During this past academic year, a few Daniels Faculty undergraduates were participants in the first-ever School of Cities Multidisciplinary Urban Capstone Project, a full-year design program in which students from different disciplines work together on a complex project for a government or nonprofit client. The program is a chance for students to learn firsthand about the complexities of delivering a real-world design project in an urban context.

Six Daniels students worked with students from other university departments on four different design projects for four different clients. Below, some details on two of those projects, the students who worked on them, and what they learned in the process.

(If you're a Daniels Faculty student entering your fourth year of undergraduate architecture studies and you'd like to apply to participate in next year's Multidisciplinary Urban Capstone Project program, see the School of Cities website for details. To undertake a School of Cities capstone project, students must first have applied to — and been accepted into — the Daniels Faculty undergraduate thesis program.)

Ghalia Alchibani Alnahlawi and Lucas Siemucha

The School of Cities placed Ghalia and Lucas, both architecture undergrads, in a work group with Jonathan Mo, a senior at Rotman Commerce. Their client was John Lyon, a senior city planner who acts as a liaison between the city of Toronto and public school boards.

Lyon's problem had to do with schoolyards: because of a lack of funding and limited maintenance staff, many schools around the city struggle to keep their outdoor spaces safe and pleasant for students and teachers. Some schools also have difficulty figuring out how — and to what extent — to allow people from surrounding communities to make use of school-owned outdoor spaces when class isn't in session. Ghalia, Lucas, and Jonathan were tasked with studying these problems and coming up with a suite of solutions that could be applied throughout the city.

The three students approached their task like professionals. They attended monthly meetings with Lyon and representatives from the Toronto District School Board and the Toronto Catholic District School Board. After getting a sense of the client's needs, they selected four specific schools to use as case studies. They visited those schools and conducted questionnaires with leadership figures at each one.

They discovered some unexpected obstacles. "Funding is a huge issue," Lucas says. "School boards don't have enough money to put new equipment in the schoolyards or repave them. Some schools actually do get some funding from parent councils, whereas there are high-needs schools that don't gain enough support."

Through research and consultation, the students refined their problem down to a series of key priorities that needed to be addressed at each school: safety, cost efficiency, sustainability, community engagement, student learning, and opportunities for public-private partnerships.

Next, the students spent some time thinking about design solutions that could help schools achieve those priorities in their outdoor spaces. They developed a guidebook of ideas — a sort of toolbox full of design solutions that they could apply as necessary, depending on the needs of a specific school.

With Jonathan focusing on funding, financing, and third-party outreach, Ghalia and Lucas set about tackling the design component of the project. For each of their four case-study schools, they developed a detailed design proposal.

A site plan, showing trees used as a natural perimeter at Chalkfarm Public School.

One of the group's case studies was Chalkfarm Public School, in North York. The school's administration expressed concern about the safety of the schoolyard, which is open to the surrounding neighbourhood. Ghalia and Lucas suggested using rows of trees to create a natural perimeter around the yard, which would add some privacy without the cost or unsightliness of a fence. The trees, they suggested, could be sourced at low cost from a partner organization, like the Highway of Heroes Tree Campaign.

In order to enhance community engagement at the school, Ghalia and Lucas suggested adding planters to an existing outdoor play area. The planters would become the basis of a community garden, which could be used as a pedagogical resource. A few trusted members of the public would be able to volunteer in the garden, and a lockable gate would keep strangers away, ensuring the safety of young students.

Ghalia and Lucas's combined play area/community garden.

They delivered their final design guidelines and case studies to their client at the end of the academic year. Now it will be up to the city government and the school boards to decide how to implement the students' recommendations. Regardless of whether their designs are implemented, Ghalia and Lucas say the learning experience was worthwhile.

"This project was eye-opening," Ghalia says. "I learned a lot about urban design and landscape, which are very new to me. And it was really interesting to work on something that could potentially make a change for people."

Sara Ghorban Pour and Evan Guan

Sara and Evan, both architecture undergrads, teamed up with Sarika Navanathan, a student at the Rotman School of Management, to take on an urban design challenge on a (much) smaller scale.

Their client was the city of Toronto's urban planning division. For the past 30 years, the urban planning division has maintained a scale model of Toronto's downtown core. The model is large — it's 1:1250 scale — and it's on permanent display in the rotunda of Toronto's city hall, where it's frequently seen by tourists and dignitaries.

Maintaining the display has been a problem for the city's urban planners. The model is composed of thousands of handmade miniature buildings. Because the process of creating and adding new miniatures is so laborious, and because the city has transitioned to using digital models for most planning purposes, the scale model has rarely been updated over the past three decades, even as Toronto has added countless new tall towers and experienced considerable change to its neighbourhoods and street grid. The scale model is now badly out of date.

The scale model, in the city hall rotunda.

Sara, Evan, and Sarika were given the job of figuring out a way to revive the scale model without spending an inordinate amount of taxpayer dollars. The client was also interested in developing a plan to engage outside organizations in the model's upkeep.

While Sarika worked on the community partnership aspect of the project, Sara and Evan set about figuring out how to physically upgrade the model and bring it up to date. It soon occurred to them that model-making technology has progressed considerably in the three decades since the scale model was originally built. They decided that their design solution would take advantage of modern 3D printing.

Every 3D-printed model starts as a digital file — a 3D computer object that the 3D printer replicates in some kind of physical material, like plastic or starch. Sara and Evan needed to figure out a way of gathering those digital files for hundreds of new buildings that had sprouted in downtown Toronto in the years since the scale model last received a comprehensive update.

They found a solution in the city of Toronto's "open data" portal, a website where ordinary citizens can download large sets of municipal data, like building permit records and 311 logs.

Among the open data provided by the city is a vast repository of so-called "3D massing" files — digital 3D models of city buildings. The files are accurate, up-to-date representations of the shapes of the city's newer structures — but they're not ideal for 3D printing. They have a number of technical formatting inconsistencies that would interfere with a normal printing process — and, to complicate matters even further, they're solid masses. (The cost and duration of a 3D printing process is determined by the amount of material to be printed, so it's cheaper and faster to print a hollow object.) Sara and Evan devised a process for taking the massing files, cleaning them up, hollowing them out, and resizing them to the proper scale.

Massing models.

Their next step was figuring out who, exactly, would be doing all this 3D printing. The city doesn't have the resources — but, the students realized, the Daniels Faculty does. The Daniels Bulding's Digital Fabrication Labratory has 3D printers capable of extruding durable ABS plastic, an ideal material for long-lasting architectural models.

The group's final proposal was a partnership between the city's urban planning division and the Daniels Faculty, in which architecture students would earn course credit for using the Faculty's 3D printers to help update the scale model. (The city and the Daniels Faculty have not yet responded to this proposal.)

For Sara and Evan, the project was a welcome opportunity to expand their horizons.

"It was less creative than what we usually do at Daniels," Sara says, "but it was actually more work, because you have to research a lot more, and you have to convince your client. It was a great opportunity for us to experience this kind of work."

"Normally at Daniels we focus on one building, our own design," Evan says. "This time we were working with digital massing data the size of the entire city. It was a breath of fresh air."

New Circadia — the inaugural installation in the Daniels Building's new Architecture and Design Gallery — is closed for the moment, while the Daniels Faculty takes part in the necessary COVID-19 response.

But even while closed, New Circadia's relaxing, cavelike environs are finding new admirers in the design community, thanks to an article by Daniels Faculty dean Richard Sommer, out now in the latest issue of Canadian Architect.

Dean Sommer co-curated and designed New Circadia with New York–based designers Natalie Fizer and Emily Stevenson. In his Canadian Architect story, he explains the rationale behind the installation. He writes:

The modern university evolved from the religious cloister. The new subterranean Architecture and Design Gallery had a brutal, uncanny beauty to it. For the gallery’s inaugural installation, I thought, what about staging a radical play on the cloister-as-cave?

The result is New Circadia (adventures in mental spelunking) [...] The installation is modelled loosely on Dr. Nathaniel Kleitman’s 1938 Mammoth Cave experiment (the first scientific study of human circadian rhythm) and the Greek abaton (the sequestered ritual-sleeping temple at the origins of the modern hospital). New Circadia is a soft utopia created from CNC-milled plywood, mesh, and 1,850 square metres of grey felt, with integrated sound works, dim circadian lighting, and Oneiroi (a dream recording station) — all fabricated in-house with colleagues at the Daniels Faculty.

Read the rest of the dean's story on Canadian Architect's website.

LAMAS, an architecture studio co-founded by Daniels Faculty associate professor Wei-Han Vivian Lee and lecturer James Macgillivray, has built a stellar reputation on the strength of projects like its Townships Farmhouse and its recent revamp of Avling Kitchen and Brewery.

Now, Domus, an influential architecture and design magazine based in Italy, has named LAMAS one of the year's best architecture firms.

LAMAS was one of 50 practices named on Domus's 2020 best-firms list. The jury of international experts who vetted the contenders selected just one other Canadian firm for inclusion: Winnipeg's 5468796 Architecture.

Avling Kitchen and Brewery. Photograph by Felix Michaud.

Domus praised LAMAS for exemplifying "the trend among architects to distance themselves from the pure formal work that preceded them throughout the course of the past century in order to concentrate on issues that are now central in architectural design, namely materials and finishes."

(Anyone interested in learning more about LAMAS can check out Lee and Macgillivray's recent interview with The Architect's Newspaper.)

Social distancing is hard for architects. Studios and reviews are inherently social, and design work often requires the use of bulky tools — like 3D printers and laser cutters — that most students and practitioners don't have in their homes. With the University of Toronto in online-only mode for the foreseeable future, Daniels Faculty instructors and students have had to find ways of taking all that in-person creative energy and fitting it into the confines of their computer screens.

As always, the Daniels community has risen to the challenge.

For "The Pleasure of Ruins: The Allure of the Incomplete — Drawing as Thesis" (ARC3016), a graduate research studio with an associated thesis prep component, associate professor John Shnier took students on a trip to Rome, as he does every year. This year, as the group was preparing to head back to Toronto, there were news reports of a coronavirus outbreak in northern Italy. The group made it back safely, but soon afterward the university cancelled all in-person classes.

After some deliberation with his students, Shnier moved the studio's meetings and reviews to Blackboard, an online learning platform. Students now show their work using screen-sharing, and the class discusses the work using Blackboard's videoconferencing features. "We did an interim review two weeks ago," says Shnier. "We invited two guest reviewers, and it worked out to be pretty good."

Even before COVID-19, Shnier was a prolific Instagrammer of his students' work — but now, with in-person reviews suspended, he has redoubled his efforts to put student work online. His Instagram feed is currently full of videos made by students in response to some of the architectural inspiration they picked up during the Rome trip. (The ghostly, holographic effect is a result of Shnier's method of adding the videos to Instagram, which involves pointing his phone's camera at his computer monitor.)

This one is by Enica Deng:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Kohn Shnier Architects (@kohnshnierarchitects) on Mar 29, 2020 at 3:13pm PDT

And this one is by Steven Chen:

View this post on Instagram

#distancelearning continued with #architecturestudent #films for #drawingssthesis with @stevenchen_yc rumination in #filters and #lenses @uoftdaniels

A post shared by Kohn Shnier Architects (@kohnshnierarchitects) on Mar 29, 2020 at 2:07pm PDT

...

In assistant professor Adrian Phiffer's undergraduate course, "Reality and its Representation" (ARC465), some students have taken the shift to internet-based coursework into their own hands.

The course is heavily focused on readings. Before the pandemic, student groups would give presentations on their assigned readings in front of the class. Post-COVID, a different approach was required.

Students Thomas Buckland, Sara Ghorbanpour, Sam Shahsavani, Lucas Siemucha, Peter Dowhaniuk, and Stuart Thomson decided to create an Instagram account with videos of their reading presentations. That way, their classmates would be able to access the discussion from their home computers and respond in the comments on each Instagram post.

Here's one of the group's videos, featuring Lucas Siemucha and Thomas Buckland:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by BigFlatNow (@bigflatnow) on Mar 23, 2020 at 5:00pm PDT

The use of Instagram dovetailed nicely with the week's readings, which were on the theme of "flatness" — the non-hierarchical, decentralized way information travels online. "Anyone with an interest can access and hear these presentations," Phiffer says. "I think there's a benefit to that. Plus, the students came up with, for lack of a better word, 'cool' ways of making the presentation, given the medium."

...

Phiffer's class isn't the only one learning to love Instagram's distance-learning capabilities. Assistant professor Petros Babasikas' undergraduate course, "History of Housing: Crisis, Visions, Commonplace" (ARC354) has been using the medium to its fullest. Groups of students have been posting elaborate photomosaics of their work — like this one, by Ozlem Bektas, Nicole Zohorsky, Patricia Prieto, Trumon Tse, Kenzie Burke, and Christopher Schaefer:

Each student group was tasked with imagining what it would be like if a seminal work of 20th century architecture from elsewhere in the world were to be built in Toronto, in the present day.

Here's Casa Bloc (the real structure, by architect Josep Lluis Sert, is in Barcelona). Work by Tasneem Murtaza, Vinati Kokal, Amelie Liu, Anna Jasinska, Catherine Joung, and Franklin Tang:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Casa Bloc Toronto (@casabloctoronto) on Mar 29, 2020 at 10:59am PDT

And another one from the group that did the mosaic, above. Their assignment was the Jeanne Hachette Complex (Jean Renaudie, Paris):

View this post on Instagram

The Jeanne Hachette Complex will be a place for people to breathe in open space and greenery. #whatiftoronto #historyofhousing #designfiction #uoftdaniels #toronto #visions #crises #commonplace @uoftdaniels @petrosbabasikas

A post shared by Mountainous Insurgence (@mountainousinsurgence) on Mar 29, 2020 at 1:44pm PDT

This isn't the first time professor Babasikas has asked his History of Housing students to create work on Instagram, but it's the first time he has done so in the midst of nationwide school closures and social distancing. "Our current lockdown, ongoing virtual coursework, and isolation within our respective living quarters make it especially relevant," he says.

Architects aren't used to social distancing. The field is collaborative, with an emphasis on close-quarters work in open studios. Drew Sinclair, a sessional lecturer at the Daniels Faculty and managing principal of SvN Architects and Planners, wrote for Toronto Storeys about some of the challenges (and successes) he has encountered as he has shifted his practice to a work-from-home routine in order to mitigate COVID-19 risks.

Drew writes:

Is it working? In some ways, yes. We have found early success using Google hangouts for working sessions, Jamboard for collective drawing (while also sending trace paper and pens to staff who need it at home). We’ve implemented a communication rhythm, mimicking our typical office habits, starting with a Partner huddle every morning, immediately cascading into various project team huddles. We also brought our usual all-staff social and status meetings online from the Weekly Forum to "The Kitchen" — a new digital environment that simulates the daily lunch crush in our office each day at noon.

But we are still finding our footing in other areas, presumably the same issues many creative workplaces are experiencing. We need to rely on the imperfect infrastructure of our homes. The situation in the world has disallowed us from addressing or changing the shortcomings of internet service or physical environment, so our key staff are having to make do. Sometimes with great impacts on productivity (and morale!!). Our methods of managing the work and flowing tasks from our project leads through to our professional teams, is evolving slowly as we figure out ways of reproducing the efficiency of a list written or pinned to the wall. There are digital tools to help with this but it’s hard transferring something that happens so naturally in our physical space to something we have to diligently monitor ourselves and translate into a set of digital behaviours. And lastly, the learning environment and constant exchange of ideas, described above, has not yet been perfectly replicated in the new online environment we’re working in, but we’re definitely "Doing our F*cking Best."

Read the full story on Toronto Storeys.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, during the University of Toronto's mid-February reading week, a handful of Daniels Faculty students accompanied associate professor Aziza Chaouni on a trip to Dakar, capital of the West African nation of Senegal. There, they linked up with an international crew of students from the University of Zaragoza, the Collège Universitaire d'Architecture de Dakar, and the Université Polytechnique G5 of Dakar. The group's mission was to spend one week participating in a workshop, in which they would study the Centre International du Commerce Exterieur du Senegal (CICES), a 19-hectare fairground and convention centre that some consider a modern masterpiece.

CICES was designed in the early 1970s by French architects Jean-François Lamoureux and Jean-Louis Marin. The facility was originally intended to be an expression of the aesthetic ideals of Senegal, which had achieved independence from France just a decade prior. According to Chaouni, Léopold Sedar Senghor, Senegal's first president, personally participated in the design process. The complex's many individual buildings are unified by a common motif: triangular and trapezoidal forms that jut out from rooflines and adorn the sides of exterior walls.

The ensuing decades were not kind to CICES: the complex fell into disrepair, and renovations gradually chipped away at the original design. And then came the coup de grâce: the completion of the Dakar Expo Centre, a new convention centre, which began to compete with CICES and sap it of its remaining clientele.

The purpose of the workshop was to collaborate with local stakeholders to imagine ways of raising awareness of CICES and restoring it to its former modernist glory. The international student group attended lectures, toured the city, met with stakeholders, and worked on-site at CICES before developing detailed preservation proposals, which they presented to a panel of professors, officials, and locals.

Here are a few photos of the Dakar trip, with commentary from Chaouni.

"On our first afternoon in Senegal, we had a tour of modern Dakar, organized by the Collége Universitaire d'Architecture de Dakar," Chaouni says. "Our first stop was The Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar, which has many amazing buildings that were built from the colonial time to after the independence of Senegal. Designed by Henri Chomette, this building is a set of auditoriums accessible by a raised platform."

"When we toured Dakar, we visited a market. This was a street stall selling some African masks. Some of them are representative of divinities. Some are used during religious ceremonies. They have a lot of different uses, and each one is from a different tribe. The angular wood carvings on the masks were a source of inspiration for Senegalese and foreign architects, who strived to express a national identity in their work after independence."

"Here we're at the private residence for the ambassador of Canada to Senegal. He invited us for cocktails. It was the first time he'd welcomed Canadian students. He was very interested in the CICES complex. He had never visited it before. He thanked us for introducing him to the complex and its unique architecture. On the last day of the workshop, we gave him a tour of CICES, and he saw the work of students."

"This is the courtyard of the administrative building in CICES. The landscape is not original. It was added in later years. Most of the other elements of this building are original, though."

"The main auditorium is a glulam structure that spans 28 metres — which, at the time, in the 1970s, was quite a stunning architectural innovation. It originally had 1,200 seats, and it has this incredible drop ceiling made out of wood struts. The middle yellow piece on the ceiling is a recent addition, from 2002. In the original design, the wood struts met and intermingled, which was one of the architectural highlights of the whole complex."

"The 'orange pavilion' is a concrete structure with an open floor plan. Its roofscape is composed of alternating high and low pitch roofs. The floor plan is flexible and can be adjusted depending upon the event being held there."

"When CICES was built, there were seven regions in Senegal. And so CICES has seven regional pavilions, which originally displayed craftwork from each region. Materials characteristic of each region were used on the facades. The reddish stone that you see here is called laterite. The fresco is made of sand and concrete."

"Every morning, we had lectures by invited local architects, international conservation experts, historians, and the staff of CICES. Here, I'm presenting the methodology for the workshop."

"This is the entrance of CICES, but it's not the original entrance. It was changed in 2002. The Daniels students here are Clara Ziada, Tarek Mokhalalati and Emily Lawrason."

"We were given a studio space on-site at CICES. Imagine that you're studying an amazing piece of architecture and you're given a space to work inside of it. It's not that you go, see it, and then go to a school or hotel. You're basically embedded. You really get yourself immersed in the architecture. These Daniels students are Clara Ziada, Diana Franco Camacho, Saif Malhas, Noor Alkhalili, and Tarek Mokhalalati."

"Sadly, this photo shows how decrepit the CICES exhibition halls have become, mainly due to lack of funds and knowledge about modern heritage maintenance and conservation. In 2014, the Senegalese government built a gigantic convention centre outside of the city, which further exacerbated the downfall of CICES. CICES is now forced to rent some of its exhibition halls for rice storage just to make ends meet.

"The workshop allowed architecture and engineering students from Senegal, Spain, and Daniels to share ideas about how safeguarding the original architecture can become a driving force for CICES’s future. Showcased in local news and newspapers, the workshop had a strong impact in Dakar. It has unveiled a possible, exciting future for CICES and raised awareness about the necessity to protect it as a whole."

Photographs by Saif Malhas, Christian Paez Diaz and Noor Alkhalili. Video by Christian Paez Diaz.

Near King and Dufferin streets is a pair of crumbling semi-detached houses where nobody has lived for quite some time. The site is an increasingly rare piece of unoccupied space in the west-end Toronto neighbourhood of Parkdale, where waves of gentrification are transforming what used to be a community of affordable-rental apartment towers and rooming houses into the type of place where raw juice bars outnumber laundromats.

In the fall 2019 semester, for the second iteration of his course "Guided Distractions" (ARC465), sessional lecturer Reza Nik tasked his students with studying those abandoned semis, as well as the neighbourhood around them. The class's semester-long assignment was to use the site as inspiration for a diverse series of creative projects.

Nik became interested in Parkdale last year, when he was working at an architectural firm with offices in the neighbourhood. He got to know some local nonprofits that were working to ensure low-income members of the Parkdale community weren't excluded from the area's increasing prosperity — like the Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust, which is involved in buying and preserving old rooming houses that might otherwise be demolished or converted into single-family dwellings.

"I really wanted to learn from that," Nik says. "I wanted to see how designers can look at the community as an important aspect of the architectural process. My criticism is that generally the community and the people get abstracted. We focus so much on the building itself and the site. As architects and designers, we often choose to be apolitical, or believe it's possible to be."

Nik asked his students to engage in a series of creative experiments. First, they made one-minute short films about the site. The following week, they all wrote poems. Then they made drawings and sculptures before refining all that experimental work into their final design projects.

Students aimed to explore the neighbourhood's issues creatively. The resulting work comments incisively on Parkdale's situation, but without any pretence that design alone can solve all of the intractable problems that come along with economic and social change in a neighbourhood.

Nik was pleased with the results. "I was trying to take the pressure off of design being the thing that will solve everything," he says. "We were learning to think about design as a powerful tool that lets you reflect on and view things through a different lens. And through that process you may be able to find an answer to some issue that's happening."

Here are a few projects from the fall 2019 iteration of Guided Distractions.

(For more images of ARC465 coursework, visit the Guided Distractions Instagram, or buy the book.)

Made by: Emily Lawrason, Pablo Espinal Henao, Christian Paez Diaz, Lucas Siemucha, and George Wang

The image shows a collection of commonplace items from Parkdale — stop signs, barbecues, dumplings, cats — hovering protectively over the area's street grid. "If gentrification and development happens with Parkdale, these important pieces are above it all, so they're not getting destroyed," Nik says. "This piece was taking the concept of everyday objects and putting them above the ongoing issues surrounding gentrification."

Made by: Andrea Sanchez, Vanessa Parodi Silva, Justin Morandin, Jamie Latimer, and Patricia Castaneda Prieto

"This group was dealing with sound and nature," Nik says. "This piece was an experiment in physically expressing the relationships at play between built form, nature, and sound in Parkdale. The white plexiglas forms are about showing sound waves. The concrete is the site, and the green is nature, growing sporadically." (The "concrete" is actually a lightweight material that the students painted.)

Made by: Elizabeth Liao, Angela Gou, Jill Lee, and Larissa Ho

For their final project, this group of students produced a line of unusual, brightly coloured playground equipment intended to address a shortage of community gathering spaces in Parkdale. They built a 1:1 scale model of one of their designs, an orange lounger with a curvy profile. The other structures on display here are reduced-scale models. There's a picnic area that the students called an "ogre's hut" (green), a "novel arch" public bookshelf (red), a "potty pod" public washroom (blue), and some "slice theatre" public performance stages (purple).

"This was one of the projects that really followed through on the group's previous experiments," Nik says. "The end result was something that could be practical. And it was playful. They really had the community in mind throughout the whole process."

Made by: Jasper Chen, Eric Espinosa, Gabrielle Lamanna, and Jennille Neal

This group created a bench, but not an ordinary one. The design had three separate pieces — two cardboard seats and a concrete support block — that would only function as a bench if assembled in a particular way. The piece was intended to symbolize the way Parkdale's community holds the neighbourhood together. "This was one of the most effective conceptual projects," Nik says. "The bench is only functional if it comes together. They were one of the only groups who took their design out to the site. And they photographed it beautifully."

Ontario Place, the former amusement park on Toronto's downtown lakeshore, is currently hosting the third-annual edition of its Winter Light Exhibition, a public art showcase.

The curatorial theme of this year's exhibition is "Cocoon." Daniels Faculty assistant professor Victor Perez-Amado, along with MArch students Anton Skorishchenko, Robert Lee, and Shamim Khedri, banded together to produce their own take on that concept: a glowing sculptural installation that's meant to fool the eye.

Lumina is a tunnel made up of a series of brightly coloured ellipse-like forms, all crafted using equipment in the Daniels Faculty's Digital Fabrication Lab. A hidden system of LED black lights illuminates the surfaces of the ellipses, causing them to glow with an iridescent pinkish light. When a visitor walks up to the installation and peers inside, the interior geometry appears to shift and rearrange itself as they view it from different perspectives. The effect is like being enveloped in a tiny world — a cocoon.

A first-person view of Lumina's interior.

This isn't the first time the Daniels Faculty has been represented at the Winter Light Exhibition. Last year, a group of MArch students, including Skorishchenko and Lee, created an installation called Obscura.

Lumina will remain on view at this year's Winter Light Exhibition until March 29. For details and hours, visit the Ontario Place website.

Photographs by Yasmin Al-Samarrai.

On Thursday evening, the main hall at the Daniels Building was full to capacity. Throughout the crowd, people were chattering excitedly in American Sign Language. The evening's guest of honour was Christine Sun Kim, a multimedia artist whose work frequently draws inspiration from deafness and deaf identity.

Kim was born deaf, and she often uses sound as an artistic medium. This isn't as paradoxical as it seems. Game of Skill 2.0, an installation she staged at MoMA PS1, was an interactive system in which museum visitors could hear a story read aloud from an electronic device, but only by maintaining physical contact between a sensor-equipped probe and an elevated strip of velcro. (It's easier to understand if you just watch the video.) The awkwardness of the arrangement made it necessary for visitors to acquire a skill in order to hear the story — and that was precisely the point. Kim has created lullabies and operas. Even when she does visual art, it often explores ideas about the way sound behaves in the world — like her famous pie charts, which cleverly quantify the irritations of navigating a hearing-oriented world as a deaf person.

Her work is starting to become better known. A giant mural of hers hung on the outside of the Whitney Museum in 2018. Earlier this month, she sang The Star-Spangled Banner and America the Beautiful in sign language at the Super Bowl — then wrote a New York Times op-ed in which she critiqued Fox's decision not to air the majority of her performance.

During her appearance at the Daniels Building, which was part of the Daniels Faculty's "Hindsight is 20/20" public programming series, Kim presented a multimedia piece of performance art called Spoken on My Behalf. The work consisted of three large video projection screens that displayed white captions on plain, black backgrounds. As the captions flashed by, they began to accrete into an essay about what it's like for Kim to rely on family, friends, and acquaintances to speak for her in social situations. The experience, she seemed to suggest, can be both frustrating and liberating.

The hall was darkened, and the performance was silent, except for occasional recorded voices saying the kinds of things that deaf people sometimes ask (or don't ask) others to say for them: "She'll have a pilsner." "She needs to go the bathroom." Each time one of those voices spoke, Kim would step into a lighted area on the stage and gesture along. The nature of the complex relationship between the artist and her many surrogate voices was left to the audience to contemplate.

Here are a few photos from the night.

Many members of the audience were deaf, so dean Richard Sommer's introductory speech was interpreted into American Sign Language:

A trio of projection screens displayed captions and images, making the performance equally accessible to deaf and non-deaf audience members:

The only sounds were occasional recorded voices that seemed to be speaking for — or through — Kim. The sound captions on the upper screen were mostly drawn from TV shows Kim had watched, and weren't referencing actual sounds in the room. (There were no seagulls squawking when this photo was taken.)

Without signing a word, Kim eloquently communicated some of the frustration that is part and parcel of negotiating differences in communication style:

After the performance, she gave an artist talk in which she showed slides of some of her other work. As Kim signed, an interpreter voiced her for hearing audience members:

During a Q&A session, a few audience members posed their questions in sign language:

And at the end of the presentation, the audience applauded in sign language:

Photographs by Harry Choi.

Toronto's condos are tiny, and they're only getting tinier. As of 2017, according to Statistics Canada, the median size of a condominium apartment in Ontario was just 665 square feet, about one third smaller than similar units built in the 1980s and 1990s.

Recently, the builders of a new south Etobicoke condo tower called Reina — a partnership between Urban Capital and Spotlight Development — announced a student competition aimed at getting young designers to think about new ways of using the very limited amount of living space inside a typical condo. The competition brief called on student entrants to devise innovative, space-saving designs for condo interiors and tower amenity spaces.

Late last week, Reina's project team announced the winners of the competition's $2,500 grand prize: Keenan Ngo and Ozyka Videlia, a pair of Daniels Faculty students.

Keenan Ngo and Ozyka Videlia.

Ngo and Videlia met this summer, during a two-week workshop at the Daniels Faculty. Ngo is in the first year of his Master of Architecture studies, and Videlia is a second-year architecture undergrad. The pair quickly became friends. When Videlia learned about the competition, she asked Ngo to team up with her, and he agreed.

"I've dabbled in tiny houses," Ngo says. "So this was a point of interest."

The two designers began by trying to pinpoint the things about apartments that had annoyed or inconvenienced them in the past.

"In typical condos, the ratio between the kitchen and the living room is nonsense to me," Videlia says. "The kitchen will be really small and the living room will be huge, and the cabinetry is very small." They also had issues with the cramped layouts in condo bathrooms.

After some deliberation, they decided to focus their efforts on those two spaces.

For their kitchen, their first innovation was a system of cabinets that could slide up or down on the wall, in order to enable the condo's occupant to access upper shelves without need for a stool. They envisioned built-in counterweights to ensure that the cabinets could travel smoothly up and down, with hidden catches to lock the assembly in place at the desired height.

Ngo and Videlia also came up with a solution for a problem that has vexed many condo owners: kitchen counter space. Rather than a permanent, full-sized breakfast bar, they devised a skinny bar top that could fold away, accordion-style, into the wall of the unit. The condo's occupant could fold out the bar when it was needed, and then stash it to clear up precious floor space.

Ngo and Videlia's prize-winning bathroom design.

For their bathroom design, Ngo and Videlia came up with a floor plan that allows for a tub, a separate shower, and a partitioned-off toilet-and-sink area, all within a 40-square-foot envelope. The door to the bathroom is a wooden screen, inspired by Ngo's travels in Japan.

This was Ngo and Videlia's first-ever entry in a student design competition, and their first win. "It put a big smile on our faces," Ngo says.

And they weren't the only Daniels Faculty students to win honours in Reina's competition. Ivy Chan and Wesley Fong, a pair of MArch students at the Faculty, were named semi-finalists for their kitchen and bathroom designs. They won $500.

Top image: Ngo and Videlia's prize-winning kitchen design.