Mezcal, a type of alcoholic spirit made from agave, has become a favourite at high-end cocktail bars around the world. With urbanites buying the stuff by the crate, mezcal production has become the basis for a thriving export industry in rural areas of Mexico that have been fermenting and distilling agave juice since the colonial era.

But mezcal production results in a considerable amount of waste: each litre of finished mezcal leaves behind 13 litres of an acidic liquid known as vinaza, which, when disposed of improperly, can contaminate local aquifers.

For her 2019 option studio, "Adobe Bricks, Mezcal and the Arid Landscape of Oaxaca's Central Valley," Sessional Lecturer Elisa Silva led third-year Master of Architecture students on a trip to the Central Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico, where they visited working mezcal distilleries, or palenques. There, they got some hands-on experience with a novel way of disposing of vinaza: combining it with a fibrous agave residue known as bagazo to make traditional adobe bricks for use in local construction.

The brick-making technique, refined by architect Alejandro Montes of COAA, produces blocks of adobe that are stronger and more earthquake-resistant than adobe bricks made from other materials.

The studio's trip to Oaxaca brought students to Ejutla, a rural region about 80 kilometres south of Oaxaca's urban capital, where they witnessed the mezcal-making process before getting their hands dirty making bricks. Now that Silva's students have returned to Toronto, they'll begin developing design concepts for buildings constructed out of those same agave-derived bricks.

Here, some photos of their travels, with commentary from Silva.

"Some students went to Monte Albán, which is a pre-hispanic Zapotec ruin," Silva says. "Monte Albán is a pretty impressive site. It's on the top of a mountain. No one quite understands how they made it absolutely flat like that."

"This is the cathedral in the city of Oaxaca."

"The students had a night on the town in the city of Oaxaca. This is the main square."

"This is Oaxaca's Central Valley. It's arid. The dry season typically goes from September all the way through the new year, and it doesn't start to rain again until June. The landscape will get pretty brown because of the scarcity of water. And there's progressive deforestation because of grazing, and because of the use of wood for fire, which is the main source of energy for locals. Things that grow here include agave, cacti, and some indigenous species of oaks and pines."

"We're in the town of San Martin Tilcajete, at the studio of Jacobo and María Ángeles. Over the years, they've grown this place into an art complex where they teach people and produce alebrijes, which are these animal figures that are carved out of wood from copal trees, then heavily painted in very intricate patterns.

"We stopped to see the place, and then everyone was hungry. We're eating gemelas. It's basically a long tortilla filled with ground black beans, Oaxaca cheese, and hot sauce. And it was all produced locally."

"This was taken at a palenque — a place where mezcal is produced. The maestro — the owner of the palenque — is called Félix. This is a big oven, lined with volcanic stones and encino pine, which is the type of local pine wood that you can see here in the foreground. The wood is heated up, and then they put the agave piñas in there and cover the whole the thing with earth. The piñas will cook there for about five days. After that, they are shredded into fine pieces, either with a stone wheel that's pulled by an animal or with a mechanical grinder."

"This, at Félix's palenque, is a double distillation vessel that is typical of the region. Mezcal starts as a fermented liquid called pulque — like a beer made of agave, with a very low alcohol concentration. Each of these boxes is a wood oven. The fire heats the distillation vessel and evaporates and condenses the pulque until it's about 50 to 55 per cent alcohol by volume."

"The man on the left is Herminio Coronado, the maestro at a mezcal palenque in Agua del Espino, a town in Ejutla. His palenque was our ultimate destination, where we made our adobe bricks. I'm on the right. We had already made some bricks when this photo was taken, which is why my feet are covered in mud."

"The mezcal production process leaves behind a fibrous waste product called bagazo. Here, we're breaking down and measuring some of it for use in our adobe bricks. The person standing up is Alejandro Montes, who showed us the adobe-making technique. The kid on top of the mountain of bagazo is Herminio's son Gabriel."

"The bagazo here had been accumulated over time as Herminio produced mezcal, so we needed to separate the fibres of it so that they weren't all clumped together. The adobe mixture is 10 parts earth, three parts bagazo, and three parts of the liquid, vinaza. The students here are Lori Chan, Ivee Wang, and Thomas Kim."

"Thomas Kim and Ted Marchant are shovelling earth that was collected for our adobe-making project into buckets."

"Here, Paulina Aviles Parra and Maria Cortes Herrera are filling a mould with the adobe mixture. You have to level it off at the top, and then you use the two side handles to pull it up evenly."

"We were able to make about 60 bricks during our first day and 150 the following day before it started to rain and we weren't able to make any more. The virtue of this process is that it doesn't waste scarce water supplies. At the same time, it helps keep the harmful vinaza liquid out of the environment. Once the bricks are made, they need to dry in the sun for about three weeks before they can be used."

Photographs by Thomas Kim and Stephanie Tung.

The University of Waterloo School of Architecture's Rome program, founded in 1979, enables students to spend a term in the Italian capital, one of the world's great centres of architectural heritage. Starting on October 17, Roma XL, an exhibition curated by Sascha Hastings, will show off some of the extraordinary student work completed as part of that program, juxtaposed with professional work created later on by the same people.

And some of that student work belongs to practitioners who now teach at the Daniels Faculty.

Among the contributors to RomaXL's collection of Rome-inspired student drawings are Daniels Professor Brigitte Shim, Lecturer Alex Josephson, and Adjunct Lecturer Lisa Rapoport. Another Daniels faculty member who will have work on display is Associate Professor John Shnier, who attended Waterloo prior to the establishment of the Rome program, but later lived and worked in the city after winning the first Canadian Prix de Rome in 1987. While he was in Rome, he developed a relationship with the Waterloo program.

Image: House for Piranesi, monotype by John Shnier (1988).

"Rome has continued to affect the way I think about contemporary practice," Shnier says. "and, perhaps more importantly, how I think about how I create relevant pedagogy here at Daniels." Professor Shnier has taken Daniels students to Rome as part of his option studios.

Hastings, the curator, believes that time spent in Rome had a similarly profound impact on many of the architects who contributed work to the exhibition. "Three months of being in a place like that opens up students' eyes, helps them find direction in their own practice and in their own thinking," she says. "For some of them, it may be the first really big international trip they do."

Roma XL will take place at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura (496 Huron Street), beginning October 17 and ending November 1. There will be an opening reception on October 16 at 6:30. For more information, and for hours, visit the Istituto Italiano di Cultura's website.

Sidi Harazem, a thermal bath complex located just outside of the Moroccan city of Fez, has fallen on hard times. The 1960 facility, designed in the Brutalist style by French-Moroccan architect Jean-François Zevaco, fell into disrepair before being subjected to a halfhearted renovation that attempted to hide — rather than accentuate — the austerity of its concrete construction.

In 2017, a team led by Daniels Faculty associate professor Aziza Chaouni won a $150,000 (U.S.) Keeping it Modern grant from the Getty Foundation to fund the development of a plan to restore Sidi Harazem while addressing the needs of the local population and ensuring the complex's long-term sustainability. On Tuesday, the project made the New York Times.

The Times writes:

In 2001, on a visit home, Ms. Chaouni went to Sidi Harazem for a swim and was horrified by the renovation. As an Aga Khan Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, she studied the architecture of tourism in post-independence Morocco, including work by Mr. Zevaco [...] Armed with that knowledge, she approached the [the Moroccan pension fund] CDG, convincing Rachid Karkari, the official in charge of Sidi Harazem, that their duckling could — with proper intervention — turn back into a swan.

“We were amazed by the splendor of the plans drawn by Zevaco,” said Mr. Karkari, pointing to the architect’s rendering of the thermal station entrance. In that drawing, called “The Signal,” plants and people climb up a hillside defined by ridges of concrete architecture, a building that rises up and spreads out at the same time. “We hope, through this project, to restore the image of Zevaco’s work so that it regains its former glory.”

Chaouni developed her conservation management plan for Sidi Harazem with her office and with the assistance of Daniels Faculty students Li Cheryl Li, Yi Zhang, and Treasure Zhang. Daniels students Francis Ted Marchand, Avery Clarke, Saaraa Premji, David Alba, and Muyao Zhang performed research and worked on a seminar that gathered international experts at Sidi Harazem.

Read the rest of the New York Times article about Chaouni's work here.

Photograph of Sidi Harazem by Andreea Muscurel.

The Jordan Valley is located in one of the world's most disputed geographical areas, sandwiched between Israel, the occupied West Bank, and the western border of Jordan. Although the valley is riven with political strife, it's also an important agricultural region and a home to many Jordanians, Israelis, and Palestinians.

For (Re) Revisiting the Valley Section, a project now on display at the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, assistant professors Fadi Masoud and Victor Perez-Amado were invited to contemplate new urban forms and housing typologies that are sensitive to the landscape conditions on both sides of the Jordan Valley. Their project is a response to the Biennale's theme, "Collective City."

"The Jordan Valley is very rich in culture," Perez-Amado says. "It's very rich in history. There's already a strong tradition in agriculture there, but the buildings and the infrastructure are separated from the actual landscape and are at odds with it. Furthermore, as populations grow there's a need to provide more housing. We were looking at the potential of the landscape and its topographic conditions as the basis for urban development and decentralized infrastructure, regardless of man-made political divisions."

Masoud and Perez-Amado propose a series of new housing typologies that take the Jordan Valley's geographic and environmental context into consideration, while also referencing the traditional courtyard architecture of arid regions in the Middle East.

Section of a five-person courtyard home in the Jordan valley, as conceived by Fadi Masoud and Victor Perez-Amado.

Each housing type would be integrated into the slope of the valley, which would preserve soil for agriculture. Every home would have a central courtyard that would be planted with vegetation, to retain moisture. Systems of windows and louvres would allow each courtyard to act as a passive ventilation system.

Each home would also be equipped with a system for collecting rainwater—both from courtyards and rooftops—in cisterns. Grey water would be preserved for use in irrigation farther down the valley. This would address problems with water distribution in the valley's dry middle section. "Every drop of water counts," Perez-Amado says. "So we're trying to collect it in as many ways as we can."

(Re) Revisiting the Valley Section will be on view in Seoul until November 10.

Architects rely on wood. It's an integral part of almost every construction project, and, with the advent of new mass timber technologies, it's becoming a viable substitute for steel. And yet, architects rarely contemplate the fact that every plank of wood was originally a tree. And every tree, of course, was originally part of a forest.

As part of this year's option studio program, instructors Brigitte Shim and Robert Wright will be leading Daniels Faculty students on a scholarly investigation of a place where the world of forestry intersects with the world of architecture: a mass timber factory.

Students will work with Shim and Wright to design a mass timber production facility based on the requirements of Element 5, a mass timber producer that is actually in the process of constructing a factory in St. Thomas, Ontario.

Aiding Daniels students in this design process will be a series of expert speakers, who will visit One Spadina for "midday talks"—hour-long lectures on topics relevant to forests and wood production. These talks, although intended to supplement the studio's course material, will be open to the public and free to attend.

Here's the schedule:

Tuesday, October 1: Dr. Sean Thomas (Daniels Faculty), "Forests, Architecture, Sustainability," 12:30 p.m. - 1:30 p.m., Room 200

Tuesday, October 15: Jane Hutton (Waterloo Architecture Faculty), “Wood Urbanism," 12:30 p.m. - 1:30 p.m., Room 200

Tuesday, October 22: Dr. Danijela Puric-Mladenovic (Daniels Faculty), "The Southern Ontario Forest," 12:30 p.m. - 1:30 p.m., Room 200

Tuesday, October 29: Craig Applegath (Dialog Design), Robert Wright (Daniels Faculty), “Mass Timber Buildings,” 12:30 p.m. - 1:30 p.m., Room 200

Tuesday, November 12: Dr. Sandy Smith (Daniels Faculty), “Urban Forests,” 12:30 p.m. - 1:30 p.m., Room 200

The "midday talk" series will help students form ideas for the design of a mass timber production facility that is, itself, constructed of mass timber. Architecture and landscape architecture students will work together to conceptualize a building and site plan that meet the requirements of a busy factory while also achieving design excellence.

"Wood is a metaphor for thinking about how we build, how we use our materials, and how we relate natural materials to urban resources," says associate professor Robert Wright. "Canada should be a world leader in mass timber production."

Photograph by Province of British Columbia/Flickr

Brian Boigon, an associate professor at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, has just launched a new research lab: the Inner Outer Space Lab.

The IOSlab's research is focused on architecture and quantum dimensional design, with an emphasis on design problems associated with reality, dynamical systems, consciousness, and meta states in metaphysics.

For the past three years, Boigon has been working at the intersection of architecture and science fiction. His project "The Interopera" is based on his research in the locomotive pathway that he refers to as "Framing, Looping and Projecting" (FLP). Boigon will be delivering a lecture on this concept at the Institute of Architecture at the University of Applied Arts Vienna this fall. And he will continue to teach the design precepts associated with FLP as part of the Daniels Master of Architecture program.

The Inner Outer Space Lab will provide a scalable infrastructure for Boigon to use in developing a broader array of research projects, both with Daniels students and through his advisory board, which includes:

• Barbara Imhof, a preeminent architect of space station design, based in Vienna.
• Elizabeth Diller, founding partner of DSR Architects and a professor at the Princeton School of Architecture.
• Sanford Kwinter, a professor at the Pratt School of Architecture and an honorary professor at the Institute of Architecture at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.
• Harry Ruda, the Stanley Meek Chair in Nanotechnology and a professor of applied science and engineering at the University of Toronto, as well as the director of the Centre for Advanced Nanotechnology.

Together with his lab research associates, Boigon will accelerate his projects and offer students a new level of exposure to architecture design and quantum mechanics.

For more information, see www.innerouterspacelab.org, or visit the lab on Instagram or Facebook.

Professor Ted Kesik was inducted as an Fellow of the International Building Performance Simulation Association (IBPSA) during its the biennial Building Simulation 2019 conference in Rome, Italy this past September.

IBPSA launched their Fellows program in 2010 to recognize individuals who have attained distinction in the field of building performance simulation, through education, research, practice, and/or simulation tool development.

Kesik has contributed to the building performance simulation field since 1983 as a practitioner, researcher, and academic who trains highly qualified personnel. His large body of technical studies, conference, and journal papers has influenced energy efficiency requirements in building codes. His former PhD student, Aylin Ozkan is now teaching building performance simulation courses at the Daniels Faculty in both the undergraduate and graduate programs as a sessional lecturer.

Canada is home to nine per cent of the world's forests, with more hectares of greenery per person than any other nation on earth. And yet our production of wood products often lags behind that of other countries, and we've been slow to adopt new construction technologies that allow timber to be used in place of steel in tall buildings.

On Thursday, September 26, the Daniels Faculty will host Forest Culture, a panel discussion that will consider the state of Canada's forests from three very different perspectives.

Dan Handel, an architect who has curated exhibitions on the meanings of wood and forests for institutions in Canada and around the world, will discuss forestry from a cultural standpoint. Stephanie Seymour, an Anishinaabe-kwe from Garden River First Nation who is conducting PhD research in forest science at Lakehead University, will come at the subject from an Indigenous angle. Representing the forestry profession will be Scott Jackson, a former policy manager for the Ontario Forest Industry Association who is now the director of Indigenous and stakeholder relations at the not-for-profit Forests Ontario, which advocates for forest restoration and stewardship.

The evening's discussion will be moderated by Brigitte Shim, who in addition to being a professor at the Daniels Faculty is also a consumer of architectural wood products at her private practice, Shim-Sutcliffe Architects.

Forest Culture is part of Hindsight is 20/20, the Daniels Faculty's 2019-2020 public programming series. More details about this event and others in the series can be found on the faculty's website.

Image: "The Forest Community: Sovereign, Subject, Trees," Dan Handel

Daniels Faculty alumnus Drew Adams (MArch 2011) has co-authored an essay for Azure magazine in which he argues that architects have a responsibility to be more environmentally responsible in their choices of building materials.

The essay, which Adams wrote with Janna Levitt — a 1986 U of T architecture graduate and founder of LGA Architectural Partners, where Adams is an associate — discusses the ways in which adaptive reuse can reduce the carbon footprint of a construction project. The piece takes particular notice of LGA's own design for the reuse of the kiln building at Toronto's Evergreen Brick Works, a former brick manufacturing facility that the firm helped transform into an event and education space.

Adams and Levitt write:

For too long the profession has rationalized using carbon-intensive materials so long as we built to last — and built better... The change needs to happen now. In contrast to the long-term impacts of energy efficiency, embodied carbon is an upfront consideration. While it is possible, for example, to add renewable energy at a later date to offset a building’s operational impacts, the carbon costs of building materials cannot be reversed.

Read the full story at Azure.