Architect Jerome Markson graduated from the University of Toronto's architecture program in 1953 and went on to a six-decade-long career designing modern structures throughout the city, including private homes, social housing, and cultural and institutional buildings.

Now, Daniels Faculty associate professor Laura Miller has curated "A Quite Individual Course: Jerome Markson, Architect," a new public exhibition on Markson's work. The exhibition, currently on view in the Daniels Building's Larry Wayne Richards Gallery, coincides with the release of Miller's new book, Toronto's Inclusive Modernity: The Architecture of Jerome Markson, which traces Markson's career against Toronto's emergence as a global city. (It's available at the University of Toronto bookstore.)

The exhibition opened Wednesday night with a reception attended by hundreds of guests, including Markson and his wife, Mayta. "A Quite Individual Course" will remain on view in the Larry Wayne Richards Gallery until March 13.

Here are a few photos from opening night.

Jerome and Mayta Markson at the book-signing table:

Jerome and Mayta Markson with dean Richard Sommer, associate professor Laura Miller, and professor emeritus George Baird:

And a few more from the evening:

Photographs by Harry Choi.

As Master of Architecture student Christian Huizenga gets ready to defend his thesis project at the Daniels Faculty, he's simultaneously putting the finishing touches on an extracurricular architectural feat.

In 2018, Huizenga and his brother, Aaron, entered a competition to design a multi-use pavilion for Tait Waterfront Park, a new public green space located on the south bank of the Fraser River, in Richmond, British Columbia. Theirs was one of 19 submissions. A few months later, following a juried selection process, they found out that they had won. Richmond city council soon approved a $130,000 budget for design and construction.

The pavilion's design references the nearby river, with an undulating aluminum roof. "It draws on vernacular architecture in the area," Huizenga says. "And also on formal notions of movement of water. The roof structure is a series of wave-like figures coming together. It all funnels into a native garden that will surround it."

The design was strongly influenced by Huizenga's graduate studies at the Daniels Faculty. "Because of my comprehensive studio, I was pretty excited about trusses and the merging of timber with structural steel," he says. "This project utilizes some very unique Vierendeel trusses that connect to Douglas fir structural rafters."

"And I've learned a lot of technical skills at Daniels. Before coming here, I had not really used 3D modelling software. This project was completely designed digitally."

Photo: Huizenga at work, at Fabrikaat Custom Fabrication.

Huizenga is now making periodic trips to the west coast to help fabricate the pavilion at Fabrikaat Custom Fabrication, his brother's Vancouver-based metal shop. The in-house fabrication process puts him in complete creative control, and it's also less expensive than contracting out the carpentry and metalwork, meaning he'll be able to realize his complex roof design without exceeding the city's budget.

The pavilion is scheduled for completion in July.

To view more of Huizenga's work, visit his website.

Architecture education isn't always about designing buildings. Students at the Daniels Faculty are frequently asked to expand their imaginations beyond bricks and mortar, often with surprisingly beautiful results. That was the case last semester, when sessional lecturer Andrew Bako led fourth-year undergraduates through the first-ever iteration of his design course, Lazy Computing (ARC465).

Bako, a recent graduate of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, joined the Daniels Faculty as a part-time instructor in 2019. (He's also an intern architect at Adamson Associates, where he's working on the firm's high-profile CIBC Square project.) With Lazy Computing, he wanted to make students think about and critique the way architecture is defined by digital drafting tools, which he contends promote a kind of "laziness" (hence the course title) by greatly easing the design process. Bako also wanted students to reflect on the internet's rampant image culture — particularly the way social media overwhelms architectural practitioners with unfiltered information about new styles and trends.

"One of the major criteria for success in the course was whether or not students were able to make a cohesive argument," Bako says. "Each piece of their work had to have some kind of conceptual clarity." The best projects, according to Bako, also had an element of timeliness about them. To succeed, students needed to develop real-time responses to the rapidly changing world around them.

Bako divided his students into teams of two or three, then began assigning them readings that covered various contemporary design-theory topics. The readings served as inspiration for a trio of design projects over the course of the semester. Students were free to create drawings, physical models, or computer animations.

The resulting student projects are visually striking, whimsical, and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny. Here are few of them, with commentary from Bako.

 
Made by: Alex Tomasi and Marta Zinicheva

"The course was called Lazy Computing, and this project was definitely the 'laziest,'" Bako says. "It's comical and a bit satirical. And there is a certain timeliness to it. The same way Marcel Duchamp would turn a urinal into a piece of high art, Alex and Marta were looking for easily downloadable content on the internet to see if the rapid transmission of files and content could produce a new architectural proposal, and a new aesthetic."

Made by: Amira Babeiti, Jeremy Chow, and Jasper Choi

"This team was trying to manipulate concrete. It was a formal experiment, but also an experiment in how we work back and forth between digital media and the physical environment. They used spray foam insulation as formwork to create this almost grotesque cavelike grotto. At the same time, they were embedding 3D-printed and laser-cut forms into it. They were also 3D scanning the physical model and entering their 3D-scanned point cloud back into the computer and continuing to manipulate it digitally. I found this back-and-forth workflow to be quite successful."

 
Made by: Haadiah Kahn and Yuanrui He

"These students were trying to provide a commentary about the use of augmented reality in architecture. They were tapping into how image culture allows people to comment on almost anything nowadays. Really, the world is your critic."

 
Made by: Noa Wang and Tasneem Shahpurwala

"When I saw this animation, I was floored and delighted. They used images of Toronto to provide a mental image of a city without the actual form of the city. They were trying to capture the cultural zeitgeist of image culture in Toronto through the rapid transmission of images."

 
Made by: Zirong Liu and Shengfang Gao

"These students were inspired by the work of Andrew Kovacs, whose writings we discussed in the course. What they were trying to do was critique the way in which our design software behaves, and the commands that are ingrained within that software, which dictate the way we design. If the cartesian grid system suddenly became unstable rather than acting as a unifying grounding element, what sort of reverberative impact would that have on design?"

Anthony Mattacchione didn't enrol in architecture school intending to make furniture. And yet, his architecture education ended up being excellent preparation for the task.

As a work-study student in the Daniels Faculty's Digital Fabrication Labaratory, the 21-year-old fourth-year undergrad had plenty of time and opportunity to master the use of CNC mills and waterjet cutters — computerized crafting tools that make it possible to cut and shape materials in incredibly precise ways. About a year ago, it occurred to Mattacchione that he could use these tools for things other than coursework.

"I started dabbling, designing my own furniture," he says. "It was a hobby."

Eventually, he developed a way of creating beautiful, minimalist stools and tables using lengths of cantilevered steel. Now, he and his business partner, fellow Daniels undergrad Temi Adeniyi, have entered sales mode. Their furniture design company, which is called Mattacchione, made its public debut earlier this month at this year's Interior Design Show, at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.

The company's initial line of furniture, titled "Inserire," consists of a trio of similarly styled pieces: a side table, a stool, and a coffee table. Each item has a cantilevered base made of powder-coated steel and a top made of solid maple. Grooves in the wood allow it to integrate smoothly with the metal. The items are sturdy and functional, but their liberal use of negative space prevents them from appearing bulky. Mattacchione and Adeniyi are fabricating everything at a workshop in Etobicoke, using Canadian materials.

"Steel is meant for structure, wood is for beauty and elegance," Mattacchione says. "How do you connect the two together? That's how I came to the title, 'Inserire.'" (It's Italian for "to insert.")

The Daniels Faculty's fabrication lab was the perfect place for him to cultivate his furniture-making skills. "I would never have gotten into wood shop and metalworking if I hadn't been working down in the lab," he says. "Most designers don't actually know how their products are made. My involvement in fabrication makes things a lot easier."

Mattacchione and Adeniyi are already starting to see results. Mattacchione says that their company's booth at the Interior Design Show attracted interest from several potential buyers and business partners.

To view Mattacchione's furniture designs, or to inquire about buying his work, visit his website.

Photo: Temi Adeniyi (left) and Anthony Mattacchione, at their booth at the Interior Design Show. Courtesy of Anthony Mattacchione.

The Art, Architecture, Design Film Festival will bring a week's worth of design-related documentary features to the Hot Docs Cinema, on Bloor Street. And, as the festival's official education partner, the Daniels Faculty will be there every step of the way.

That will be especially true on opening night, January 22, when the Daniels Faculty's dean, Richard Sommer, will be participating in a Q&A about Neutra: Survival Through Design, a documentary about the groundbreaking Austrian-American architect Richard Neutra.

Sommer will be joined on stage by the documentary's director, P.J. Letofsky. The conversation will be moderated by former Toronto Star architecture critic Christopher Hume.

For tickets to that screening, or for information about the other films showing at AADFF, visit the Hot Docs website.

Photo: Richard Neutra's Kaufmann House, in Palm Springs, California.

During reading week, which begins on February 17, Daniels Faculty students have an opportunity to do something quite a bit more exciting than hitting the books: associate professor Aziza Chaouni will be taking a few Daniels graduate students along with her to an international design workshop she's leading in Dakar, Senegal.

The focus of the workshop will be the Centre International du Commerce Exterieur du Senegal (CICES), a 19-hectare fairground designed in the early 1970s by French architects Jean-François Lamoureux and Jean-Louis Marin. The modernist regional pavilions at CICES expertly reference traditional African building styles, and the grounds and exhibition halls have hosted countless regional and local events. But age and lack of upkeep are starting to take their toll on CICES, leaving its future uncertain.

Participants in Chaouni's workshop will visit CICES, attend lectures by local and international experts, and tour key landmarks in and around Dakar. The group will work with local stakeholders to imagine ways of revitalizing CICES and restoring it to its place as an icon of modern architecture in the region.

The workshop will include students from the Daniels Faculty, the Mackenzie Presbyterian University of Sao Paulo, the Collège Universitaire d'Architecture de Dakar, and the Université Polytechnique G5 of Dakar.

Daniels graduate students interested in joining the workshop have until Friday, January 10 to sign up. Students are responsible for paying their own airfare, but accommodation and transportation in Dakar will be provided free of charge. Some financial assistance may be available through the Office of the Registrar and Student Services. The workshop begins on February 17 and ends on February 21.

If you're a Daniels graduate student who's interested in reserving a spot, claim your place by emailing Aziza Chaouni as soon as possible.

For more details, download the brochure.

By 2003, Don Mills Centre was a relic. It was a large indoor mall marooned amidst sprawling parking lots — a midtown Toronto monument to the excesses of 20th-century suburban planning.

Over the past 15 years, Giannone Petricone Associates, an architecture firm founded by Daniels Faculty associate professor Pina Petricone and alumnus Ralph Giannone (BArch 1987), has worked with the mall's owner, Cadillac Fairview, to redevelop Don Mills Centre into an outdoor, modern shopping destination organized around major public spaces and punctuated by residential towers, including a repurposed 1970’s office building. The former mall is now the heart of a neigbourhood. With that project finally complete, Giannone Petricone is creating new designs for other retail-focused sites across Toronto, including Cloverdale Mall in Etobicoke and the Golden Mile in Scarborough.

On January 18, students and members of the public will have a rare opportunity to find out about this type of suburban intensification directly from the source, when Giannone Petricone joins with DesignTO for an afternoon of learning about the Don Mills redevelopment.

Participants will start the afternoon at Giannone Petricone's offices in downtown Toronto. From there, they'll board a chartered bus and be driven directly to Don Mills, where they'll attend a panel discussion at the Don Mills library branch. On the panel will be Pina Petricone, Ralph Giannone, city planner Leo Desorcy, Metrolinx chief development officer Leslie Woo, and Daniels Faculty assistant professor Michael Piper as moderator. The discussion will focus on the successes of the Don Mills redevelopment, as well as its failings. Attendees can also expect to learn about the ways Metrolinx's Eglinton Crosstown light-rail line, now under construction, will change the design calculus in midtown Toronto by introducing rapid transit to formerly car-dependent precincts.

After the panel, staff from the offices of Giannone Petricone will lead guided tours of the Shops at Don Mills. Attendees will be able to gain firsthand knowledge of the area's redevelopment.

Tickets — which cover the bus ride from downtown, the panel discussion, the walking tour, and a return trip to downtown — are $30 and can be purchased on DesignTO's website. The event will take place on Saturday, January 18, from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.

Athens, the capital of Greece, is an old city with some very typical modern-day problems: it struggles with gridlock, and with providing appropriate housing to its citizens.

But Athens also has some urban issues that are specific to its context. A debt crisis in 2010 cast a lasting pall over the Greek economy, leaving Athens with a number of abandoned buildings. And the city's historic centre, which has been in continuous use for thousands of years, has evolved into a tightly packed cluster of narrow streets lined with postwar concrete apartment blocks, making large-scale redevelopment difficult.

Last year, Athens Anaplasis, a Greek government organization responsible for overseeing urban renewal projects in Athens, held a competition to create a new master plan for the city's historic centre. Daniels Faculty assistant professor Petros Babasikas answered the call. His design, developed in collaboration with Athens-based engineers and a research team made up of Daniels Faculty students, won an honourable mention.

Babasikas has a strong personal connection to Athens: he lived and worked there for 10 years before coming to Toronto. "A good part of my work and research is on the Mediterranean metropolis, and how to deal with the changes that are coming, in terms of the climate crisis and the general decline of the commons," he says. "How do you revitalize public space, and at the same time how do you create resiliency for climate change?"

When he was considering ways of driving renewal in central Athens, he knew that creating iconic public buildings and grand public spaces would be practically impossible: the city's street grid is too tight, its administration is too fragmented, and public investment is too scarce. Instead, he came up with a network of smaller interventions aimed at creating new pockets of green space within the grid and bringing new life to existing buildings. The idea was to replace some of Athens' outmoded concrete multiresidential buildings and car-focused amenities with new, ecologically friendly infrastructure that would help prepare the city for impending environmental and economic challenges. Babasikas titled the project "Athens 2030: The City as a Resilient Waterscape."

The linchpin of the redevelopment proposal is a series of new communal parks built within existing vacant lots and underused spaces in the city core. Some of these parks would be what Babasikas refers to as "parking gardens" — surface parking lots that would be reengineered to serve as public recreational spaces. About two thirds of each parking lot's surface area would be replaced with grass and trees, while the other third would remain as parking space. Cars and park-goers would coexist.

Within these new parks, and also underneath the city's streets, Babasikas and his team envision a renewed network of water infrastructure — including reservoirs, basins, channels, and water towers — which would capture storm runoff while also providing a vital supply line for new, water-based public amenities, like water fountains and splash pads.

A parking garden, with an on-site concrete water tower.

Underground water tanks inside a reprogrammed parking garage.

"The point of this is to give an architectural identity to water," Babasikas says. "Usually infrastructure is hidden. To build a water tower out of a type of concrete that weathers well is a very cheap intervention. But as an expression of these new commons, it's quite important."

Babasikas's plan also has a solution for the city's abandoned buildings, many of which are sturdy concrete mid-rises built after the second world war. Rather than letting them languish, Babasikas and his team would turn them into community hubs by filling them with entrepreneurs. "Each building becomes a co-op," Babasikas says. "There would be work-live scenarios. There would be other places where you would have incubators and high-tech uses, as well as traditional commercial activity." A former bus depot, for example, would become a marketplace.

Although the Athens Anaplasis competition is over, Babasikas's work on his team's proposal continues. He hopes to refine a few of the ideas in the master plan enough that they can be implemented in Athens in a piecemeal fashion, possibly as pilot projects.

The student researchers who assisted Babasikas with Athens 2030 were Miranda Fay, Niko Dellic, Ambika Pharma, Phat Le, Anne Kwan, Thomas Huang, and Marienka Bishop-Kovac. The team's Athens-based engineering consultants were Kyriakos Tyrologos (traffic), Mania Lambrou (planning and environment), and Leto Christodoulopoulou (landscape).

The Paul Oberman Graduate Student Endowment Fund, established by Eve Lewis and family along with colleagues at Woodcliffe Landmark Properties, honours the legacy of Paul Oberman, a property developer known for his restorations of historic landmarks like the North Toronto railway station. Oberman passed away in 2011.

The fund provides research grants to Daniels Faculty students whose work follows Oberman's lead by probing the ways historic architecture is being transformed to meet contemporary needs. For 2019's Paul Oberman recipients, Isaac Neufeld and Heather Richardson, awards from the fund enabled overseas travel that directly influenced both of their Master of Architecture thesis projects.

Isaac Neufeld

Neufeld, who has an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering, is interested in the intersection between architecture and infrastructure. When he was considering potential thesis topics, he was drawn to the idea of doing a study of district heating and cooling systems — centralized plants that distribute steam or water to an entire urban district for use in HVAC systems.

"There has been a lot of documentation from organizations like the UN about how district heating and cooling systems are going to be one of the top tools for fighting climate change in cities," Neufeld says. "And so I thought architects should concern themselves with them."

But there was an obstacle to Neufeld's research: many of the most architecturally remarkable examples of district heating and cooling plants are located in western Europe. Making site visits would be prohibitively expensive.

With support from the Paul Oberman Graduate Student Endowment Award, Neufeld was able to go on a grand tour, with stops in France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Italy, Iceland, and Austria. Along the way, he visited district heating and cooling plants and attended two professional conferences: the Euroheat and Power Congress in Nantes, France, and the Urban Future Global Conference in Oslo, Norway. The award paid for travel, accommodations, and entry fees to the conferences.

Over the course of several months, he was able to visit dozens of sites relevant to his research. One standout was the Leyweg Geothermal Heat Plant, a twin-gabled structure in The Hague that pumps water from 2,000 metres below the earth's surface for use in heating. In Copenhagen, he visited the Borgergade District Cooling Plant, which cleverly emulates the red brick of the city's older buildings to put a people-friendly face on the industrial cooling equipment located within.

Top: the Leyweg Geothermal Heat Plant. Bottom: Borgergade District Cooling Plant. Photographs by Isaac Neufeld.

Neufeld returned to Canada with sketches, photographs, and a whole new understanding of the ways heating and cooling infrastructure can be integrated into the urban fabric. Now he's ready to tackle the biggest project of his academic career: his thesis will investigate ways of incorporating district energy systems into a suburban Toronto neighbourhood.

Photograph by Lauren Meeker.

Heather Richardson

Richardson grew up near Collingwood, Ontario, not far from the Blue Mountain ski resort. "I've been skiing since I could walk," she says.

As she entered her final year in the Daniels Faculty's Master of Architecture program, she decided to turn that lifelong skiing infatuation into a globetrotting thesis project. With the support of the Paul Oberman Graduate Student Endowment Award, she embarked on a tour of modernist ski resorts in France. The goal was to gain an understanding of the ways architects had applied mid-century urbanist ideals to these leisure-focused mountain settings, and to learn about the challenges inherent in designing a community that experiences massive seasonal population swings.

To get a sense of the size of those population swings, she planned her trip for the tail end of summer. "Even mountain biking season was ending," she says. "The resorts were really ghost towns when I went to see them. I got to chat with people who live in these places permanently, which was great."

Her stops included Flaine, a purpose-built French resort that was completed in 1969. Flaine's Bauhaus-style architecture, heavily reliant on precast concrete panels, left a strong impression on her.

At Avoriaz, another French ski village, she took in the architecture of the resort's inviting, cedar-shingled mid-century villas.

She also spent time at Les Arcs, a ski resort designed by the renowned French architect Charlotte Perriand. Richardson was struck by the designer's use of modular, prefabricated forms to produce spaces that are both efficient and beautiful. She was also impressed by the way the resort's buildings hug the slope of the mountain, making them seem like part of the landscape.

Les Arcs. Photograph by Heather Richardson.

For her thesis project, which she presented in December, she developed her own take on a modernist ski resort. Her design took inspiration from the sloping, concrete forms she saw on her European trip. She also added some innovative touches, like a system for physically moving residential modules between an on-hill station and the base of a mountain using the same elevated tramways developed for ski lifts, which Richardson sees as a potential way of increasing a resort's flexibility amidst seasonal population changes.

Image from Heather Richardson's thesis presentation.

"Visiting these communities has given me a great sense of place," she says. "I spent a semester studying European alpine urbanism, but once you're there you really understand the silhouettes of the buildings and how they reflect the mountainscapes behind."

Common Accounts, the office of Igor Bragado and Daniels Faculty sessional lecturer Miles Gertler, had a busy summer in Italy. There, under the auspices of Bragado's fellowship at the Spanish Academy in Rome, they built an unusual pavilion with a roof made of black yoga balls. The intent? To connect the culture of fitness with the rituals of funerals and death.

"The project of self-design has always been central to our office's research," Gertler says. "Understood on a spectrum, architectures of fitness and death both address the construction and deconstruction of the body. The gym and the funeral are fundamentally linked to the design of the human in material terms. The contemporary representation of ourselves online demonstrates a desire to produce and memorialize ritual at the scale of the everyday. This pavilion provides a platform for that.”

The pavilion consists of a smooth aluminum floor, covered with athletic-looking graphics. Up above is some equipment: weights, bars, and a set of black punching bags. The structure is wrapped in a black-and-white print that is actually an enlarged photo of a piece of raw meat. ("Taken from Stamo Papadaki’s unused cover for Sigfried Giedion's book Mechanization Takes Command," Gertler says.) The whole thing is topped off with the black yoga balls and a giant-sized slogan that hints at physical and spiritual rebirth: "REFRESH, RENEW."

A set of silver cabinets houses a rack of servers that are intended to store selfies and videos of visitors to the pavilion, creating space for a sort of virtual afterlife archive within the structure.

Bragado and Gertler refer to the pavilion as a "catafalque for the digital age." (A catafalque is a type of funeral structure that can be used as a platform for a coffin, but is also sometimes used as a substitute for the actual body of the deceased.) They were inspired by the catafalque for Philip IV of Spain, a 17th-century structure that was inscribed with geographic features from the Spanish territories.

"We were interested in architecture that would similarly account for disparate or remote territories," Gertler says. "In this case, data and the body online, and images of the body sublimated to server space."

The pavilion stood in the Piazza San Pietro in Montorio, in Rome, for two months this summer. It's expected to tour other cities in 2020. Here are a few more photos: