Assistant Professor Erica Allen-Kim contributed the chapter "Condos in the Mall: Suburban Transnational Typological Transformations in Markham, Ontario" to the book Making Cities Global: The Transnational Turn in Urban History, now available from University of Pennsylvania Press. 

Edited by A. K. Sandoval-Strausz and Nancy H. Kwak, Making Cities Global argues that "combining urban history with a transnational approach leads to a better understanding of our increasingly interconnected world. In order to achieve prosperity, peace, and sustainability in metropolitan areas in the present and into the future, we must understand their historical origins and development."

The publication was recently featured in The Metropole.

"One of the features of the Chinese-dominated ethnoburb in North America has been the densely configured shopping center, in many cases an enclosed plaza or minimall that serves as a social gathering space for a decentralized population," says Allen-Kim. "Condo malls, which were developed and marketed primarily to Asian and Hispanic immigrants in North America, have occupied an unusual position in that qualities of informality and looseness were cultivated rather than repressed by local and transnational developers, investors, and entrepreneurs."

Erica Allen-Kim is an historian of modern architecture and urban design. Her work on global cities and cultural landscapes focuses on issues of memory and citizenship. She is currently completing her first manuscript, Mini-malls and Memorials: Building Little Saigon in American Suburbs, and has published on Vietnamese-American war memorials and the transnational politics of Chinatown gates. Her current book project, Chinatown Modernism, situates the architectural and urban projects of American Chinatowns within the broader context of modern architecture and planning.

Images, top by Luke Duross (MArch 2016) as part of his thesis Retail Revisions: Ownership, Authorship and the Ethnic Mall: 1) Current Ground Floor Expansion, Pacific Mall 2) Original Ground Floor Expansion, Pacific Mall

Associate Professor Mason White was recently interviewed by urbanNext on Lateral Office’s participation in the inaugural Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism. Lateral Office's contribution to the Biennale titled States of Disassembly envisioned seven architectural typologies for a techno-commons that would manage our electronic waste stream.

“We were given the theme of recycling, which is interesting because it sounds like a very functional, utilitarian thematic, but there are people, labour, and architectural possibilities within recycling,” said White in the interview with urbanNext. ‘We wanted to look at e-waste’s geopolitics and material politics because the future of waste will be mining precious materials that are embedded in discarded products."

The seven architectural typologies were represented in an axonometric drawing. Each type illustrated is involved in upcycling discarded technology: a port for e-waste, a campus for knowledge exchange, an electronics market, and other building types or public spaces that might exist once we better incorporate the end-of-life materials into our economy.

Our culture currently celebrates the assembly of products, but the un-making, the disassembly will be part of our future, says White. The earth has a finite resource for these precious materials, so eventually we will have to explore urban mining to continue the use of these resources.

Daniels Faculty students Kearon Roy Taylor, Genevieve Simms, and Brandon Bergem, assisted Lateral Office with research and work on the States of Dissassembly exhibit.

View the full interview on Vimeo.

The Daniels Building at One Spadina is now bustling with hundreds of architecture, art, landscape architecture, and urban design students, but many may be unaware that the building's contemporary addition was constructed with some help from an unusual building material: recycled kayaks. The repurposed kayaks make up the “bubbles” in One Spadina's bubbledeck floors — an innovative structural detail that incorporates spherical voids (i.e. bubbles) into what would otherwise be a solid concrete slab.

A traditional concrete floor slab is made up of concrete poured into a solid form with steel reinforcements (called rebar) laid throughout. The thickness can vary depending on the type of occupancy, the span in between beams, and a variety of other factors. However, because of the nature of forces moving through a floor, it is actually unnecessary for it to be solid concrete.

Building a solid concrete floor is a simple and well-known practice, but it can result in an excessively heavy floor. As Tom Beresford, Project Manager at NADAAA explains on the firm's blog, introducing spherical voids (i.e. "bubbles") reduces the concrete’s weight while maintaining its structural integrity, which allows the floor slab to achieve longer spans. The bubbledeck slab performs like several “I-beams” stitched together: the concrete mass is concentrated at top and bottom of the section, where compressive and tensile bending stresses are greatest and where they are most needed.

Writes Beresford, "Voided slab’s longer, beam-less spans, combined with its smooth ceiling finish, allowed the [One Spadina] design team to transform spaces that would have otherwise been cluttered with concrete beams and drop panels into clean architectural volumes."

Bubbledeck systems allow designers and builders to produce and use less concrete and more recycled materials, lowering energy consumption and carbon emissions.

But why kayaks?

When we told visitors during Doors Open in May about the bubble deck beneath their feet, they were curious: Why were old plastic kayaks were used? Was there something special about their material? Was there a large recall in the recent past? How many kayaks are people discarding these days, anyway?  We asked Jerry Clarke-Ames at BubbleDeck North America for answers.

He explained that the bubbledecks used at One Spadina come from Metelix Products Inc, based out of Brampton, Ontario. Metelix manufactures molded products with High Density Polyethylene (HDPE) which is used to create kayaks. Occasionally, a kayak will be rejected by quality control, and this rejected kayak will be regrinded and saved to make the "bubbles."

"There is no reason to specifically use kayaks," he says. "It's a matter of coincidence."

Fun fact: One recycled kayak can produced fourty bubbles.

Visit NADAAA’s blog for a full description on the construction process and materials used in the bubbledeck slabs.

Photos by Peter MacCallum; Images courtesy of NADAAA.

In one of their first "Superstudio" assignments this year, graduate students were asked to overlay ideas onto a supergraphic of the city of Toronto initially created for the Design Exchange’s inaugural EDIT Festival. The students looked at the city through a specific lens in an exercise to imagine alternative futures.

Questions addressed in the exercise include:

• How can the process of looking at and drawing the city at a very large scale inform the way we design the city at other, smaller scales?
• What infrastructural, landscape, and building features should be highlighted in drawings of the kind?
• How might designers participate in imaging processes of city-wide and regional urbanization in a serious yet inventive way that can offer compelling, future-oriented alternatives?
• What kind of big pictures might inspire the public imagination in ways that might compel citizens to participate in making meaningful change?

The Daniels Faculty's  Superstudio course is an opportunity for architecture, landscape, and urban design students to discover shared concerns, approaches, and design solutions, and to model the kinds of collaborative, creative, and technical processes required to successfully address the complex demands (political, social, cultural, environmental, formal, infrastructural, etc.) of urban projects today and into the future. Graduate students in architecture, landscape, and  urban design work on the same set of assignments throughout the semester, allowing each discipline to bring its range of approaches to urban-scale exercises so they can be identified and speculated upon across the whole “super” studio.

For the full album, visit the Daniels Faculty Flickr page.

The Graduate Architecture, Landscape, and Design Student Union (GALDSU) will launch this year’s issue on Friday, October 6. This issue will explore “the multiplicity of ways in which the graduate students of Daniels confront the realities of our world – and their worlds – as a way to imagine and create space for multiple futures.” How, Co-Editors and Alumni Jasper Flores, Elise Hunchuck, and Dayne Roy-Caldwell ask, do the “practices of architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, and visual studies suggest ways for us to design with and for each other?”

The launch party will take place at OFFSITE Concept Space at 867 Dundas Street West. There will be music, food, and a cash bar. Copies of the new publication will be available to purchase. For more information, visit the Eventbrite page.

A note from the editors on the cover image (pictured above): “The moon was installed at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto in April 2016, alongside Gillian Dykeman (MVS 2016)'s video 'Dispatches from the Feminist Utopian Future,' watercolour schematic drawings of the earthworks, and a keystone covered in tachyon particles. For more, please see 'Dispatches from the Feminist Utopian Future (page 13-18) and Psychic Strata: Land, Art, Subjectivity (page 19-26). Both works are by Gillian Dykeman. The cover photograph was taken by Jesse Boles (MVS 2015), courtesy of Gillian Dykeman (2015).

Other photos (in order of appearance): 2-On Spheres by Ekaterina Dovjenko, 3-Wasting Futures by Elaine Chau, 4-To Melt Into Air, Slowly by Vanessa Abram, 5-∆ Museum by Melissa Gerskup and Ray Wu

On October 27, Lecturers Adrian Phiffer, Alex Josephson, and Monica Adair will join discussions on marketing and promotion of architecture at this year’s POP // CAN // CRIT symposium. In its second year, POP // CAN // CRIT 2017 will bring together Canadian architects, marketing professionals, photographers, advocacy groups, and media to discuss and debate the vital roles that architects, media, marketing personnel, and the public play in shaping the general discourse surrounding architecture.

Featured Panel Discussions

Panel 2: advocacy + activism
Moderator: Matt Blackett (Spacing)
Speakers: Toon Dreessen, Susan Algie, Monica Adair, Johanna Hurme

Panel 3: image + architecture
Moderator: Adrian Phiffer
Speakers: Ben Rhan, Younes Bounhar, Amanda Large, Norm Li, Naomi Kriss

Panel 4: architecture as icon/ branding + Toronto condo revolution
Moderator: Nicola Spunt (PARTISANS)
Speakers: Alex Josephson, Alex Bozikovic, Adrian Phiffer

In these discussions, participants will be answering questions such as, “In what ways do we market architecture?" "How can we best advocate for the profession?" "And what impact does a photograph have on our understanding of the built environment?” The event will take place at the Design Exchange in Toronto with $45 general admission and $35 student admission. Tickets can be purchased on Eventbrite.

For more information, visit http://spacing.ca/popcancrit/

Listen to audio from last year’s discussions:

Photo, top: Tinker's Orchard by Acre Architects, founded by Monica Adair and Stephen Kopp.

“It is commendable when a design student tackles a tough building typology, and exceptional when the author discovers real invention within that typology. The developer-driven world of mid-rise residential housing requires just such invention and new thinking.”

This summer, a group of students worked together to tackle issues of sustainable and affordable housing through straw bale design. Master of Architecture student Sarah Hasan writes about the first project undertaken by the new University of Toronto student group: Future-Living Lab.
 
Future-Living Lab consists of architecture students at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design; U of T’s Department of Civil Engineering; and Ryerson University’s Department of Architectural Science.
 
Earlier this year, the students set off to design a 1000 square feet home in Callander, Ontario. The design brief provided by their client called for affordability, ease of construction, and sustainability within the home’s environmental context. The students researched and consulted with multiple design and engineering firms before settling on a Structurally Insulated Panel (SIP) system that uses straw bale as the main insulation material.
 
In August, the group acquired building permits and held a build workshop where interested students gathered and assembled the SIP’s. This process consisted of layering clay and straw bale in specific proportions within pre-fabricated wooden formwork. In the upcoming weeks, the panels will be lifted up into position to form the house walls.
 
The Future-Living Lab aims to continue fostering collaboration among students from different disciplines for a common goal. Going forward, the group also hopes to have an influence on the future of dwelling through ongoing research and design projects.
 
You can view their website at: Futurelivinglab.ca
 

On September 2, Lecturer Matthew Allen presented a paper titled “"Architecture and the Algorithm, or: What Happens When Abstract Art Meets Concrete Poetry?" at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science on in Boston.

From the abstract:

Cambridge UK in the 1960s saw a surge of interest in pre-war abstract art and a thriving concrete poetry scene. Also in this milieu one of the first laboratories in which architects worked with computers opened in 1967. To explain how these events are related, this paper describes how a new discipline (built form studies) adjacent to architecture congealed around a new epistemic object, the algorithm.
 
The concept of the algorithm was famously formalized in 1936 by Alan Turing as a jarring combination of abstract procedure and physical analogy. In post-war Cambridge, philosophers of science continued to parse the divisions between the poetic and the concrete. This line of inquiry made its way into architecture as several mathematics students switched departments around 1960. With the opening of a university computer center, they faced the practical matter of working rigorously in the realm of the algorithm.
 
I argue that this productive moment set in place concepts and practices that continue to reverberate through architecture. Assessing their impact is difficult, however, because they did not resolve into a broad explanatory theory. I argue that algorithms often took the place of theory. Because an algorithm can be seen as containing its own explanation, protagonists of built form studies developed a matter-of-fact textual style that lends itself to misinterpretation. Though a close look at algorithms created in 1960s Cambridge, I will elaborate a catalog of aesthetic effects and political intentions and begin to reconstruct a retroactive theory for relating architectural ends with algorithmic means.
 

An architect and writer, Allen has a Master of Architecture degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Design as well as degrees in Physics and the Comparative History of Ideas. He has worked previously in the video game and bioengineering industries as well as several internationally-recognized firms — most recently for Preston Scott Cohen, Inc., on a number of award-winning projects in China. His expertise in design spans the intricately geometric, the flexibly parametric, and the complicatedly situated.

The presidents of Toronto’s four universities – the University of Toronto, OCAD University, York University and Ryerson University – have teamed up for a new initiative called StudentDwellTO to tackle one of the biggest issues facing post-secondary students in the Greater Toronto area: affordable housing.

The initiative brings together nearly 100 faculty and students from the four universities to take an in-depth look at student housing in the GTA. The Daniels Faculty is thrilled to have faculty and students participating in this project.

This follows a previous collaboration between the four universities: a massive survey of student travel behaviour, called StudentMoveTO, which revealed that long daily commutes for students – many of whom live far away where housing is more affordable – were leading to lower campus engagement and in some cases limiting students’ class choices.

StudentMoveTO and StudentDwellTO are parts of an initiative by the presidents of the four universities aimed at improving the state of the city-region – and, in turn, the experiences for university students in the GTA.

“This is another example of how the impact of our collective efforts can be far greater than the sum of individual contributions,” says Professor Shauna Brail, U of T’s presidential adviser on urban engagement and director of the urban studies program.

Given the number of post-secondary students in the GTA – more than 180,000 spread across the four universities alone – studying the basic issues facing our students as they live in and navigate the city is critical, says Brail, who will be U of T’s representative for StudentDwellTO’s steering committee.

StudentDwellTO will look at housing affordability from a range of perspectives, bringing together disciplines including architecture, art, education, engineering, environmental studies and design, geography, psychology, real estate management and urban development and planning.

The two-year initiative will have heavy research and advocacy components, and the researchers will collect data using a variety of research methods that include:

• wide-scale focus groups and accompanying surveys to draw out narratives surrounding students’ lived experiences,
• interactive website and community arts programming and communication tools, and
• interactive maps to develop affordable housing strategies.

The subject matter will also be incorporated into experiential learning courses, across all four universities and various disciplines, to propose and test solutions to the student housing experience and crisis.

Along the way, researchers will collaborate with government, non-profit, private sector and community partners in the GTA.  Each university will hold public events, including affordable housing charrettes, to get a wide range of input on solutions.

Image, top: by Suhaib Arnaoot, from his Master of Architectrure thesis titled Responsive Social Housing