The Canadian Society of Landscape Architects (CSLA) has named Elise Shelley (Associate Professor, Teaching Stream) one of the 2024 inductees into its prestigious College of Fellows.

Fellows are recognized for their outstanding contributions to the profession of landscape architecture.

The College of Fellows will welcome the newest members—10 in total—during a ceremony at the CSLA’s next Congress, taking place in Winnipeg May 30 to June 1.

Investiture to the College is the highest honour that the CSLA, founded in 1934 to advance the art, science and practice of landscape architecture, bestows on its members. A jury of six Fellows, representing regions across Canada, selected the new ones based on extensive submissions documenting each candidate’s contributions to the profession.

“It is humbling and empowering to be nominated to the College of Fellows by my peers, as it validates that the work I do as an educator and practitioner has significance in the field of landscape architecture,” says Shelley, who is Director of the Faculty’s Master of Landscape Architecture program.

“As a CSLA Fellow, I will represent the Daniels Faculty and our students as I continue to pursue excellence for our program and for the discipline. I appreciate this honour and will do all I can to live up to the great work of those that have come before me.”

Since the inception of the CSLA’s College of Fellows in 1964, 270 members have seen induction, which comes with the designation “FCSLA.”

Shelley is being inducted in the categories of Professional University Instruction and Executed Works of Landscape Architecture. Other categories include Administrative Professional Work in Public Agencies or Government Service and Direct Service to the CSLA.

In addition to her roles at the Faculty, Shelley is the Director of Landscape at the Toronto-based interdisciplinary firm gh3*. Among her current projects are Warehouse Park in Edmonton and Olympic Plaza in Calgary, both collaborations between gh3* and CCxA. 

When the CSLA meets in Winnipeg at the end of May, it will be celebrating its 90th anniversary. For the full list of 2024’s inductees, click here

Dallas Fellini, graduating this semester from the Master of Visual Studies in Curatorial Studies program, has been awarded the 2024 Middlebrook Prize for Young Canadian Curators.

Established in 2012, the prize is awarded annually to a Canadian curator or curatorial team under the age of 30 with the goal of supporting an inclusive national arts sector while recognizing the vital role of exhibitions in expanding awareness and art histories.

Exhibitions proposed by prize recipients are subsequently presented at the Art Gallery of Guelph, which announced Fellini’s win earlier this week.

Fellini (pictured above) is a Toronto-based curator, writer and artist whose research is situated at the intersection of trans studies and archival studies, interrogating the compromised conditions under which trans histories have been recorded and considering representational and archival alternatives to trans hypervisibility.

Their winning submission for the Middlebrook Prize, a proposed exhibition called Some kind of we, features works that approach or incorporate t4t sensibilities.

The term t4t is shorthand that emerged in the early 2000s in Craigslist personals ads, where it was used by transgender and transsexual people prioritizing relationships with other trans people.

Emphasizing networks of trans relationality, self-representation, cross-generational inheritance and desire and love between trans people, the exhibition will feature video works by B.G-Osborne with Benjamin Da Silva (pictured below) and by Mirha-Soleil Ross in collaboration with Xanthra Phillippa MacKay, as well as a print project by Cleopatria Peterson.

It’ll be paralleled by a “distributed exhibition” that speaks to trans histories of pre- and early-Internet activism and community building in Canada.

Fellini’s winning submission was selected by a three-person jury of esteemed curators: Alyssa Fearon (Director/Curator at Dunlop Art Gallery), Tarah Hogue (Curator of Indigenous Art, Remai Modern) and Renée van der Avoird (Associate Curator of Canadian Art, Art Gallery of Ontario).

While Fearon noted the importance of the exhibition’s emphasis “on t4t relationality and visibility,” van der Avoird was struck by its highlighting of an “urgent topic with artworks that are compelling, moving and impactful.”

Hogue, meanwhile, noted the significance of the “distributed exhibition as a means of reaching trans audience members and reiterating the networks of support trans communities have created.” 

Some kind of we will be on view at the Art Gallery of Guelph later this year, from September through December.

For more information about the Middlebrook Prize and on past winners, visit middlebrookprize.ca.

Fellini portrait by Phillip Lý. Video still (7:22) from POLISHED, 2016, by B.G-Osborne in collaboration with Benjamin Da Silva, courtesy of the artist.

The Daniels Faculty’s Michael Piper, Assistant Professor of Urban Design and Architecture, is among the co-recipients of the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s 2023 President’s Medal for Outstanding Housing Research.

Co-won with Janna Levitt, Principal of LGA Architectural Partners, and Samantha Eby, a sessional instructor at the Faculty, the prize was bestowed for ReHousing.ca, an online housing platform the trio co-created.

The award recognizes innovative and impactful research in Canadian housing, and includes a $25,000 prize to fund further knowledge mobilization and outreach.

The ReHousing initiative was developed by the joint academic and professional team to help make “missing middle” housing more attainable, showing “citizen developers” how to transform single-family homes into multiplexes.

Characterized by clear language and easy-to-read drawings that explain various types of multiplex housing as well as a step-by-step guide to how they can be achieved, the website offers options for a range of prospective users, including those looking to get into the housing market, mature homeowners who would like to remain in their homes while earning rental income for retirement, and those aiming to build additional housing for extended family, friends or rent-paying tenants.

“We’re excited that our housing catalogue has received national recognition, especially as all three levels of government are promoting design catalogues as a key approach to realizing small-scale infill housing,” Piper said on behalf of the winning team. “The CMHC grant will help us to expand awareness of the ReHousing project by creating more how-to videos and to share our research further through social media.”

Elements of the ReHousing plan were featured in Housing Multitudes: Reimagining the Landscapes of Suburbia, the 2022-23 Daniels Faculty exhibition that Piper co-curated with Professor Richard Sommer.

Last year, Piper, Levitt and Eby used their research to contribute design analysis to the City of Toronto’s potentially game-changing multiplex-zoning legislation, and they are currently working on a second Toronto commission to study alternative neighbourhood densities.

ReHousing has also been funded by a grant from the Neptis Foundation, an independent charitable foundation that conducts and disseminates nonpartisan research, analysis and mapping related to the design and function of Canadian urban regions.

For more details about ReHousing, click here.

A rendering from the award-winning website ReHousing.ca envisions the addition of secondary housing on the site of a postwar bungalow. Image courtesy ReHousing.ca

Professor Mason White, Sessional Lecturer Kearon Roy Taylor and Assistant Professor Karen Kubey have been recognized by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) with 2024 Architectural Education Awards. The trio won for two separate projects in the category of Faculty Design. The Faculty Design Awards acknowledge work that advances the reflective nature of practice and teaching through creative design and design investigation and by promoting work that expands the boundaries of design. 

Colleagues at the Toronto-based practice Lateral Office, co-founder White (pictured above at right) and associate Taylor won for “Contested Circumpolar: Domestic Territories,” an installation that examines domestic life in eight Arctic nations by situating it within broader sociocultural, economic and geopolitical contexts. Their partners on the winning team include Lateral Office co-founder Lola Sheppard of the University of Waterloo and Matthew Jull and Leena Cho of the University of Virginia. 

Exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2021, “Contested Circumpolar: Domestic Territories” presents eight narratives of inhabitation from each of the countries that lay claim to the Arctic—Canada, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the U.S.—to reveal deep and complex connections between domestic space and the larger territory.  

A series of rooms within eight houses juxtaposes the distinct artifacts and architectures of everyday life in the Arctic with territorial narratives that expose the interlinked far-flung contexts shaping the domestic scenes. 

In the process it addresses issues of transnational politics, Indigenous self-determination and radical socio-environmental adaptation in one of the 21st century’s most complex and contested regions.  

The installation “Contested Circumpolar: Domestic Territories” was exhibited as part of the Across Borders series at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale. Models were arranged as a roundtable assembly representing different regional challenges. Photos by Giorgio Lazzaro

An urbanist specializing in housing design and social justice, Kubey (pictured at left in the banner) won her ACSA Award, along with Neeraj Bhatia of the California College of the Arts and Ignacio González Galán of Barnard College, for “Aging Against the Machine,” a research project that looks at aging not as a problem to be solved but as a life stage facing a range of barriers—physical, social, financial and cultural—that make it difficult to grow older with dignity and in community. 

Part of a 2022 Center for Architecture exhibition entitled Reset: Towards a New Commons, the project builds on past and ongoing work in the California community of West Oakland, a culturally diverse and historically activist neighbourhood where older residents nonetheless face precarious living conditions, insufficient public amenities and limited caregiving options.  

It was developed by examining, connecting and expanding on existing initiatives there and by consulting with and amplifying the voices of its residents, who contributed through a series of roundtables and conversations. 

“Aging Against the Machine,” a commissioned research project overseen by the Daniels Faculty’s Karen Kubey and others, was part of a 2022 Center for Architecture exhibition entitled Reset: Towards a New Commons. Photos by Asya Gorovitz and Miguel de Guzman

Among the project results were proposals in a range of scales, from interior home renovations to collective land-ownership models and intergenerational housing projects. In particular, diverse spaces for commoning and networks of care at the scale of the building and the neighbourhood are integrated with public social programs and mutual aid initiatives, ultimately contributing to an intersectional, community-based approach to aging. 

According to ACSA, award winners are selected for their ability to inspire and challenge students, to expand the architectural profession’s knowledge base and to extend their work beyond academia into practice and the public sector. 

Winners of the Faculty Design Award are chosen in particular for how their work expands the boundaries of design through formal investigations, innovative design processes, addressing justice, working with communities, advancing sustainable practices, fostering resilience and/or centering the human experience. 

For a full list of 2024 ACSA Award winners, click here. 

Lukas Pauer, an Assistant Professor and inaugural Emerging Architect Fellow at the Daniels Faculty, has been awarded the 2024 AIAS/ACSA New Faculty Teaching Award.  

The annual award, sponsored jointly by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) and the American Institute of Architecture Students (AIAS), recognizes excellence and innovation in teaching during the formative years of an architectural teaching career. 

Pauer, who originally joined the Faculty as an Adjunct Professor in 2021, is also the founding director of the Vertical Geopolitics Lab (VGL), an investigative practice and think-tank at the intersections of architecture, geography, politology and media dedicated to exposing intangible systems and hidden agendas within the built environment. 

“All of my courses relate to aspects of space and power in the built environment but range in scale from the built object to the city or the polity,” says Pauer. “A key component of my academic practice is to serve the empowerment of marginalized, underrepresented, and vulnerable individuals and communities.” 

A scene from the Counterhegemonic Architecture thesis research studio course during a visit to the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal.

When it comes to his pedagogical approach, Pauer emphasizes removing hierarchical barriers between instructors and students. “I focus on the fact that they [students] will soon become my colleagues, often in just a few years’ time. Rather than a rigid hierarchy with instructors and critics being the sole possessors of knowledge, I want to open it up and make more horizontal dialogues possible.” 

This dialogue proves particularly useful in the context of studio-based learning. “Especially in design, there are often multiple approaches to solving problems, which is why I tend to actively encourage my students to challenge me,” he says, adding: “I often ask students to comment on each other’s projects individually. By inviting students to have just as much of a voice, the studio not only becomes an inclusive but also an authentic environment in which future practitioners can meet to inspire and learn from each other.” 

At Daniels, Pauer teaches at both the graduate and undergraduate level, including a year-long Master of Architecture (MARC) design research studio that investigates space and power in an effort to expose, challenge and reconstitute the pervasive and ongoing reality of imperial-colonial expansion.  

MARC students in the Counterhegemonic Architecture (ARC3020) studio have produced diverse theses (snapshots of which can be seen above) that range from a proposal for a pavilion at an international horticultural exposition that comments on the Turkish state’s colonial displays of progress to protest on behalf of the Kurds of Hasankeyf (“An Archive of Memories Washed Away” by Liane Werdina) to a temporary gallery exhibition on the cyclical push-pull nature of countries seeking to actively control the physical manifestation and collective memory of their national identity and history (“Forward Not Back, Reconsidering the Past in a Future Ukraine” by Bryson Wood) and a design for a mixed-use high-rise building and accompanying professional practice manual intended to empower residents of Toronto’s Chinatown (“Seeing through Transit-led Displacement in Toronto’s Chinatown” by Christopher “Chris” Hardy).  

In the Bachelor of Arts in Architectural Studies (BAAS) program, Pauer teaches Close Readings in Urban Design (ARC253), which has the overarching hypothesis that public space isn’t actually “public” for everyone—a theme that Pauer considers a throughline between research and teaching.  

“In many ways this award feels full circle,” says Pauer. “Given the integration of my practice, research, and teaching.” He adds: “A few years back I had planned my doctoral dissertation as a stepping stone toward achieving particular mid and long-term objectives; (a) to develop an original didactic-pedagogical approach to an emerging academic field at the intersections of architecture, geography, politology, and media as well as (b) to develop a business plan-like framework for a non-profit investigative practice and think-tank. So my think-tank’s upcoming research-based debut exhibition is another outcome informed by this integrated approach to academic practice.” 

On March 6, Pauer will open the exhibition “How to Steal a Country,” which will transform the Larry Wayne Richards Gallery into scenes from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Scale- and life-size dioramas, vignettes and tableaus will create an immersive experience, revealing the key role architecture plays in the ongoing sovereignty dispute. A corresponding public lecture, “Recognizing Facts on the Ground,” will take place on March 14. 

Two Daniels Faculty landscape architecture professors are among the recipients of 2024 CELA Awards, given out by the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture for excellence in teaching, research, creativity and design innovation.

Associate Professor Alissa North (pictured above at left) has won this year’s senior-level Award of Excellence in Research or Creative Work, while Associate Professor Liat Margolis (pictured above at right) has been recognized with the award for Outstanding Administrator.

The CELA Awards are an annual program administered by the Council’s Awards Committee and overseen by its Board of Directors. This year’s 13 winners were chosen from among nearly five dozen competitors for 2024 faculty and student prizes, according to the Council.

The editor or co-editor of numerous publications, including last year’s Innate Terrain: Canadian Landscape Architecture, North teaches graduate design studio, visual communication and history and theory courses at the Faculty.

She is the co-founder with Peter North of North Design Office, which won a 2023 Toronto Urban Design Award in the category of Small Open Spaces for its Stackt Market project.

Margolis, who was the Faculty’s Associate Dean of Research and directed the Master of Landscape Architecture program from 2017 to 2022, has been leading the Green Roof Innovation Testing Laboratory (or GRIT Lab) for the past 14 years.

Based at the Daniels Faculty, GRIT Lab is an internationally renowned research facility dedicated to research and training in living green infrastructure. 

According to CELA, the awards “serve to not only recognize these individuals, but also to inspire us, elevate our standards, and build this growing community of educators.”

This year’s recipients will be honoured on March 22 at an awards dinner and reception in St. Louis, Missouri. The ceremony will be held during CELA’s 2024 annual conference, entitled Taking Action: Making Change. The conference will take place March 20 to 23.  

Two practices spearheaded by members of the Daniels Faculty—Lateral Office and Ja Architecture Studio—have been awarded 2023 Canadian Architect Awards of Merit.

A Toronto-based platform for new spatial environments, Lateral Office is co-led (with Lola Sheppard) by Professor Mason White, Director of the Faculty’s Master of Urban Design and Post-Professional programs. The practice was recognized, with Verne Reimer Architecture Inc., for the Inuusirvik Community Wellness Hub, a multipurpose community centre in Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut.

Also based in Toronto, Ja Architecture Studio was co-founded (with architect and alumnus Nima Javidi) by Assistant Professor Behnaz Assadi. Ja was recognized by Canadian Architect for The Parti Wall, a multigenerational residential project proposed for a narrow lot in downtown Toronto.

Opened officially on November 30, the ICWH (pictured above and below) unites counselling services, a daycare, a wellness research centre, a research library and food-preparation and gathering spaces in a single, 883-square-metre facility.

Characterized by lightweight materials and panelized components, “the building utilizes the practical modular building techniques necessary for the North, but introduces colour and setbacks to the massing to make a building that will stand out and welcome the community,” as architect and urban strategist Michael Heeney, one of the awards jurors, put it.

“The building section, with its clerestory central atrium, pushes the boundaries of what can be achieved in Northern public buildings.”

Architect and urbanist Claire Weisz, another juror, was equally impressed. “This building does so much with a very constrained set of design moves. It uses straightforward means to prevent environmental damage and mitigate strong winds for the users, and [it] improves local conditions for passersby. Its bright yellow ramps and entrance walls can be seen in lower light conditions, and set the stage for it to connect to other community assets in this High Arctic city.”

Ja’s winning design (pictured in slideshow below) envisions the spine shared by two adjoining residences and their respective laneway suites as an armature that works with the context of its block to draw natural light deep into the homes, incorporate a range of outdoor spaces within each property...and create interior, multi-storey “nested gardens” for the two street-facing houses.

“This exploration of space and materials,” Heeney enthused, “is just the kind of thing that is good to see in small-scale residential work.”

Fellow juror Omar Gandhi, an architect celebrated for his own housing projects, added: “It is evident that the end result is the product of a highly intensive formal investigation based on spatial relationships, access to natural light, responses to climate, and relationships to the landscape.”

In total, Canadian Architect bestowed 18 Awards of Excellence and Merit for projects around the country this year. For a full list of recipients, click here.

North Design Office, the landscape architecture practice led by the Daniels Faculty’s Peter and Alissa North, is among the co-winners of a 2023 Toronto Urban Design Award in the category of Small Open Spaces. The Award of Merit was bestowed for Stackt Market, the popular “cultural marketplace” composed of artfully assembled shipping containers on the north side of the rail corridor between Bathurst and Tecumseth Streets.

Founded by Alissa North (Associate Professor) and Peter North (Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream) in 2005, North Design Office oversaw Stackt Market’s landscape architecture. The architecture firm behind the project was LGA Architectural Partners. Other members of the award-winning team include Blackwell (structural engineering), Hidi Planner (mechanical engineering), MHBC (transportation), Crozier (civil engineering) and Giant (shipping containers).

According to the five-member jury that granted the Award of Merit, Stack Market “is a fresh new concept for Toronto, in which sustainability—the retrofitting of containers—is the driver behind the creation of a new city destination that has grown beyond the concept of a market. It has become an iconic artform, an animator of a once-derelict place, and a unique public space to simply come and enjoy.”

Added the jury of the project, which is not permanent: “The success of the Stackt Market has been its ability to evolve and change since its inception; it continues to do so as use and program demands shift. This may be attributed to the fact that the market is deemed temporary, which provides the luxury as well as ease of change and adaptation until it is dismantled. The success of the market is also enabled by the level of flexibility and adaptability in the design of space and use.”

Administered by the City of Toronto, the Toronto Urban Design Awards are given out every two years to acknowledge the significant contribution that architects, landscape architects, urban designers, artists, design students and city builders make to the look and livability of the city.

This year’s winners also include another faculty member: Professor Brigitte Shim, whose practice, Shim-Sutcliffe Architects, was recognized with an Award of Merit for Ace Hotel Toronto, described by the jury as a “well crafted ‘brickworks’ project…that does a lot for the fabric of the city and the nearby park.”

It won in the category of Private Buildings in Context—Tall. 

Photos by Industryous Photography

As National Indigenous History Month 2023 comes to a close, the Daniels Faculty is proud to announce an initiative that also looks to the future: the establishment of the Nelda Rodger Indigenous Student Award in Architecture and Design, an endowed award intended to support the recruitment of First Nations, Métis and Inuit students interested in those fields.  

Historically, Indigenous groups have been underrepresented in architectural education and consequently in the profession and practice of architecture. Of the more than 7,000 registered architects in Canada last year, only about 20 were First Nations or Métis, according to a 2022 report in The Globe and Mail.  

“The Faculty is thrilled to introduce this award as part of its ongoing efforts to enhance Indigenous representation both at the Daniels Faculty and in the design professions,” says Dean Juan Du. “As co-founder of Azure Media and editor-in-chief of Azure magazine, Nelda Rodger was a long-time advocate for contemporary architecture and design and for inclusivity and community in the design professions. We are grateful to her husband and partner, Azure Media CEO Sergio Sgaramella, for endowing this award in her honour.” 

Based in Toronto, Rodger (pictured below) served as editor-in-chief of Azure, the internationally respected architecture and design publication, for nearly three decades, from 1985 (the year that she and Sgaramella co-founded it) to 2013. In addition to spearheading the magazine, she was instrumental in launching the annual AZ Awards, which recognize worldwide excellence in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, product design and other related disciplines. Rodger passed away after a long illness in January of this year. 

“Nelda and I both wanted to establish a way of helping young Indigenous students access higher education, something to which we understood many face barriers,” Sgaramella says. “In collaboration with the Daniels Faculty, we have established this bursary to recognize and assist qualifying Indigenous students pursuing degrees in architecture—the first initiative of this kind at U of T.” 

Preference for the new award will be given to full-time undergraduate students in the Faculty’s Architectural Studies program, although graduate students in the Master of Architecture program will also be considered. 

The award is a renewable one, meaning that recipients continue to receive it in subsequent years of enrolment, providing that they continue to demonstrate financial need. 

Amos Key Jr., one of the three members of the Daniels Faculty’s First Peoples Leadership Advisory Group, welcomed the award, noting the importance of now spreading the word about it among Indigenous high schoolers in Ontario and the rest of Canada. 

“I don’t think [a career in architecture] is necessarily on their radar,” elaborates Key, a member of the Mohawk Nation and a leading figure in the ongoing language revitalization movement among First Nations people in Canada. “This is a good start.” 

Contributions to the Nelda Rodger Indigenous Student Award in Architecture and Design, to be granted for the first time in 2024, may be made by clicking here. For more details, contact Stacey Charles at 416-978-4340 or stacey.charles@daniels.utoronto.ca.  

A research project exploring “the practice of perspective” in the works of 16th-century French architect Jacques Androuet du Cerceau held at the British Museum has garnered the Daniels Faculty’s Georges Farhat a Visiting Fellowship from the British Academy.

The British Academy’s Visiting Fellowships provide outstanding academics based in any country overseas (and active at any career stage and in any discipline within the humanities and the social sciences) with the opportunity to be based at a U.K. higher education or other research institution of their choice for up to six months.

Dr. Farhat, a landscape historian specializing in the history of knowledge and technology as applied to garden and landscape design, will use his Fellowship to further develop his long-standing research on built-in optical devices and topographical perspective that has previously been supported by, among others, the Académie d’Architecture de Paris, the Centre de recherche du château de Versailles, the Descartes Centre at Utrecht University, the Society of Architectural Historians, and Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C.

“This collection,” Dr. Farhat says of du Cerceau’s works in the British Museum, “is key to understanding the intertwined histories of perspective and landscape design in the West. Yet, despite growing scholarship on du Cerceau, the practice of perspective in his British Museum works remains a puzzle.”

Although du Cerceau’s oeuvre encompassed buildings, ornament, furniture and metalwork, he is largely remembered today for his detailed and often fanciful engravings of French chateaux, gardens and architectural elements. These works were influential among contemporary and later designers and even aided in garden preservation efforts in the 20th century.

For more information on Dr. Farhat’s project, entitled The Practice of Perspective in the Works of du Cerceau at the British Museum, click here. For more information on the British Academy’s Visiting Fellowships, click here.