Barry Sampson has been involved with the Daniels Faculty since 1967, when he first entered the University of Toronto's architecture program as a student. He graduated in 1972, became a sessional lecturer in 1979 and taught continually until 2018, when he retired as a full professor. He remains active as a principal at the award-winning architecture firm Baird Sampson Neuert.

Now, as a result of numerous generous contributions to a fundraising appeal initiated by Sampson's longtime colleagues Bruce Kuwabara, Brigitte Shim, Pina Petricone, Ian MacDonald, and Shirley Blumberg, the Daniels Faculty is pleased to announce the creation of the Barry W. Sampson Scholarship.

The new scholarship will honour Sampson's legacy as the originator of the Daniels Faculty's comprehensive building studio, in which graduate students are given the technically demanding task of designing a complete building, inside and out. Recipients of the scholarship will be Master of Architecture students who have demonstrated an exemplary grasp of whole-building design through their projects and coursework, and who have shown an ability to creatively integrate technical systems, environmental performance, and architectonic design.

The scholarship will be awarded annually, beginning in 2021.

Toronto's condos are tiny, and they're only getting tinier. As of 2017, according to Statistics Canada, the median size of a condominium apartment in Ontario was just 665 square feet, about one third smaller than similar units built in the 1980s and 1990s.

Recently, the builders of a new south Etobicoke condo tower called Reina — a partnership between Urban Capital and Spotlight Development — announced a student competition aimed at getting young designers to think about new ways of using the very limited amount of living space inside a typical condo. The competition brief called on student entrants to devise innovative, space-saving designs for condo interiors and tower amenity spaces.

Late last week, Reina's project team announced the winners of the competition's $2,500 grand prize: Keenan Ngo and Ozyka Videlia, a pair of Daniels Faculty students.

Keenan Ngo and Ozyka Videlia.

Ngo and Videlia met this summer, during a two-week workshop at the Daniels Faculty. Ngo is in the first year of his Master of Architecture studies, and Videlia is a second-year architecture undergrad. The pair quickly became friends. When Videlia learned about the competition, she asked Ngo to team up with her, and he agreed.

"I've dabbled in tiny houses," Ngo says. "So this was a point of interest."

The two designers began by trying to pinpoint the things about apartments that had annoyed or inconvenienced them in the past.

"In typical condos, the ratio between the kitchen and the living room is nonsense to me," Videlia says. "The kitchen will be really small and the living room will be huge, and the cabinetry is very small." They also had issues with the cramped layouts in condo bathrooms.

After some deliberation, they decided to focus their efforts on those two spaces.

For their kitchen, their first innovation was a system of cabinets that could slide up or down on the wall, in order to enable the condo's occupant to access upper shelves without need for a stool. They envisioned built-in counterweights to ensure that the cabinets could travel smoothly up and down, with hidden catches to lock the assembly in place at the desired height.

Ngo and Videlia also came up with a solution for a problem that has vexed many condo owners: kitchen counter space. Rather than a permanent, full-sized breakfast bar, they devised a skinny bar top that could fold away, accordion-style, into the wall of the unit. The condo's occupant could fold out the bar when it was needed, and then stash it to clear up precious floor space.

Ngo and Videlia's prize-winning bathroom design.

For their bathroom design, Ngo and Videlia came up with a floor plan that allows for a tub, a separate shower, and a partitioned-off toilet-and-sink area, all within a 40-square-foot envelope. The door to the bathroom is a wooden screen, inspired by Ngo's travels in Japan.

This was Ngo and Videlia's first-ever entry in a student design competition, and their first win. "It put a big smile on our faces," Ngo says.

And they weren't the only Daniels Faculty students to win honours in Reina's competition. Ivy Chan and Wesley Fong, a pair of MArch students at the Faculty, were named semi-finalists for their kitchen and bathroom designs. They won $500.

Top image: Ngo and Videlia's prize-winning kitchen design.

Richard Sommer, dean of the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, has been named a recipient of one of this year's Distinguished Professor Awards from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture.

ACSA’s Distinguished Professor Awards are bestowed upon individuals whose work provides significant insight into the understanding and advancement of architecture and architectural education. Recipients have been deemed by nominators, and a jury of peers, to have had a significant impact as teachers, and to have fostered an understanding and appreciation of architectural education in the community at large. Special emphasis is given to professors of architecture whose work and service has had a major influence upon students over an extended period of time, and whose teaching has inspired a generation of students who themselves have contributed to the advancement of architecture.

Dean Sommer began teaching as a studio assistant while still an undergraduate. For almost three decades he has been an influential pedagogue at a number of leading schools of architecture, where he has developed new curricula and programs that have drawn upon his creative work and research in architecture, urban design, and monument-making under democracy. Before 2009, Sommer was a member of the faculty at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, where he was director of the school’s Urban Design programs. He has held several other academic posts, including the O’Hare Chair/Visiting American Scholar, University of Ulster, Northern Ireland; Scholar-in-Residence, California College of the Arts; and visiting professorships at K.U. Leuven, Columbia, Iowa State, and Washington University.

Since arriving at the University of Toronto in 2009, Sommer has led a profound transformation of the Daniels Faculty. Mobilizing talented colleagues, he built an inventive undergraduate foundation in architectural studies; renewed the school’s three graduate professional programs; created a unique PhD in Architecture, Landscape, and Design; incorporated UofT’s programs in art, curatorial studies and forestry; and helped found various research initiatives, ultimately quadrupling the size of the school. His boldest achievement in Toronto — constructing One Spadina Crescent — was the result of a collaboration with a large design team lead by NADAAA. The project reinvigorated a major civic landmark that is an embodiment of the Daniels Faculty’s newfound prominence. The One Spadina project has received over 20 local, national, and international design and planning awards to date.

Dean Sommer will receive his medallion and be elected to ACSA’s College of Distinguished Professors at the organization's national conference in San Diego on March 12.

The Paul Oberman Graduate Student Endowment Fund, established by Eve Lewis and family along with colleagues at Woodcliffe Landmark Properties, honours the legacy of Paul Oberman, a property developer known for his restorations of historic landmarks like the North Toronto railway station. Oberman passed away in 2011.

The fund provides research grants to Daniels Faculty students whose work follows Oberman's lead by probing the ways historic architecture is being transformed to meet contemporary needs. For 2019's Paul Oberman recipients, Isaac Neufeld and Heather Richardson, awards from the fund enabled overseas travel that directly influenced both of their Master of Architecture thesis projects.

Isaac Neufeld

Neufeld, who has an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering, is interested in the intersection between architecture and infrastructure. When he was considering potential thesis topics, he was drawn to the idea of doing a study of district heating and cooling systems — centralized plants that distribute steam or water to an entire urban district for use in HVAC systems.

"There has been a lot of documentation from organizations like the UN about how district heating and cooling systems are going to be one of the top tools for fighting climate change in cities," Neufeld says. "And so I thought architects should concern themselves with them."

But there was an obstacle to Neufeld's research: many of the most architecturally remarkable examples of district heating and cooling plants are located in western Europe. Making site visits would be prohibitively expensive.

With support from the Paul Oberman Graduate Student Endowment Award, Neufeld was able to go on a grand tour, with stops in France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Italy, Iceland, and Austria. Along the way, he visited district heating and cooling plants and attended two professional conferences: the Euroheat and Power Congress in Nantes, France, and the Urban Future Global Conference in Oslo, Norway. The award paid for travel, accommodations, and entry fees to the conferences.

Over the course of several months, he was able to visit dozens of sites relevant to his research. One standout was the Leyweg Geothermal Heat Plant, a twin-gabled structure in The Hague that pumps water from 2,000 metres below the earth's surface for use in heating. In Copenhagen, he visited the Borgergade District Cooling Plant, which cleverly emulates the red brick of the city's older buildings to put a people-friendly face on the industrial cooling equipment located within.

Top: the Leyweg Geothermal Heat Plant. Bottom: Borgergade District Cooling Plant. Photographs by Isaac Neufeld.

Neufeld returned to Canada with sketches, photographs, and a whole new understanding of the ways heating and cooling infrastructure can be integrated into the urban fabric. Now he's ready to tackle the biggest project of his academic career: his thesis will investigate ways of incorporating district energy systems into a suburban Toronto neighbourhood.

Photograph by Lauren Meeker.

Heather Richardson

Richardson grew up near Collingwood, Ontario, not far from the Blue Mountain ski resort. "I've been skiing since I could walk," she says.

As she entered her final year in the Daniels Faculty's Master of Architecture program, she decided to turn that lifelong skiing infatuation into a globetrotting thesis project. With the support of the Paul Oberman Graduate Student Endowment Award, she embarked on a tour of modernist ski resorts in France. The goal was to gain an understanding of the ways architects had applied mid-century urbanist ideals to these leisure-focused mountain settings, and to learn about the challenges inherent in designing a community that experiences massive seasonal population swings.

To get a sense of the size of those population swings, she planned her trip for the tail end of summer. "Even mountain biking season was ending," she says. "The resorts were really ghost towns when I went to see them. I got to chat with people who live in these places permanently, which was great."

Her stops included Flaine, a purpose-built French resort that was completed in 1969. Flaine's Bauhaus-style architecture, heavily reliant on precast concrete panels, left a strong impression on her.

At Avoriaz, another French ski village, she took in the architecture of the resort's inviting, cedar-shingled mid-century villas.

She also spent time at Les Arcs, a ski resort designed by the renowned French architect Charlotte Perriand. Richardson was struck by the designer's use of modular, prefabricated forms to produce spaces that are both efficient and beautiful. She was also impressed by the way the resort's buildings hug the slope of the mountain, making them seem like part of the landscape.

Les Arcs. Photograph by Heather Richardson.

For her thesis project, which she presented in December, she developed her own take on a modernist ski resort. Her design took inspiration from the sloping, concrete forms she saw on her European trip. She also added some innovative touches, like a system for physically moving residential modules between an on-hill station and the base of a mountain using the same elevated tramways developed for ski lifts, which Richardson sees as a potential way of increasing a resort's flexibility amidst seasonal population changes.

Image from Heather Richardson's thesis presentation.

"Visiting these communities has given me a great sense of place," she says. "I spent a semester studying European alpine urbanism, but once you're there you really understand the silhouettes of the buildings and how they reflect the mountainscapes behind."

As the year (and the decade) draws to a close, the Daniels Faculty is getting a few wins in under the wire. Now Magazine's list of the "best of Toronto's art scene" in 2019 includes a number of mentions of work by people connected to the Master of Visual Studies program.

Associate professor Charles Stankievech, the director of the MVS program, earned a nod for Best Film Program, as a result of his work on The Drowned World, a multimedia marathon at the Ontario Place Cinesphere, which he curated for the Toronto Biennial of Art.

Pegah Vaezi (MVS 2019), a student in the MVS Curatorial Studies program, was the organizer of "What do We Mean When We Say 'Content Moderation?'," which Now deemed 2019's Best Symposium. The event was funded by the Art Museum at the University of Toronto.

And 2019's Best New Art Space is SUGAR Contemporary, a waterfront gallery that is co-directed by Xenia Benivolski (MVS 2021), another Daniels graduate student.

In the second year of his graduate architecture studies, Brandon Bergem (MArch 2019) received an award from the Paul Oberman Graduate Student Endowment Fund, which was established by Eve Lewis and family along with Oberman's colleagues at Woodcliffe Landmark Properties. The award provides funding to Daniels Faculty students who have submitted research proposals that promise to probe the ways historic architecture is being transformed to meet contemporary needs.

Bergem decided to use the money to finance a trip to Norway. Once there, he planned to study the country's National Scenic Routes, a series of highways that are dotted with architecturally interesting rest-stop structures.

As an afterthought, he made a detour to Svalbard, a remote archipelago that is host to some of the northernmost human settlements on the planet.

Bergem was so taken with what he saw there that he decided to make it the subject of his 2018 Master of Architecture thesis. That project, titled The Museum of Natural History to Ultima Thule, was recently named the winner of a 2019 Student Award of Excellence from Canadian Architect. The magazine's editors even put one of Bergem's images of the cover of the December issue.

"This work I did during school, which can be very removed from the professional world, is now being recognized by the professional world," Bergem says. "It instills confidence in what I've done."

Svalbard left a deep impression on him. "It's a very barren landscape," he says. "It's just full of glaciers and fjords and the occasional settlement. You'll see old hunting lodges or mining operations, and there are even the remnants of structures that were built to aid different ventures to reach the north pole."

Although Svlabard is part of the Kingdom of Norway, other countries have treaty rights that entitle them to pursue commercial activity there — a continuation of the island chain's centuries-long history as a base for mining, whaling, and other forms of resource extraction. Svalbard's frozen habitats are threatened by climate change, which has recently made the archipelago a site of scientific interest.

Bergem's thesis project imagines a future where climate change and human habitation have altered Svalbard beyond recognition. His work consists of a series of haunting images that show scenes of a fictionalized Svalbard full of megastructures, like a luxury mountaintop hotel and an opulent royal palace (the latter is depicted at the top of this article).

In Bergem's images, these fictional structures are shown in states of ruin or disarray, as their inhabitants race to shore them up against Svalbard's increasingly mercurial climate. One image shows an army of flying drones counteracting the effects of erosion and climate change by reconstructing the island pebble by pebble. Another image shows a mutant polar bear trudging across a rocky outcropping covered in melting permafrost.

"Svalbard is experiencing a large number of landslides as a result of increased precipitation," Bergem says. "The glaciers are melting, the sea level is rising. The standpoint of my thesis was to imagine a point at which the island doesn't exist anymore and look back on its history. I was treating the future as the past within this idea of a museum of natural history."

The Canadian Architect awards jury was impressed with the beauty and power of Bergem's work. "I could linger over these incredible drawings and the tales they evoke for hours," wrote jury member Joe Lobko, a partner at the Toronto-based architecture firm DTAH.

"Brandon has interwoven fact and fiction, given authority by his robust skills in representation," says Bergem's thesis advisor, associate professor John Shnier. "And he has done so in a manner that has created a perfectly plausible location populated by an equally plausible set of tectonic elements. The architecture that emerges makes you want to board a ship to the edge of the world to experience it."

Bergem's imaginative thesis work set him on a path to professional growth. Now, a year after graduating from the Daniels Faculty, he's a designer at Winnipeg-based 5468796 Architecture.

Here are a few more images from his award-winning project.

Lifting Lonyearbyen:

Hotel at the End of the World:

Primordial Pyramiden:

Instruments of Prophecy:

Monuments:

When Shawn Dylan Johnston and Siqi Wang were figuring out how to approach their second-year comprehensive studio project, their thoughts gravitated towards mass timber, a new class of engineered wood product.

"There aren't many mass timber buildings in Canada yet, even though this country has the natural resources," Wang says. "And so we decided to try it out."

Tasked with designing a structure to be located in the Golden Mile, a suburban commercial district near the intersection of Eglinton and Warden avenues in Scarborough, Johnston and Wang decided to use mass timber as the basis for a community centre and natatorium.

Their elegant design caught the eye of the Canadian Wood Council, which awarded the pair its Catherine Lalonde Memorial Scholarship, a $2,500 prize given to students whose research exerts a positive influence on the structural wood products industry.

A rendering of the inside of the aquatic hall designed by Shawn Dylan Johnston and Siqi Wang.

For Johnston and Wang, who are now in the third year of their Master of Architecture studies at Daniels, the win was welcome news. "This scholarship enables us to look into mass timber as an alternative choice for structural solutions," Wang says.

Mass timber usually consists of several layers of wood that are glued together in order to form a single piece of material. Certain mass timber products, like cross-laminated timber and glued-laminated timber, are strong enough that they can be used instead of steel beams and concrete in massive construction projects, like tall buildings or bridges. And mass timber has some advantages over steel and concrete: it's lighter, and, because it literally grows on trees, it's completely renewable.

Johnston and Wang's project, which they titled Horizontal, imagines using cross-laminated and glued-laminated timber to frame an aquatic hall with a 50-metre competition pool and a 25-metre leisure pool, as well as an adjacent lobby and cafe. Above the aquatic hall and cafe would be a "bridge" — a Pratt truss structure made almost entirely of timber, with space inside for various fitness activities. The entire building would be arranged around a courtyard with a wading pool that could double as a skating rink in the colder months.

An architectural model of the Horizontal design proposal.

The design uses the gaps between wood panels to conceal the building's electrical and mechanical systems. The resulting structure has a cozy, low-slung appearance that makes for a striking contrast with the stolid big-box retail outlets that the Golden Mile area is currently known for.

Associate professor Steven Fong, who taught Johnston and Wang's comprehensive studio, believes their win was well deserved. "Their mass timber natatorium is an engaging narrative about a public building for our times," he says. "It is also formally resolved and tectonically explorative. Work at this level speaks to a special dedication to architecture, and their award reflects well on the culture of our school."

Information on the other winners of this year's Catherine Lalonde Memorial Scholarships can be found on the Canadian Wood Council's website.

The winners of this year's American Society of Landscape Architects Student Awards include a pair of recent graduates from the Daniels Faculty's MLA program.

Proposed intervention strategies for sand dune stabilization, recreational access, and vegetation growth. Image from Waiyee Chou's thesis project.

Waiyee Chou won an Honour Award in Research for her thesis project on water conservation in the Turpan Depression.

Turpan is an arid region in far-western China that relies on a system of "karez wells" for irrigation. The wells provide drinking water to approximately 50,000 households, but they aren't just infrastructure: they have existed since the days of the Silk Road, giving them immense historical value to the local — mostly Uighur — population. Chou's project examined the well system and proposed ways of supplementing it with new water conservation techniques, like grey-water recycling and atmospheric water generation.

"Through her thesis, Waiyee cleverly tackled a series of issues that link landscape knowledge with cultural heritage and climate change in a part of the world where an indigenous minority, and their way of life, are being challenged," says Chou's thesis advisor, assistant professor Fadi Masoud. "Her intensive research, site visits, and visual translation of these cultural and operative landscapes is of immense value for scholars, designers, and the local inhabitants."

The ASLA jury was impressed by the comprehensive nature of Chou's research. "This study," they wrote, "although regional in scale, promises to restore the ancient connections between people, nature, and landscape in contemporary life."

Section of "phase two." Image from Yantong Guo's thesis project.

Yantong Guo won an Honour Award in Residential Design for her thesis. The project tackled a unique urban design challenge in Mongolia, where nomadic peoples have had their traditional lifestyles upended by increasingly erratic weather patterns and changes in government policy. As a result, many nomads have left the steppes and settled on the fringes of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia's capital, where they live in what have come to be known as "ger districts." ("Ger" is the Mongolian word for "yurt.")

These ger districts consist of a mixture of houses and tents surrounded by high fences. Municipal services are sparse, so many residents draw their water from communal water kiosks and use pit toilets.

Guo travelled to Ulaanbaatar and consulted with the Ger Community Mapping Centre and GerHub, a pair of NGOs that are working to improve conditions in the ger districts. Based on those conversations, she devised a three-step plan for creating new public amenities for ger district residents.

As a first step, ger communities would build shelters around their water kiosks. The shelters would provide protection from winter weather, and would have public seating. Guo believes this would stimulate community cohesion, setting the stage for step two: greenhouses, which residents would build in their courtyards. The greenhouses would replace some of the fencing between homes, which would further promote community cohesion while also providing a way for residents to grow food. Guo suggests that the greenhouses could even be used as a source of passive heat in winter, possibly reducing the amount of coal that ger district residents need to burn in order to stay warm.

In the third step, Guo envisions the ger district residents, empowered by the first two steps, taking the development process into their own hands. She envisions a future where homes in the districts share infrastructure for waste management and water filtration, leading to a cleaner and safer community for all involved.

"The Mongolian government has failed to provide help to ger district residents," Guo says. "As a result, most of the improvement is from NGOs. The NGOs can't plan large-scale projects, so this could be a starting point."

Her thesis advisor was associate professor Georges Farhat.

Chou and Guo will both receive free registration at the 2019 ASLA Conference on Landscape Architecture in San Diego, where all of this year's ASLA Awards recipients will be honoured with a ceremony. The conference begins on November 15.

Joel Goodwin, who is in the first year of his PhD studies in the Daniels Faculty's forestry program, has received one of this year's C. David Naylor University Fellowships.

The prestigious award, valued at $30,000, is granted annually to as many as two high-achieving first-year doctoral students (or doctoral-stream master's students) who graduated from a university in Atlantic Canada. It's named for former University of Toronto president David Naylor, and it was endowed by a gift from the Arthur L. Irving Foundation.

Goodwin's track record of volunteer work and his exemplary performance at Acadia University, in Nova Scotia, where he earned his MSc, made him eligible.

U of T News writes:

Goodwin will be studying trap optimization for bark, woodboring, ambrosia and other related beetle species – all considered invasive species in Canada.

Goodwin will be travelling to northern Ontario and central Louisiana to collect data and better understand the beetles' behaviour and how they interact with their environments.

Inspired by his master’s degree research, which involved the behaviour of invasive leaf-mining weevils in Nova Scotia forests, Goodwin says he wants to better understand insect behaviour to save native trees.

“Canada is big on importing and exporting and, with climate change, we can provide a home to these species who maybe couldn’t live here before and have routes to get here now,” said Goodwin.

Goodwin will be studying under the supervision of adjunct assistant professor Jeremy Allison and Sandy Smith, director of the Daniels Faculty's forestry graduate programs.

This year's other C. David Naylor University Fellow is Seshu Iyengar, who is studying biological physics.

Photograph of Joel Goodwin by Perry King.

The Daniels Faculty's new home at One Spadina Crescent has just added yet another trophy to its growing collection. At last night's Heritage Toronto Awards, the Daniels Building won this year's prize for Built Heritage.

The Heritage Toronto Awards honour organizations and individuals that support the preservation of the city's history. One Spadina caught the jury's attention for its reuse of the renovated 19th-century Knox College building, which now forms the southern portion of the Daniels Building. The jury was particularly impressed by the way the older structure exists "in dialogue, but not in competition" with the newly built northern portion.

The Daniels Building — designed by principal architects Nader Tehrani and Katherine Faulkner of NADAAA, with heritage architects ERA — has recently also been recognized with awards from Architectural Conservancy Ontario and the city of Toronto.

Photograph by Nic Lehoux.