2. "A Place that Fits: Landscape Architecture" with Kathryn Gustafson (March 4, 2014)

3. "Fish pluralities, refraction and decolonization in amiskwaciwâskahikan" with Zoe Todd (March 14, 2016)

4. "Walking Your Talk - Integrating Walkability in Urban Design" with Jennifer Keesmaat (November 7, 2013)

5. Green Roof Gurus Panel (March 6, 2014)

6. "Every building implies a city" with Bruce Kuwabara (January 22, 2013)

7. "Sustainable Drainage" with Laura Solano (November 15, 2012)

8. "Working in Mumbai" with Rahul Mehrotra (March 19, 2013)

9. Uber Urbanism (October 22, 2015)

10. 125th Anniversary Dialogues: Practice in an Expanded Field (May 30, 2015)

More videos can be found on the Daniels Faculty Youtube channel.

Master of Architecture students in their last semester of the program presented their thesis projects to faculty and guest critics on December 14 and 15, 2016. Congratulations to everyone on who completed their final presentation before the holiday break! And thank you to the esteemed guest critics from Toronto and beyond who provided feedback to our students.

We have created a photo album on Flickr showcasing the projects and discussions that took place. Photographs from all the student reviews that took place from December 6 to 19 have also been shared on our Facebook page.

Photographer Peter MacCallum has been documenting the construction of the Daniels Faculty's future home at One Spadina Crescent since the spring of 2014. Designed by NADAAA, the new Daniels Building includes a renewal of the south-facing 19th century Gothic Revival building (now complete) and stunning contemporary addition, which will house studio space, an advanced fabrication lab, and an architecture and design gallery.

Below are photos MacCallum took this past November and December. Visit the UofTDaniels Flickr page to view construction images from April 2014 to present.

On November 8, myself and 27 other Daniels Faculty students from this semester’s ARC201 class embarked on a day trip, led by Assistant Professor Jeannie Kim, to see architecture in Buffalo, New York. The majority of the trip was spent at Silo City where, upon arrival, everyone was astounded by the massive scale of the buildings on site. The gargantuan grain elevators were once instrumental in the economic growth of Buffalo, but gradually came to be abandoned by the 1990’s.

In recent years, the site has been re-invented as an art space where installation and performance art are juxtaposed within the derelict state of the silos.

The tour provided an opportunity to see the spatial and experiential conditions of an architectural typology that inspired Le Corbusier and his ideas about modern architecture. The silos provided a good case study in understanding relationships in massing, and addressing architectural space whether it is a conscious production or a by-product of one’s chosen form(s).
 
We were also treated to a brief tour of the Darwin D. Martin House by Frank Lloyd Wright, which helped us realize the great potential for architects to be deliberate and uncompromising about our designs in realizing a vision for space and living.

Just before heading home, we visited downtown Buffalo to see Louis Sullivan’s Guaranty Building and ponder the architect’s most famous line “form (ever) follows function.” Everyone was excited to see the richly ornate exterior of one of North America's earliest skyscrapers.

To see more photos from the trip, head over to the Daniels Faculty's Facebook page.

This Thursday, alumnus Jesse Colin Jackson (MArch 2009) launches the solo exhibition Marching Cubes at the Pari Nadimi Gallery. Marching Cubes is a large collection of 3D printed components that can be assembled together through magnetic interlocking geometries. The shapes of the individual components are based on an eponymous computer algorithm developed in the 1980s.

From the gallery's website:

Drawing inspiration from an eponymous computer algorithm, Marching Cubes is part sculpture, part playground. In the 1980s, researchers devised a method of generating mesh graphics from medical scan data that featured an underlying grammar of faceted cubes. Jackson has taken this digital syntax and refined it into a language for assembly, produced as a family of 3D printed components with interlocking geometries and magnetic connections—and invited people to help build with them. The participants enact the algorithm in the real world, becoming a collective computer in service of sculptural form-making.

The exhibition originally began as a series of events at the Experimental Media Performance Lab at the University of California, Irvine where Jackson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art. Marching Cubes at the Pari Nadimi Gallery showcases the result of these events. On display will be a two-channel video showing the collaborative construction performances, an accompanying refined sculpture of the most successful assembly, and an inventory of the components involved in the original events.

The exhibition will be on display from November 17, 2016 to January 14, 2017 with an opening reception happening November 17 from 6:00-8:00pm.

Pari Nadimi Gallery is located at 254 Niagara Street in Toronto.

Two years ago, Jackson launched an exhibition at the Pari Nadimi Gallery titled Radiant City. Focused on Toronto’s tower apartment neighbourhoods, Radiant City explored the evolving presence and status of these sites in our city: arrival destinations for incoming immigrant populations, essential housing for one quarter of the city’s population, the decaying location of much of Toronto’s urban poverty, products of modern ideologies gone awry, and locations of past glory, current dynamism, and future potential.

The Daniels Faculty’s public programming has a tradition of bringing together scholars, professionals, and leaders in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, art, and urbanism. This year, as we prepare for our Faculty's big move to One Spadina Crescent, we decided to take a different approach to the staging of our events.

For the 2016-2017 season, we will mostly forego the traditional monographic lecture format for one that presents interdisciplinary discussions and debates that promise to deepen the discourse on the role our disciplines play in creating more culturally engaged, ecologically sustainable, socially just, and artfully conceived artifacts, cities, and environments.

To this end, we have organized seven signature events in venues throughout the University of Toronto’s St. George Campus.

The first event will take place today, October 17th. Co-organized with the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), “What comes after the environment?” — this year’s George Baird Lecture — will feature a discussion between award-winning author and filmmaker Naomi Klein, and the director of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Mirko Zardini at Convocation Hall (31 King's College Circle).

The events that follow include this year’s Frank Gehry International Visiting Chairs in Architecture Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee in conversation with Michelle Addington from the Yale School of Architecture (“When do looks matter more than performance?”), contemporary media artist Walid Raad on the role of narrative in our understanding of reality (“How can fiction replace reality”), and the 2016-2017 Michael Hough / OALA Visiting Critic Pierre Bélanger in conversation with NYU Environmental Studies scholar Jessica Green, (“What is the geography of energy?”) — among others. Each presentation considers problems that cannot be solved by any one discipline or singular expertise, highlighting the role of architects, artists, and designers in facilitating new modes of research and practice tuned to our changing planet and the evolving needs of society.

For our full schedule of public events, visit daniels.utoronto.ca/events, where you may also find information on our Building, Ecology, Science, and Technology (B.E.S.T.) Lectures, midday talks, Master of Visual Studies Proseminar Series, and other public lectures.

For more information on our public lectures, contact Pam Walls at pamela.walls@daniels.utoronto.ca or 416-978-2253. 2016-2017 Public Lectures
 
MONDAY, OCTOBER 17 | 6:30PM – 8:30PM
What comes after the environment?
Convocation Hall, 31 King’s College Circle
George Baird Lecture
Co-organized with the Canadian Centre for Architecture
Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
Mirko Zardini, director of the CCA and author of the forthcoming book It’s All Happening So Fast — A Counter-History of the Modern Canadian Environment
 
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 3 | 7:00PM – 9:00PM
When do looks matter more than performance?
Innis Town Hall, 2 Sussex Avenue
Gehry Chair Lecture
Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee, Johnston Marklee, Los Angeles
Michelle Addington, Yale University, New Haven
 
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 21 | 6:30PM – 8:30PM
What shapes the city?
Isabel Bader Theatre, 93 Charles Street West
Richard Florida, University of Toronto
Adam Greenfield, Urbanscale, London
 
THURSDAY, JANUARY 19 | 6:30PM – 8:30PM
What is the geography of energy?
Isabel Bader Theatre, 93 Charles Street West
Michael Hough / Ontario Association of Landscape Architects Visiting Critic Lecture
Pierre Bélanger, Harvard University, Cambridge
Jessica Green, New York University, New York
 
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 9 | 6:30PM – 8:30PM
How can fiction replace reality?
Isabel Bader Theatre, 93 Charles Street West
Walid Raad, The Cooper Union, New York
 
TUESDAY, MARCH 14 | 6:30PM – 8:30PM
When is a model a beginning or an end?
Innis Town Hall, 2 Sussex Avenue
Amale Andraos, Columbia University, New York
D. Graham Burnett, Princeton University, Princeton
 
FRIDAY, APRIL 7 | 6:30PM – 8:30PM
Where is the critical voice in architecture today?
Innis Town Hall, 2 Sussex Avenue
Co-organized with the Canadian Centre for Architecture
Kenneth Frampton, Columbia University, New York
Keller Easterling, Yale University, New Haven
Craig Buckley, Yale University, New Haven

On Wednesday, September 21st, the City of Toronto will be holding a party to celebrate the multiple award wins of the recently finished Nathan Philips Square Revitalization — including, most notably, the Governor General’s Medal in Architecture awarded by the RAIC. The event’s program will include speeches, music, and site tours. 

With a scheme entitled AGORA/THEATRE, PLANT Architect won the NPS Revitalization Design Competition in 2006. The project has also received a Toronto Urban Design Award and a Canadian Architect Award of Excellence. Perkins + Will Canada served as venture partners for the project.

The founding partners of PLANT Architect Inc., Lisa Rapoport, Mary Tremaine, and Chris Pommer, have all served as sessional lecturers at the Daniels Faculty. 

“In built form, Toronto looks at first glance like many other large North American cities. But up close, the city reflects the various and often conflicting urban planning and urban design ideas that shaped it.”

Filmmaker Ian Garrick Mason’s latest documentary interviews some of the city’s experts on design, urbanism and history as he unpacks the conflicting visions that have shaped the city of Toronto over the years. He writes: “[The film] explores how the city came to look like it does today -- and the processes likely to determine its future form.”

The faculty’s director of the Master of Urban Design program, Mark Sterling, appears as one of the interviewees, along with a number of Daniels alumni who now serve as leading design and planning practitioners in the city including Anne McIlroy (BArch 1986), Lorna Day (BArch 1984), and Kim Storey(BArch 1978) and James Brown (BArch 1978) of Brown + Storey Architects. UofT Canadian History instructor Richard White joins the panel of experts. As part of the project, Mason will release extended selections from the interviews.

The film was presented at the "Toronto Dialogues 1" symposium last October 4, 2016, and is also available for viewing through Mason’s website.

Live in Miami? Mark your calendar! Meetinghouse, a contemporary art space collective in the penthouse of the historic Huntington Building in Miami, announces the opening of its Fall 2016 exhibition series with Aurora Roomand Type-topia — two installations blending art and architecture, on the evening of September 22nd.

Type-Topia is an idealized and fictitious composite city created from the collaged combination of nine public institutional projects by Khoury Levit Fong (KLF), the firm of Associate Professor Robert Levit, Associate Professor Steven Fong, and former Daniels faculty member-turned Dean of the University of Miami's School of Architecture Rodolphe el-Khoury.

The interactive model calls attention to the iconic status of notable public spaces and buildings in shaping the identity of cities, highlighting the role that architecture can play in the constitution of a geography of monuments. Just as New York has been represented through its monumental icons such as the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center, or Paris by the Eiffel Tower and the Arc-de-Triomphe, Type-Topia is imagined through a series of graphic representations of its civic monuments. Using programmed QR tags, visitors can interact with each project proposal. The composite city becomes a historical metropolis in which the iconic elements instantaneously become memorabilia of this fiction, complete with travel posters and postcards.

Meetinghouse Fall 2016 Opening Night!
Thursday, Sept 22nd
from 7pm to 10pm

Exhibition Design by Robert Levit with Dorsa Jalalian (MUD 2016) and Nick Reddon (current MArch student)
Principals in Charge: Rodolphe el-Khoury and Robert Levit