Last week, graduate students in the Architecture and Urban Design programs at the Daniels Faculty got a chance to connect with principals and professionals from the architecture and design community, who generously volunteered to share their insight and advice.

With 32 professionals and alumni attending the event, students had an opportunity to share their concerns, ask questions, and receive valuable tips on how to advance their studies and skills to land on their desired career path.
 
“I was really worried about the future and what to expect after graduation,” said Master of Architecture Student Zoha Nekouian. “I asked what firms expect from students and the answers were really relieving.”
 
Students who attended the event agreed that it was a positive and helpful experience.
 
In his conversation with Alex Josephson, Master of Urban Design student Saif Malhas learned that there is no perfect candidate and that your skills will always have room to grow.
 
Master of Architecture student, Weixin Zhao, who is completing her thesis this year, learned to not be afraid of approaching the designers themselves and applying to them directly when looking for jobs. 
 
The one-on-one conversations provided the students with a more in-depth and direct exchange of knowledge and guidance.
 
 "It was nice to have people show interest in what you wanted to do and keep the conversation going," said Master of Architecture student Sky Ece Ulosoy.
 
The Daniels Faculty would like to extend its gratitude to all the professionals, most of whom are alumni, who participated in this event with our students.

Our idea looks at desks that are interchangeable and moveable. Everything is controlled by artificial intelligence that records people’s stages of work and when certain people need to be clustered together. A series of curtains make the spaces but are moveable themselves. The AI will also record people’s daily patterns and attempts to gradually transition layouts in-between stages of a project to be minimally intrusive overtime. This constant flux in arrangements will help keep the workers more engaged.
 

There were 38 finalists in the competition, which was open to all. Of those, 9 received honourable mentions, and 3 winners were selected. Nguyen, Bajaman, and Baik's project will be featured in the Non Architecture Competitions book and website.

To learn more about the Daniels students' project, visit the Non Architecture Competitions website.

Second year Master of Architecture students Pedram Karimi and Ehsan Naimpour joined forces with four Schulich Master of Real Estate and Infrastructure (MREI) students to compete in the 7th annual NAIOP Development Challenge. On October 4, following live presentations made by three finalists, the Daniels Faculty / Schulich team — named “Four Corner Investments” — was awarded first prize. It was the only student team among the three finalists. 

Each competing team produced a development proposal for a prominent site in Toronto and were required to consider real-life scenarios including cost analysis and architectural design. The Four Corner Investments team's proposal included a high rise rental apartment that complements two existing office towers.

Writes Four Corners Investments:

In order to unify the entire development scheme, the team envisioned a set of bridges, a life science incubator space, and retail to unify all the buildings at the podium level. By providing multi-floor connections, the bridges aim to give emphasis to the circulation and enhance interaction.

The residential tower accommodates a vertical, yet community-oriented form of living. In its entirety, the building form consists of three jagged and dynamic blocks that offer live and leisure space within each individual block. The jagged form allows for more considerate setbacks and provides a unique presence in the fabric and skyline of the city.
 

Congratulations to the winning team members:

From the Daniels Faculty: Pedram Karimi and Ehsan Naimpour 
From Schulich: Jordan Trinder, Umehani Kanga, Alannah Bird, Bao Nguyen

Lead image, top, by Norm Li.

Students in Matthew Brown’s LAN3016 Option Studio “On The Edge” recently returned from a research trip to Newfoundland where they experienced first-hand rural coastal communities' way of life  and the complexities that have resulted from outmigration. 

The communities of Newtown and Freshwater warmly hosted the students for 3 days and shared with them the unique culture found in rural outports. Students had the opportunity to explore and document resettled communities, local fish plants, tourist attractions, heritage structures, vernacular architecture, and significant cultural landscapes, as well as run engagement workshops with officials and community members to learn from the profound knowledge of the local people. 

The two communities will be the subject of student design interventions, the goal of which is to aid in the revival of rural place-based economies. The work from the semester will be compiled into a document that will be given back to the communities as a resource to enable them to undertake their own visioning work while providing fresh perspective.

While in Newfoundland, the students also had the opportunity to tour the Fogo Island Inn and recent work of the Shorefast Organization to better understand the impact of a contemporary vernacular architecture and design on the Island. 

The students’ visit ignited an incredible amount of excitement within the rural communities and on the island — their activities were featured on both Newfoundland television and CBC Radio. 

Click here to listen to CBC Radio's full interview with Sessional Lecturer Matthew Brown.

StudentDwellTO — a cross disciplinary research project on affordable student housing being conducted by the University of Toronto, Ryerson, OCAD, and York University — wants to know more about students' experiences finding affordable homes in Toronto.

The project's researchers, which include Daniels Faculty Assistant Professor Mauricio Quirós Pacheco and recent graduate Kearon Roy Taylor (MArch 2018), are now recruiting students for a paid, two-hour focus group to help them gain more insight into barriers and strategies that students face in accessing housing and how housing could be better designed to address students' needs.

From the StudentDwellTO website:

Toronto’s housing crunch has made headlines over the last several years. The city is currently experiencing a severe lack of affordable rental units, and the vacancy rate in 2017 dropped to 1%, the lowest number in over 16 years (Myles 2017). This housing crisis, while impacting everyone living in Toronto, has specific impacts on students that need to be understood through further research.
 

To be eligible for the focus group, participants must be undergraduate, or graduate students registered full-time at OCAD, York, Ryerson or U of T.

For more information or to sign up to participate in a focus group, visit the StudentDwellTO website.

Image, top from Matthew McKenna's thesis, "Typologies for Neighbourhood Densification"

Associate Professor Aziza Chaouni was rencently featured in a Designboom interview about her work to rehabilitate the Sidi Harazem Thermal Bath Complex, a historic site of modern architecture in Morocco originally designed by Jean-François Zevaco in 1960.

With this revitalization project, Chaouni hopes “to not only raise awareness of this forgotten and dismissed heritage, but also to use it as a pilot project that could spread knowledge of concrete rehabilitation techniques and adaptive reuse approaches of brutalist buildings in Morocco.”

Her personal connection and appreciation of the existing site informs the project in a unique way. As part of the process, she has helped organize workshops for locals to raise awareness about this heritage site and its potential to be an active part of Morocco’s urban fabric once again.

To read the full interview, visit Designboom's website.

The John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design is pleased to announce its 2018/2019 public lecture series: Home and Away.

The Faculty’s stunning 400-seat multichromatic Main Hall in the heart of the Daniels Building is now open. To inaugurate our first full year of public programming in this space, we are bringing together talent and ideas from near and far for a series of discussions and debates on design issues of global importance.

Engaging broad, timely topics — including the Anthropocene, smart cities, the political functions of art and architecture, and new equations of technology and craft — this year’s speaker series connects the wealth of expertise within the Daniels Faculty community with an international, multidisciplinary network of designers, scholars, artists, and curators. As depicted in the Faculty’s lecture series poster, each set of Home and Away speakers are represented by different “game flags,” highlighting the Faculty’s role as an arena for debate and the exchange of ideas on how architecture, landscape, art, and urbanism can effect meaningful change in society today.

Featured speakers include Toronto filmmaker and MacArthur fellow, Jennifer Baichwal and landscape architect Kate Orff (who will be presenting the Jeffrey Cook Memorial Lecture); Daniels Faculty Professor Brigitte Shim and London-based architect Alison Brooks; artists Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Krzysztof Wodiczko; and Mauricio Pezo and Sofía von Ellrichshausen of the Chile-based art and architecture studio Pezo Von Ellrichshausen.

New faculty member, Associate Professor Jesse LeCavalier will join Dean Richard Sommer, Director of the Public Realm for Sidewalk Labs Jesse Shapins, renowned critic Michael Sorkin, and others in a debate about meaning, implications, and rhetoric surrounding the “smart city” movement — a keynote panel that’s part of the two-day symposium: URBAN IQ TEST.

The Daniels Faculty continues its collaboration with the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) with a joint presentation of University of Toronto philosophy Professor Mark Kingwell and Princeton University history and theory of architecture Professor Sylvia Lavin, exploring themes raised by the CCA Exhibition: Architecture Itself and Other Postmodernist Myths. We will also be co-presenting a public film screening of the Islands and Villages documentary series, which explores the transformation of architecture in rural Japan. Introduced by CCA c/o Tokyo Curator Kayoko Ota, the documentaries feature Atelier Bow-Wow, Kazuyo Sejima, Toyo Ito, dot architects, and Hajime Ishikawa.

This year’s George Baird Lecture features Chief Planning and Development Officer at Metrolinx Leslie Woo. Associate Professor Georges Farhat and author of Earthworks and Beyond John Beardsley will present the Michael Hough / Ontario Association of Landscape Architects Visiting Critic lecture.

The Daniels Faculty’s Home and Away lecture series is free and open to all students, faculty, alumni, and members of the public. Online registration for each event is required.

Details for all public lectures can also be found on the Daniels Faculty’s website.

If you are an alumni of the Daniels Faculty and would like to receive a copy of the 2018/2019 events poster, please contact John Cowling at john.cowling@daniels.utoronto.ca.

HOME AND AWAY
2018/19 Daniels Faculty Events
1 Spadina Crescent
daniels.utoronto.ca

Oct. 25-26, 2018
WOOD AT WORK 2018
Symposium
Keynotes
Oct. 25: Michael Green, Vancouver
Oct. 26: John Patkau, Vancouver

Nov. 7, 2018
Mark Kingwell, Toronto
Sylvia Lavin, Princeton
A joint initiative with the CCA

Nov. 9, 2018
Film screening: Islands and Villages
With CCA c/o Tokyo Curator Kayoko Ota
A joint initiative with the CCA

Nov. 14, 2018
Leslie Woo, Toronto
George Baird Lecture

Nov. 21, 2018
Brigitte Shim, Toronto
Alison Brooks, London

Nov. 22, 2018
Shane Williamson, Toronto
Marc Simmons, New York

Jan. 15, 2019
Charles Stankievech, Toronto
Ville Kokkonen, Helsinki

Jan. 18-19, 2019
URBAN IQ TEST
Symposium
Keynote: Jan. 18, 2019
Jesse LeCavalier, Toronto / New York
Richard Sommer, Toronto
Jesse Shapins, Toronto
Michael Sorkin, New York

Jan. 22, 2019
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Montreal/Mexico City
Krzysztof Wodiczko, New York

Feb. 5, 2019
Jennifer Baichwal, Toronto
Kate Orff, New York
Jeffrey Cook Memorial Lecture

Feb. 26, 2019
Matthew Davis, Toronto
Barbara Bestor, Los Angeles

Mar. 19, 2019
Georges Farhat, Toronto
John Beardsley, Washington
Michael Hough / Ontario Association of Landscape Architects Visiting Critic

Apr. 16, 2019
Robert Levit, Toronto
Mauricio Pezo and Sofía von Ellrichshausen, Concepción

Apr. 26-27, 2019
NEW CIRCADIA
Symposium

For the past three years, Daniels Faculty alumnus Andrew Choptiany (March 2014) has been working in the studio of the London-based firm Carmody Groarke, where he has had the opportunity to contribute to projects such as the Dorset County Museum, Paddington Hotel, the Temporary Museum for Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Hill House, House and Studio Lambeth, and the Victoria & Albert Members’ room. This past summer the practice, founded in 2006 by Kevin Carmody and Andy Groarke, was the subject of the Spanish monograph publication El Croquis. We caught up with Choptiany to ask about life after graduation and how his time at the Daniels Faculty helped prepare him for this role.

What is it like to work in London, England?
London is a very fast paced city, and to paraphrase David Chipperfield from the conversation between him, Kevin and Andy in the El Croquis, the architecture here is mercantile in the way that it requires a keen sense of tightly honed design as well as a kind of nimble positioning within a competitive environment. The part I like the most about working in London is that there is a common culture of design. There are lectures and events to attend every night but more than that, good design permeates all levels of culture and can be found anywhere you look. Working at Carmody Groarke in particular has opened up the horizons and possibilities of design. The community that has been fostered there is one in which every team member is striving for the highest quality in architecture and often results in passionate debates arguing the comparative value of material decisions. The atmosphere is a mixture of university atelier mixed with the attention to detail and professional business acumen required to realising buildings.

How did your education at the Daniels Faculty prepare you for your current role?
The U of T program has a high-level strategic focus that has been crucial to understanding the way a complex city like London operates. Additionally, the history and theory streams gave a foundation from which it was possible to develop an understanding of the architectural environment that underlies practicing architecture today.
 
What advice do you have for new students starting the Master of Architecture program in the Fall?  
The most important advice I can give is to be aware of the design discussion that is going on at a global level at the same time as absorbing as much as possible of that which makes the Canadian milieu unique and vibrant.

Images top, courtesy of Carmondy Groarke