It’s been a decade since Toronto’s building boom — which saw cultural institutions such as the ROM, the National Ballet School, the Toronto Film Festival, and OCAD, among others — transform the city with new works of architecture. Chief among these new buildings was the Art Gallery of Ontario, whose Frank Gehry-designed expansion was completed in 2008.

So how is the addition holding up? The Toronto Star spoke to AGO employees and local architects — including Daniels Faculty Dean Richard Sommer — about the transformation and how it came to be.
 

Writes Nick Patch:

Compared to the audacious scratch-made classics Gehry had recently turned out to worldwide acclaim — 1997’s astonishing Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, of course, or 2003’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles — he was going to be, in some ways, restrained simply based on the realities of the site.

Yet several critics now believe those limiting circumstances ultimately benefited the project.

“Gehry was doing extremely high-budget, big-gesture projects at that point in his career, and this one didn’t allow for that,” said Richard Sommer, dean of the University of Toronto’s Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design. “He’s sometimes at his best when he has to do something scrappier.”
 

Visit the Toronto Star’s website to read the full article “Frank Gehry’s gift to Toronto gets better with age.”

A number of Daniels faculty and alumni were recently named part of “30 Canadian Architecture Firms Breaking New Ground” by Azure Magazine. The list was created to celebrate Canada Day and was the third in a series of “best and brightest” lists.

“Some of our choices are studios that are fresh out of school and have yet to complete an entire building; others have won international competitions that will see their work realized on the other side of the world,” writes Azure. “At every scale they share a drive (some might call it an obsession) for pushing architecture to the limits in terms of technology, innovation and beauty.”

Omar Gandhi Architecture founded by Omar Gandhi, a graduate of the University of Toronto’s Honours, Bachelor of Arts in Architectural Studies program (project pictured above)

“With a second office now in Toronto, the studio is bringing and adapting rural sensibilities within an urban context. Says Gandhi: “I want my aesthetic to change constantly.” Last week, the firm took home a People’s Choice AZ Award for Rabbit Snare Gore.”

Studio AC, founded by Sessional Lecturer Jennifer Kudlats and Andrew Hill

“Principals Jennifer Kudlats and Andrew Hill are alums of KPMB Architects, where they first met. Running their own studio since 2015, they are now finishing up three residential renovations that express their taste for clean lines, wide open rooms, natural wood finishes and large doses of natural light.”

Office OU, founded by Sessional Lecturer Nicolas Koff and Uros Novakovic

“Earlier this year Office OU won a major masterplan competition for Sejong City (shown). The 190,000-square-metre site has been mapped out to house administrative buildings and five national museums that sit among manicured and natural landscapes, including terraced rice fields. When completed in 2023, the project’s impact is expected to shift South Korea’s cultural focus from Seoul to Sejong.”

Hapa Collaborative, where Sarah Siegel (MArch 2006) is an Associate

“Along with Nick Milkovich Architects and Matthew Soules Architecture, Hapa is responsible for the new Vancouver Art Gallery Plaza (shown), a $9.6-million renovation of the popular 4,197-square-metre square. The project, which had a soft opening on June 22, is already adored by locals. Its most defining feature is a tricolour mosaic of asymmetric tiles. In Canadian cities public squares can be few and far between. This plaza’s dramatic upgrade gives a new face to the entire downtown core.”

Public Work, the Landscape Architects for One Spadina

“Public Work is one of the key players envisioning plans for a 400-hectare waterfront site in Toronto. Called the Port Lands, the massive project has just received a financial injection of $1.25-billion from three levels of government. It is the largest redevelopment project of its kind in the history of Toronto, and it is expected to transform the postindustrial area into new neighbourhoods and parks, while providing a necessary flood barrier.”

Polymétis, founded by Sessional Lecturer Michaela MacLeod and Nichola Croft

“When Polymétis won the Prix de Rome for Emerging Practitioners, a year-long scholarship, they used the funds to visit 20 international sites that take a design approach to reclaiming waste sites within cities. We’re excited to see how Polymétis finds ways to apply this knowledge for cultivating public spaces out of wastescapes.”

Office of Adrian Phiffer, founded by Lecturer Adrian Phiffer

“The firm makes little distinction between art and architecture. Their competition entries have ranged from imagining Guggenheim Helsinki as a giant purple barge to a winter warming hut that lends out orange blanks to keep ice skaters warm.”

JA Architecture Studio, founded by Sessional Lecturer Nima Javidi, Behnaz Assadi (MLA 2008), and Hanieh Rezaei (MUD 2004)

“Now under construction is Duple Dip, a minimalist house in Toronto’s westend that from the exterior looks like a chapel. Inside, the sparse interior connects four outdoor spaces.”

Partisans, founded by Sessional Lecturer Pooya Baktash and Lecturer Alex Josephson

“The early success of Partisans hasn’t meant they have rested on past laurels. Among other large-scale projects the studio is working on is the rebirth of Union Station, Toronto’s central rail hub. The station is now undergoing a massive expansion that will see it double in size, mostly by digging underground. The project is expected to be completed in 2018.”

Woodford Sheppard Architecture, founded by Taryn Sheppard (MArch 2010) and Christ Woodford

“A number of WS projects signal a change for the region [St. John’s in Newfoundland]. In particular is the firm’s ambitious concept for The Bridge, a building that responds to the recent expansion of Newfoundland’s offshore oil industry and the need for both housing and office space. If built, the project would provide a campus that acts as a buffer zone between industrial and residential areas.”

Public City Architecture, a merger between Peter Sampson (BArch 1999) Architecture Studio and Plain Projects Landscape Architecture

“Making winter fun is one of the PCA’s main preoccupations. Their latest social engagement effort appeared on a public ice rink in Winnipeg last winter: a giant “crokicurl” game that mixes the rules of the tabletop board game crokinole with the physical scale of a curling rink.”

For the full article, visit Azure's website.

When he graduated in 2015, Jonah Ross-Marrs received the Jackman-Kuwabara Prize, awarded to the student judged to have the most outstanding Master of Architecture thesis of the year. That summer, he won a Pier 9 Artist-in-Residence fellowship at AutoDesk in San Francisco. How’s life a year after graduation? Honours Bachelor of Arts in Architectural Studies student Josie Northern Harrison (HBA 2017) caught up with Ross-Marrs over email to find out how his time at U of T has helped prepare him for future work in computation and architecture — and how he plans to expand on his thesis this Fall as a new student in the Master of Science in Architecture Studies (SMArchS) in Computation at MIT.

What inspired you to study architecture at the Daniels Faculty?
After completing an undergraduate degree in History, I wanted to study something tangible that would give me a foothold in the professional world. I was inspired by the models and diagrams on the walls of the architecture department at McGill University and felt I would be more at home in such an environment. I thought architecture might be an opportunity to build on my hobby of making electro-mechanical things and bring my creative work into a more formal academic environment.

I decided to study at Daniels because of the accomplished faculty. I liked the diversity of professors and felt the reputation of the school would help me in my career. I also felt that living in a large urban center would be a good supplement to my studies.

When did you first start experimenting with open source software?
I have been interested in electronics since the mid-1990s, when I began building simple solar-powered robots from e-waste. My interest was sparked by the magic of tiny, intricate mechanisms coming to life when charged with electricity. When Arduino (an accessible type of open-source hardware and software) was released, it allowed a whole group of people like myself access to microchips (mini reprogrammable electronic brains) that was previously unavailable. Once I was familiar with Arduino, it was a natural progression to make Do-It-Yourself (DIY) Computer Numerically Controlled (CNC) machines.

How did studying at the University of Toronto influence your work?
Every design studio was, for me, life-changing and extremely challenging. I wasn’t sure I would continue on the traditional path of a practicing architect, so I used the courses I took as opportunities to develop my own creative method. I began to develop a creative process and learned that my strengths were in visual communication. I also learned to work within a highly critical environment and to accept criticism of my work. Studying design changed my view of making and made me aspire to higher ideals and have a greater appreciation for the context of my work.

Living in Toronto, I had access to valuable resources needed for experiments with custom CNC tooling. Active Surplus, Jacob’s Hardware, Above All Electronic Surplus, Hacklab.To, and other communities were crucial assets to my projects.

The Mini CNC Foam Cutter tutorial that you posted on Instructableshas been very successful (with ~42,000 views and ~500 favorites). Will you continue to contribute to the open source/hardware hacking community?
I have published a few more Instructables since the Mini CNC Foam Cutter and hope to get feedback from the community about the value of these projects. I hope to meaningfully contribute to the open-source community because I build on projects created by my peers as prime resources for my investigations. For the open-source hardware community in particular, I would like to continue to develop a series of mini CNC machines that work with different materials and use e-waste components in different ways.

What was it like being an Artist-in-Residence at the Autodesk Pier 9?
The Autodesk Artist-in-Residence Program was an excellent opportunity to interact with the programmers who develop software used by designers, and to gain access to cutting edge fabrication technologies. It was also an opportunity to meet incredibly talented designers and artists from around the world and learn from their practices. The San Francisco tech scene in general is extremely stimulating and full of intelligent and entrepreneurial individuals.

What did you create for the residency?
My project captured a moment that is normally lost in the process of printing a 3D model. When a computer prepares a 3D model for printing, it rebuilds the model out of triangles (i.e. translates the model into triangles) before virtually slicing the model into layers for the 3D printer to interpret. This first triangulation step is called the meshing process. I printed each component of this translation process separately in the order they have been rebuilt by the meshing algorithm. This was done with various input models: a house, a car, a washing machine, or a pencil sharpener. The results visualize the work of the meshing algorithms, providing a behind-the-scenes look into an almost instantaneous computer process that designers interact with every day but would never experience spatially. The potential of the project is in the way it can analyze and compare the behavior of different algorithms designed to do the same task in a kind of visual short-hand.

Do you hope to expand on the work you did for your MArch thesis in the SMArchS program in Computation at MIT?
At MIT, I hope to continue exploring my MArch thesis project and follow it wherever it leads me while challenging myself to increase my skill level in programming languages. Most of all, I hope to meet others in my field and learn from them, hopefully allowing myself to evolve and develop new insights.

Do you have any advice for students starting their Masters of Architecture degree next year?
I would suggest attending the guest lectures as they are a valuable opportunity to get insight into the design process and various strategies of presenting work. I think maintaining an interest in extra-architecture subjects is important because of the nature of inspiration. Connected with this, I think it is important to find ways to maintain a balanced lifestyle throughout the degree.

This summer, the Research Opportunity Program (ARC399H1) was conducted as a two-week intensive workshop offering undergraduate students the unique opportunity to design and build a structure on Hart House Farm.
 
Students spent the first week in a studio setting on the St. George campus, designing and prototyping a collaborative project using both digital and analog tools and materials. During the second week, they stayed at Hart House Farm to collectively assemble the structure they designed. Taught by Instructors William Haskas, and Matei Denes of PlusFARM, the studio (entitled “Nocturne Elemental”) was established as an environment for discourse, digital design, craftwork, fabrication, and construction with a particular emphasis upon the areas where analog and digital design overlap, trade places, and inform each other.
 
Following an initial analysis of a pivotal cinematic moment, students worked with Rhinoceros and Grasshopper to explore generative workflows and fluidity in form-making. This was followed by a series of physical prototypes developed around the simple program of a space for projection and different forms of bodily occupation. In the absence of a specific site or material constraints, the exuberant forms were then evaluated in terms of their potential performative success.
 
The project was then developed through a poly-authored digital design process, allowing every student to embed, share, and infuse their ideas upon the final outcome. In keeping with this model of collaborative authorship, the students decided collectively which scheme to invest in and take to Hart House Farm the following week.
 
For the second half of the course, students continued to develop and refine the scheme while camping on site, ultimately fabricating a collaboratively-built structure that functions as a screening pavilion, a beacon, and a viewing device that is intended to transform our understanding of the natural setting of Hart House Farm.
 
PlusFARM is an internationally recognized design and fabrication studio with built projects in London, Lima, Toronto, and New York City. Working with both digital and material design, the studio inverts traditional, authoritarian, top-down design to explore horizontal platforms of participation and production through the practice of “poly-authorship,” which responds to how digital technologies have changed the way artchitecture is being taught, practiced, and managed.

Visit our Facebook page for more photos.

Photos above by Harry Choi

A team of undergraduate students from the Daniels Faculty — including Kian Hosseinnia, Pearl Cao, Tina Siassi, Dimah Ghazal, and Ous Abou Ras — won the URB PRK Emerging Young Architecture + Planning Program (EYAPP) design-build competition. The competition “was inititiated to provide an outlet for students and interns in Architecture and Planning to showcase their creative talents and show to the community the importance of design and how it can be both clever and environmentally sustainable."

Each year, students are challenged to create a summer refuge or “parklet” within a city using innovative strategies and sustainable materials. This year the site was two parking stalls on Whyte Avenue in Edmonton Alberta.

Hosseinnia and Cao were guests on CBC’s Edmonton AM to discuss their design on June 8.

The students are now raising money to realize their winning plan. The extra funds will assist them securing the necessary materials.

“This is a very important project for us as it gives us the opportunity as emerging designers to provide for the public and enhance their social experience of Whyte Avenue,” write the students on their Go Fund Me page. “We greatly appreciate your support in helping us with this exciting project and for taking the time to read about our cause.”

Lecturer Matthew Allen recently reviewed the exhibition Archaeology of the Digital: Complexity and Convention (pictured above) for the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. Curated by Greg Lynn at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), the exhibition presented 25 projects "for which digital materials are integral to an understanding of the design process.”

“My guess is that exhibitions like Archaeology of the Digital will help incorporate new aesthetic categories surrounding digital production into the larger scheme of architectural values,” writes Allen. "Archaeology of the Digital represented a type of show that will undoubtedly become more common."

Allen also contributed to the recently launched exhibition architecture, architectural & Architecture at the Architecture and Design Museum in Los Angeles (pictured above). At the centre of Allen's contribution is an example of cutting-edge computational aesthetics in the form of a screencapture of a digital model of Preston Scott Cohen's Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Curated by Anthony Morey and Ryan Tyler Martinez, the exhibition is a collection of “100 Architects, 100 Objects, 100 Texts, 100 Images,” and will be on display until July 2, 2017.

Daniels Faculty undergraduate student Victoria Cardoso was part of the winning team in the “Towers on the Ravine, 1967-2067: Transitioning to Net-Positive Biophilic Urbanism” competition, which took place in May. Her team members included York University graduate students Alex Gatien, Assaya Moustaqim-Barrette, Kiana Javaheri, Nick Brownlee, and Steven Glass.

The competition, launched at the 2017 Ontario Climate Symposium May 11 & 12, asked students to envision the transformation of the tower neighbourhood north of Finch on Kipling Avenue into a resilient and environmentally and socially sustainable community.

The winning proposal included a focus on honouring indigenous history; strategies for addressing the projected population increase; the formation of a local community land trust to develop, fund, and manage public spaces; recognition of emerging technologies such as autonomous vehicles; and the reintegration of a ‘lost’ stream  with the neighbourhood’s commercial and public spaces.

A number of other Daniels Faculty students participated in the competition. They included: Master of Landscape Architecture students Catherine Howell and Stacey Zonneveld; Master of Architecture students Zoal Razaq, Shou Li, and Xiaolong Li; and undergraduate students Adaeze Chukwuma, Feng Le, Tian Wei Li, and Yujie Wang. Images from Howell, Li, Razaq, and Zonneveld’s proposal (Alisa Nguyen was also part of this team) are pictured above.

First year Masters of Architecture student Josh Silver recently published the second issue of his zine titled Cntrl+Z[ine]. The publication imagines a series of narratives using fellow student work as a starting point.

Writes Silver:

"Architectural images contain accidental moments of narrative: a scale figure, a shadow designed, a moment, a view. The latent narratives can begin to reveal themselves as stories of poems or songs or essays or memories remembered in passing. This publication explores those accidents of representation; the stories of images, the places imagined but remembered nevertheless as real déjà vu."

CNTRL+Z[ine] #2 includes work from Masters of Architecture students Yasmin Al Sammarai, Bobbi Bortolussi, Diana Franco, Avi Odenheimer, Siri Hermanski, Martin Drozdowski, and Jess Misak. The full issue can be viewed on Issuu.

Image, top: Self-portrait by Josh Silver

A grand total of 8,213 people visited One Spadina May 27 & 28 during Doors Open Toronto. The event offered the public an early look at the Daniels Faculty’s new home as it nears completion.

The site “was one of this year's popular destinations,” reported Urban Toronto. “Photographers and urban enthusiasts were drawn to the NADAAA- and Adamson Associates-designed facility for views of its juxtaposition of restored heritage and modern design.” Heritage architects ERA were responsible for the renewal of the original building, while the firm Public Work are the project’s landscape architects.

Globe and Mail architecture critic Alex Bozikovic reviewed the nearly complete Daniels Building earlier in the month, calling it "one of the best Canadian buildings of the past decade." It is "spectacular," he says, "rich with arguments about how contemporary architecture, landscape, and urbanism can work with history and build the city of the future."

The CBC was among the visitors on May 28th, interviewing Dean Richard Sommer in the third floor Graduate Design Studio for the evening news. 

Many people who participated in the weekend event were interested in the history of the building. The original cloister, designed by the firm of Smith & Gemmel for Knox College, was constructed in 1875. During World War One, it was a military hospital where Amelia Earhart volunteered at the time.

In the 1940s, One Spadina was home to Connaught Laboratories, where insulin was produced. Sandy MacPherson (pictured above, with Linda Tu) found the office where his father worked in those days. He remembered visiting him there as a child. The space is now part of the Office of the Registrar and Student Services.

Many Daniels Faculty alumni also came by for a first look of the new building, and were welcomed in an alumni lounge set up for the event. Nazila Atarodi (MUD 2008) generously volunteered her time to meet and greet graduates of the Faculty over the weekend. 

An exhibition of graduate student work was also on display throughout the building. Produced by an exhibition team that included students Brandon Bergem, Katerina Gloushenkova, and Serafima Korovina, with Faculty Advisor Assistant Professor Jeannie Kim, the exhibition showed the breadth of creative questions and research topics our students tackle to address the many design challenges we face in our shared quest to make a better world. 

Classes at One Spadina are set to start in September. The building will officially open in the fall.

Post Doctoral Fellow Roberto Damiani has received a 2017 grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts for a proposed book on the work of Professor Emeritus George Baird, former Dean of the Daniels Faculty (2004-2009). Titled The Architect and the Public: The Contribution of George Baird to Architecture, the book will include contributions by Daniels Faculty members Lecturer Hans Ibelings, Director of Master of Architecture Program Robert Levit, Assistant Professor Michael Piper, Professor Brigitte Shim, and Dean Richard Sommer. Other contributors include Pier Vittorio Aureli, Joseph Bedford, Louis Martin, Joan Ockman, Jorge Silvetti, Hans Teerds, and Roemer van Toorn.

From the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts' website:

The Architect and the Public is a collection of essays and interviews on the work of George Baird, and serves as evidence of the architect's public engagement with contemporary society. With the rise of mass media, traditional modes of producing and communicating architecture have been transformed, as many practitioners choose to express the cultural and societal relevance of buildings, and to ground architectural design beyond personal agendas. George Baird's work and research reflects this practice, and Baird—along with Colin Rowe, Kenneth Frampton, and Peter Eisenman—has served as a model for North American architectural debate. From his early theoretical writings as a doctoral student, to his involvement with Toronto city planning, to his commitment to teaching at the University of Toronto and Harvard, Baird played a key role in shaping the relationship between architecture and its multiple publics, many of which emerged in the second half of the twentieth century.

In 2017, the Graham Foundation awarded $568,500 to 72 projects by individuals. The Architect and the Public is one of 34 publications included in the 2017 Grantees list. It is scheduled to be published in 2018.

Damiani is the organizer and curator of Italy under Construction, a program of exhibitions and lectures on contemporary Italian architecture, in collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute in Toronto. Earlier this year, he curated an exhibition titled Palimpsests and Interfaces that presented four civic buildings by the Venice based architect Renato Rizzi, and seven buildings — four residential and three office buildings — by Cino Zucchi Architetti based in Milan. Information about the exhibition can be found on the Italian Cultural Institute website.

Photo, top: George Baird (front), Ted Teshima (behind). Courtesy of Canadian Architectural Archives, University of Calgary. Toronto, May 1959.