Anyone searching for King William Street, a major dining and entertainment strip in Hamilton, Ontario, will soon have a new landmark to navigate by. Make Studio — a design-build practice led by sessional lecturer Dina Sarhane, Daniels alumnus Mani Mani (MArch 2010), and Tom Svilans, a designer and researcher at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen — has won a competition to build a tall, functional piece of public art at the street's eastern terminus.

Make Studio was announced as the winner of Hamilton's King William Street Beacon and Gate Public Art Project competition on October 16. The studio's winning design, titled "Wood Gate," consists of a series of custom wood glulam arms, arranged to resemble a tall tree that has been splintered, as if by lightning. ("Glulam" is short for glued laminated timber, a durable engineered wood product.) The design is intended to complement the surrounding urban streetscape while symbolizing Hamilton's transition from a manufacturing town to an arts and hospitality hub.

The eight-metre-tall structure satisfies the "beacon" part of the city's design brief, and it also acts as concealment for a utilitarian element: an internal pulley system allows one of the glulam arms to be lowered to street level, so it can serve as a barricade to vehicle traffic during pedestrian-focused public events. (That's the "gate.")

Make Studio's proposal was one of six to make the city's shortlist. The competition jury, in its public report, praised Wood Gate for the way its design "creates a welcome connection to nature, speaks to evolution and growth and brings a unique warmth to the street."

Wood Gate is scheduled to be installed during summer 2021. "We are thrilled that municipalities are welcoming the use of wood in our public spaces," Sarhane says. "We are advocates for the use of wood in the public realm because we see the material choice as sustainable, local and inviting. It is a humble and tactile material that is readily available in our country. With advances in digital fabrication, it can be transformed into infinite possibilities."

The Wood Gate design includes a number of innovative touches, starting with the wood itself. Make Studio will be using yellow cedar to create a custom, free-form glulam material designed to resist weather and wear. Recessed within the glulam arms will be strips of high-intensity LED lights. The lights will serve a dual purpose: they'll illuminate the beacon with white light and also serve as a warning system, by flashing red when the barricade is being lowered.

The design also includes a public bench, which will be installed on the other side of King William Street, opposite the beacon. The bench will double as a locking mechanism for the barricade, and will also conceal a storage area for the barricade's pulley handle and "road closure" sign.

Designing and building public works projects out of engineered wood is a specialty of Make Studio, which was founded by Sarhane and Mani in 2016. (Sarhane is also the founder of DS Studio, a separate architecture and urban design practice.) The studio's other recent projects include "Turtle Tower," a beacon-like wooden public sculpture that resembles an elongated turtle shell, now under construction in Kelowna, British Columbia. And Make is currently at work on developing a system of wooden playground equipment for public use.

Louisa Kennett, a third-year student in the Daniels Faculty's Master of Landscape Architecture program, has been named the 2020 recipient of the Landscape Architecture Canada Foundation University of Toronto Scholarship, a $1,000 award that recognizes students who exemplify landscape architecture scholarship.

The award was endowed in 2017, in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Ontario Association of Landscape Architects. Candidates are selected by Daniels Faculty instructors and approved the LACF.

In a letter announcing the award, the LACF praised Louisa for her "excellence in communication and demonstrated strength in leadership, character, and participation."

For Louisa, receiving the LACF scholarship was a pleasant surprise. "I'm very grateful for the support of the MLA faculty," she says. "This award really encourages me to continue developing my skills and knowledge in this exciting field."

Before coming to the Daniels Faculty, Louisa graduated from Queen's University with a Bachelor of Science in biology. She had no previous background in design. "Landscape architecture excited me because it's able to address both social and environmental issues," she says. "One of the great things about this field is that it draws people from so many different backgrounds."

After overcoming some early difficulties with acclimating to design software and design culture, Louisa began to distinguish herself in the MLA program. For the past year, she has worked as a research assistant to assistant professor Fadi Masoud, director of the Centre for Landscape Research. Her work at the CLR has focused on developing revitalization strategies for Toronto's suburban green spaces.

"Louisa is a stellar student who demonstrates extraordinary capacity for design as well as history and theory," says Liat Margolis, director of the Daniels Faculty's Master of Landscape Architecture program. "I congratulate her on this well-deserved national recognition."

A rendering from moveTO.

Her recent coursework includes "moveTO," an imaginative design for an extension of the West Toronto Railpath. The project, which Kennett co-created with fellow student Allison Smith, employs a long, continuous tube of steel called "the spine," which twists into various useful shapes — like benches and basketball hoops — as it traverses the Railpath corridor.

For more information on the LACF University of Toronto scholarship, visit the LACF website.

David Martell, a professor emeritus in the forestry program at the Daniels Faculty, has been named the recipient of the 2020 Ember Award for Excellence in Wildland Fire Science, a prize given by the International Association of Wildland Fire to scientists who have demonstrated sustained excellence in wildland fire research.

In its public notice about the award, the IAWF noted Martell's 45-year career as a wildland fire researcher — especially his efforts to conduct operational research on forest fire suppression and apply that research to the creation of simulation models. The Ontario government used the results of Martell's research to determine how to manage its air tanker fleet, and his work enabled the creation of new techniques for weighing the costs and benefits of different fire suppression systems.

"Dr. Martell has had a strong influence on the development of fire leaders and managers across Canada because he dedicated time to understanding their operational point of view, integrating academic and operational perspectives, and absorbing the real application of fire management," the IAWF writes.

Martell is the co-director (with Mike Wotton) of the Daniels Faculty's Fire Management Systems Laboratory, where he conducts research on fire in boreal forest ecosystems.

"I'm very honoured to be the 2020 recipient of the Ember award," Martell says. "Although I am the recipient, this award recognizes research that I carried out in collaboration with my graduate students, research assistants, other researchers, and forest fire management personnel of the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry (OMNRF). I'm very grateful for their contributions, and for the financial support I've received from the OMNRF, as well as the University of Toronto and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada."

The annual Arbor Awards are the University of Toronto's highest honours, given to alumni or friends who have performed extraordinary volunteer service at the university. The awards were established in 1989, and have since been received by about 2,400 people, out of more than 600,000 U of T alumni worldwide. This year's recipients include four people who were nominated specifically for their service to the Daniels Faculty.

The Daniels Faculty's honourees are:

Barry Sampson

Barry Sampson (BArch 1972) is a longtime professor (now professor emeritus) at the Daniels Faculty, and a principal at Baird Sampson Neuert Architects. As a career educator, he has inspired and mentored successive generations of students in the technically demanding field of whole-building design. He was chosen for an Arbor Award as a result of his many extracurricular contributions to life at the Faculty — particularly his service as an advisor to the dean during construction of the Daniels Building. "This is a very much appreciated and unanticipated honour," Sampson wrote in an email. "It has been particularly satisfying for me to have had many opportunities over the years to support the work of the Faculty and, ultimately, assist in creating a fitting new home for it at a prominent location within the University of Toronto and city."

Jane Welsh

Jane Welsh (MScPl 2000) is a project manager at Toronto City Planning and also president of the Ontario Association of Landscape Architects governing council. Her Arbor Award recognizes her efforts to engage the OALA's membership in support of the Michael Hough/OALA Visiting Critic in Landscape Architecture, an endowed position that continually enriches the Daniels Faculty's landscape architecture program. Welsh has also personally mentored several Master of Landscape Architecture students and has been a frequent participant in the Faculty's student-professional networking events. "I think it's so important to foster emerging practitioners in landscape architecture," she says. "It's a very important profession — especially in the world we're in now."

Carl Blanchaer

Blanchaer has played a pivotal role in city-building, both as a principal at WZMH Architects (a role from which he is now retired) and as a member of Toronto's Design Review Panel, which helps shape the municipal government's response to high-stakes development proposals. Carl also serves on the University of Toronto's Design Review Committee, where he has volunteered his expert judgment on countless campus design projects, including the St. George Campus Secondary Plan. On top of that, he has, on many occasions from 2016 to the present, generously volunteered his time as a guest critic during the Daniels Faculty's design reviews, making him a crucial bridge to the design professions and development community. "I feel like I've been very fortunate with the opportunities that I've had in my professional career, and volunteering at the university was an opportunity to give back to the community in a way where I could offer some experience and expertise," Blanchaer says. "I was really taken aback by the award, but obviously I was incredibly pleased. I never expected any recognition."

Heather Dubbeldam

Heather Dubbeldam is the principal of Dubbeldam Architecture + Design and a past chair of the Toronto Association of Architects. Heather is known within the profession as an advocate for racial and gender equity — a cause she advances in her role as advisory vice chair of Building Equality in Architecture Toronto (BEAT). Her Arbor Award recognizes her role in helping establish the Daniels Faculty's student-professional networking event series, as well as her time spent as a guest critic during the Faculty's design reviews. "Engagement between students and professionals really helps to strengthen our profession," she says. "There's so much new thinking that's happening at the school, and that can really enrich the practice of architecture."

A pair of Daniels Faculty students have won an international award for a pavilion they designed, which uses coloured panes of glass to raise awareness of global air pollution.

Rick Schutte and Mina Onay, both architecture undergraduates, were named regional winners in the "daylight investigations" category of the 2020 International Velux Awards — a biannual competition run by Velux, a manufacturer of windows, skylights, and blinds. In addition to a cash prize, Rick and Mina have won the right to present their design at this year's World Architecture Festival, where they will compete with four other regional winners for the grand prize in their category.

"It's so amazing, and so we're so grateful," Rick says. "We've been on cloud nine for weeks."

Rick Schutte and Mina Onay.

Participants in the daylight investigations category of the 2020 International Velux Award competition were required to submit designs that investigated the physical properties of light, using new materials and technologies.

Rick and Mina realized that they would need to take an unconventional approach in order to make their project stand out from hundreds of other entries. Both of them are minoring in visual studies, and it occurred to them that a visual arts perspective could be precisely the thing to give them an edge. The competition's rules required them to pick a faculty advisor, so they chose J.P. King, a sessional lecturer in the Daniels Faculty's visual studies program. J.P. is a working artist who specializes in printmaking.

"When Rick and Mina came to me, they didn't necessarily want architectural thinking to guide their project," J.P. says. "They were looking for someone who was more process oriented, who could guide them through the stages of thinking through a piece of public artwork."

The design process was complicated by the fact that the project team's members were located on different continents. Rick and J.P. were both in Toronto, but Mina had left the city for her home in Turkey in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and was unable to return. She and Rick ended up doing most of their collaborative design work on Miro, an online whiteboarding platform that has become popular with designers over the past few months.

Despite the distance, the pair were able to develop a sophisticated design that they titled "AQIP," or "Air Quality Index Pavilion." They developed the concept using parametric design methods.

The pavilion, which they envisioned being installed on a site on the Toronto Islands (this project, like most student competition entries, will not actually be built), is made almost entirely of four-inch-thick panes of glass that are precisely curved to create a maze-like environment that looks, from above, like the bloom of a flower. The striking structure straddles the line between architecture and public art, in the vein of large-scale sculptors like Richard Serra.

A chart, created by Rick and Mina, that shows the air quality indices of various cities around the world.

Under J.P.'s guidance, Rick and Mina researched the air quality index, a standard measurement of air pollution used in population centres around the world. They surveyed the air quality of several of the world's largest countries and took note of the cities within those countries that had recorded the worst pollution.

Once they had compiled a table of air quality index scores from around the world, they set about finding a way to represent the data within the built form of their pavilion. They researched the visual effect of particulate matter in the atmosphere and realized that excessive pollution typically causes the sky to take on an orange tint — a fact now familiar to anyone who has been following news of the California wildfires.

Rick and Mina decided that each glass panel in their pavilion would represent a different global city. Each of the panels would be tinted orange in proportion with the air quality of its corresponding city: the worse the air quality, the deeper the orange hue.

Top: A rendering of the view from inside the pavilion. Bottom: A view of the skylight at the pavilion's centre.

A visitor to the Air Quality Index Pavilion enters from the outer edge of the "flower," where the lightest-orange glass (representing the least polluted cities) is located. As the visitor progresses towards the centre of the pavilion, he or she encounters glass panes that are deeper orange, representing cities with poorer air quality. At the centre of the pavilion, in the middle of the whorl of glass, the orange is so intense that it's almost opaque. Bathed in orange light, the visitor has a visceral experience of the effect of air pollution on the earth's atmosphere.

At the very centre of the pavilion, the glass petals part, leaving a round, open portal through which a visitor can look up and see blue sky. "This element of the design was inspired by James Turrell's skylights," Rick says. "Visitors have the ability to look up and see the bright blue sky when they're covered with this orange light filtering through the glass. It's a hopeful moment at the centre of our installation."

The World Architecture Festival, where Rick and Mina will present their design and vie for the grand prize in their category, will take place in June 2021.

Sing Zixin Chen, who graduated from the Daniels Faculty's Master of Landscape Architecture program last semester and quickly landed a job at SvN Architects and Planners, now has something else to celebrate: not only has she been named a winner of an Honor Award in the Urban Design category of this year's American Society of Landscape Architects Student Awards, but an image of her work is on the cover of the September 2020 issue of the society's official publication, Landscape Architecture Magazine.

"I feel very honoured to have been selected, and I really appreciate that my work has been recognized by such a highly professional group of people," Chen says.

Her ASLA-award-winning project was her Daniels Faculty thesis, which she presented in winter 2020. The project proposes a number of carefully considered, low-tech design interventions for the eastern waterfront of Mumbai, the largest city in India.

Sing Zixin Chen.

Chen chose Mumbai because she had visited the city in 2017, prior to starting her MLA studies. "It was a design exchange program," she says. "I spent two weeks there. We studied the waterfront, spoke to residents to gather information about how the area was used, and collaborated with students from Mumbai."

When she began researching Mumbai for her thesis project, Chen noticed that the city's eastern waterfront had a variety of different groups of users, including the residents of a local fishing village, visitors to a nearby 17th-century British fort, birdwatchers attracted by the local flamingo population, and workers at a nearby salvage yard for boats. Her design, she realized, would need to take all these uses into consideration. Her aim was to preserve the site's cultural context and its people’s way of life by building on the waterfront's existing infrastructure in a sustainable, natural way.

Her final design proposal called for a three-phase rehabilitation of the shoreline, starting with the construction of a dike to control erosion. A treatment pond and waste collection area would remove pollutants from the water, setting the stage for phase two: the introduction of aquaculture systems, which would allow locals to grow their own algae, seaweed, kelp, and shellfish. Mangroves would flourish in the purified water, which would attract fish for locals to catch, restoring some of the area's traditional fishing economy.

Top: A section showing Chen's proposal for aquaculture along Mumbai's eastern waterfront. Bottom: Chen's site plan.

In the final phase of Chen's proposed redesign, locals would use salvaged plastics to create an archipelago of artificial floating islands, which could be used as platforms for agriculture, commerce, or community events.

Gathering waste materials for use in the creation of floating islands.

Chen's project was the only Daniels Faculty student project to be recognized by ASLA this year. "This is a very competitive award," says Chen's thesis advisor, associate professor Liat Margolis. "The fact that her drawing was used for the cover of a national professional magazine is an enormous accomplishment and a testament to Sing's brilliant work."

Top image: A drawing of the Mumbai waterfront, showing Chen's proposed design interventions.

Drew Adams (MArch 2011), at the age of 35, has already had a distinguished career in the nine years since he graduated from the Daniels Faculty. Now he has something else: the 2020 Emerging Architect Award, from the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada.

The award, formerly known as the "Young Architect Award," is given each year to a young architect who has demonstrated excellence in design, leadership, or service to the profession. Adams sees the win as a heartening vote of confidence in his career path, which has focused mostly on design for nonprofit clients. "What stands out to me is that it affirms a type of community-focused work that is too often under-recognized," Adams says. "More than ever, I'm optimistic about community-impact work and what we can still achieve together through collective action."

Adams is currently an associate at LGA Architectural Partners, where he has worked for the past seven years. He was the project architect for LGA's Evergreen Brick Works' Future Cities Centre, a former kiln building that now serves as a multifunctional event space. The project is known as one of Toronto's best and most prominent examples of adaptive reuse.

The Evergreen Brick Works' Future Cities Centre. Photograph by James Morely/A-Frame.

Adams also had a leading role in creating LGA's design for Eva's Phoenix, a transitional housing centre for homeless youth, located in downtown Toronto. The building's 10 townhouse-style units provide a supportive environment for young people who need a safe, temporary place to live, learn, and recover from trauma.

The RAIC jury noted Adams's frequent conference appearances and university guest lectures, as well the quality of his design work.

The jury writes: "Drew’s work displayed an impressive commitment to the benefits of material research, technical explorations of building systems, energy modelling, and daylight studies all in the service of designing and building a more inclusive living environment for those most in need in our communities."

Adams received the 2011 Irving Grossman Prize for his final thesis on innovative and sustainable housing design. Before entering the Daniels Faculty's Master of Architecture program, he graduated from the University of Waterloo, with a bachelor's degree in urban planning.

LAMAS, an architecture studio co-founded by Daniels Faculty associate professor Wei-Han Vivian Lee and lecturer James Macgillivray, has built a stellar reputation on the strength of projects like its Townships Farmhouse and its recent revamp of Avling Kitchen and Brewery.

Now, Domus, an influential architecture and design magazine based in Italy, has named LAMAS one of the year's best architecture firms.

LAMAS was one of 50 practices named on Domus's 2020 best-firms list. The jury of international experts who vetted the contenders selected just one other Canadian firm for inclusion: Winnipeg's 5468796 Architecture.

Avling Kitchen and Brewery. Photograph by Felix Michaud.

Domus praised LAMAS for exemplifying "the trend among architects to distance themselves from the pure formal work that preceded them throughout the course of the past century in order to concentrate on issues that are now central in architectural design, namely materials and finishes."

(Anyone interested in learning more about LAMAS can check out Lee and Macgillivray's recent interview with The Architect's Newspaper.)

Blanche Lemco van Ginkel, a former Daniels Faculty dean, has been named the recipient of this year's Royal Architectural Institute of Canada Gold Medal, a high honour reserved for those who have made significant and lasting contributions to architecture in Canada.

Lemco van Ginkel's win puts her in a category with esteemed past recipients like Gilles Saucier, André Perrotte, George Baird, and the Aga Khan.

She became the director of the School of Architecture (as the Daniels Faculty was then known) in 1977. By then, she had already had a distinguished career.

Lemco van Ginkel graduated from McGill University, where she was among the first female students ever admitted to the architecture program. She spent the 1940s and early 1950s working at a number of prestigious architecture firms, including a productive stint at Le Corbusier's atelier in Paris, during which she had a hand in designing the distinctive ventilator stacks atop the Unité d'habitation, in Marseille. She began her teaching career at the University of Pennsylvania, then taught at the University of Montreal and McGill, all the while developing a specialty in urban design.

Her notable achievements as a practitioner include studies of Old Montreal that helped preserve the city's historic core amid highway construction, a design for Bowring Park in St. John's, and a preliminary plan for Expo 67.

Lemco van Ginkel's University of Toronto School of Architecture directorship was a successful one. She is believed to have been the first woman ever to have led a school of architecture in North America. Under her direction, the school established its first study-abroad programs and repatriated the university's landscape architecture program, which had been transferred to the Faculty of Forestry in 1975. By the end of her term, in 1981, she was dean of the newly reconstituted Faculty of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. She continued teaching at the Faculty until 1993.

Lemco van Ginkel has received numerous previous honours, including the Massey Medal for Architecture (1962), the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture Distinguished Professor Award (1989), an honourary doctorate from the University of Aix-Marseille (2005), and the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Medal (2012).

The RAIC Gold Medal jury writes that Lemco van Ginkel "has had a profound influence on architectural thinking, education and practise. She has been an inspiration to generations of architects, and has consistently furthered the architectural and planning discourse through publication and practise."

In 2015, the Daniels Faculty established the Professor Blanche Lemco van Ginkel Admission Scholarship, in recognition of her achievements and leadership at the school. The award was initiated and generously supported by architect and Daniels Faculty alumnus Ho K. Sung.

Photograph by Joy von Tiedemann.

The Peter Prangnell Award, given annually to as many as two students enrolled at the Daniels Faculty, provides crucial funding for research-related travel. This year's recipients, Diana Franco Camacho and Alexia Hovis, used their award money to finance trips to European locales that few travellers ever visit. Here's where they went, and what they did there.

Diana Franco Camacho

When Diana was contemplating ideas for her master's thesis project, her thoughts gravitated toward her home country, Mexico — specifically the Conjunto Urbano Nonoalco Tlatelolco, a mid-20th-century high-rise apartment community located near the centre of Mexico City. The giant, modernist tower complex (it sprawls over nearly an entire square kilometre) was designed by famed Mexican architect Mario Pani.

Tlatelolco was once an attractive place to live, but quality of life in the area has been on a steady decline for the past few decades, partly as a result of heavy damage sustained during the 1985 Mexico City earthquake.

Diana was drawn to the site because of a personal connection. "My father grew up in this housing complex," she says. "I have memories of going there as a kid and learning about it."

With her thesis project, which she'll be presenting this spring, she hopes to find ways of using design to return Tlatelolco to some of its former glory. After receiving the Prangnell Award, she arranged a trip to western Europe, where she embarked on a tour of mid-20th-century apartment communities that, unlike Tlatelolco, have successfully revitalized themselves. "I wanted to study best practices," she says.

A scene from the Bijlmermeer. Photograph by Diana Franco Camacho.

One stop on the tour was the Bijlmermeer, a tower complex located in Amsterdam. Like other tower communities of its vintage, the Bijlmermeer had a period of decline. Some of its buildings were demolished, and it gained infamy as a hotspot for poverty and crime. Its reputation was also affected by a tragic accident: in 1992, a commercial jetliner crashed into two of the neighbourhood's apartment structures.

Now, after 25 years of continual urban renewal, the Bijlmermeer has begun to flourish again. Diana was particularly impressed by the way careful renovations have improved the variety of housing types available in the area, making the Bijlmermeer hospitable to people of multiple income levels. She also appreciated the local approach to bike infrastructure. "The bike lanes go underneath the buildings," she says. "They cut tunnels in the podiums so riders can go through. You only see cars in certain areas."

Diana also noted the way the neighbourhood has used public art to overhaul its image. Many tall buildings in the Bijlmermeer are adorned with giant, colourful murals by skilled graffiti artists from around the world. "It's to change the perception," Diana says. "And to tell people, 'we are improving this area for you, and it's exciting to live here.'"

Later, Camacho made a stop in Berlin to visit Marzhan, a community of communist-era concrete towers. It has remained a viable, vibrant neighbourhood over the years, in part because of an intelligent infill strategy. Camacho admired the complex's wide-open spaces and clean sightlines. She also made stops in France, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.

Now fully armed with ideas, she's back in Toronto and thinking, once again, about Mexico City.

Alexia Hovis

Cyprus, a Mediterranean island nation with a fraught political history, had fascinated Alexia since long before she began work on her Master of Architecture thesis project. Her mother was born and raised there, and her family still owns a home on the island.

The country bears the scars of a 1974 military coup that resulted in a large-scale invasion by Turkish troops. The island is now divided by a United Nations "buffer zone" — a political border that separates the Republic of Cyprus, in the south, from a Turkish-occupied area in the north.

For her thesis, Alexia wanted to explore ways that design might help Cyprus's two separate communities start to forge new relationships. "I saw the project as a way to try to bring the two sides together," she says. "Not in an attempt to solve the problem, but just to make a new relationship with the buffer zone for both communities, and humanize either side to each other."

The UN buffer zone in Cyprus. Photograph by Alexia Hovis.

With funding from the Prangnell Award, Alexia travelled to her family home in Cyprus, which she hadn't visited for more than a decade. From there, she explored the island. Her travels included her first-ever foray north of the buffer zone, into the Turkish-occupied part of the country. "Everything felt less maintained," she says. "And there was more concern for heritage because there wasn't as much western influence and development."

As she travelled, she took careful note of the way Cypriots have learned to coexist with the border that slices through their cities and towns. Although the buffer zone is several kilometres wide in some places, there are spots in Nicosia, the Cypriot capital city, where the zone narrows to just a few metres across.

Alexia was struck by the way the border has melded with everyday life in Cyprus. In some areas, it's defined by flimsy, seemingly makeshift barriers: a pile of oil drums, or a dilapidated concrete wall. She visited a lively Nicosia café that sidled right up against one of those thin barriers, and the experience helped convince her to focus her thesis on eating-related design interventions. When she returned to Toronto, she set about designing a series of informal ways of redefining the buffer zone along culinary lines, including a border-straddling kitchen table, a market, and a community kitchen.

Her travels led her to insights about Cyprus and the buffer zone that she wouldn't have been able to glean from research alone. "The barrier has become so much part of their lives that they don't really think about it," she says. "Without going there, I wouldn't have been confident in saying that my project should be about an everyday activity like eating."