Last fall, students in Assistant Professor Justine Holzman's studio, Longitudinal Landscapes: Mud, Monitoring, and Mobilization, were residents at Autodesk in the MaRS Discovery District, working alongside designers and researchers at the forefront of their fields.
 
With graduate students in both architecture and landscape architecture, the option studio challenged students to develop design strategies that support revitalization of the San Fransico Bay Area's watershed: its tributaries, marshes, and mudflats — all of which host important ecologies, retain carbon, and have a role to play in protecting communities from risks associated with rising sea levels, unpredictable weather patterns, increased flooding, fires, and erosion. Autdoesk generously provided specialized software and fabrication training, access to advanced fabrication tools, and space for the students to prototype and develop their ideas.
 
The work of the students built on research and design initiated by the multidisciplinary design team Public Sediment, a participant in the Resilient by Design | Bay Area Challenge, held in 2017. Led by SCAPE Landscape Architecture studio, the team included members of the Dredge Research Collaborative, to which Holzman belongs. Gena Wirth, Partner and Principal of SCAPE Landscape Architecture and Cy Keener, Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland supported the students with design and technology workshops throughout the semester. The students also took a field trip to the Bay Area to explore the geography, conduct field work, meet with local stakeholders, and engage with members of the Public Sediment team.

Above: 1) A hydrophone, designed to sense the sediment movement and load, inspired by singrays and horseshoe crabs, by Devin Tepleski, Aaron Hernandez, and John Nguyen; 2) a citizen tool kit for eel grass restoration and floating boardwalks would support these efforts, by Peggy Wong ; 3) a wand that measures turbidity, salinity, and temperature, by Lexi Kalman, Peggy Wong, and Hadi El-Shayeb; 4) part of a series of bio-inspired eco-concrete form that would hold sensors; 5) an electronic sensore that  could measure temperature, salinity, and turbidity, by Neil Philips, Anton Skorishchenko, and Reesha Morar | Images above by Devin Tepleski; images top of page by Harry Choi

The students’ design projects were developed with the understanding that living systems require careful monitoring and adaptive management. With this in mind, they worked to produce site design strategies alongside monitoring infrastructure, such as prototypes for upland, fluvial, tidal, and coastal sensors. Together, they generated concepts that included "listening" to sediment, measuring salinity and turbidity (the amount of sediment in the water), floating boardwalks that support restoration efforts, and citizen ecological restoration tool kits.
 
The studio culminated in a public exhibition of student work at Autodesk’s Toronto Technology Centre. Students, faculty, and guest critics participated in an advanced discussion of how monitoring infrastructure can assist in the design, adaptive management, and understanding of urbanized coastal watersheds while providing opportunities to connect with the public and democratize data.

Students included: Aaron Hernandez, Anton Skorishchenko, Devin Tepleski, Hadi El-Shayeb, John Nguyen, Krystal Kramer, Lexi Kalman, Neil Philips, Peggy Wong, Resa Morar, Shujie Zhang, and Vinaya Mani.
 
For more information:

• Read the studio description: Longitudinal Landscapes: Mud, Monitoring, and Mobilization
• Visit the Dredge Research Collaborative website
• Check out the Resilient by Design | Bay Area Challenge website

Daniels Faculty Alumna Megan Torza (March 2005) will present the public lecture "Exploring Low Cost Sustainability" on Thursday, March 28 at 6:30pm at the University of Toronto's Faculty Club (41 Willcocks Street).

An architect and partner in the Toronto-based multi-disciplinary design practice DTAH, Torza has a strong personal interest in adaptive re-use and the integration of contemporary, sustainable design with historic urban fabric.

Her talk will share methods to reduce the ecological footprint of a building while also minimizing its complexity and cost. She argues that for projects in the arts, non-profit, and cultural sectors with limited capital and operating funding, creative approaches to energy efficiency can be highly effective not only in achieving environmental and financial sustainability, but also in encouraging lasting social and cultural sustainability through place-making and behavioural change.

Citing DTAH projects such as Evergreen Brick Works, Artscape Wychwood Barns, the Niagara Falls Exchange, and Baker Street Development, Torza's lecture will highlight ways to align sustainability objectives with limited budgets in the context of community-focused revitalization.

Sponsored by Tremco, Torza's lecture is free and open to all. Participants will be eligible for 2 Structured Learning Hours. Part of the B.E.S.T. Lecture Series.

Image of Evergreen Brickworks via DTAH

People passing by the Autodesk Technology Centre in the MaRS Discovery District on the corner of College Street and University Avenue may catch a glimpse of Generative Pavilion through the floor to ceiling windows.

Designed and built by Daniels Faculty students, the project was part of an Independent Study Project proposed by Master of Architecture Students Anton Skorishchenko, John Nguyen, Stephen Baik, and Robert Lee and led by Lecturer Jay Pooley. The studio was supported by an Autodesk research grant.

Creating the Generative Pavilion allowed the students to explore the relationship between modular building materials and computational component design.

“To extend the thought process off the page and into reality suggests new questions of material, connections, tolerances, durability, portability, scale and weight,” writes Pooley. "By connecting pre-existing construction systems to component-based design, the goal was to produce a working prototype for a connecting system that allows the user to build structural forms from generic building materials.”

Photos by Yasmin Al-Samarrai

For the first assignment of ARC253: Close Readings in Urban Design, taught by Associate Professor Jesse LeCavalier, students worked in groups to investigate Toronto's King Street corridor, from the Queensway in the west to the Don River in the east. Each group studied a different block along the street.

King Street was divided into five zones, one for each section of the class. Students were asked to analyze thresholds between public and private space by making a plan, an elevation, and a model of their assigned section. The individual models come together to form a collective portrait of an iconic Toronto street.

As King cuts through a range of neighborhoods and conditions, it acts as a microcosm of sorts to understand its larger urban context. Through building this stretch of King Street in a collaborative setting, students got a chance to be familiar with their block — its history, its life, and its habits — which helped them understand a strip of their local geography in a unique way. 

The team behind the recent restoration and expansion of the Daniels Building at One Spadina Crescent recently received the Lieutenant Governor’s Ontario Heritage Award for Excellence in Conservation. The project’s heritage consultants, ERA Architects; design architects, NADAAA; and the University of Toronto were the joint recipients for this prestigious provincial honour, which was announced this past January by Ontario Heritage Trust.

Presented annually at Queen’s Park, these awards were established “recognize exceptional contributions to heritage conservation, environmental sustainability and biodiversity, and cultural and natural heritage.” Ontario Heritage was established by a provincial act in 1990 to preserve Ontario’s significant cultural heritage and educate the public on its history.

ERA Architects highlighted some of the aspects of the project they felt made this project so impactful within Toronto’s urban landscape:

The recent renewal of the south-facing 19th-century Gothic revival building and contemporary addition – home to the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design – is a showcase for the city and an international focal point for education and research on architecture, art and the future of cities. The rehabilitation and new addition at One Spadina Crescent provides a significant expansion to the heritage building for use by the faculty and its students as design studios, fabrication shops, a multi-functional principal hall, library programs, social spaces and offices. The addition was conceived to fill in the “U”-shaped space vacated by demolition of previous additions to the original 1874 Knox College on its north side, thereby preserving the original heritage structure and integrating existing and new program space for optimal use of the finite site.

Read More about One Spadina Crescent, and view the full list of awards the Daniels Building has received to date.

A new temporary public art installation by Assistant Professor Victor Perez-Amado and third year Master of Architecture students John Nguyen, Anton Skorishchenko, Abubaker Bajaman, and Stephen Baik is drawing large crowds to Toronto’s Woodbine Beach.

Part of the Winter Stations exhibition, now in its 5^th year, the project is one of six installations enticing visitors to explore the city’s waterfront in the winter.

Four of the installations were selected via an international design competition and two were created by invited post-secondary institutions. The group from the Daniels Faculty was among the international competition winners, which included teams from the United States, Mexico, and Poland.

The theme of this year’s exhibition was migration. Cavalcade — the Daniels Faculty team's winning design — depicts brightly coloured silhouettes of migrants on a journey to a better life. Visitors may walk around them, their footprints converging in the sand and snow. At the centre of the installation is a mirror where one may view their reflection and see themselves as part of the collective.

Video and photos above courtesy of the Cavalcade team

"Cavalcade is an installation that reflects the collective spirit of human movement and transversal," wrote the Daniels Faculty team about their installation. "Not just in the contemporary political sense of global migration, but in the consensus that the human quest for a better life is one that is timeless and universal.”

Mayor John Tory visited the installations on the opening day, February 18, and was on hand to view presentations by each team February 13 at Rorschach Brewery.

Woggle Jungle photo by Yasmin Al-Samarrai; Obscura photo courtesy of Ontario Place

In their presentation, Perez-Amado and Skorishchenko, representing the Daniels Faculty team, shared other public art installations they created in Toronto that helped inform their approach, including Woggle Jungle, Obscura (pictured, respectively, above), and most recently a modular 3D printed design now on display at Autodesk’s Toronto headquarters.

Open to the public, the Winter Stations exhibition runs until April 1.

Read media coverage of the Winter Stations exhibition, via CBC News, and Now magazine.

Keeping It Modern is a grant initiative of the Getty Foundation that advances the conservation of modern architecture around the world. To further the initiative's goals, architect and Daniels Faculty Associate Professor Aziza Chaouni, together with architect and Professor at Escola da Cidade in São Paul Silvio Oksman will lead a workshop at the Sidi Harazem complex in Morocco.

The workshop will showcase presentations of the Conservation Management Plans of Keeping It Modern grantees from the Global South. International leading experts in modern heritage conservation will provide reflections. Participants include keynote speaker Sheridan Burke, Shaika Jain from Shandigarh, India, and Joe Addo, from the Accra Children's Library in Ghana.

Members from the Order of Architects of Morocco, as well as leaders, activists, conservation groups, and architects working on the conservation of modern heritage from Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Palestine, Tunisia, and Turkey will attend.

As the principal investigator, Chaouni received a grant of $100,000 USD from  the Getty Foundation to support the workshop and its proceedings.

For more information on the Modern Heritage Under Pressure workshop, visit: www.kimmhup.com

New to Toronto’s historic Gladstone Hotel is the launch of the installation Connect by Daniels alumna Safoura Zahedi (MArch 2016). The immersive installation was part of Gladstone’s yearly group exhibition, Come Up to My Room, and will be exhibited for a full year as an artist-designed meeting room.

Connect, is part of Zahedi's independent experimental design series "Beyond the Surface," and explores geometry and its potential as a contemporary, universal design language. Using two-dimensional geometry to create three-dimensional spatial experiences through the principles of fractal geometry, Connect exhibits the subtle and meaningful order of our universe by reflecting the unseen, transporting the viewer from immersion in the mundane to serene contemplation.

Zahedi currently works at an award-winning architecture studio based in Toronto. Her independent work explores geometry through a process of merging traditional analogue design methods with contemporary digital technology.

"Toronto’s Safoura Zahedi is one of DesignTO’s breakaway voices," writes Azure in its online article "10 Canadian Talents We Loved at IDS Toronto and DesignTO."

Connect was made possible by the generous support of Daniels alumni as well as  Assistant Professor Brady Peters

Images, top, courtesy of Safoura Zahedi

Common Accounts — the office of Igor Bragado and Daniels Faculty Sessional Lecturer Miles Gertler — has been shortlisted to represent Canada at the 2020 Venice Biennale in Architecture.

Their proposal, "After Life," interrogates the intensifying attention on the body:

With the prospect of humanity's demise at the planetary scale, the body is more present than ever — in architectural discourse, in social media, and in the popular imaginary — and so too is the spectre of a post-human future as the motivating force of its ubiquity. Paradoxically, there is arguably no other time in history when the average human being has been as drawn to beautifying, hardening, and enhancing itself than now, confronted with the crisis of the body's ultimate disappearance. After Life proposes to see the body anew, as a product of this context.

Common Accounts is recognized for their work in the design of death and the virtual afterlife, including the project Three Ordinary Funerals, a prototypical funeral home produced for the Seoul Biennial on Architecture and Urbanism, now in the permanent collection of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Korea. The office's work in architecture and self-design has expanded to an ongoing collaboration with Sephora for experimental new spaces and broadcast platforms in their Shanghai flagship.

Gertler and Bragado are the recipients of the 2016 Suzanne K. Underwood Prize from Princeton University and have recently lectured at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Korea (Seoul), the Harvard GSD (Cambridge), Alserkal Avenue (Dubai), Cornell University AAP (Ithaca), and Soho House (Istanbul).

Image, top: Three Ordinary Funerals, Common Accounts, 2017. Collection of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Korea (Seoul).

The Daniels Faculty would like to congratulate first year Master of Architecture student James Bird on winning the President's Award for Outstanding Indigenous Student of the Year. Lisa Boivin, an undergraduate student from the Faculty of Medicine, also received this honour. Two students, one graduate and one undergraduate, receive the award each year.

"I felt honored to be selected from a very large cohort of extremely talented people. It is a humbling experience, and I am filled with deep gratitude," said Bird. "The President's Award means a recognition for perseverance and persistence in educations goals I had always hoped for."

Bird recently completed his Bachelor of Arts in Indigenous Studies and Renaissance Studies at U of T. He began his master’s degree in architecture this fall after nearly 30 years as a carpenter, journeyman, and cabinet maker. A knowledge keeper from the Nehiyawak nation and Dene Nation, he says his future goals include the possibly pursuing a PhD and continuing his SSHRC research in "linguistincs and the interaction between space making and Indigenous languages."

A ceremony and reception for the President's Award was held on December 6th at First Nations House at U of T.