The COVID-19 pandemic is, in a certain sense, a design problem. The virus thrives indoors, in the built environment — meaning architects have an important role to play in prevention.

Associate professor Jeannie Kim and assistant professor Mauricio Quirós Pacheco put a handful of Daniels architecture students on the work-study payroll this summer and had them apply their design skills to the problem of studying and mitigating the spread of the virus. Here's a look at what those students produced.

Declan Roberts

Declan, in collaboration with Master of Architecture student Lina Kostoff, studied the way the COVID-19 pandemic was affecting Toronto's homeless population. "I quickly became aware that it was a pretty severe problem," Declan says. "Most homeless shelters are not set up to deal with any form of social distancing. Most of the ones in Toronto had to cut their capacity in half, at least."

When he surveyed the way other cities were handling similar problems, he came upon San Francisco's Safe Sleeping Village, a government-sanctioned homeless encampment located right beside city hall. He decided to investigate what it would take to implement a similar encampment in Toronto.

Here's a drawing showing the amount of space that would be required to create an encampment for the total estimated number of people who are now being denied spots in Toronto's permanent shelters as a result of the pandemic:

(Click here to view a larger version.)

And here's a drawing of what Toronto's city hall might look like if an encampment, with proper distancing and support services, were created in Nathan Phillips Square:

(Click here to view a larger version.)

Jay Potts

Jay conducted a study of the floor plans of Toronto-area long-term care homes, in an attempt to discover whether or not there was anything about the design of the buildings that was contributing to the astonishingly high COVID death rates being reported in eldercare facilities at the time. "When we started looking at this problem, it was reported that 82 per cent of COVID-19 deaths in Ontario were occurring in long-term care homes," Jay says. "This has mainly been attributed to Ontario's systemic disinvestment in this sector."

He obtained plans for two local long-term care homes: the Briton House, a high-rise complex in midtown, and One Kenton Place, a four-storey facility in North York. In collaboration with Master of Architecture student Lina Kostoff, he created drawings that superimpose two-metre social distancing bubbles on each set of plans. The visualization highlighted a disturbing fact. "I found that Ontario's construction standards for long-term care homes didn't account for social distancing," Jay says. Narrow hallways and crowded, multi-occupant residential rooms made isolation all but impossible.

A Briton House floor plan. (Click here to view a larger version.)

As a final step, Jay applied a similar treatment to floor plans from the Arkansas State Veterans Home, in North Little Rock — a facility designed according to the "small house" model of long-term care, which aims to improve quality of life for residents by, among other things, giving them private bedrooms and minimizing walking distances to shared amenities. The Arkansas approach, Jay found, was more amenable to social distancing and quarantine.

An Arkansas State Veterans Home floor plan. (Click here to view a larger version.)

Joshua Sam-Cato

Joshua began by examining data on the geographical distribution of COVID-19 cases in Toronto. He noticed that infections were not evenly spread across they city: residents of certain neighbourhoods were more likely to contract the virus. When he compared those infection-prone neighbourhoods, he realized that many of them had something in common: they had higher-than-average amounts of land zoned for industrial uses.

Here's a map he created showing the correlation between industrial areas and COVID infections. The blackened areas are industrial buildings, and the height of the vertical lines corresponds to the prevalence of the virus:

(Click here to view a larger version.)

Joshua theorized that the relationship between industrial areas and COVID might have to do with the fact that many industrial jobs aren't compatible with social distancing, because they can't be done remotely and they often require workers to be in close quarters with one another. To gain a sense of the employment mix in these areas, he took a single neighbourhood, York University Heights, and created a colour-coded map that shows the variety of different industries represented in the industrial zones:

(Click here to view a larger version.)

Aisling Beers

Aisling took an ethnographic approach to studying the effects of COVID-19. She produced a series of storyboards showing the daily routines of three Daniels Faculty community members — herself, a professor, and a member of the Faculty's administrative staff — before and during the pandemic.

The exercise made her notice something about the pandemic's effect on people. "All of the post-pandemic stories were very similar," Aisling says. "People are united in a shared experience of living and working from home. Which I think is interesting compared to the 'before' stories, where everyone was living very different lives."

Here's the before-and-after of Aisling's own routine:

(Click here to view a larger version.)

(Click here to view a larger version.)

And here's the staff member:

(Click here to view a larger version.)

(Click here to view a larger version.)

Gemma Robinson

For her project, Gemma kept things close to home. She scrutinized the Daniels Building's floor plans for "pinch points" — places where it might be difficult for people to maintain the required two metres of distance.

She homed in on a few particularly problematic spots: a corridor next to an elevator, a waiting area outside some bathrooms, and the "commons" area inside the building's main entrance, where a student-run café tends to attract crowds.

For each of her pinch points, she created an animated vignette that shows how people would move through the space. The red spots indicate violations of social distancing protocol. Here's the elevator corridor:

And the commons:

Sheetza McGarry

Sheetza focused on creating visualizations of viral spread at human scale. She drew axonometric images of the virus travelling through air, and then created similar drawings in plan.

Viral spread in axonometric view. (Click here to view a larger version.)

Viral spread in plan. (Click here to view a larger version.)

Drawing and thinking about the way the virus emanates from individual humans allowed Sheetza to see virus-prevention efforts from a new perspective. "Putting these things into real space made me realize just how much of stopping the virus is about personal prevention and conscientiousness," she says. "The most important thing is that everyone understands their responsibility to the community."

With social distancing still in effect and the start of school still almost a month away, some of us are running out of ways to keep our creativity alive. That's why the Daniels Faculty, with funding from the School of Cities, is holding the Daniels Design Challenge, a design competition in which all the work can be done using household materials.

Daniels students, as well the friends and families of Daniels students, are eligible to participate. The creators of the best entries will win prizes, like Daniels swag or gift cards.

There are five different challenges to take part in. Some can be done from home, and others require light city exploration.

Details of each challenge are available on the Daniels Faculty website, and submissions are due by September 30.

Find out more about the Daniels Design Challenge

The Architectural Conservancy of Ontario is an organization that works to document and preserve architecture throughout the province, but they can't do it all by themselves. For the next few weeks, every Daniels Faculty student who makes a contribution to TO Built, the ACO's online database of Toronto architecture, will receive a free one-year ACO membership (a $35 value) and an entry into a raffle for other architecture-related prizes.

What do I have to do to get my free ACO membership?

All you have to do is send the ACO a photo of a building for them to add to their TO Built database of Toronto architecture. The ACO is looking for two types of buildings: postwar homes and religious buildings. Submissions are due by October 31.

Step one: Find a postwar home or religious building somewhere in Toronto and take a photo of it. Any building that falls into one of those categories will do.

Step two: Search the TOBuilt database and make sure the ACO doesn't already have a photo of the building.

Step three: Post the photo to Instagram with the hashtag #tobuiltdaniels. Or email it to info@acotoronto.ca. Be sure to include the building's exact location and any other relevant information.

Step four: Watch for a DM or email reply with details on how to claim your ACO membership.

What's the point of the TO Built database?

TO Built is an online repository of photos and information about buildings in Toronto, collectively maintained by ACO members throughout the city. The database is a resource for anyone who conducts research on Toronto architecture, including historians, conservationists, designers, and architects. But it's as only as good as the submissions it receives.

What are the benefits of ACO membership?

ACO members get the following benefits:

• A free subscription to Acorn magazine, a biannual publication about Ontario heritage and related issues.
• Discounts on ACO-sponsored networking events, talks, and design charrettes.
• A TOBuilt login, with full posting and editing privileges.

What other prizes might I win?

All students who make contributions to TOBuilt before October 31 will be entered into a raffle for a chance to win a copy of Toronto Architecture: A City Guide, a book by Patricia McHugh and Globe and Mail architecture critic Alex Bozikovic. Winners will be notified by November 6.

Top image: The TARIC Islamic Centre, in North York.

The Daniels Faculty is bringing a little bit of the natural world to one of downtown Toronto's most prominent locations.

Pebbs and Hex, an educational pop-up park co-created by assistant professor Victor Perez-Amado and forestry PhD candidate Eric Davies in collaboration with a team of Daniels Faculty students, is now available to visitors at the base of the CN Tower, Canada's most recognizable urban landmark.

The park opened to the public on Saturday, July 25th, in the plaza located immediately to the south of the tower. It will remain on display until early December.

Detail of one of Pebbs and Hex's solar-powered lighting elements.

Pebbs and Hex consists of a series of CNC-milled wooden "pebbles" — rounded seating structures, accentuated with kinetic, solar-powered lighting elements that move with the wind. The "hexes" are modular hexagonal planters that hold a gallery of native trees, including burr oak, black ash, sugar maple, and poplar. A series of explanatory plaques will educate visitors about the different tree species and the important roles they play in Ontario's ecology. The park’s elements were fabricated in the Daniels Faculty’s digital fabrication laboratory.

The installation is part of the CN Tower's ongoing effort to bring life and variety to the downtown core.

“We are excited to partner with University of Toronto’s John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design to bring the Pebbs and Hex pop-up park to life at the base of the CN Tower,” says Peter George, the tower’s chief operating officer. “With its beautiful array of trees that are part of the city’s natural canopy, the installation is one of many ways the CN Tower is helping Torontonians fall in love with their city all over again, and we’re so pleased to provide our community with a refreshingly green urban space to enjoy.”

For Robert Wright, interim dean of the Daniels Faculty, an installation in the CN Tower's plaza represents an opportunity to bring design excellence to a wide audience. "I'm proud of the Daniels Faculty’s support of this activity," Wright says. "Pebbs and Hex is both beautiful and educational. And it's an incredible showcase for the Daniels Faculty's design expertise and fabrication technologies."

Pebbs and Hex was completed with support from Sidewalk Labs.

Here are a few more photos of the park:

The Daniels Faculty design team consisted of:

Concept design and research:

• Victor Perez-Amado – Assistant professor of architecture and urban design
• Anton Skorishchenko – Master of Architecture student
• Christian Huizenga – Master of Architecture student
• Niko McGlashan – Master of Architecture student

Concept design and research of native tree gallery:

• Eric Davies - PhD candidate in forestry, MSc, BSc

Concept design and research of educational component:

• Eric Davies - PhD candidate in forestry, MSc, BSc

Pebbles and lights fabrication:

• Anton Skorishchenko – Master of Architecture student
• Christian Huizenga – Master of Architecture student
• Miranda Fay – Master of Architecture student
• Niko McGlashan – Master of Architecture student
• Peter Dowhaniuk - Bachelor in Architectural Studies student

Hexagons fabrication:

• Victor Perez-Amado – Assistant professor of architecture and urban design
• Anton Skorishchenko – Master of Architecture student

Project management and project installation:

• Victor Perez-Amado – Assistant professor of architecture and urban design
• Anton Skorishchenko – Master of Architecture student

Photgraphs by Rémi Carreiro

George Baird is many things to the Daniels Faculty: a graduate (BArch 1962), a long-time professor, and a former dean. But Baird's influence extends well beyond the university. A new book, The Architect and the Public: On George Baird's Contribution to Architecture, attempts to explain how Baird's conception of "the public" in architecture and urbanism impacted the development of those fields.

The book, edited by Daniels Faculty lecturer Roberto Damiani and published by Italy-based Quodlibet, is an outgrowth of "George Baird: A Question of Influence," a 2012 symposium hosted by the Daniels Faculty. The finished volume consists of 19 essays and interviews about Baird's work and his contributions to architectural theory.

Among the book's group of essayists and interview subjects are international architecture luminaries like Kenneth Frampton and Peter Eisenman. But much of the writing and talking is done by voices from closer to home, like KPMB's Bruce Kuwabara, who studied under Baird in the 1960s; Michael Piper, director of the Daniels Faculty's Master of Urban Design program; and Richard Sommer, who just completed his appointment as the Daniels Faculty's dean.

"In choosing and arranging the book's elements, I wanted to highlight Baird's intellectual commitment to envisioning architecture as a social and political construction," Damiani says. "It became clear to me that Baird's conceptualization of public space is much broader than the design of the physical environment of public streets and squares. His thinking assesses architecture as a medium of cultural representation that embodies the potential of engaging and empowering spontaneous forms of social life."

Baird has had a storied career in private practice. He's the founding principal of Baird Sampson Neuert Architects, which is known for its many public space and institutional commissions, both in Canada and abroad. Baird's early work included an influential report on design guidelines for Toronto's downtown. His firm's more recent highlights include the Old Post Office Plaza, in St. Louis, and York University's new McEwen Graduate Study and Research Building.

The book places Baird's accomplishments in context with the evolution of architectural thought during the latter half of the 20th century. "The reader will find critical references to the formation of what we now define as architectural theory," Damiani says, "as well as the transatlantic intellectual exchange between North America and Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, the development of architectural pedagogy in North America, and finally the design guidelines that shaped downtown Toronto."

The Architect and the Public is available from the publisher's website, and will soon be for sale on Amazon.

The Centre International du Commerce Extérieur du Sénégal (CICES) is unlike anything else in sub-Saharan Africa. The 19.5-hectare convention centre, located in the city of Dakar, is characterized by daring triangular and trapezoidal forms. Traditional Senegalize motifs blend seamlessly with the modernist, early-1970s designs of architects Jean-François Lamoureux and Jean-Louis Marin.

In recent years, the architecture at CICES has begun to deteriorate, largely as a result of neglect. Now, Daniels Faculty associate professor Aziza Chaouni will have an opportunity to help reverse the site's decline, thanks to a $190,000 (U.S.) Keeping it Modern grant from the Getty Foundation.

The Keeping it Modern grant was established in 2014 to address a worldwide lack of expertise in preserving modernist buildings. These structures are often misunderstood by their owners, which can lead to them being damaged in renovations or demolished altogether. And many of them were built using experimental systems and materials that simply don't stand the test of time.

As the principal investigator of CICES's Keeping it Modern grant, Chaouni will work with a Senegalese architect, Mourtada Gueye, to enact a multi-step preservation process. Chaouni and Gueye will perform research and data collection, conduct an in-depth diagnostic study of CICES's buildings and infrastructure, and develop a comprehensive conservation plan for the complex.

This won't be Chaouni's first time championing CICES's built heritage. In February, she led an international workshop in which students from three countries, including a contingent from the Daniels Faculty, convened at CICES to study the site. The success of the workshop helped raise awareness of CICES's value as an exemplar of African modernist design. (Daniels students Clara Ziada, Cheryl Wei, Christian Paez Diaz, and Noor Alkhalili, who joined the workshop, will be releasing a publication about the trip in August.)

Chaouni was a recipient of a previous Keeping it Modern grant, in 2017, for the purpose of developing a conservation plan for Morocco's modernist Sidi Harazem bath complex, designed by architect Jean-François Zevaco.

The Daniels Faculty and Dean Wright are pleased to announce that Vivian Lee has been appointed to the position of director of the Master of Architecture program. She brings a wealth of teaching experience and the insights of a well-regarded professional to the position. We look forward to her leadership at the Faculty.

Wei-Han Vivian Lee is a registered architect in the U.S. and Canada, and an assistant professor at the University of Toronto's Daniels Faculty. As founding partner of LAMAS, Lee brings to the studio her research on the role of craft in the age of digital architecture as related to issues of labour, professional practice, vernacular traditions, and ornament.

LAMAS was named one of the world's 50 best architecture firms by Domus in 2020. The firm was included by Architect Magazine in its series “Next Progressives" in 2017. LAMAS has won awards for both its built projects and its speculative research. In 2019, the firm was awarded Best Research Project by Architect's Newspaper for its project “Delirious Facade.” LAMAS also won Frame Magazine’s Bar of the Year Award in 2020 for Avling Brewery. The studio was shortlisted in 2014 by MoMA PS1’s Young Architects Program. Prior to LAMAS, Lee practiced as a project manager at SHoP Architects and LTL Architects in New York City. While at SHoP Architects, she co-led her team to earn a P/A Award for the NYC East River Waterfront project in 2008.

Lee received her Master of Architecture from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. She holds a BA in studio arts from Wesleyan University, where she was awarded the Jessup Prize in 1999.

For the second time in the past few weeks, Archinect has featured a thesis project by a recent Daniels Faculty graduate — part of a series of stories on student thesis projects completed within the past year. This time, the featured project is "Everyday Data," which was presented in fall 2019 by Rachel Chan.

"Everyday Data envisions how data aesthetic and infrastructure will infiltrate our domestic lives both culturally and physically in our visionary future," Rachel writes. "The internet continues to require an ever-growing network of physical data space – undersea cables, mega data centers, and so on – and an increasingly visible part of the rural landscape. If the internet is so prominent in our everyday lives, how can its infrastructure and aesthetic infiltrate our domestic lives both culturally and physically in the future?"

Read the full story on Archinect

Assistant professor Brady Peters is known for his work on architectural acoustics — the art and science of controlling the way sound travels in built environments. Earlier this week, Research2Reality, an organization co-founded by U of T professor Molly Shoichet to highlight university research online, released a short YouTube video featuring Peters and his work. The video, shot in the Daniels Building prior to the COVID-19 lockdown, is embedded above. You can also watch it on YouTube.

In 2017, assistant professor Carol Moukheiber was in Lebanon, teaching at the American University of Beirut. She and a Beirut-based colleague, AUB instructor Rana Samara Jubayli, were struck by the way the city's approach to planning left certain parts of its urban fabric looking threadbare.

Beirut's zoning rules mandate that plots of land be a certain minimum size in order to be developed into tall buildings. Privately owned lots that aren't large enough for development tend to remain vacant for long periods of time. "These lots are noticeable when you're in Beirut," Moukheiber says. "There are all these gaps. They're sometimes interesting places where informal activities take place, but a lot of times they're places where people are just dumping things. Sometimes they add to public life, but sometimes they do the opposite."

That observation became the basis for a 2019 research studio, in which third-year Daniels Faculty graduate students, under Moukheiber's supervision, collaborated with AUB students studying under Samara Jubayli and guest professor Christos Marcopoulos (who previously taught at the Daniels Faculty).

Over the course of the semester, students at both universities worked to design architectural solutions to the problem of Beirut's underutilized lots. Moukheiber and her colleagues at the AUB have now collected some of those designs in a new book, titled Inhabiting Invisible Plots.

Top: Infill lot typologies in Beirut. Bottom: A map of land use in Beirut. Both images taken from Inhabiting Invisible Plots.

A print edition is in the works, but for now the book can be read in its entirety online.

The principal aim of the research studio was to find ways of using Beirut's small, undeveloped lots to address the city's housing affordability crisis. Students were tasked with developing new types of collective housing that could exist on oddly shaped bits of vacant land — but without sacrificing life essentials like privacy, access to air and light, and access to common areas.

The book details the research conducted by the studio's participants. Daniels Faculty students did an intensive study of architectural precedents, in order to gain a sense of how other cities around the world have developed collective housing. At the AUB, meanwhile, students analyzed and mapped Beirut's infill lots. At one point in the semester, Moukheiber took her students on a class trip to Lebanon (this was pre-COVID, and before the onset of Lebanon's recent economic and political crisis), where they met their AUB counterparts in person.

The book concludes with a selection of architectural designs by students at both universities. Each design is a distinct response to the studio's design prompt, tailored to fit an actual vacant lot located somewhere in Beirut.

Section of Linnea Coveney's "tall row."

Daniels student Linnea Coveney designed a new housing type she called a "tall row" — essentially an extra-tall row house complex, designed to fit three households onto a narrow lot. The housing units are placed side-by-side in such a way that all of them have ground-level access and city views. The structure is topped with a greenhouse, which Coveney designed to be reminiscent of a Babylonian hanging garden. All three units share a central guest bedroom — an innovative touch of collectivity.

Coveney's design is just one of 18 student projects included in Inhabiting Invisible Plots. Eight are by Daniels students, and the other 10 are by students of the AUB.

Click here to read Inhabiting Invisible Plots now