Associate Professor Mason White will serve as the Jury Chair for this year’s Steedman Fellowship — one of the oldest and most prestigious awards in the United States. The 2016 Call for Proposals marks a shift for the biannual Fellowship from a design competition to an invitation to develop research proposals that respond to a particular theme. To go along with this change, White created the 2016 theme of Adaptation.

From the Steedman Fellowship website:

“Our age is increasingly defined by unpredictability and a need for contingency in design. However, the life of a building or design cannot always keep pace with changes in culture, context, or climate. How is the rigidity of architecture slackened? Where does the ability to adjust, modify, or respond to factors exist? Can (and does) Architecture adapt?  

This year, the theme of adaptation is offered as an area of enquiry. In biology, adaptation enhances the survival and fitness of organisms. Within design, demands for adaptive responses to climatic, cultural, or societal change have tested architecture’s transformative properties. More than ever, exciting new considerations of accessibility, sustainability, and flexibility are being incorporated earlier and earlier into design processes. It could be argued that an inability of architecture to adapt will be its demise.”

 

The Steedman Fellowship is open to practicing architects anywhere in the world who have received an accredited degree in architecture within the last eight years. Proposals are due November 1. The winning proposal will receive $50,000 to support up to a year of international travel and research. Other members of the jury include Deborah Berke, Elena Cánovas, Joyce Hwang, and Jeff Ryan.

White, along with Lola Sheppard, is a founding Partner at Lateral Office. Earlier this year, their firm won a Royal Architectural Institute of Canada Urban Design Award for Impulse — a playful installation created for the Place des Festival in Montreal. The artwork transformed Montreal’s arts district “into a space of urban play through a series of thirty interactive acoustic illuminated see-saws that respond and transform when in motion.”

Over the summer, Sessional Lecturer Marcin Kedzior coordinated a group of students from the University of Toronto, University of Waterloo, OCAD U, and Humber College in the design and construction of an accessibility ramp located within U of T's Massey College.

The finished project is a prototype that provides a needed accessibility ramp and peninsular seating. The design provides an accessible extension to the meandering path of the Massey College Quad while also adding additional seating. Kedzior writes that the design is a prototype to study how the community would use the space, and he welcomes thoughts, suggestions, and comments about the design. 

Kedzior’s involvement with the project stems from his interest in critical pedagogy and situated learning practice, which has led to several design build projects of a similar nature such as tree houses, and micro-urbanism projects. The extra-curricular initiative provided the students involved with an opportunity to participate on a situated design and build project. The project exhibits the expediency found in small-scale design and its potential for significant social impact.

The project was realized by Kedzior’s firm SITUATE | DESIGN | BUILD in collaboration with the Massey College Accessibility Committee and local builders.

Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee are founding principals of Johnston Marklee in Los Angeles — and this year’s Frank Gehry International Visiting Chairs in Architectural Design — have been announced the artistic directors of the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial.  

From The Architects Newspaper:

The second iteration of the first and largest architectural biennial in North America will be entitled Make New History. The biennial will focus on two central themes, “The axis between history and modernity and the axis between architecture and art.” The themes look to discuss the role that history has to play in the making of contemporary architecture, as well as the relationship of architecture to art. Chicago itself will act as a lens through which to raise and debate these issues.

JohnstonMarklee, the Los Angeles-based firm of Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee, has a substantial architectural portfolio including residential, commercial, institutional, and exhibition environments with a particular focus on the arts. Their work explores the relationship between design and building technology to create unique works of architecture, which vary in scale from master plans to buildings and temporary installations. The firm has garnered many notable awards including Progressive Architecture Design Awards, AIA Los Angeles & AIA California Council Honor Awards, the American Architecture Award, and an AR Award for Emerging Architecture.

Named in honour of Frank O. Gehry, this endowed Gehry Chair brings a highly recognized international architect (or two) to teach a graduate studio and deliver a public lecture at the Daniels Faculty each year. Graduate students in their third year of the Master of Architecture program or Master of Landscape Architecture program or second year of their Master of Urban Design program have the opportunity to study with the chair holder before they start their design thesis. The chair's public lectures are well attended by all our our students and the broader design community. Previous Gehry Chairs have also taught in the undergraduate program, mounted exhibitions in our gallery, joined undergraduate studio reviews, and given guest lectures as part of the core lecture courses for undergraduates.

After extensive renovations led by Associate Professor Aziza Chaouni and her firm Aziza Chaouni Projects, the Qarawiyyin library in Fez, Morroco is set to open within this year. On September 19, The Guardian featured the restoration of the library in its "cities" section.

Located in the old Medina of Fez, the library is widely considered to be the world’s oldest and joins the Qarawiyyin Mosque and the Qarawiyyin University as significant cultural artefacts in the ancient Medina of Fez. Citing its large pedestrian network and immense collection of historic buildings within its walls, Chaouni considers the potential of the Medina to become a model for sustainability. Her firm’s renovation is one of the projects leading the current restoration of Fez as a spiritual and cultural capital of Morocco.

Chaouni approached the renovation with a philosophy of sustainable architecture. Writes Kareem Shaheen in The Guardian: “for Chaouni [this] means that the library cannot be a relic of ages past, but a breathing part of the city, much like the old medina is still an inhabited living organism.” Apart from structural work, the library’s renovation also included restorative work on the library’s collection of books and manuscripts that date as far back as the ninth century.

Having begun work on the library in 2012, Chaouni was inititally surprised by the appointment given that architecture is, as The Guardian writes, “a field traditionally seen as a man’s province” in Morocco. That said, the Qarawiyyin library was founded by a woman, Fatima al-Fihri, the daughter of a wealthy Tunisian merchant in the ninth century. Chaouni’s personal attachment to the library extends to familial ties. She tells The Guardian stories of how “her great-grandfather travelled on a mule from his ancestral village in Morocco to study at Qarawiyyin University in the 19th century.”

Chaouni has also drafted a plan to restore the river in Fez. For a more in-depth article, visit the article by The Guardian.

Alumna Novka Ćosović (MArch 2013) takes part in this year’s line up for Nuit Blanche with a large-scale art installation that reminds us how media representations of trauma have become a background subject to daily life.

Entitled The Museum, the piece is closely linked to her graduate thesis of the same name. Accoring to Ćosović (and as described in an earlier article on her work):

Acts of violence and trauma captured in the media have one common denominator: their backgrounds. Prisoners of war have been held in school gymnasiums; dead bodies have been piled high in swimming pools; bathrooms have been turned into slaughter houses. The backgrounds in each setting include tiles, wallpaper, curtains — the architecture of our everyday lives. Normally benign settings, ‘domestic-institutional-communal spaces’ become perverted by war and violence.

At Nuit Blanche, Ćosović will present her idea of “perverted spaces” through an installation that appears to be a typical swimming pool. This pool, however, represents one that was once used as a morgue during the Yugoslavian war. Visitors are invited to lounge within her makeshift “pool” as they watch news clips of warfare played out within highly domesticated and communal backgrounds/spaces in places such as the former Yugoslavia, East Timor, Rwanda, and Syria.

Ćosović is an MArch graduate and currently splits her time between working for Community and writing for Site Magazine. The Museum can be viewed at Artscape Youngplace on the night of Nuit Blanche this October 1st.

Metro Toronto writer Luke Simcoe asks “Why do condo towers in Toronto all look the same?”

The reason, says Daniels Faculty Lecturer and architectural historian and critic Hans Ibelings, who Simcoe spoke to in pursuit of an answer, has to do with the real estate market, which views condos as financial investments rather than homes.

Ibelings and Daniels Faculty Lecturer Alex Josephson, explored Toronto’s ubiquitous glass towers in their book Rise and Sprawl: The Condominiumization of Toronto.

Writes Simcoe:

Ibelings’s motto is that “there’s a solution to everything” and the latter half of the book lays out 11 options for adding diversity to Toronto’s skyline.

Among them are suggestions to eliminate condo balconies, add more public housing to condominiums, financial incentives for better design and a call to “play” with the podiums at the foot of tall buildings.
 

Read the full article in Metro Toronto.

For more information on Rise and Sprawl: The Condominiumization of Toronto, visit the architecture observer.

Ibelings is the author of a number of books, including European Architecture Since 1890 (2011), published in English, Dutch, German, and Russian, and Supermodernism: Architecture in the Age of Globalization (1998 and 2003), published in English, Dutch, Spanish, French, and Italian.

Work to renew One Spadina Crescent — the very-soon-to-be new home of the Daniels Faculty — is closer to being complete! Recent months have seen a new addition to the historic site take shape — and acclaimed photographer Peter MacCallum has been there to document the transformation. 

In Februrary, we launched an exhibition of MacCallum's photographs, but so much has changed since then. Below is a selection of photos MacCallum has taken over the past four months. Click each set of images below to view them on the Daniels Faculty's flickr page.

June 2016

April + May 2016

March 2016

February 2016

January 2016

December 2015

November 2015

October 2015

September 2015

August 2015

June + July 2015