order to get a sense of how they feel about the levels of light exposure the receive in their homes and workplaces throughout the year.

Using all that data, Jakubiec hopes to create a computational model that will allow architects and engineers to evaluate tradeoffs between natural light and energy efficiency in far-north building design. This computerized tool will, Jakubiec hopes, interface with 3D-modelling software to help designers figure out, for example, whether the potential heat loss from a large window is worth the potential benefit of increased natural light during the dark winter months — or whether it's better to make up some of the light deficit with artificial illumination.

"My goal is to have a standalone user interface that could work on top of a model for fixed geometry to give you outputs about circadian performance, or non-visual lighting performance," Jakubiec says.

While Jakubiec gears up for his research, the two previous Mayflower Fund recipients are putting their grants to work.

Assistant professor Fadi Masoud, the grant's inaugural recipient in 2019, used his funding to launch an in-depth study of the design of suburban parks, with a view towards creating a primer that would help designers, public agencies, and private developers create green spaces that respond to contemporary social and environmental needs. “The Mayflower funding enabled my research team at the Centre for Landscape Research to spend the summer documenting and analyzing a network of public parks along the Black Creek sub-watershed in Toronto –– a region that faces chronic social and environmental stresses,” Masoud says. You can view the group's findings on their website.

Assistant professor Maria Yablonina, who received the grant in 2020, is using her funding to advance research in the field of computational design and digital fabrication with a focus on innovative ways to use robotics in architecture and the environment.

Samantha Eby, who graduated from the Daniels Faculty's Master of Architecture program in 2019, has been named the recipient of the 2020 Prix de Rome in Architecture for Emerging Practitioners, a prestigious $34,000 prize awarded annually by the Canada Council for the Arts to a recent architecture graduate who has demonstrated potential in contemporary architectural design.

This is the third year in a row that a Daniels Faculty alumnus has won the prize. The other two recent Daniels Faculty recipients were Kinan Hewitt, who graduated in 2018, and David Verbeek, who graduated in 2017.

Samantha Eby.

The Prix de Rome prize money can be used to finance travel to sites of architectural research interest. Once pandemic-related travel restrictions are lifted, Eby plans to use her new funding to make research trips to Australia, Germany, and Austria, so that she can visit and document examples of collective and non-profit housing developments. She hopes to gain a deeper understanding of the ownership models, financing practices, and planning policies that have made such developments possible.

Her interest in collective housing stems from her Daniels Faculty thesis project, for which she investigated new ways of adding affordable multi-unit housing to Toronto's single-detached neighbourhoods. "My research is looking for unrealized opportunities in Canada for new forms of housing that are outside the current practices of financing and site development," she says. "I'm looking at questions of how housing in Canada can be more than just a commodity, and how, by using communal financing and development practices, we can make multi-unit housing more accessible, sustainable, and desirable."

Images from Eby's Daniels Faculty thesis project.

"As an architect, Samantha balances a deep curiosity for the economies that contribute to architecture and urbanism with a provocative and tangible design sensibility," says Eby's thesis advisor, assistant professor Michael Piper. "Her thesis research about collective development models, the calculus of site selection, and the design of beautifully sensible housing demonstrates this unique combination of skills."

Eby says this fully funded travel opportunity will be a rare chance for her to elaborate upon some of the design concepts she studied during her time at Daniels. "I think, as architects, we often have very idealistic approaches, where we think we can change the world with our ideas — which is something that is amazing in school and often gets crushed when you get out into the real world," she says. "This is a really good opportunity for me to challenge myself to push back against those real-world constraints, and consider thoughtful and convincing ways to understand pro formas for development, how different ownership models actually work, and what the barriers are to these new architectural typologies."

Even as she has continued to pursue her research, Eby has been working in the architectural field. For the past two years, she has been an intern architect at Toronto-based Batay-Csorba Architects.

The pandemic-era shift to remote learning forced many Daniels Faculty students to get extra creative with their thesis projects. Milan Nikic, who presented his thesis in fall 2020, was no exception.

He had originally planned to display models for his thesis presentation, but the lack of a physical presentation space made him rethink the way he'd present that work. Instead, he ended up creating a 15-minute short film, titled Raft Islands.

Now, that film has gained Milan some international recognition. It was accepted by the International Architecture Film Festival Barcelona, where it will make its international debut as part of a short-film program on May 13.

"New and creative ways of representing architecture have emerged as a result of this pandemic," Milan says. "I never really explored storytelling and film as a medium before my thesis, but I found it to be a powerful tool to communicate the experience and atmosphere of the built environment. There is a lot you can show with just a simple pan of a camera."

The inspiration for Milan's short film came from a trip he took with his thesis advisor, assistant professor Adrian Phiffer, and the other members of Phiffer's thesis-prep studio. The group visited Tofino, British Columbia and made a stop at Freedom Cove, a giant floating home located off the shore of Vancouver Island.

The home — which is so sprawling and complex that it could be considered more of an artificial island — is an agglomeration of 12 floating platforms, cobbled together from salvaged materials. On top of those platforms is an off-the-grid homestead, complete with a cottage, gardens, dance floor, and artificial beach. The owners, Wayne Adams and Catherine King, are a pair of artists who began building the Freedom Cove complex in 1991. They welcomed the students and showed them around.

"I found it really fascinating to see how these two individuals lived in their environment, and how they managed to be self-sufficient atop this piece of floating infrastructure," Milan says.

He decided to use Freedom Cove as a jumping-off point for an imaginative exercise. His thesis project used film to weave a narrative about a future world where entire communities live on floating barges that are tailored to the needs of inhabitants. "I wanted to tell a story about a fictional future community that was inspired by Freedom Cove," Milan says. "As I was building physical models, a specific architecture evolved out of the necessity for them to actually float on water. I was quite interested in telling a story about how collective life was negotiated amongst individuals. Imagining a community on a floating island was a way to amplify that negotiation."

His film is an impressionistic mixture of water imagery and shots of his scale models. "I wanted the designs to feel like they were attainable to almost everybody, in the spirit of Freedom Cove," he says.

The Raft Islands trailer is embedded above. The International Film Festival Barcelona is not open to viewers outside of Spain, but Milan plans to make his full film available online at the conclusion of the festival.

Victoria Cardoso, Erman Akyol, and Eugenia Wong, all first-year students in the Daniels Faculty's Master of Architecture program, jointly created a design project that has been named one of five honourees in this year's SHIFT Challenge, a biennial competition, hosted by the Ontario Association of Architects, that invites students and architects to address social challenges through design.

Their winning project is a proposal for a community-oriented redesign of Ontario Place, the disused public amusement park located on a small chain of artificial islands off Toronto's western shoreline. They originally created the design for a fall semester course at Daniels, professor Ted Kesik's Building Science 1 (ARC1041).

Victoria Cardoso, Erman Akyol, and Eugenia Wong.

Cardoso, Akyol, and Wong, along with the four other groups whose designs were selected by the 2021 SHIFT jury, will present their work during the OAA's Virtual Conference. The online SHIFT event will begin at 4:30 p.m. on May 20, and will be viewable online on the OAA's YouTube channel.

"This was really an opportunity for us to open ourselves up to the field," Eugenia says. "We'll get to present our project not just to teachers and our colleagues, but also to architects, landscape designers, and urban designers. We're hoping to get our proposal out to decision makers and important stakeholders for the site."

The group's project, titled "Ontario Place: On-to-our Next Adventure," is a master plan for the revitalization of Ontario Place, a publicly owned piece of land that operated as an amusement park and exhibition ground from 1971 until 2012, when it was shuttered by Ontario's provincial government.

Although Ontario Place has fallen into disuse, it still has a number of architecturally significant buildings and landscapes designed by architects Eberhard Zeidler and Michael Hough.

Victoria, Erman, and Eugenia's master plan would attempt to draw diverse groups of users back into the site by adding a variety of new amenities, but without destroying or disfiguring any of the existing historic structures. They approached the problem by splitting the Ontario Place site into five different zones, each tailored to a different group of users.

A rendering of the group's proposed sports facility.

In the "play" zone, there would be indoor and outdoor public recreational spaces, including beaches and boardwalks. The "exhibit" zone would preserve two of Ontario Place's most important existing structures, Zeidler's iconic Cinesphere (a ball-shaped Imax theatre) and his "pods," large diamond-shaped structures that hover above Lake Ontario's waters on sets of stilts. Each of the five pods would get a modest interior retrofit for a different type of programming. (For instance, one pod would be an exhibition hall, and another would be a digital arts museum.)

The plan also calls for the addition of new sports facilities and the preservation of the Budweiser Stage, an existing concert venue on Ontario Place's central island.

A rendering of the group's proposed research campus.

But the most radical change proposed in Victoria, Erman, and Eugenia's plan is in the "innovation" zone, where they would add a university research campus to the southern edge of Ontario Place's east island. The campus would include student residences, which would give Ontario Place a permanent population, transforming it from a tourist destination into a neighbourhood.

"For Ontario Place to be sustainable financially, there's no point to just introducing new programming," Eugenia says. "The innovation hub can provide a source of economic activity that can sustain the island without casual visitors. So when casual visitors come there will be restaurants and other amenities available to them."

Top image: A rendering of Ontario Place's pods and Cinesphere.

Starting in June, high schoolers will have a unique opportunity: as part of the Daniels Faculty's first-ever Architecture and Film Camp, an online summer program for students entering grades 11 and 12, they'll learn how to use the principles and techniques of architecture to make spectacular short films.

Leading the new online camp will be Jay Pooley, a Daniels Faculty assistant professor whose life story proves the camp's architecture-is-film thesis. "I was designing sets for independent theatre companies, and then I went to architecture school and really fell in love with architecture," he says. He earned his Master of Architecture from Dalhousie University in 2011, then worked at a few architecture firms before deciding to take his career in a different direction. He's now a production designer for film, with an extensive resume of award-winning work.

One of several "Sick Kids Vs." spots that Pooley worked on.

Pooley was the production designer for Sick Kids hospital's "Sick Kids Vs." campaign — a series of commercial shorts that used clever sets and costume design to portray the hospital's young patients as fierce fighters against childhood disease. The campaign won four awards at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.

Pooley's Jedi: Fallen Order commercial.

Pooley's other notable credits include an ADCC-award-winning ad spot for the Canadian Olympic Committee. In 2019, he was the production designer for a commercial for the video game Jedi: Fallen Order, for which he oversaw the design and fabrication of a miniature sci-fi universe, down to the lightsabers.

Although film and architecture are usually considered to be separate disciplines, Pooley doesn't see them quite that way. For him, buildings and films are different means of imparting similar ideas and feelings. "When you finish watching a movie, you find yourself struck by the environment you were immersed in, and the story you psychologically took part in," he says. "I think it's the same thing with great buildings. When we leave a space that we find very moving, we have a similar feeling of being immersed. We remember moments inside it. We remember textures and smells and the way that light bounced off surfaces. I have always felt that the type of skill sets we teach in architecture are a close jump to making films."

Jay Pooley.

The Architecture and Film Camp will teach students to deploy architecture in the service of film, and vice versa. During each one-week course, Pooley and the other camp instructors will use videoconferencing software to remotely mentor students through a creative exercise that marries the two mediums. The setup is pandemic-friendly: there will be no need for anyone to gather or leave their homes.

Each week will have a slightly different theme. At times, students will use film to document real architectural spaces and objects within them. At other times they'll point their camera lenses at abstract worlds where the normal laws of physics and reason don't apply.

"Each of the weeks will end with students having made a short film," Pooley says. "But each week the approach to making that film will be different. For example, week one will be more about documentation. Week two will be about abstracting an existing world — so maybe taking the work from the first week and saying: okay, now your room exists without gravity. So what does that look like?"

Students will be able to sign up for as many (or as few) one-week courses as they choose.

The camp's participants will produce their films using only the equipment they have on hand. None of them will be expected to use anything more sophisticated than a smartphone camera. Each week of the program will consist of a mixture of guided tutorials, workshops, and independent work.

The Architecture and Film Camp is just one of several remote-learning camp programs the Daniels Faculty will be offering this summer. To find out about the others, which include programs for younger students, visit the "outreach" section of the Daniels Faculty website.

The Daniels Faculty's Architecture and Film Camp will begin the week of June 28. For more information, or to reserve your spot in the program, click the link below.

Sign up for the Daniels Faculty's Architecture and Film Camp

Top image: Still from a commercial for the Canadian Olympic Committee. Production design by Jay Pooley.