What was the most enjoyable or memorable part of your Master of Architecture degree?
The most memorable part of my degree was traveling to Sarasota, Florida as part of my research studio. Our studio toured and studied the work of Paul Rudolph who spent his early career developing a highly contextual, regional architectural style in Sarasota. 

What inspired your #thesis?
My thesis topic was inspired by a longstanding exploration of residential form in Toronto. The realities of residential practice in this city often dictate a derivative, formulaic architecture based on zoning bylaws and building code. I was inspired by the formal and material innovation of modernists such as Paul Rudolph as well as the socially and environmentally performative work of contemporary Scandinavian practices to develop new residential models.

Tell us more about your thesis!
Using Toronto’s Annex neighborhood as a testing ground, my project proposed a gradient of urban infill typologies for incremental densification. These mid-density interventions aim to bridge the gap in planning policy designations that create an adversarial relationship between neighborhoods and their urban context. Narrow lot parcelization patterns are exploited through efficient aggregation and re-distribution of domestic program. Through a marriage of material innovation and contextual, qualitative domestic objectives, the hypothetical typologies aim to examine the morphological potential of Toronto’s established neighborhoods.

What advice would you give to a new student?
My advice to a new student would be to take advantage of the network of professionals you are exposed to at Daniels. Whether as mentors, instructors, or future employers, they represent a wide range of interests within the field and serve as an amazing resource during your studies and as you begin your career.

What are your plans after graduation?
I am currently an intern architect at Studio JCI, a small architecture studio in Toronto. Our firm specializes in mixed-use residential infill at a variety of scales. The work is a logical and rewarding extension to my past professional and academic experience.

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Convocation for #UofTDaniels students is on June 14. This month we are featuring our graduates, including their work, their memories, and their advice for new students. Follow #DanielsGrad18 for more!

Degree: Honours Bachelor of Arts, Architectural Design and Visual Studies

What advice you would give to a new student?
One thing I wish I could change in my university experience is that I wish I started spending time in studio earlier. At Daniels we constantly exposed to such great and inpiring artists and designers that at the end of the day it really motivates you to become a better artist. My only advice to new students is to spend more time in studio and become a part of the studio culture, you will definitely benefit from it! 

How has your understanding of architecture changed over the course of your degree?
I never wanted to be an architect. It was never my dream. Growing up, I changed my mind about what I wanted to be every couple of months—I wanted to be a sergeant, then a teacher, then a volleyball player, and the list keeps going. Because I didn’t necessarily want to study architecture, I hated my first year, but then I met a professor who gave me an even harder time and pushed me to work harder; he showed me what my actual potential was and he made me fall in love with architecture. Working late nights in the studio and engaging with other students, I didn’t just fall in love with architecture but with the studio culture as well. Everyone helps and gives feedback on one another’s designs for further improvement. Each project I worked on became a part of me and I worked on it for hours and hours. For the first time in my life I knew what I wanted to be and how I wanted to spend the rest of my life. I never wanted to be an architect, never planned on being one, but I know for sure that’s what I am meant to be. 

What are your plans after graduation? How has this degree prepared you for the future?
I decided that I want to continue studying architecture and I will start my MArch degree at the Daniels Faculty in September. Eventually I would like to be that one professor who makes students not just like architecture but fall in love with it. 

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Convocation for #UofTDaniels students is on June 14. This month we are featuring our graduates, including their work, their memories, and their advice for new students. Follow #DanielsGrad18 for more!

What was the most memorable part of your Master of Architecture degree?
My education at Daniels taught me how to design through research. It strengthened my capacity in analysis and design. I learned how to build architecture in my bachelor degree, but  Daniels taught me why to build it.

What inspired your thesis?
After a class trip to Utah, where we saw great land art, I wanted to further explore the relationship between humans and landscape.

Tell us more about your project!
At the Francon quarry in Montreal, plowed snow is stored during the winter, contaminating the soil and groundwater in surrounding marginalized communiites. I proposed desrupting this cycle of resource extraction and disposal with a remediation project that transforms snow from waste into a cold energy source. Through heat exchange and desalination, contamination is reduced while the proposed structure creates a recreational space for the neighborhood and rconnects them to the site. Transformed, the urban void created by the quarry helps rehabilitate the city.

What are your plans after graduation?
I have a strong desire to excel in the profession, and am seeking to align myself with a company positioned for strong growth!

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Convocation for #UofTDaniels students is on June 14. This month we are featuring our graduates, including their work, their memories, and their advice for new students. Follow #DanielsGrad18 for more!

Degree: Honours Bachelor of Arts in Architectural Studies and Visual Studies

What was the most enjoyable part of your Honours Bachelor of Arts in Architectural Studies and Visual Studies degree?
Most enjoyable for me has been the friendships I've made with my brilliant and inspiring colleagues. Students often describe Daniels as "tight-knit community", and I wholeheartedly agree; the sense of camaraderie found in the 'studio culture' of both Architecture and Visual Studies has been a memorable and gratifying aspect of my time at U of T. Supporting each other on in-school and extracurricular projects and learning from our collective experiences in fields outside architecture allows for a broader and more rewarding education, not to mention making lifelong friends along the way.

Want to Play Cars? | VIS204 Installation with Ed Pien, Dec 2017
This work explores the idea of play. As kids, we project our imaginations onto the world around us; anything can become a castle, or a road, or a bridge, or a parking lot. 'Playing cars' with friends was a big part of my childhood, so this was a lot of fun to revisit. The pipes in the installation room made for a fantastic, untapped world to explore, and I added an aerial video projection of a real city for context. So, want to play cars?

What advice would you give to a new student?
Consider all of your courses as one giant course. Although every student has different subjects that they study (or different classes within architecture), avoid artificially siloing them: each can bring something new and unique to another, and taken as a whole your education will be far more fulfilling than if they are kept in isolation. Always be thinking about how you can use what you've learned in one class to influence your work in another!

Tension Tower | ARC280 Modelling and Fabrication in Design with Nicholas Hoban, April 2018
Modelling proves a tricky means of exploring a project's physical strength. While often highly delicate, they represent towers that are designed to be strong and resilient. This project was a study in structure, where two non-parallel cores serve to anchor and self-align each floor plate. The final model was built without the use of glue, supporting itself exclusively through tension.

What are your plans after graduation? How has this degree prepared you for the future?
I currently work in the Woodworking and Fabrication lab at Daniels and plan to pursue my Master's degree in the future. As the program encourages students to pull knowledge and experience from courses outside the faculty, such as Environmental Studies, Physics, and Gender Studies, I feel that the breadth of education that Daniels provides has allowed me to broaden my sense of what art and architecture can be and how those practices can influence one another. I'm planning to pursue a career in design/build with an ecological and artistic focus.

Den | VIS431 Thesis with Joanne Tod and John Massey, April 2018 | Photo: Harry Choi
Where does architecture end, and furniture begin? Den explores the architecture of play at furniture scale. Invoking the magic of creative, anarchic, childlike freedom, Den is a playful take on the spatial spectrum and inspired by the unprogrammed primitive shelters of animals.

Illustrations in slideshow, top:
Smaller Than Life | VIS308 Advanced Drawing with Ed Pien, Feb 2017 | Pencil on Paper
This work compares reality and perception. Four stills of my model train set are composed as though they are actual photos of a landscape, and rendered in a traditionally realistic way. However, each still includes a nod to the truth of their existence, such as a leaning paintbrush, unhooked train track, or the rafters of my basement. As such, it is a series of drawings (abstractions) of photographs (direct depictions) of a model (abstraction) of reality, where the abstractions are meant to increase the true reality relative to the perceived and expected idea of what is being shown. The work is scaled to the relative size of the train set, self-reflecting on the idea of the constructed image.

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Convocation for #UofTDaniels students is on June 14. This month we are featuring our graduates, including their work, their memories, and their advice for new students. Follow #DanielsGrad18 for more!

On Wednesday, May 16^th, the Daniels Faculty was proud to host the Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate Lecture: “Paths Uncharted” with Balkrishna Doshi.

Professor Doshi has been instrumental in shaping the discourse of architecture throughout India and internationally as an architect, urban planner, and educator. Influenced by masters of 20th century architecture, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier, and Louis Kahn, he has been able to interpret architecture and transform it into built works that respect eastern culture while enhancing the quality of life in India. His ethical and personal approach to architecture has touched lives of every socio-economic class across a broad spectrum of genres since the 1950s.

Tickets for Doshi’s lecture sold out in minutes, and people from around the world watched his presentation live via Instagram and facebook. For those who missed it, the livestream is available on the Daniels Faculty’s YouTube page. (Dean Richard Sommer’s introduction starts around the 20:00 mark.)

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Pritzker Prize, and the first time that the international award was presented in Canada. The private award ceremony took place at the Aga Khan Museum on May 18.

Each year, the Pritzker Prize honours a living architect whose built work demonstrates a combination of those qualities of talent, vision and commitment, which has produced consistent and significant contributions to humanity and the built environment through the art of architecture.

View more photos on the Daniels Faculty's Facebook page.

The University of Toronto’s John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design in partnership with The Pritzker Architecture Prize is honoured to welcome Professor Balkrishna Doshi, the 2018 Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, to present the public lecture "Paths Uncharted" on Wednesday, May 16, 2018.

While registration is full for this event, there will be a rush line for non-ticket holders, and any unclaimed seats will be made available on a first-come, first served basis. Overflow spaces with some visibility into the hall will also be available. If you are a ticket holder, remember to arrive 10 minutes before the start of the event to claim your seat!

Professor Doshi’s lecture will also be recorded and streamed live on Facebook and Instagram via @UofTDaniels. Following the event, the recording will be made available on the Daniels Faculty’s YouTube channel, youtube.com/UofTDaniels.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Pritzker Prize, and the first time that the international award will be presented in Canada. Its purpose is to honor annually a living architect whose built work demonstrates a combination of those qualities of talent, vision and commitment, which has produced consistent and significant contributions to humanity and the built environment through the art of architecture.

An architect, urban planner, and educator, for the past 70 years Doshi has been instrumental in shaping the discourse of architecture throughout India and internationally. Influenced by masters of 20th century architecture, including Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier, and Louis Kahn, Doshi has been able to interpret architecture and transform it into built works that respect eastern culture while enhancing the quality of living in India. His ethical and personal approach to architecture has touched lives of every socio-economic class across a broad spectrum of genres since the 1950s.

Doshi's architecture explores the relationships between fundamental needs of human life, connectivity to self and culture, and understanding of social traditions, within the context of a place and its environment, and through a response to Modernism. Childhood recollections, from the rhythms of the weather to the ringing of temple bells, inform his designs. He describes architecture as an extension of the body, and his ability to attentively address function while regarding climate, landscape, and urbanization is demonstrated through his choice of materials, overlapping spaces, and utilization of natural and harmonizing elements.

Image, top: Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore (photo courtesy of VSF)

2012 Daniels Faculty graduate Mohamed Serour will have his Master of Architecture thesis published as part of the Egyptian national pavilion's exhibition at the 2018 Venice Biennale, May 26 to November 25.

Curated by architects Islam El Mashtooly and Mouaz Abouzaid, with architecture professor Cristiano Luchetti, art director and producer Giuseppe Moscatello, and art director Karim Moussa, the Egyptian Pavilion will focus on "Roba becciah: The informal city."

"Having grown up in Cairo, I have always found informal settlements very interesting in terms of the socio-economic and political space they inhabit and, more importantly, the opportunities that informality has created to re-shape these settlements’ social and urban landscapes," says Serour.

For his thesis project, Serour examined the role that architecture could play in increasing the autonomy and self-sufficiency of informal settlements, though an exploration of Ezbet El-Nasr, an informal settlement in Cairo.

His research involved developing an understanding residents' most pressing needs and reviewing the existing technologies they rely on to provide basic services, such as the use of low-tech solar heating systems to provide hot water. His proposal for new, decentralized infrastructural systems in the form of towers builds on opportunities that already exist within the dense neighbourhoods and aims to bring the informal settlement communities back from the margins.

Serour grew up in Cairo and moved to Toronto in 2002 to attend the University of Toronto. He is currently an architect at the Toronto-based firm Superkül.

For more information on Egypt's pavilion at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, visit: www.robabecciah.com

For more information on the Venice Biennale, visit: http://www.labiennale.org

This week (May 7-12), the Daniels Faculty is hosting Smartgeometry — a biennial workshop and conference that investigates how digital tools and computation can serve architecture and design. Attracting a global community of innovators in the fields of architecture, design, science, engineering, and science, this year's events will explore the relationship between architecture and AI.

Globe and Mail architecture critic Alex Bozikovic wrote about some of the novels ways that computation and new fabrication technologies are altering the how architects design spaces in a recent article (now available to subscribers online). His piece features The Living, a New York studio among the pioneers in the field of generative design.

Bozikovic also spoke to Assistant Professor Brady Peters, a director at Smartgeometry who helped organize this year's workshops and conference at the Daniels Faculty:
 

"Smart geometry is not just about computation,” Daniels assistant professor Brady Peters says, “but increasingly about fabrication – the relationship of the design process to the fabrication and construction process.”

Peters, a long-time participant in the biennial event, speaks from experience. While working at Foster & Partners in London, he participated in the design of complex structures – including the glass-and-metal roof of a courtyard at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, which appears to ripple like a sail.

Making such forms has been the most visible application of software in architecture, and 20 years ago, it meant serious technical challenges. Frank Gehry’s office was able to design his famous Guggenheim Bilbao by customizing software intended for aircraft production.

At this point, “the software problem has gotten solved,” Peters says. “The tools” – software including Grasshopper and Rhino – are widely available, and they allow users to “design a series of relationships between geometric forms that then combine into architecture.”

The question, then: Where can tech take us? At this year’s Smartgeometry – which begins with a five-day workshop, “a chance for people in practice to get together, geek out and develop new technology” – the territory is artificial intelligence. One possible application: tracking and interpreting data from building sensors that reveal how a build performs. “Now, it’s about energy being measured on an hourly basis or minute-by-minute basis – and that can serve as part of the design of new buildings,” Peters says. “This is research that hasn’t yet been done in architecture – a real living lab, and seeing how building can evolve.”
 

Tickets for the Smartgeometry conference are available online via eventbrite. A list of speakers and the schedule can be viewed on the Smartgeometry website.

Faculty, students, and alumni among the winners of the "Everyone is King" design competition

This week, people will have even more of a reason to visit King Street in Toronto's downtown core. The busy street is now home to a series of temporary "parklets" thanks to the "Everyone is King" design competition.

Among the many installations is Woggle Jungle, by Assistant Professor Victor Perez-Amado (of VPA Studio) with Daniels students Anton Skorishchenko and Michael De Luca, in collaboration with MAKE Studio's Dina Sarhane (MArch 2013) and Mani Mani (MArch 2012). Located where King Street intersects with Ed Mirvish Way, by Metro Hall, Woggle Jungle is made up of hundreds of colourful foam pool noodles that emerge from a wooden platform, where visitors may meander, sit, or rest.

"This parklet takes advantage of the flexibility of pool noodles and its modular elements which allow for different engaging configurations and expansion," says the Woggle Jungle design team.  "As the project title suggests, 400 foam buoyancy aids are bundled to create a multi-colored forest and seating destination that stretches across King Street."

The project and other winning entries will remain on King Street until October 1, 2018. The "Everyone is King" competition is part of the King Street Transit Pilot, which the City of Toronto launched in November 2017, to explore a new configuration for King Street that would improve transit service on the busiest streetcar route in the city.

For more information on the King Street Transit Pilot, visit the City of Toronto's website, where you will also find a list of the other winning entries.

Photos by Yasmin Al-Samarrai

First year Master of Architecture student Pedram Karimi and fourth year Master of Architecture student Parham Karimi (who happen to be brothers) received an honourable mention for their submission to BOUN: International Urban Furniture Design Competition.

The 2018 competition sought design for furniture that would enrich the built environment and improve the quality of the urban landscapes marked by "ever-increasing skyscrapers" that tend to overpower smaller elements.

The duo's proposal, titled GATHERING-TIME, is a series of modular urban furniture that encourages the discovery of interstitial spaces within urban university campuses.

Writes Pedram, "The design proposal intends to redefine the campus bench from a repeatable object into a distinct, expressive space that can attract and delight people, inviting them to gather in small and large groups."

Congratulations to Pedram and Parham on their successful competition entry!