Adrian Phiffer, an assistant professor at the Daniels Faculty, didn't come up with the name for his newly released book, Strange Primitivism, entirely on his own.

"'Strange primitivism' is a characterization that I've heard friends using when they speak about my design work. It's not my own invention," he says. "The reason I'm embracing this characterization is that I do think my designs aim towards a sense of primitivism — meaning, a sense of legibility and honesty in the way that form, materials, and program are being manipulated."

The book, a collection of 35 essays about Phiffer's architectural design practice and his experiences teaching design students at the Daniels Faculty, went on sale yesterday. It includes autobiographical notes, brief treatises on architectural theory, and thoughts on life and design in Toronto.

The volume was published by The Architectural Observer, a small publishing house run by Daniels Faculty lecturer Hans Ibelings.

In his writing, Phiffer has attempted to replicate some of the forthrightness that he strives for in his architectural practice. "Overall," he says, "the book is characterized by a sense of honesty that maybe is typical for someone who has grown up in Eastern Europe." (Phiffer is from Romania.)

"My ambition was to unearth parts of the process of working in the architectural realm that sometimes are not fully revealed, because designers would feel uncomfortable revealing them."

The book's intentionally fragmented layout and its four different covers (which Phiffer says are a way to "engage with readers in a visual dialogue about having, or not having, an image") were created by Haller Brun, a Dutch designer. The pages are filled with images of Phiffer's projects, as well as his students' projects.

Strange Primitivism's cover price is $37.50, and it's now available on Amazon.

Jessica Ying (MArch 2019) presented her Master of Archiecture thesis project, titled "Reading Between the Lines," during the fall 2019 review period. Her series of graceful, 3D-printed forms — produced under the tutelage of her advisor, associate professor John Shnier — was recently featured on Archinect, as part of a series of stories on student thesis projects completed within the past year.

Read the full story on Archinect

Image: Jessica Ying's thesis project, on display at the Daniels Building in fall 2019.

Associate professor Aziza Chaouni has recorded a free public lecture about her work restoring Sidi Harazem, a modernist bath complex in Morocco.

Chaouni's lecture, part of "Space, Health, and Care," an online lecture series co-hosted by her and Toma Berlanda, of the School of Architecture, Planning, and Geomatics at the University of Cape Town, is available on the APG UCT Vimeo channel, and is also embedded above. Chaouni will also be conducting a live online conversation about Sidi Harazem, beginning at 10 a.m. EST on Wednesday, June 3. The chat will stream on the the University of Cape Town's Bachelor of Architectural Studies Instagram, which can be found right here.

The Space, Health, and Care online lecture series will also include video lectures and live chats with the following other architects, all of whom will be speaking on topics related to the creation of new futures amidst a global pandemic:

• James Mitchell and Carolina Larrazábal (BuildX Studio, Nairobi)
• Baerbel Mueller ([applied] Foreign Affairs, Vienna)
• Christian Benimana (MASS Design Group, Kigali)
• Rachel Lee (Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich)

For more details, and to view the lectures and livestreams, visit the APG UCT Vimeo and Instagram pages.

Yahya Abdullah, a Master of Architecture student, took the year off from his studies at the Daniels Faculty in 2019. He travelled to Italy to take a course on architectural restoration. There, he met a new friend, Claudio Araya, an architecture student at the Universidad Finis Terrae, in Chile. Soon afterward, Yahya and Claudio both landed internships at OMA, the renowned Rotterdam-based architecture firm.

"As rigorous as OMA is, we found that we had some weekends where we needed something to do," Yahya says. "So we figured we'd enter a few competitions."

Eventually, Yahya and Claudio came upon a competition that seemed to play to their strengths: a Young Architects Competitions contest that called upon entrants to design a way to restore Craco, a medieval Italian town that was abandoned in the late 20th century as a result of natural disasters, and that now lingers on as a picturesque ruin, frequented by tourists and film crews but otherwise devoid of human life.

Yahya and Claudio had just been in Italy, studying restoration, no less. The brief seemed tailor-made for them. And yet, the ideas weren't flowing. They spent a week thinking about the problem with few results. They were considering giving up.

Then, finally, they hit upon what seemed like a workable concept. And in the end, it was more than just workable: their competition entry, titled "Traces," won first place, netting them a cash prize of 8,000 euros (approximately $12,000) and the esteem of a jury of prominent international architects.

Yahya (left) and Claudio (right).

Yahya and Claudio's design solution was intentionally minimal. Their goal was to provide amenities for visitors to Craco without dramatically altering any of the ruined buildings. "The town is so rooted in its history," Yahya says. "It would be a shame to take a modernist brush and get rid of a lot of the town's legacy. We didn't want to take away from that."

Yahya and Claudio's design proposes building guest accommodations within some of Craco's ruined homes. Their design calls for the homes to be stabilized with a "nesting" of wood frame and wire mesh. The smaller homes would become modest shelters for day trippers looking for places to relax. Some of the larger structures would have their interiors converted into villas — hotel-like environments where families or groups of friends could spend a few days in relative comfort.

A shelter structure, nested within one of Craco's ruined buildings.

The pair also designed a corridor of public amenity structures that revive the town's centre without erasing the damage wrought by years of abandonment. For example, a ruined church, with only minor upgrades, becomes a performance space:

Yahya and Claudio's site plan also includes a "gallery path" (a type of linear art gallery that runs through a series of ruined buildings), a restaurant, a library, and a wellness centre. They envisioned transforming the town's tallest structure, a small tower, into a scenic overlook. "We did studies on travel," Yahya says. "The idea was to not have people walk more than five minutes to get somewhere. We kept everything very close, while still maintaining levels of privacy."

A section showing the relationship between the tower overlook and the town below.

Now back in Toronto, Yahya is preparing to enter the third year of his Daniels Faculty MArch studies in the fall.

COVID-19 has architects speculating on how cities and architecture might change during the pandemic and in the post-pandemic world. Robert Levit, an associate professor and associate dean at the Daniels Faculty, joined Carie Penabad, director of the Bachelor of Architecture program at the University of Miami, for a conversation (conducted online, naturally) about the effects of the lockdown on how we think about our built environments. Video of their talk is embedded above, or you can watch it on YouTube.

Their encounter was part of "Architecture and the Great Confinement," a video interview series being produced by the University of Miami School of Architecture. Recent participants in the series include another University of Toronto luminary: the Rotman School of Management's Richard Florida.

The full series playlist is here.

When Tye Farrow (BArch 1987), a Daniels Faculty alumnus and president of the University of Toronto Alumni Association, first heard that cities and countries around the world were building temporary hospitals for COVID-19 patients, he was impressed by the initiative — but he was underwhelmed by the design. The makeshift patient rooms were frequently small, dark, and spartan. Many were little more than curtained-off areas inside retrofitted convention centres. He wondered: what if there was a way to design a hospital ward that was quick to build, but that still provided a high-quality environment for patients and medical workers, with ample space and light?

Then it occurred to him: there was a way.

For the past few years, Farrow's practice, Farrow Partners, has been experimenting with Grip Metal, a super strong, velcro-like material made by Nucap, an automotive brake manufacturer. Grip Metal uses tiny metal hooks to securely attach itself to a variety of materials, like wood, concrete, and plastic. Two-sided Grip Metal — a metal strip with hooks on both its upper and lower surfaces — can be used as a substitute for chemical adhesives.

Before the pandemic, Nucap and Farrow Partners had jointly developed a way of using Grip Metal to bind scraps of wood into sturdy wooden bricks, about the size and shape of concrete blocks. The bricks are assembled with Grip Metal and then subjected to enormous pressure by an industrial press, which causes the Grip Metal's tiny hooks to form a permanent mechanical bond with the wood. The bricks' tops and bottoms are lined with more Grip Metal, which allows them to be securely stacked, without any need for skilled carpentry or masonry. They're like Lego bricks — except they're large and stable enough to be used in full-sized, real-world construction.

Top: a wooden brick, with Grip Metal surface. Bottom: a close-up of a strip of Grip Metal.

Farrow decided that he would attempt to use these wooden bricks as the basis for a new type of quick-assembly hospital for COVID-19 care.

Within a few weeks of the onset of the pandemic, Farrow Partners had arrived at a design that achieved the hoped-for standard of quality — and, crucially, was easy to build with a minimum of involvement from skilled trades. Farrow calls the design the "Solace Rapid Assembly High Performance Covid-19 Inpatient Bed Solution."

"Right now, if you build a building, approximately 80 per cent of the cost of the building is labour," Farrow says. "With these wooden bricks, the skilled labour cost is brought down significantly. I could stack the walls myself. You can build something rapidly that's as strong as it would be if you were using concrete blocks, and it has the feel of a permanent building."

Unlike many other designs for temporary hospital spaces, Farrow's design does not repurpose an existing structure, like a convention centre or a shipping container. The entire frame of the temporary hospital ward is made from Grip Metal–equipped wooden bricks. Once stacked, the velcro-like surfaces of the bricks interlock, holding the bricks tightly together. Tie rods secure the structure, allowing it to resist physical stress.

Farrow's goal with the design was to create an interior that "causes health" by immersing patients and healthcare workers in a (relatively) pleasant environment, with plenty of natural light.

"Sitting in a black box is really bad for your health," Farrow says. "There are studies that show if you take a patient that has had heart surgery, and you put them in an inpatient room that has a view of the sky, they heal faster, they use less medicine, they have better outcomes, and they have shorter stays in the hospital."

Drawing on considerable past experience designing hospitals and other healthcare facilities, Farrow Partners' architects came up with a U-shaped floor plan. On the edges of the U are 12 patient rooms, each one 12 by 14 feet. The generous square footage ensures that medical workers can move freely around a patient's bed, which greatly eases the process of performing medical procedures.

The Solace Rapid Assembly floor plan.

In the centre of the U is a clinical workstation, where medical staff can don or remove protective equipment and perform other work functions. All the patient beds face inward, toward the workstation, in order to allow medical staff to monitor their charges at all times. This arrangement created a design problem: if the only thing in a patient's line of sight was the workstation, how would it be possible for them to see natural light?

To address this, Farrow's designers added a row of windows around the ceiling of the workstation. A patient reclining in a bed would be sitting at precisely the right angle to see a sliver of sky.

A section of a patient room, showing the sightline from bed to window.

Farrow's designers also gave some thought to the space's mechanical elements. Each room in an intensive care unit requires numerous electrical and gas connections. Maintaining those connections in a COVID-19 ward presents an obvious hazard to technicians, who might be exposed to the virus while fixing some machinery. The Farrow Partners design addresses this problem by putting all of the structure's mechanical and electrical systems in a corridor behind the patient rooms, separated by a wall.

The floor plan is designed to be repeatable. Two of the U-shaped 12-bed wards could be linked together to form a 24-bed, square-shaped ward. Two or more of those 24-bed squares could be linked with corridors to create even larger hospital floor plans.

At the end of the temporary hospital's service life, Farrow says it would be possible to reuse much of the structure. The Grip Metal bricks can be pulled apart, much like Lego blocks, and saved for future use.

Nucap is currently manufacturing thousands of Grip Metal bricks, using wood salvaged from wooden shipping pallets. Farrow Partners, for its part, has already used some of the bricks to build a full-sized mockup of three intensive-care patient rooms inside a barn in King City.

According to Farrow, there is considerable interest from government and industry in using the bricks to construct temporary hospital spaces. "We've had discussions not only with hospitals, but in education and long-term care," he says. "And that's not only locally, but in the United States and Israel."

During the 2019 school year, fourth-year undergraduate architecture students were given the option to undertake thesis projects. (Previously, thesis projects were exclusively for graduate students.) These undergrads were required to attend seminars tailored to their area of study — design, history and theory, or technology — and they were encouraged to develop projects that were thematically related to schools and education. They were otherwise free to pursue their own research interests. Each project was developed over the course of an entire academic year.

The optional undergraduate thesis program is open to all incoming fourth-year architecture undergrads. If you're an undergrad who's interested in applying, you can find information on prerequisites and eligibility in the Architectural Studies academic calendar. Applications for the 2020/2021 academic year are due on June 1, 2020. Application forms are available from the Office of the Registrar and Student Services.

What did this year's undergraduate thesis students produce? Here's a brief look at three projects.

Raphael Kay and Kevin Nitiema

Raphael and Kevin's thesis project was born long before the start of the school year, in April 2019. Raphael had received an NSERC Undergraduate Student Research Award, which provided him with a stipend for working as a research assistant to associate professor Benjamin Hatton.

Hatton works in the University of Toronto's Department of Materials Science and Engineering's Functional and Adaptive Surfaces Group. Among his lab's many research projects was one of particular interest to Raphael: an experimental technique for using microfluidic devices (devices capable of precisely manipulating very small amounts of liquid) to create windows that can automatically adapt to changing climate conditions. By pumping liquid into tiny channels between a sandwiched pair of window panes, Hatton's research group believed it might be possible to change the thermal properties of the glass.

For their thesis project, Raphael and Kevin decided to work together on developing a different type of fluid-filled window for use in architecture. Hatton's research is often inspired by biological forms and processes. Raphael and Kevin decided to pursue a similar tack. They became interested in krill, tiny crustaceans that live in oceans around the world. Certain species of krill react to intense sunlight by changing the colours of their exoskeletons. Under high magnification, the change is obvious: tiny orange pockets in a krill's chitinous skin expand and expand until the krill, initially almost completely transparent, takes on the pinkish colour of cooked shrimp. The pinkish pigment blocks the sun's ultraviolet rays, protecting the krill's internal organs from radiation damage.

The exoskeleton of a krill, from Raphael and Kevin's project presentation. They sourced these images from a study published in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

Raphael and Kevin wanted to take that basic mechanism — a skin that deploys a layer of protective pigment to ward off excessive sunlight — and put it on a building. “Building skin should be designed like animal skin,” Raphael says. "We think we can scale biology architecturally."

Over many months of collaborative work, they modified a working prototype of Charlie Katrycz’s (a PhD student within the Functional and Adaptive Surfaces Group, who had spent a decade developing systems of the kind in which Raphael and Kevin were interested). This prototype window consisted of two layers of plexiglass. They suspended small amounts of liquid, like oil or molasses, in between the two layers. Then, using a piece of tubing, they pumped a small amount of a thinner material, like water or air, into the pocket between the plexiglass panes. Because the two materials in the middle of this plexiglass sandwich had different levels of viscosity, their interaction produced a snowflake-like, spreading pattern. The effect is known, in materials science, as "viscous fingering." Raphael also learned about the fingering phenomenon from Charlie. The results were very reminiscent of the spots on the krill.

A demonstration of viscous fingering between panes of glass, from Raphael and Kevin's project presentation, first designed by Charlie Katrycz. The dark areas are molasses, and the light areas are air.

Raphael and Kevin demonstrated, through their testing, that a technique like this one can produce windows with a built-in ability to adjust the amount of light passing through them, just like the exoskeleton of a krill. A light-blocking liquid — for example, water suffused with reflective titanium dioxide — can be pumped between the window panes to reduce light exposure, and then that liquid can be withdrawn to increase light exposure. Raphael has recently received another NSERC Undergraduate Student Research Award, and will use that funding to continue working with the Department of Materials Science and Engineering on related research.

Raphael and Kevin are hoping to co-author two peer-reviewed publications about their work, one for a science journal and one for an architecture journal*. "There needs to be a lot more testing, and a lot more data collection before we get there," Kevin says. "It's going to be a substantial amount of work."

*Note: Journal of Building Engineering published their work in 2022.

Saige Michel

Saige was interested in the relationship between young children, environmental education, and architecture. "The younger children are when they're exposed to environmental education, the bigger the impact on them later in life," she says.

Her thesis project, titled "Non-Anthropocentric Ways of Learning," consisted of a series of designs for primary-school learning environments. Each environment was intended to instil an early respect for nature in young students.

"I went fairly deep into the pedagogy of environmental education," Saige says. "Specifically in a physical sense, because that's what architecture is able to help with."

She decided to design her learning environments along four different themes: atmosphere (air), biosphere (plants and animals), hydrosphere (water), and lithosphere (rock). By representing all these different types of natural elements in her classroom spaces, she hoped to create a learning experience that would be representative of the earth's diverse landscapes.

Saige ended up designing 20 different learning environments. For each one, she meticulously hand-crafted a 16-by-16 centimetre scale model out of foam core, museum board, and other materials. She decided not to use laser cutters or 3D printers. "When you fabricate something on a machine, like a laser cutter, to a certain extent you need to have already finished your design," Saige says. "By hand-building, I found that I was able to change the design as I went along."

Saige's learning environments are subtle; her version of environmental pedagogy is not heavy-handed. One of her designs, which she calls "Boulder Threshold," is a cluster of large rocks that bridges the inside and outside of a school building, allowing children to gain an intimate familiarity with natural stone.

A rendering and model of "Boulder Threshold."

Another learning environment, "Untamed Forest," is exactly what it sounds like: a wilderness area where children can engage in unstructured learning about plants and animals:

Saige envisioned her 20 different learning environments being used as a toolkit of sorts: educators could deploy them as necessary, in mix-and-match fashion, on school grounds. Here's a rendering she created of what that might look like:

In this image, Saige's various design interventions are used in conjunction, to form a continuous learning area.

Joyce Sandoval

Early on in her thesis research, Joyce became interested in the Academy for Global Citizenship, a charter school located in the southwest Chicago neighbourhood of LeClaire Courts. The school was preparing to break ground on a new facility — a modern new building designed by Studio Gang.

As a student in the architecture program's history and theory stream, Joyce was fascinated by the history of LeClaire Courts. The neighbourhood was built in the middle of the 20th century as a public housing project. Then, about a decade ago, its housing units were largely demolished for redevelopment. Residents were scattered across the city. They were promised that they would be able to return to LeClaire Courts eventually, once the redevelopment process was complete. In this politically fraught context, The Academy for Global Citizenship has become a source of controversy. Some former residents of LeClaire Courts who were displaced for redevelopment see the school's expansion plans as a colonial-style incursion on land that used to be theirs.

Joyce decided to focus her thesis on developing design proposals for the future of LeClaire Courts. Her goal was to use her skills as a designer to speculate on ways of healing the neighbourhood's political divides — especially the divide between public housing residents and their new, more affluent neighbours.

While researching the neighbourhood, Joyce reached out to local experts. She spoke on the phone with a journalist who has covered LeClaire Courts, and with a representative of the CHA, Chicago's public housing authority. She visited Chicago twice, first on a group trip with other Daniels Faculty undergraduate thesis students, and then on her own, so she could spend time in the LeClaire Courts area and meet with locals. She held a stakeholder meeting with the principal of the Academy for Global Citizenship, neighbourhood residents, and community activists.

Her final project was a website, in which she detailed the history of LeClaire Courts and presented a series of speculative drawings. The drawings illustrate a vision, based on Joyce's discussions with stakeholders, of how the neighbourhood might address its many political and economic fault lines in years to come.

One thing Joyce heard repeatedly from stakeholders was that the neighbourhood lacked a grocery store. This drawing imagines a future in which the neighbourhood's food supply is secure:

This drawing imagines the Academy for Global Citizenship's current building — which will be vacant after the school moves into its new facility — being transformed into a community workshop:

Joyce also imagined parts of the former Academy building being transformed into a community kitchen:

"This school year took me out of my comfort zone," Joyce says. "I got to do different things that weren't architecture related. I got to build a website from scratch. I got to hold a stakeholder meeting. I got to travel to Chicago and do site observations. It definitely informed what I want to do in the future. I want to do urban design, ultimately."

Welcome to our new cohort of undergraduate students coming this fall. The Daniels Faculty has a long and distinguished 125-plus year history. There have been other times when we have had to cope with unpredictable circumstances. Our past and our present are replete with stories of our students, faculty, and staff rallying together for the greater good. Together with our faculty, undergraduate students in our Architectural Studies program have assembled some of those moments in the video above. You will also see previews of some of the exciting things you will be engaged in as a Daniels student.

We look forward to meeting everyone soon.

Jeannie Kim, Undergraduate Director, HBA Architectural Studies

Drew Adams (MArch 2011), at the age of 35, has already had a distinguished career in the nine years since he graduated from the Daniels Faculty. Now he has something else: the 2020 Emerging Architect Award, from the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada.

The award, formerly known as the "Young Architect Award," is given each year to a young architect who has demonstrated excellence in design, leadership, or service to the profession. Adams sees the win as a heartening vote of confidence in his career path, which has focused mostly on design for nonprofit clients. "What stands out to me is that it affirms a type of community-focused work that is too often under-recognized," Adams says. "More than ever, I'm optimistic about community-impact work and what we can still achieve together through collective action."

Adams is currently an associate at LGA Architectural Partners, where he has worked for the past seven years. He was the project architect for LGA's Evergreen Brick Works' Future Cities Centre, a former kiln building that now serves as a multifunctional event space. The project is known as one of Toronto's best and most prominent examples of adaptive reuse.

The Evergreen Brick Works' Future Cities Centre. Photograph by James Morely/A-Frame.

Adams also had a leading role in creating LGA's design for Eva's Phoenix, a transitional housing centre for homeless youth, located in downtown Toronto. The building's 10 townhouse-style units provide a supportive environment for young people who need a safe, temporary place to live, learn, and recover from trauma.

The RAIC jury noted Adams's frequent conference appearances and university guest lectures, as well the quality of his design work.

The jury writes: "Drew’s work displayed an impressive commitment to the benefits of material research, technical explorations of building systems, energy modelling, and daylight studies all in the service of designing and building a more inclusive living environment for those most in need in our communities."

Adams received the 2011 Irving Grossman Prize for his final thesis on innovative and sustainable housing design. Before entering the Daniels Faculty's Master of Architecture program, he graduated from the University of Waterloo, with a bachelor's degree in urban planning.

The COVID-19 pandemic has abruptly transformed university life, turning what used to be an intensely communal experience into a marathon of videoconference calls and work from home. As part of a series of "field notes on pandemic teaching" in Places Journal, associate professor Jesse LeCavalier and assistant professor Fadi Masoud have written some reflections on what it all means.

A screenshot of an online meeting of Fadi Masoud's section of "LAN1022: Visual Communications." The work shown is by student Elva Hu.

Masoud writes that, despite the evident downsides, the pandemic has led to some unexpected opportunities for creative growth:

"In my thesis studio, there is a real sense of grief that capstone projects won’t be celebrated through reviews and exhibitions. But in the other course I’m teaching — an intro to visual communication for first-year masters students — we are practicing core skills that will be relevant throughout the students’ careers. Now there is greater emphasis on constructing narrative. Often student presentations are put together at the last minute, with an unrehearsed script that presents a lackluster 'biography' of a project (first I did this, then I did that). But the new reality compels better storytelling, and so we are taking inspiration from how filmmakers and literary artists arrange and synthesize information."

(Read the rest here.)

LeCavalier, meanwhile, worries that the shift to distance learning will set a harmful precedent:

"In this unsettling new context, the shift to remote instruction could well be exploited by universities to package and promote the targeted distribution and discrete 'delivery' of courses as a new kind of educational service or branded product. So we need to be vigilant — to be wary of any effort to normalize this 'pivot.' Large lecture courses might — might — survive a change of platform. Back in the old days, a couple of months ago, I’d gaze out at the 200 or so students in my lecture class; all were looking intently at their screens, energetically typing notes (at least that is what I told myself) even as I was searching for the best ways to connect with them, either individually or collectively. While streaming platforms and communication channels create new opportunities for sharing, they also promote the isolated and individualized consumption of educational 'content.'”

(Read the rest here.)

The rest of the "field notes" series can be found on the Places Journal website. It includes contributions from instructors in architecture and design programs around the world, including Columbia GSAPP, the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, the Bartlett School of Architecture, Taubman College, the Pratt Institute School of Architecture, and others.

Top image: the work-from-home setup of Daniels Faculty lecturer Hans Ibelings.