Aaron Hernandez (MLA 2019), Douglas Robb (MLA 2014), Thevishka Kanishkan (MLA 2019), and Rayna Syed (MLA 2018) — all graduates from the Daniels Faculty's Master of Landscape Architecture program — are among this year's recipients of grants from the Landscape Architecture Canada Foundation, a national charitable organization that invests in landscape research. Their newly funded projects will tackle a range of issues relevant to the contemporary profession. Here are some details.

Aaron Hernandez

Hernandez's LACF-funded project will be an extension of the work he began while he was preparing his Daniels Faculty thesis project. For that project, he used the tools of landscape architecture design to develop a new way of visualizing how policy documents dictate land use in Rouge National Urban Park, a protected area located in the northeastern corner of Toronto. Using his visualizations, Hernandez developed a series of site-specific remediation strategies that, he contended, could be used as the building blocks of a new and more ecologically sensitive regulatory regime.

Now, with $8,250 in funding from the the LACF's annual grants program and the LACF Donald Graham Bursary, Hernandez plans to perform even deeper policy research on land use in the Rouge. "The grant provides an opportunity to look at the Rouge in the context of a wider set of provincial policies," he says. "I'm also looking at this history of treaties with Indigenous peoples, and how they have formed settler perception and attitudes towards the landscape."

Image from Aaron Hernandez's MLA thesis project.

Hernandez will use part of the new funding to develop ways of disseminating his research. The grant will help him finish work on a paper he's writing with associate professor Jane Wolff, and he'll also begin developing a website to show his work to the public.

Douglas Robb

Robb's grant proposal is an outgrowth of his PhD work at the University of British Columbia's Department of Geography, where he's working on a dissertation about the ways landscape architecture intersects with changes in Canada's resource economy. "I'm looking at landscapes of decarbonization," he says. "How are designers implicated in building this energy transition that we're supposedly all moving towards?"

For his dissertation, Robb has been investigating the role played by architectural drawings in legitimizing controversial energy projects. As part of that project, he has been researching hydropower and hydraulic fracturing in British Columbia's Peace River region. With his $7,825 in funding from the LACF's annual grants program and the LACF Northern Research Bursary, he plans to accelerate his field work.

The W.A.C. Bennett Dam, a hydroelectric dam located on the Peace River. Photograph by Douglas Robb.

"I'm going to be driving the extent of the Peace River," he says. "I'll be documenting landscapes of energy extraction along the way and trying to tell a broader landscape narrative of the river in relation to energy transitions."

The new funding will also allow Robb to publicize his work through scholarly writing and a website. And it will support "Designing Canadian Energy Futures," an advanced undergraduate seminar that Robb is teaching this year at the Daniels Faculty. The money will allow him to provide guest speakers with honoraria.

Rayna Syed and Thevishka Kanishkan

Syed and Kaniskhan applied to the LACF on behalf of an organization they co-founded, Common Space Coalition. "The coalition was founded after a letter demanding action on the perpetuation of systemic racism in landscape architecture, signed by over 120 landscape architects across Canada, was sent in the wake of the killing of George Floyd to the OALA and CSLA," Kanishkan says. Common Space Coalition is now a registered non-profit.

With the $6,000 LACF grant, Common Space Coalition plans to develop the Common Space Directory, an interactive online platform that will catalog and map grassroots activism, community groups, and leaders who operate in fields adjacent to landscape architecture. "It's imperative to the resiliency of our work as landscape architects to meet community groups where they are at, and to bring them into projects at the earliest stages of design,” Kanishkan says. “Our hope is that the Common Space Directory will create a place for landscape architects to connect directly to the communities whose physical spaces we shape, ultimately leading to more equitable and sustainable design work.”

Syed and Kanishkan believe this new tool will help alleviate inequities in the way that landscape architecture manifests in the public realm. "This directory introduces community and activism as a layer of the site inventory and analysis process. It has the potential to break down the systemic racism and Eurocentric values inherent in Canadian landscape architecture, and start the design process with a bottom-up approach," Syed says. "The first step in that is amplifying community voices and grassroots organizations who are already doing this work, and paying attention to them in our profession."

The end result, Syed and Kanishkan say, will be an interactive map directory that shows the location and history of community leaders, groups, movements, and activists working in fields adjacent to landscape architecture in the Toronto area. The Common Space Directory website will also include video clips and notes from interviews and case studies.

The pair hope to promote this project at the CSLA Congress in 2021 and launch it completely by the end of the year.

Syed and Kaniskhan are hoping to raise an additional $4,000, to support the expansion of the project across a larger geographic area. For details, visit the Common Space Coalition website or Instagram.

Each year, the Landscape Architecture Foundation funds a series of research grants for use in producing case studies of landscape projects. This year, the international group of 10 grant recipients includes a familiar name: Kanwal Aftab, who earned her Master of Landscape Architecture at the Daniels Faculty in 2018 and is now a student in the Faculty's PhD program.

Aftab will use her LAF grant to study the University of Toronto Scarborough's Valley Land Trail, a 500-metre public trail, designed by Schollen & Company, that connects the campus with the adjacent Highland Creek Valley. Aftab will conduct her research under the supervision of Jen Hill, the Daniels Faculty's assistant dean of academic planning and governance. “I’m delighted that the Landscape Architecture Foundation supports our interest in this wonderful, universal-design project on one of our own campuses," Hill says.

Kanwal Aftab

Aftab's final product will be a case study brief. It will be published online as part of the LAF's Landscape Performance Series, a collection of scholarly evaluations of the environmental and social performance of various works of landscape architecture in locations around the world.

"This case study will examine a combination of social and environmental factors," Aftab says. "We'll be seeing how the trail was built out and how it's being used."

The case study's analysis, Aftab hopes, will help illuminate the way the trail, which opened to the public in 2019, has transformed U of T Scarborough's relationship to the nearby ravine. "I'm interested in looking at the placement of the campus within the larger community of Scarborough," she says. "COVID has been an interesting turning point because it has forced people to find more outdoor public spaces, like this one."

When she's not studying the Valley Land Trail, Aftab will be working on her PhD thesis, a history of the integration of systems thinking into landscape architecture pedagogy in the 1960s and 1970s.

Top image: The Valley Land Trail. Photograph courtesy of Schollen & Company.

The LA+ Creature competition presented entrants with an unusual design prompt: pick a nonhuman animal as a "client," and then use design methods to create something that might improve that animal's life.

Ambika Pharma, who graduated from the Daniels Faculty's Master of Landscape Architecture program in 2020, and Niko Dellic, who is now completing his Master of Architecture thesis, took one of the competition's top prizes. Their winning design? An aquatic swingers' club for horseshoe crabs.

Their project, titled "Moonlight Orgies," is a modified barge that would float off the coast of Sagar Island, in India. The structure would contain an artificial habitat designed specifically to encourage mating by mangrove horseshoe crabs. Pharma and Dellic chose to focus on horseshoe crabs because of their importance to the medical industry. The crabs' blood contains a rare chemical that is essential for the production of certain kinds of pharmaceuticals and medical devices.

Ambika Pharma and Niko Dellic.

The project was one of five winning designs. Another recent Daniels graduate, Hillary DeWildt (MLA 2020), had her submission chosen for an honourable mention. The competition had a total of 258 entries.

"It's a relief when something like 'Moonlight Orgies' wins," Pharma says. "The project deals with a serious topic, but the design is peculiar. Our win means there's room for humour within ecology and design."

Rendering of Moonlight Orgies.

Pharma and Dellic's design is intended to create a space for mangrove horseshoe crabs to live and breed away from predators. The barge also corrals the crabs, keeping them within reach of humans, so that their blood can be harvested for pharmaceuticals. Allowing the crabs to be exploited by humans is, paradoxically enough, a way to keep them safe.

"Prior to their blood being discovered for medical use, their numbers were dwindling for the first time since the Jurassic period," Dellic says. "Suddenly, once they were discovered to have value from a human standpoint, their numbers started to go back up."

The reason horseshoe crab populations can benefit from human exploitation is that harvesting horseshoe crab blood doesn't always kill the animal. In most cases, a blood draw leaves the crab alive, but lethargic. "There's a two-week period where they're disoriented," Dellic says.

The barge is intended to act as a "crab paradise," where horseshoe crabs whose blood has recently been drained can relax in incubated wading pools. The pools are equipped with artificial lighting designed to emulate the precise kind of moonlight that is most conducive to horseshoe crab mating rituals. Once the crabs have recovered their strength, they can easily find partners and reproduce, benefitting both themselves and their human stewards.

The dark, moody style of the Moonlight Orgies project's renderings was intended to capture some of the moral ambiguity of this exchange of blood for species preservation. "It's not the most cheerful looking aesthetic," Pharma says. "I had some personal reservations about the trade-off we're proposing, between using a species as a resource and providing it with a habitat."

To find out more about the winners of LA+ Creature, visit the competition's website.

New Circadia (adventures in mental spelunking), the inaugural exhibition in the Daniels Faculty's Architecture and Design Gallery, has been named a recipient of a 2020 Best of Canada Award.

The Best of Canada Awards, given annually by Canadian Interiors magazine, recognize excellence in Canadian interior design projects of any size or budget. New Circadia was one of two winners in the "exhibit" category.

The New Circadia exhibition consisted of a 7,500-square-foot underground space, lined in soft, grey felt. Visitors were invited to drape their bodies with pillow-like "spelunking gear" and then lounge in the "Dark Zone," a dim, cave-like environment suffused with low, relaxing sound.

The project was curated and designed by former dean Richard Sommer, in partnership with Natalie Fizer and Emily Stevenson of Pillow Culture, a New York–based interdisciplinary design studio. They were inspired by the Mammoth Cave Experiment, a 1938 sleep experiment conducted by University of Chicago professor Nathaniel Kleitman. "We are interested in using architecture to convey the idea that idling and resting isn't unproductive," Sommer told U of T News.

New Circadia's soundscape was designed by assistant professor Mitchell Akiyama. Assistant professor Petros Babasikas and artist Chrissou Voulgari created Oneiroi, a space within the New Circadia exhibition where visitors could record descriptions of their dreams, or listen to dream descriptions recorded by others.

A number of special events took place inside the exhibition during its five-month run, including guest lectures, film screenings, and musical performances. New Circadia ended in mid-March, when the Daniels Building closed to the public at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

New Circadia wasn't the only Daniels-connected project to be honoured with a 2020 Best of Canada Award. Kohn Shnier Architects, co-founded by associate professor John Shnier, won in the "residence" category. Williamson Williamson Inc., co-founded by associate professor Shane Williamson, won in the "institutional" category.

Photograph by Bob Gundu.

Kohn Shnier Architects, which was co-founded by associate professor John Shnier, has been named a recipient of a 2020 Best of Canada Award for Wrap House, a home renovation project the firm completed in 2019.

The Best of Canada Awards recognize excellence in Canadian interior design projects of any size or budget, anywhere in the country. The awards are given annually by Canadian Interiors magazine.

The Wrap House project consisted of a total modernization of a mid-century home, located in the Toronto suburb of Etobicoke. Kohn Shnier Architects created a new front addition, clad in blackened wood, that wraps (hence the name) around the existing structure. Using the home's existing side-split typology, the designers totally revamped the interior volumes and added a new master suite. The new living spaces are characterized by material surfaces that reflect and energize the idea of a special family dwelling.

"Anticipation, reflection, and glimpsed views make for a home that is at once open yet discreet," Kohn Shnier writes in its description of the project. "This, coupled with the the cross-flow energies introduced through entry make an environment that is alive, yet calm."

To learn more about Wrap House and the other winners of the 2020 Best of Canada awards, visit the Canadian Interiors website.

Top image: Wrap House.

Sing Zixin Chen, a 2020 graduate of the Daniels Faculty's Master of Landscape Architecture program, is no stranger to accolades. She recently racked up another victory: one of her student projects received an honour award from the Society of American Registered Architects.

Sing's was one of six student designs recognized at the "honour" level (there is also a higher "excellence" level) of the the 2020 SARA National Design Awards, which are granted annually. She created her winning project for Longitudinal Landscapes: Memory, Medium, and Mobilization, a third-year option studio taught by Justine Holzman.

Sing Zixin Chen.

Students in Holzman's option studio studied the Los Angeles River, a once-natural waterway that now flows through Los Angeles in a manmade concrete channel. For their final projects, students developed proposals for redesigning the river, taking into consideration a real-world revitalization effort that is being led by the Army Corps of Engineers. The studio made a (pre-COVID) class trip to Los Angeles to view the site in person.

Sing approached the problem by thinking about the site's various users, both human and animal. Her project introduces a series of interventions designed to replicate the type of underwater environment that would be found in a natural river. At the same time, she widens the water channel to create space for human enjoyment.

Renderings of Sing's winning design.

The design creates different kinds of underwater habitats by manipulating the speed and direction of the river's flow. Tight curves and strategically placed underwater boulders and logs are intended to slow down the water, allowing the river to deposit sediment and form pools where fish can live. Shallower curves allow the water to speed up, creating areas ideal for recreational boating and other human activities. Along the river's banks, Sing envisioned a network of public amenities, including fishing platforms and parks.

"The naturalization of the Los Angeles River has been the subject of design and engineering exploration for over two decades," says Liat Margolis, director of the Daniels Faculty's Master of Landscape Architecture program. "The SARA jury recognized that Sing's proposal offers a new possibility of braiding concrete and riparian vegetation to reconcile the extreme conditions of deluge, drought, and restoring the river's life."

The SARA award has been a confidence booster for Sing, who is now working her first job in the profession, as a landscape designer at SvN Architects + Planners. "I was really happy and honoured to win this award," she says. "This was one of my favourite school projects. I enjoyed it and the design studio. And having the chance to travel to Los Angeles was a fun and memorable experience."

Noor Alkhalili, a third-year Master of Architecture student at the Daniels Faculty, was singled out for a rare honour late last month. The Ontario Building Envelope Council named her as the recipient of its 2020 OBEC Graduate Research Scholarship.

OBEC, a group that connects professionals from architecture, engineering, construction, and related fields, awards the $1,000 scholarship annually to one graduate student. Recipients must have a record of academic achievement, and they also need to be pursuing research related to building science.

Alkhalili was presented with a framed certificate at a socially distanced award ceremony in November. She says the scholarship is both a personal honour and a reminder that the discipline of building science is becoming more important at Daniels. "I was really happy to have received this scholarship, especially considering that building science is still an emerging topic," she says. "It's not recognized as much as it needs to be, but it is a very important topic in architecture."

Alkhalili has spent her entire graduate career performing building science research. In her first year at Daniels, she worked with professor Ted Kesik on a conference paper about metrics for visual privacy in buildings. She has continued that work, and is now preparing to co-publish a journal article on the topic with Kesik and Terri Peters, an assistant professor at Ryerson University.

In 2019, Alkhalili and fellow MArch student Jing Li co-founded the Daniels Faculty's OBEC student chapter. And Alkhalili has been a TA in several building science courses at Daniels.

"Noor is a gifted student, a dedicated teaching assistant, and a tireless research assistant," Kesik says. "Soon she will graduate and become a valued colleague. Her journey at Daniels is a testament to the dreams that become reality when the hard work of our students is generously sponsored by scholarships and bursaries."

Top image: Noor Alkhalili.

Being a magazine cover model is great, but Ja Architecture Studio, a practice co-founded by assistant professor Behnaz Assadi and Nima Javidi, has achieved something that is arguably even better: a model they created is on the cover of a magazine.

Anyone who picks up the December issue of Canadian Architect will see, on the front, a scale model of "Wardell," a home addition designed by Ja Architecture Studio. The reason for the prominent placement? The design was a winner of a Canadian Architect Award of Excellence.

The Canadian Architect Award of Excellence is given annually to Canadian projects that exemplify architectural design excellence. Ja Architecture was one of four 2020 winners.

Wardell is a front-facing addition to a semi-detached home in Toronto's Riverdale neighbourhood. In creating the design, Assadi, Javidi and their staff of current and former Daniels Faculty students — MArch student Kaveh Taherizadeh and recent graduates Kyle O’ Brien (MArch 2017) and Rosa Newman (MArch 2020) all made direct contributions — transformed one of the most prosaic types of housing in Toronto into something exceptional.

The design adds a curved brick face to the front of a home on a wedge-shaped lot. The new facade rises to a gable-like peak that resembles, but does not emulate, the rooflines of adjacent houses. The front wall is cantilevered over the home's entrance, which gives the whole assembly an appearance of lightness. Inside are 51 square metres of new living space. The interior includes a sunken first floor with a courtyard, a second-level living area, and a luxurious open-plan master suite with its own winter garden, balcony, and skylight.

The Wardell design is currently still in development. The structure is scheduled for completion in 2022.

“This is a little jewel in the middle of the city," Stephan Cavalier, one of the award's jurors, wrote in Canadian Architect. "The designers could have just added to the existing house, but they created a separate object with a versatile space between. I like the tension from the street façade, which respects the smaller scale of the added component. The sculptural shape is complemented by a very interesting tectonic approach that does something different with brick."

To find out more about Wardell and the other winners of this year's Canadian Architect Awards of Excellence, visit the Canadian Architect website.

Felipe Coral has had a year full of ups and downs. He graduated from the Daniels Faculty's undergraduate architecture program in spring 2020 and made a life-changing move to Melbourne, Australia — right before the city entered one of the world's longest and most stringent COVID-19 lockdowns. And then, at the end of that lockdown, he notched a major professional achievement: he won an international design competition.

Felipe's friend, recent University of Melbourne graduate Simeon Chua, noticed a call for submissions for "Reviving Mines: Shandong Park," a competition that asked entrants to design ways of rehabilitating a former mining site in China's Shandong province. The two young designers decided to work together on an entry. In November, their design, titled "Gallery of the Anthropocene," won first prize.

The competition was organized by Non Architecture. The jury included Jules Gallissian, an architect at Snøhetta, as well as several representatives from China's tourism and cultural development establishment. Felipe and Simeon will jointly receive an award of 7,000 euros.

Felipe Coral.

"This was an uncertain year for me, graduating and trying to prove I have talent," Felipe says. "So it was very rewarding to be given this prize."

Simeon is currently in Singapore, where he's working for WOHA Architects. With Felipe locked down in Melbourne, the pair had to coordinate their efforts online. They met twice a week on Zoom to strategize and compare notes and drawings. The entire design process took about three months.

Felipe and Simeon's design transforms a mine in Shandong into a place for relaxation and thought. The centrepiece of their of their proposal is an artificial river that flows down the staircase-like terraces left behind by years of extraction activity. Around the river, the two designers placed filtration dams, ponds, and water-filtering native plants. They also included a few "gallery" spaces — areas where visitors could pause to learn more about the history and consequences of landscape-altering industrial activity.

"For us, it came back to making industrial pasts of landscapes visible, instead of swiping it under the rug," Felipe says. "That's how I think landscape architecture can be used to create new futures that also educate."

A rendering of Felipe and Simon's design.

The artificial river would flow into a reservoir at the bottom of the mine, which would serve as a place for people to relax and reflect. In keeping with the Chinese setting, Felipe and Simeon styled their drawings after Chinese ink paintings.

To learn more about their design, and to find out about the competition's other finalists, visit the Non Architecture website.

On November 19, the Daniels Faculty is hosting Architecture in Dialogue, an online symposium to celebrate the 14th cycle of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture. But even once the symposium ends, it will still be possible to learn about the award's latest crop of honourees in an engaging way. That's because the Daniels Faculty has created a new Architecture in Dialogue website, to educate the public about the award and its impact on the design fields.

The Aga Khan Award for Architecture is given every three years by the Aga Khan Development Network. The recipients are projects in the fields of architecture, landscape, planning, and historic preservation that address the needs of societies with significant Muslim populations.

The Aga Khan Award was first given in 1980, but it has struggled to gain prominence in the western hemisphere. "Although this award has existed for decades, the winning projects are not well known to North Americans, particularly students of architecture, landscape, and urbanism, who could learn from their examples," says Daniels Faculty professor Brigitte Shim, who is a member of the award's steering committee. "Taken individually and seen together, these works provide remarkable precedents for tackling global challenges."

The Daniels Faculty's symposium, and the accompanying website, are intended to help bring the award's latest winners to the attention of Canadian and American architects, academics, and students.

The new website, designed by sessional lecturer Andrew Bako and Nikolas McGlashan (MArch 21), includes information about the award competition in general. It also contains a wealth of details on the winners of the award's 14th cycle, which concluded in 2019.

The 2019 winners include the Alioune Diop University Teaching and Research Unit, a Senegalese educational facility designed by the Spanish architecture firm IDOM. The building expertly references local architecture while incorporating modern sustainability features like passive cooling and wastewater filtration.

Another highlight among 2019's winners is the Palestinian Museum, designed by Heneghan Peng Architects, of Ireland. The structure, located in the West Bank town of Birzeit, takes inspiration from the rough-hewn agricultural terraces that surround it.

For more information on those and other winners of the 14th cycle of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, visit the Architecture in Dialogue website.

Take me to the Architecture in Dialogue website

Web design by Andrew Bako and Nikolas McGlashan, with thanks to Jeanie Lim (Shim-Sutcliffe Architects) and the Daniels Faculty exhibition committee.