Batoul Faour, a student in the Daniels Faculty's post-professional architecture program, has been named the first-prize winner in the 2021 Avery Review Essay Prize competition. Her winning essay is a distillation of her Daniels Faculty thesis project, which critically examines the role of architectural glass in exacerbating the damage from last year's catastrophic port explosion in Beirut.

The essay, which won Batoul a $4,000 prize and top billing in the Avery Review's April issue, describes the way shattered window glass piled up in Beirut's streets after the blast. It traces the historical and contemporary uses of glass in Lebanon to reveal the politics behind the fragile material.

Batoul writes:

Desired for its transparency in a country that has none to offer its people, glass in Beirut is a valuable form of absence: it provides unobstructed views of the city beyond. Windows permit one to see without having to smell, hear, or touch the power structures at play beyond the transparent panels. As political and economic corruption flourishes and the outside world grows exponentially more inhospitable, glass proliferates across the city. Glass, in all its many iterations, was the last line of defense for a people attempting to make a life within and around the failures of the Lebanese state.

A material designed to uplift quality of life through light and views, glass has instead become a weapon wielded by a corrupt state. On August 4, it splintered and stabbed for miles across Beirut’s homes and streets — disfiguring, blinding, and murdering. Some victims, left with dozens of stitches, described how the glass hit them like “shooting guns.” Shattered and splintered glass was blamed for causing an overwhelming number of the recorded injuries and deaths.

The Avery Review is a monthly architecture journal published by the Office of Publications at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture. The April issue is readable online.

Read Batoul Faour's winning essay here

Top image: A pile of broken glass in Beirut, after the blast. Photograph by Batoul Faour.

The Daniels Faculty delegation to the 2021 Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism keeps growing.

GAMBJTS, an interdisciplinary collaboration between Daniels alumni and lecturers, will be exhibiting a joint project, titled "Beneath the City: Rivers," at the biennale.

This will make them one of at least two groups with Daniels connections at the event. Another project group, made up of Master of Architecture graduates from 2020, announced that its installation had been selected for the biennale in January.

GAMBJTS consists of Pooya Aledavood (MArch 2019), Nicolas Mayaux (MArch 2019), Brandon Bergem (MArch 2019), Vincent Javet (MLA 2018), Robbie Tarakji (MArch 2019), and Elly Selby (MArch 2019), who are all recent graduates of the Faculty, and Jeffrey Garcia, who isn't a Daniels alumnus. Javet and Garcia teach at Daniels as sessional lecturers.

A GAMBJTS group photo.

The Seoul Biennale, which takes place in the South Korean capital, is a major international showcase for architecture and design, with a competitive entry process. Teams submit proposals and are invited — or rejected — based on the merits of their designs and the applicability of them to the biennale's chosen areas of focus. The theme of this year's event is "building the resilient city."

Beneath the City: Rivers addresses resiliency in a unique way. Rather than propose definite solutions to environmental ills, the project engages in speculation: What if, it asks, Toronto "daylighted" some of its hidden water infrastructure, including the long-buried creeks that channel the city's stormwater? Could these hidden waterways be remade into sustainable leisure landscapes?

“Toronto’s seen and unseen natural systems can provide a framework for how we might think about resilient urbanism.” Javet says. "The idea is to expose these buried hydrological systems to promote resiliency through landscape as a means of infrastructure."

The group's installation at the biennale will consist of a large, 3D-printed model of downtown Toronto, suspended upside-down over a convex mirrored surface, with the buried creeks represented as translucent slashes across the city grid. The topsy-turvy presentation will encourage viewers to think about what lies beneath the city's streets.

Around the perimeter of the circular model will be renderings of a series of design exercises intended to show what the city might look like after its water infrastructure was thoroughly daylighted.

Each rendering shows a speculative city scene. In one, the familiar parkland in front of the Ontario Legislative Building is flooded with water. The legislature's statue of John A. Macdonald, Canada's first prime minister, is shown immersed in the flood, with only its head poking above the waterline. In this instance, water infrastructure isn't the only thing being revealed.

"This is an acknowledgement that the land does not belong to us," Garcia says. "It is a depiction of colonization, because the statue sits on territory taken from many nations, including First Nations and Indigenous peoples.”

Another rendering shows one of Toronto's Victorian neighbourhoods, its streets excavated to expose the ancient creeks that, in reality, flow through subterranean culverts. The area around the creeks is transformed into a public park.

The group took the opportunity to reinterpret one of the most sacred sites in Toronto architecture, Mies van der Rohe's modernist TD Centre Plaza. A rendering shows the plaza's sleek grey pavers replaced by a pool of water, with a tree growing proudly amid the monumental cluster of dark towers. The group was aware that this might create controversy. "It's quite telling that people have a visceral response to the excavation of this relatively recent cultural landscape," Javet says. "The plaza has occupied the land for a little over 50 years, where many of Toronto’s waterways were of ecological and cultural importance for thousands of years. It’s the same reaction.”

The group also gave its speculative treatment to one of the city's most laid-back leisure landscapes: the nude beach at Hanlan's Point, on the Toronto Islands. A rendering shows the beach transformed into a hybrid landscape, where leisure and infrastructure are practically indistinguishable. Nude bathers lounge in the mouths of large concrete drainage pipes.

The Seoul Biennale begins on September 16 and runs through the end of October. Its organizers are currently planning to hold the event in person, pandemic permitting. For more information, visit the biennale's website.

Each semester, the Daniels Faculty publishes a booklet with short descriptions of every graduate thesis project being presented during final reviews. The Winter 2021 Thesis Booklet is an easy way to get an overview of the work produced by the latest cohort of Master of Architecture, Master of Urban Design, and Master of Landscape Architecture students before you attend their presentations on April 21, 22, and 23.

The booklet can be read in its entirety below. (Download a PDF to read offline by clicking the "download" button in the upper righthand corner.)

The Urban Land Institute Hines Student Competition is a prestigious annual contest in which student teams compete to create the best solution to a complex urban design problem. In the past, the grand prize has always gone to students from American universities. That streak ended this week when a Canadian team, including two students from the Daniels Faculty, took the competition's top spot for 2021.

The winning team included Ruotian Tan, a Daniels Faculty Master of Urban Design student, and Chenyi Xu, a Daniels Faculty Master of Architecture student. They had three teammates from other Toronto universities: Frances Grout-Brown and Leorah Klein, urban planning students at Ryerson University, and Yanlin Zhou, a student in York University's Master of Real Estate and Infrastructure program. The group was supervised by Steven Webber and Victor Perez-Amado, both assistant professors at Ryerson's School of Urban and Regional Planning. Raymond Lee, a senior associate at Weston Williamson + Partners, and Christina Giannone, vice president of planning and development at Port Credit West Village Partners, acted as advisors.

The group made its final submission to the competition's jury on April 8, in a videoconference presentation. The Urban Land Institute, which holds the competition, announced the win on Monday.

The all-Toronto team bested a field of 104 other entires from schools around North America. The four other finalists represented a number of America's top schools, including Penn State, Columbia, Berkeley, and the Georgia Institute of Technology.

In addition to the bragging rights that come with having impressed the competition's high-powered jury of practitioners from the fields of design, land use, and real estate, the students will get something a little more tangible: a $50,000 (U.S.) prize to split.

"Reflecting on this experience in its entirety, it’s surreal how much we’ve learned along the way," the team said in a statement to the Urban Land Institute. "Though each member of the team brought different skills to the table, we were strongly aligned in our aspirations for the site and were proud to present our proposal rooted in enabling physical and social connectivity and achieving economic and environmental resilience."

The group's master plan includes a 107,000-square foot community centre.

The ULI Hines Student Competition asks students to form multidisciplinary teams and tackle a multifaceted urban design project. This year's competition brief called for groups to develop master plans for the East Village, a neighbourhood in Kansas City, Missouri. Student proposals had to take into account a number of goals, including positive economic impact, sustainability, housing affordability, and access to transportation. Teams were required not only to design ways of transforming the neighbourhood, but also to develop phased implementation plans and financial pro formas.

The Daniels/Ryerson/York team's design, titled "Fusion," was unique among the competition's finalists in that it didn't include any tourist infrastructure. Instead, the group chose to focus on building a lively pedestrian promenade for locals, lined with mixed-income residences, office space, retail, and a 107,000-square-foot community centre with housing for seniors inside.

The Fusion site plan.

The group's master plan also included a network of green infrastructure intended to control the flow of stormwater across the site. Permeable pavement and street bioswales would allow the East Village to absorb rain and store it for reuse in a series of local gardens and green roofs. A vertical farming greenhouse would make it possible for the neighbourhood to produce some of its own food.

This attention to environmental sustainability and agriculture won the competition jury's approval. "Fusion stood out as it pushed a new paradigm for an urban neighborhood based on the strong regional legacy of agriculture," ULI Hines jury chair Diana Reid wrote in a statement. "Their financing plan and design enabled economic resilience through small scale food growth and distribution, local culinary incubation, and research-driven employment opportunities."

Learn more about Fusion and the other ULI Hines Student Competition 2021 finalists on the Urban Land Institute Americas website.

Top image: The group's design for a vertical farming greenhouse.

Visiting lecturer Kelly Alvarez Doran spent the fall semester leading a research studio in which he and his students investigated the environmental impact of "embodied carbon" — the energy used to create building materials. Embodied carbon ratchets up a building project's greenhouse gas emissions before shovels so much as pierce the ground, and those emission levels are permanent. They can't later be mitigated through retrofits.

Now, Doran has written an open letter to Canada's municipalities, architects, engineers, and planners, in which he summarizes his studio's findings and pleads for limits on embodied carbon in buildings. The letter appears in the April 2021 issue of Canadian Architect, and it can be read on the magazine's website. In the letter, Doran writes:

Canada, as well as a growing number of its jurisdictions, has set necessarily ambitious carbon reduction targets as part of an increasingly urgent global bid to achieve climate stability. While the spotlight often falls on the transportation and energy production sectors, 40 percent of global carbon emissions comes from the construction and operation of buildings. We are becoming increasingly aware that a big part of the issue — 11 percent of global emissions — comes from the embodied carbon of the materials that go into the new buildings constructed each year.

The AED sector is just starting to understand the immense carbon impact of building materials. To drastically reduce this impact, greater knowledge, and firm embodied carbon benchmarks and targets, must become part of building standards and planning policies that govern construction across Canada.

Read the full letter at Canadian Architect

Image: Sectional diagrams indicate the percentage of project embodied carbon emissions below grade, showing the embodied carbon impact of foundations and underground parking.

Alumni, future students, and members of the public are welcome to join us online for final reviews (April 15-23). Daniels Faculty students in architecture, landscape, and urban design will present their final projects to their instructors, as well as guest critics from the professional community and local and international academic institutions.

Daniels On Air is the Faculty’s online platform to navigate through final reviews. Here you’ll sign up, browse the schedule, and learn more about each studio. Daniels On Air will re-launch in time for reviews beginning on April 15. All reviews will take place over Zoom (create a free account here).

Current students do not need to sign up for Daniels On Air to access reviews. Check the Review and Examination Schedule for all dates and times.

Follow UofTDaniels on Twitter and Instagram and join the conversation using the hashtag #DanielsReviews. Reviews take place 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. unless otherwise stated. Please note that the times and dates may change, and there may be scheduled breaks in a Zoom throughout the day.

Undergraduate 

Thursday, April 15 

Design Studio I | JAV101 
Time: 9 a.m. – 1 p.m.
Instructors: Jay Pooley (Coordinator), Alex Josephson, Danielle Whitley, Peter Sealy, Jennifer Kudlats, Katy Chey, Luke Duross, Chloe Town, T. Jeffrey Garcia, Mauricio Quiros Pacheco, Nuria Montblanch, Scott Sorli, Anne Ma, Marcin Kedzior, Avi Odenheimer 

Friday, April 16 

Design Studio II | ARC201 
Time: 9 a.m. – 1 p.m. 
Instructors: Fiona Lim Tung (Coordinator), Daniel Briker, Carol Moukheiber, Tei Carpenter, Maria Denegri, Alex Josephson, Mauricio Quiros Pacheco, Andrew MacMillan 

Drawing and Representation II | ARC200 
Time: 2-6 p.m. 
Instructors: Michael Piper (Coordinator), Jon Cummings, David Verbeek, Reza Nik, Fiona Lim Tung 

Monday, April 19 

Architecture Studio IV | ARC362 
Instructors: Dina Sarhane (Coordinator), Chris Cornecelli, Sam Ghantous 

Landscape Architecture Studio IV | ARC364 
Time: 9:30 a.m. – 1 p.m. 
Instructor: Alissa North 

Technology Studio IV | ARC381 
Time: 10 a.m. – 3 p.m. 
Instructors: Tom Bessai (Coordinator), Tomasz Reslinski  

Thursday, April 22 and Friday, April 23 

Senior Seminar in History and Theory (Thesis) | ARC457 
Instructor: Jeannie Kim 

Senior Seminar in Design (Thesis) | ARC462 
Instructor: Jeannie Kim 

Senior Seminar in Technology (Thesis) | ARC487 
Instructor: Nicholas Hoban 

Graduate 

Monday, April 19 

Design Studio 2 | ARC1012 | MARCH 
Instructors: Adrian Phiffer (Coordinator), Tei Carpenter, Petros Babasikas, An Te Liu, Brigitte Shim, Tom Ngo, Aziza Chaouni, Mauricio Quiros Pacheco 

Design Studio 2 | LAN1012 | MLA  
Instructors: Liat Margolis (Coordinator), Elise Shelley, Terence Radford 

Urban Design Studio Options | URD1012 | MUD 
Instructors: Ken Greenberg, Simon Rabyniuk 

Tuesday, April, 20 

Design Studio 4 | ARC2014 | MARCH 
Instructors: Sam Dufaux (Coordinator), Carol Moukheiber, James Macgillivray, Chris Cornecelli, Aleris Rodgers, Maria Denegri, Anne-Marie Armstrong, Francesco Martire 

Design Studio 4 | LAN2014 | MLA 
Instructors: Behnaz Assadi (Coordinator), Todd Douglas 

Wednesday April 21 

Architectural Design Studio: Research 2 | ARC3021 | MARCH 
Instructors: Adrian Phiffer, Vivian Lee, Mason White 

Architectural Design Studio: Research 2 | ARC3039 | MARCH 
Instructors: Jesse LeCavalier, Mauricio Quiros Pacheco 

Architectural Design Studio: Research 2 | ARC4018 | MARCH 

(L9101) Redeployable Architecture for Health—Pop-up Hospitals for Covid-19 
Instructor: Stephen Verderber 

(L9109) Towards Half: Climate Positive Design in the GTHA 
Instructor: Kelly Doran 
 

Design Studio Thesis | LAN3017 | MLA 
Instructors: Liat Margolis (Coordinator), Behnaz Assadi, Fadi Masoud, Peter North, Alissa North, Jane Wolff, Elise Shelley, Matthew Perotto, Megan Esopenko, Aisling O’Carroll 

Urban Design Studio Thesis | URD2015 | MUD 
Instructor: Angus Laurie 

Thursday, April 22 

Architectural Design Studio: Research 2 | ARC3021/ARC4018 | MARCH  

(L9103) STUFF  
Time: 1-6 p.m.
Instructor: Laura Miller 

(L9105) ARCHITECTURE ♥ MEDIA 
Instructors: Lara Lesmes, Fredrik Hellberg 

(L9106) Designing Buildings with Complex Programs on Constrained Urban Sites that include Heritage Structures 
Time: 1-6 p.m. 
Instructor: George Baird 

(L9107) What is Inclusive Architecture (Landscape Architecture, Urban Design)? 
Time: 9 a.m. – 12 p.m. 
Instructor: Elisa Silva 

(L9108) The Usual Suspects  
Time: 8:30 a.m. – 5 p.m. 
Instructors: Filipe Magalhaes, Ahmed Belkhodja, Ana Luisa Soares 

Design Studio Thesis | LAN3017 | MLA 
Instructors: Liat Margolis (Coordinator), Behnaz Assadi, Fadi Masoud, Peter North, Alissa North, Jane Wolff, Elise Shelley, Matthew Perotto, Megan Esopenko, Aisling O’Carroll 

Post-Professional Thesis 2 | ALA4022  
Time: 12-4 p.m. 
Instructors: Mason White (Coordinator), Adrian Phiffer, Maria Yablonina, Carol Moukheiber, Jesse LeCavalier, Paul Harrison 

Friday, April 23 

Architectural Design Studio: Research 2 | ARC3021/ARC4018 | MARCH  

(L9110) Anthropocene and Herd 
Instructor: Gilles Saucier, Christian Joakim, Gregory Neudorf 

(L9103) STUFF  
Time: 1-6 p.m.
Instructor: Laura Miller 

Architectural Design Studio 7: Thesis | ARC4018 | MARCH 
Time: 10 a.m. – 4 p.m. 
Advisors: Petros Babasikas, Michael Piper 

Architectural Design Studio 7: Thesis | ARC4018 | MARCH 
Time: 1-6 p.m. 
Advisors: John Shnier, Mauricio Quiros Pachecho, Carol Moukheiber, An Te Liu 

Design Studio Thesis | LAN3017 | MLA 
Instructors: Liat Margolis (Coordinator), Behnaz Assadi, Fadi Masoud, Peter North, Alissa North, Jane Wolff, Elise Shelley, Matthew Perotto, Megan Esopenko, Aisling O’Carroll 

Photo by Harry Choi.

After an 18-month search and many interviews with outstanding candidates, the Daniels Faculty is pleased to announce the appointments of three new tenure-track faculty members. Daniel Chung will join the Faculty as an associate professor of building science. Bomani Khemet, who began teaching building science at the Daniels Faculty in 2018 on a limited-term appointment, will now join the Faculty permanently, as an assistant professor. And Zach Blas will join as an assistant professor of visual arts.

"The search committee was struck not only by the candidates' abilities in their respective areas of research and creative practice, but in each case by the possibilities of their participation in the Faculty’s multi-disciplinary future in which our diverse programs and disciplines benefit from each other," says Robert Levit, the Daniels Faculty's associate dean, academic. "As individuals, they are outstanding pedagogues who will be able to teach at all levels, addressing the curricular goals of our doctoral, professional masters, and undergraduate programs."

Bomani Khemet

Bomani Khemet began his career as a design engineer. He worked for Texas Instruments, Honeywell Inernational, Siemens, and Dryvit Services Canada before transitioning into higher education in 2012. He holds two patents.

Khemet earned his Master of Engineering from Howard University in 2003, and his Master of Building Science from Ryerson University in 2012. In 2019, he completed his PhD in civil engineering, also at Ryerson. His primary research focuses are building enclosures, airtightness, and ultra-low-energy buildings. The aim of his work is to find new and innovative ways of measuring, documenting, and controlling interior airflow, in order to promote human comfort and energy efficiency in built environments.

Since arriving at the Daniels Faculty, Khemet has conducted extensive research on building envelope performance. In 2018, he performed a large-scale analysis of airtightness in Canadian single-detached homes, using data culled from a Natural Resources Canada survey of over 900,000 properties. The resulting peer-reviewed article was published in Building and Environment.

Photo: Sarah Bodri

In recent months, Khemet has turned his critical eye on the Daniels Faculty itself. In 2020 he orchestrated a series of tests on the airtightness on the Daniels Building. By measuring airflow, he was able to determine that the building's southern, heritage wing leaks three times as much air as the new-construction northern wing. He is now investigating the airflow impacts of various heritage restoration approaches. He expects the results to have wide-ranging implications for designers, owners, and contractors that are planning partial and full restorations of large historic buildings.

"Building science has always been an important facet of architecture, but its importance has never been more clear, especially with the pandemic and its implications for the designing of enclosures," Khemet says.

Zach Blas

Zach Blas earned his Master of Fine Art from UCLA in 2008 and his PhD in literature from Duke University in 2014. He spent a year as an assistant professor at SUNY Buffalo's Department of Art before moving to the U.K. to lecture at Goldsmiths, University of London.

In addition to his teaching duties, Blas has maintained a busy research and artistic practice. His work deals with queerness, power, and digital technologies — specifically, the ways digital technologies can be used either to exert social control or resist it.

Facial Weaponization Suite.

His best known work is Facial Weaponization Suite, in which he led a series of workshops in locations around the world. Using aggregated facial data from participants, he created a series of surreal face masks designed to subvert and defeat facial-recognition technologies.

Contra-Internet.

Contra-Internet, a solo exhibition of Blas's work, first mounted at London's Gasworks gallery in 2017, used sculpture and film as means of engaging with the increasingly totalitarian style of capitalism practiced by American tech magnates. A centrepiece of the exhibition was Contra-Internet: Jubilee 2033, a video work in which Ayn Rand and her followers take a psychedelic journey through a devastated future version of Silicon Valley.

The Doors.

Blas's most recent commission, The Doors, is currently on view at the de Young Museum in San Francisco and the Van Abbemuseum in the Netherlands. The work is an immersive installation. Its centrepiece is a multichannel video, which was produced only partially by Blas. His co-creator was an artificial intelligence that he trained on a diet of psychedelia, ASMR keyboard noises, and Jim Morrison speech samples. The result, a 50-minute video loop, is a complex commentary on the kinship between the modern tech industry and California's 1960s counterculture.

In 2018, Blas was the recipient of a Leadership Fellowship from the United Kingdom Arts and Humanities Research Council. In 2022, his work will appear in the British Art Show, one of the U.K.'s most important touring exhibitions of contemporary art.

"I'm really excited to be able to teach visual art at a research university," Blas says. "Daniels provides a unique opportunity for arts education at the intersections of practice and theory, and I look forward to exploring the connections between visual art, architecture, and design."

Daniel Chung

Daniel Chung comes to the Daniels Faculty from Drexel University's Westphal College of Media Arts and Design. He began teaching architecture there in 2014, earned his PhD in architectural engineering in 2019, and, in 2020, attained the rank of associate professor. Before he did any of that, he worked in the field. He earned a Master of Architecture at Yale in 2006 and then spent several years as a project architect at MGA Partners.

Chung researches building envelope performance, with a focus on the way moisture moves through materials. Recently, he has been working on methods of using dielectric permittivity sensors — a type of water-sensitive probe ordinarily used to test the moisture content of soil — to measure and track the amount of water present in the facades of buildings. The slender probes might one day be usable as alternatives to more destructive methods of testing for building envelope moisture, like core sampling.

A thermal imaging study of a building envelope.

During his time at Daniels, Chung hopes to use his moisture-sensor research to develop a way of creating a fully self-monitoring building envelope that can automatically adjust its internal properties to keep moisture out.

Chung also works on moisture from a more theoretical angle. In a recent paper he co-authored for Building Simulation, he describes a method of simulating the behaviour of moisture in building envelopes using open-source software. He has also completed statistical studies of building envelope performance, in order to forecast the effects of moisture over time and in different climate conditions. "I'm asking, if the climate is very different in 50 years, do we have a problem with our existing buildings and designs? I don't just look at the worst-case conditions or the best-case conditions. I look at what might happen over a wide distribution of cases," he says.

Each year, hundreds of student teams from across North America make submissions to the ULI Hines Student Competition, in which entrants are challenged to tackle a complex urban planning and design exercise. Only four teams advance to the competition's final round. This year, one of those teams includes two Daniels Faculty students: Ruotian Tan, a student in the Faculty's Master of Urban Design program, and Chenyi Xu, a Master of Architecture student.

Ruotian and Chenyi are working as part of a five-member, multidisciplinary crew. The other three students on the team are Frances-Grout Brown and Leorah Klein, both Ryerson University urban planning students, and Yanlin Zhou, a student in York University's Master of Real Estate and Infrastructure program. The group was supervised by Steven Webber and Victor Perez-Amado, both assistant professors at Ryerson's School of Urban and Regional Planning. Raymond Lee, a senior associate at Weston Williamson + Partners, and Christina Giannone, vice president of planning and development at Port Credit West Village Partners, acted as advisors.

The students will give their final presentation during a video call with the ULI Hines Student Competition jury on April 8. The competition's winning team receives a prize of $50,000. The three runner-up teams receive $10,000 each.

The competition is a rare opportunity for students to work with people in disciplines other than their own. "It was a great multidisciplinary learning experience for me," Ruotian says. "It was a very good chance for me to practice and get some good results before I actually go into a professional career."

The competition brief called for each student group to develop a detailed master plan for the East Village, a neighbourhood in Kansas City, Missouri. The East Village is a lightly developed 16.2-acre site located within the city's central business district. The student proposals had to take into account a wide variety of ambitious goals, including positive economic impact, sustainability, housing affordability, and easy access to transportation. In addition to redesigning the site, students had to produce implementation plans and financial pro formas that described exactly how their designs might be made into reality.

The Daniels Faculty/Ryerson/York team designed its master plan, titled "Fusion," around two central ideas: connectivity and resilience. Although the East Village is a relatively blank slate, with plenty of room for megaprojects, the group's plan doesn't contain any large tourist attractions, like stadiums or museums. "One thing that distinguished our proposal from the other finalists is that we wanted to create a community for people who are actually living there, rather than attracting tourists or visitors to the site," Ruotian says.

In the first phase of the group's three-step implementation plan, the city would build a new pedestrian promenade at the centre of the neighbourhood, then line it with the beginnings of a dense new urban neighbourhood. The plan calls for an initial 615 mixed-income rental units, a 107,000 square-foot community centre with some seniors housing inside, plus office space and ground-floor retail.

The group's site plan.

Over two subsequent phases of redevelopment, the neighbourhood would evolve into a continuous row of mixed-use housing, office, and retail structures. The community centre and an adjacent water-feature park would serve as gathering points not only for neighbourhood residents and workers, but also for other Kansas City residents, who would be channeled into the East Village by cross streets and bus routes parallel to the pedestrian promenade.

The "resilience" piece of the group's plan manifests in the form of a neighbourhood-wide network of green infrastructure aimed at allowing the site to gracefully accept rainwater. Permeable pavement would allow precipitation to seep into the ground. Street bioswales would collect rainwater for reuse. A series of rain gardens, community gardens, and green roofs would use stormwater for irrigation. And a vertical farming greenhouse would allow the neighbourhood to produce food at scale, in an environmentally friendly way.

The vertical farming greenhouse.

"Kansas City has a long history with agricultural industries," Leorah says. "We noticed to the east of the site, they have really strong community networks with urban agriculture, so we wanted to build on networks that were already existing and provide a place for them to build up their networks and build up their businesses. And COVID really showed the importance of a local food system."

Visit the ULI Americas website to learn more about this year's ULI Hines Student Competition finalists.

Radio National, Australia's public radio broadcaster, invited a few local experts to educate the antipodean listening public about the city of Toronto. One of those Torontonians was Mason White, a professor of architecture at the Daniels Faculty.

White appeared on Lost and Found, a program hosted by Jonathan Green. Every week, the show picks a different city or neighbourhood and explains it through the lens of art, architecture, food, and culture.

Amid interviews with Raptors superfan Nav Bhatia and freelance writer Ivy Knight, White pipes in to explain Toronto's architectural heritage. "Toronto does not have a distinct architectural style," he tells Green. "I'd say its style is best described as ad-hoc eclecticism. Which is probably quite fitting given that Toronto has really been defined by waves of immigration, and these immigrants are really the ones who have shaped and formed the identity of the city, brick by brick and timber frame by timber frame."

To listen to White's full interview — which also includes some discussion about Ontario Place, the Bentway, the PATH, and the Eaton Centre — visit Radio National's website.

Listen to Mason White on Radio National

Top image: Ontario Place's aquatic pods.

When a new and frightening viral infection began spreading around the world last year, healthcare agencies raced to keep up with demand for hospital beds. In very short order, dozens of experimental, hastily assembled healthcare facilities began to sprout in unlikely locations.

As all of this was happening, professor Stephen Verderber, director of the Daniels Faculty's Centre for Design + Health Innovation, was keeping a careful eye on all the new construction. He has now released a white paper in which he reviews four different categories of built and unbuilt rapid-deployment healthcare facilities, including some designed by Master of Architecture students in his fall 2020 Architecture + Health research studio.

The white paper, titled "Pandemical healthcare architecture and social responsibility — COVID-19 and beyond," identifies several key inadequacies in existing designs for COVID-inspired healthcare facilities. Verderber argues for future rapid-deployment facilities to be designed in ways that allow them to be both therapeutic and socially responsive. He writes:

Effective rapid response requires personal conviction, perseverance, and appreciation of timeless Vitruvian precepts calling for architecture as the provider of commodity, firmness, and delight in a civil, democractic society. The first two precepts alone are insufficient, if architecture is to be a meaningful participant. An advocacy-based architecture for health in the public, civic interest is worthwhile and achievable — especially in trying times.

Read the full white paper

Image by Emily Moore and Jiawen Lin.