Hart House Farm is a 150-acre property in Caledon, Ontario, located within the Niagara Escarpment Biosphere buffer zone, in the territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. Managed by the University of Toronto’s Hart House for a range of outdoor, co-curricular opportunities, this site, and its layered context, was the setting for last term’s Advanced Design Research Studio (LAN3016) led by Associate Professor Liat Margolis.

In the wake of U of T’s Truth and Reconciliation report, Answering the Call: Wecheehetowin, Hart House wanted to consider how the Farm might contribute to realizing the commitments contained in the document. Master of Landscape Architecture (MLA) students subsequently researched the environmental and Indigenous-settler history of the Farm to create design proposals and forest management plans that explore its future as a locus for Indigenous-led land-based teaching, research and guardianship training community-engaged programs.

“The goals of this studio,” says Margolis, “were to develop an understanding of the environmental history of the land under a decolonization lens, create a framework of understanding of the Farm as part of a larger landscape mosaic and network of stewardship, and develop a set of values, designs, management protocols and partnerships as part of Hart House’s forthcoming strategic plan.”

In addition, the studio has been featured in the Niagara Escarpment Biosphere Network (NEBN) report for the Canadian Commission for UNESCO and the International Coordinating Council of the MAB (Man and Biosphere) Programme.

“This studio led by Liat Margolis is a prime example,” says the report, “of how experiential education within the landscapes of the Biosphere can profoundly shape the learning of the students and provide them with genuine connections to the land and partners within it.”

MLA students in the Hart House Farm Studio on a site visit during the Fall 2023 semester. The dolomite rock formations that span the site consist of fissures, caves and dramatic escarpment cliffs.

The design proposals presented by the MLA students exhibited a possible future for the Farm based on an interdisciplinary and integrated lens of Indigenous-led and community-centered land relations, landscape architecture, and ecological conservation.

Adrienne Mariano and Jessica Palmer, two students who participated in the studio, shared their perspectives in the report:

What did it mean for you to have this experiential learning on the land at Hart House Farms?

Adrienne Mariano and Jessica Palmer: The opportunity for experiential learning meant that our conversations with treaty rights holders, organizations working in the region, and community members were able to be framed within the context of colonial land-based practices that were highly specific to observations on the property at Hart House Farm. Having the chance to frame these conversations with experiences such as walks, fieldwork, and even pond swimming meant that we were actively able to form deeper relationships with the land as we explored it from an academic lens.

What did it mean for you to work with all our studio contributors at the farm and throughout the term?

Mariano and Palmer: Getting all these people together for walks and presentations meant that they were also a part of this learning process, and were encouraged to reflect on how their ongoing work contributes to or works against decolonial land views and practices. Getting these conversations out of the classroom and into the world with working professionals was important because, as students, we often are encouraged to think as changemakers but it takes time to become established in our fields, whereas working professionals can make changes in more immediate ways.

Mariano and Palmer's project focuses on the former quarried areas of the Bruce Trail Conservacy-owned Quarryside Property, which has turned into a series of lush successional wetlands at the base of the Niagara Escarpment.

What does it mean for you to have explored this site from a decolonial lens?

Mariano and Palmer: Exploring Hart House Farms from a decolonial lens allowed us to think more critically about landforms and how they are shaped on a time scale that is so large it is almost incomprehensible to humans. This thinking helps to frame our relationship with the natural world and foster deep respect for the time it takes for cliff faces, rocks, and fossils to form. Comparing these ancient geological forms to the impacts caused by industrial quarrying in the region allowed us to question the impacts of ongoing extractive practices along the Niagara Escarpment and how the University of Toronto can use Hart House Farms to advocate for its protection.

Their project allows Hart House Farm visitors and Bruce Trail hikers the opportunity to experience lush novel habitats in their evolutionary stage, as they continue to mature and expand over time. A system of boardwalks spans slag piles and wetlands, allowing visitors to interact with a landscape that extraction practices have dramatically altered, and through subtle didactic panels at rest points.

What are you excited about / what do you hope to see in the near future, or in the long term?

Mariano and Palmer: In the near future, we hope to see the non-Indigenous partner organizations (especially those who work in conservation) work more actively to support Indigenous-led conservation practices and co-governance models. We are excited about the response from the team at Hart House and look forward to seeing how they incorporate and run with our research in making concrete changes at the property both immediately and in the long term.

Using a series of interconnected trails and boardwalks, their design focuses on bringing people to the areas of former quarrying to learn about the impacts of extraction on these delicate ecosystems. 

The principles and recommendations explored at the final review of the studio by the MLA students, the partners and rights holders, and Hart House Farm staff will be summarized and integrated in the strategic planning for the Farm.

The Hart House Farm studio was supported by and co-created in partnership with University of Toronto Hart House, Waakbiness Institute for Indigenous Health, Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation (MCFN), Niagara Escarpment Commission, Niagara Escarpment UNSECO Biosphere Network, Credit Valley Conservation, Bruce Trail Conservancy and Town of Caledon Heritage Department.

Based at the Daniels Faculty’s Centre for Landscape Research, Parks in Action is a multidisciplinary, multi-year design-research initiative investigating the untapped potential of public and private open spaces in Toronto’s inner suburbs.

It has included a partnership with Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Urban and Regional Planning and is funded by the University of Toronto’s School of Cities, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Partnership Grant, TransformTO’s Neighbourhood Climate Action Champions Program and Environment Canada.

Recently, Parks in Action launched a comprehensive website, parks-in-action.webflow.io, where is outlines and archives its research to date and documents the workshops and exhibition connected to it.

Entitled “Parks in Action: Co-designing Inclusive Open Spaces,” that exhibition (pictured in slideshow below) opened in June of last year and is still on view at the World Urban Pavilion in Toronto’s Regent Park.

The Parks in Action project, writes Associate Professor Fadi Masoud, Director of the Centre for Landscape Research, “underscores the vital role of suburban parks, open spaces and the public realm in Toronto’s climate adaptation and mitigation,” particularly with relation to air pollution, urban heat-island effect and urban flooding.

“One of its primary objectives,” he continues, “is to assess and quantify the social and environmental value of public and private open spaces in the city’s inner suburbs, specifically its ‘Tower in the Park’ neighbourhoods.”

It also “investigates the untapped potential of these parks in suburban communities,” and asks what kind of design and management strategies are needed to reflect the diversity and heterogeneity of the population they serve, as well as how they might be retrofitted to increase their environmental and social performance.

In June of 2019, the City of Toronto launched its first Resilience Strategy at the Daniels Faculty. This strategy identified the overlap of climate risks and social vulnerability in Toronto’s aging high-rise rental apartment towers as “the single most pressing, urgent priority for the city’s resilience.”

Toronto is home to North America’s largest concentration of postwar apartment towers, with vast green spaces, ravines, parks and schools typically surrounding over 1,500 buildings throughout the city.

Over the years, the Parks in Action team has engaged in “Knowledge Exchange” sessions with grassroots leaders, city officials and community members, with members co-creating and distributing risk and opportunity maps (such as maps that illustrate the links between surface heat temperature, air pollution, land cover and tree canopy) to local leaders. Local leaders and climate champions then connected this data with lived experience and existing policy to advocate for neighbourhood change, building a shared language for considering green open spaces’ critical role in residents’ daily lives and long-term health and well-being.

Based on the “Knowledge Exchange” sessions, the Parks in Action team devised a set of Climate Design Action Cards that identify a slate of design solutions to climate change ranging from small and easy interventions to more significant ones that can be enacted or advocated by leaders and residents. The Climate Design Action Cards informed spatial scenarios on prototypical transect cross-sections of Toronto’s inner suburbs, offering innovative tools to engage with local leaders and residents, facilitate engagement, and empower community members to better advocate for local climate action.

Congruently, a series of Community Climate Action Hubs were designed for parks in equity-deserving neighbourhoods. The installations exemplified the project’s commitment to reinventing outdoor spaces, providing environmental education, increasing accessibility and offering spaces for socialization. The first set of installations is currently under construction in various parks in the city. 

Overall, Parks in Action has showcased how building resilience requires a holistic approach that considers public open space as part of the shared infrastructure of climate adaptation. To that end, the design research is shaped by the lived experiences of individuals and communities, highlighting the interconnectedness of social climate action and design thinking.

For more information on the Parks in Action project and to peruse its research to date, visit its site here.

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

On view at the Jackman Humanities Institute (JHI) until next June, the exhibition Mnemonic silences, disappearing acts grapples with the absences, erasures and censorships that pervade queer and trans histories, offering alternative forms of documentation, storytelling and memory-keeping that respond to archival gaps and propose strategies for future archiving.

On Tuesday, November 14, exhibition curator Dallas Fellini, who is currently pursuing a Master of Visual Studies in Curatorial Studies at the Daniels Faculty, will provide a guided tour of the show, which features works by artists Jordan King, Kasra Jalilipour, Hazel Meyer and Cait McKinney, Kama La Mackerel and Lan “Florence” Yee.

Following the tour, attendees will be invited to walk over to the Daniels Building at 1 Spadina Crescent, where curator Fellini and artist King will lead a discussion about their work and its role in trans memory-keeping and resistance.

All are welcome to join both the tour and the talk. The hour-long JHI tour will begin at noon on the 10th floor of 170 St. George Street. The talk, at which lunch will be provided, will commence at 1:30 p.m. in Room 230 of the Daniels Building. Attendees may register here.

Situated at the intersection of trans studies and archival studies, Fellini’s research interrogates the compromised conditions under which trans histories have been recorded and considers representational and archival alternatives to trans hyper-visibility. 

King is a multidisciplinary artist, curator and writer whose practice is rooted in performance, archival research and intergenerational dialogue. She is currently a Curatorial Practice MFA student at OCAD University, where her focus is on documentary film and multimedia documentation of underground queer performance. 

The JHI tour and Daniels Faculty talk will take place during Trans Awareness Week, established to encourage awareness of and advocacy around trans rights and inclusion and to affirm trans lives and experiences in all their complexity. Trans Awareness Week will be observed this year from November 13 to 17.

The week will be followed by Trans Day of Remembrance and Resilience (TDoRR) on November 20. TDoRR is observed annually to honour the memory of the trans people who have lost their lives as a result of transphobic violence.

U of T will mark both Trans Awareness Week and TDoRR with a range of events and gatherings. For the full programming list, click here.

Exhibition images: Among the works on view in the exhibition Mnemonic silences, disappearing acts are Untitled by Jordan King (top) and Leaving Space by Lan “Florence” Yee (bottom). On Tuesday, November 14, curator Dallas Fellini will lead a tour of the show at the Jackman Humanities Institute before joining artist King for a discussion at the Daniels Faculty. Lunch will be provided. King photo courtesy of the artist, Yee photo by Alexis Bellavance.

The presence of robotics in art, research, design and construction has undeniably changed the way these fields operate and will no doubt play an even bigger role in the future. For more than a decade, the Association for Robots in Architecture has been working to consolidate knowledge in this area, bringing universities together to form a transdisciplinary network of robot users worldwide.

This spring, the Daniels Faculty is pleased to host ROB|ARCH 2024, the Association’s highly regarded biennial workshop and conference, alongside the University of Toronto Robotics Institute, the Design + Technology Lab at The Creative School (Toronto Metropolitan University) and the Waterloo School of Architecture. 

Each gathering aims to bring together international teams of researchers and practitioners to share expertise, foster networks, increase knowledge and stimulate innovation. ROB|ARCH 2024 will consist of three days of hands-on workshops (May 21 to 23) and two days of conference presentations (May 24 to 25). 

The hosting team, which includes the Daniels Faculty’s Maria Yablonina, Zachary Mollica, Paul Howard Harrison, Nicholas Hoban and Brady Peters, has selected the theme Beyond Optimization. Intended as a provocation, the 2024 conference will reflect on the changes affecting the field of robotics in art, design and architecture—and how to respond by shifting priorities and examining the criteria by which we evaluate research. The hosts aim to move beyond technically focused discourse toward inclusive conversations that centre critical approaches in robotics. 

A detailed list of workshops and registration details will be announced in the fall of 2023, and discounted registration fees will be available for students. Conference events will be hosted in the Main Hall of the Daniels Building at 1 Spadina Crescent. 

Dates 

• Workshops: May 21 to 23, 2024 
• Conference: May 24 to 25, 2024 (call for papers deadline: October 16, 2023) 

Visit the ROB|ARCH website and follow @robotsinarchitecture for the latest information. 

For decades, Phragmites australis (pictured above) has ranked among the worst weeds in Canada, damaging the biodiversity, wetlands and beaches of Ontario, Quebec and elsewhere. 

A new guide, co-developed by researchers at the Daniels Faculty and at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC), aims to combat this destructive invader—a tall, dense grass that was introduced into North America from Europe in the 1800s and is also known as common reed—by offering “a suite of simple, easy-to-use identification tools” designed to distinguish it from vulnerable native species without relying on expensive, specialized lab analyses.

“Given the importance of Phragmites management in Ontario as a conservation concern,” says postdoctoral research fellow Michael McTavish of Forestry, “we think this tool would be of great use to land managers and other researchers.”

Dr. McTavish is the lead author of the guide, which was recently published in Invasive Plant Science and Management, the online peer-reviewed journal focusing on fundamental and applied research on invasive plants and the management and restoration of invaded non-crop areas.

His co-authors and collaborators include Professor Sandy M. Smith of Forestry and three researchers from AAFC: research scientists Tyler Smith and Robert Bourchier and research technician Subbaiah Mechanda.

“To effectively manage the invasive introduced subspecies of common reed and avoid misallocating resources,” they write, “land managers require practical, reliable tools to differentiate it from the desirable native subspecies. While genetic tools are extremely useful for identification, morphological identification is a valuable complementary tool that is easier [to use], cheaper, available in the field and thus more accessible for many land managers and researchers.”

In the course of the team’s research, a suite of 22 morphological traits were measured in 21 introduced and 27 native P. australis populations identified by genetic barcoding across southern Ontario. Traits were compared between the subspecies to identify measurements that offered reliable, diagnostic separation. Overall, 21 of the 22 traits differed between the subspecies, with four offering complete separation: the retention of leaf sheaths on dead stems; a categorical assessment of stem colour; the base height of the ligule, excluding the hairy fringe; and a combined measurement of leaf length and lower glume length. 

Additionally, round fungal spots on the stem occurred only on the native subspecies and never on the sampled introduced populations. 

“The high degree of variation observed in traits within and between the subspecies,” the researchers conclude, “cautions against a ‘common wisdom’ approach to identification or automatic interpretation of intermediate traits as indicative of aberrant populations or hybridization.”

As an alternative, their “five best traits” checklist offers simple and reliable measurements for identifying native and introduced P. australis. It is most applicable, they note, “for samples collected in the late summer and fall in the Great Lakes region, but can also inform best practices for morphological identification in other regions as well.” 

The full guide as well as the research that led to it is detailed in the IPSM report. To read it, click here.

The checklist, however, isn’t the only weapon in Dr. McTavish’s arsenal against common reed. This past spring, he publicized details about another initiative involving the release of “two old/new adversaries” of P. australis: a pair of European moth species expected to provide effective biological control of the native-choking plant.

“The two European moths, known by their scientific names Lenisa geminipuncta [pictured below] and Archanara neurica, were selected only after extensive safety testing confirmed they were highly specific to invasive Phragmites, meaning that they can only complete their lifecycle on this plant,” Dr. McTavish said. “The caterpillars of the two moths feed inside the invasive Phragmites stems, causing the weed to wilt or die. In 2019, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) approved the release of both biocontrol agents in Canada. To date, over 17,000 insects have been released at 13 locations across southern Ontario.”

According to Dr. McTavish, “early monitoring at the release sites is very promising for establishment and use of this new tool for Phragmites management. The released insect populations have survived over a year at the release points. They have completed their full lifecycle and are causing visible damage to Phragmites plants at several release locations. The research team is now focused on an intensive laboratory rearing program for the caterpillars and on testing release methods using insect eggs, caterpillars, pupae and adult moths.”

The program’s ultimate goal, he adds, “is to use these early ‘nurse’ locations for collection and redistribution of insects to land managers and the public with serious patches of Phragmites. Populations of the insects are still establishing, and initial results are very encouraging. Over time, as the insect populations continue to grow and spread, biological control is expected to become a valuable new component of the integrated management strategy for invasive Phragmites.”

This second, insect-based control initiative is based on a research program that began in 1998 as well as critical support from stakeholders including Ducks Unlimited Canada, MITACS, the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry, the Nature Conservancy of Canada, NSERC, the rare Charitable Research Reserve and AAFC.

The research team is an international one led by AAFC and U of T. Other members include collaborators from the University of Waterloo, Ducks Unlimited Canada and the Nature Conservancy of Canada in Canada, Cornell University and the University of Rhode Island in the United States and CABI (the Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International) in Switzerland. 

Image of Lenisa geminipuncta moth on a stem of invasive Phragmites by Patrick Häfliger. 

Associate professor Daniel Chung is this year’s beneficiary of the Mayflower Research Fund, an endowment established by a generous donor to encourage and stimulate research in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture and urban design, and allows for collaboration with other areas of the University.

Chung’s current research examines a building’s envelope—the roof, walls and surfaces that are in contact with the outdoors—to better predict the effects of climate change on buildings.  

With support from the Mayflower Research Fund, he will advance his research on building-envelope performance as it relates to moisture flows and moisture-related damage. 

“If we can more easily monitor moisture throughout the building, not just at the surface, and know what is happening across all facades, like a fit-bit that monitors day-to-day activity, we can attune buildings to have adaptive properties that respond to varying climatic conditions and prevent building deterioration before it becomes an expensive and time-consuming process to address and repair,” he says.

Both a registered architect and a professional engineer, Chung will direct his grant funding, totalling $10,000, to test and develop a new assessment method for real-time moisture-transport behaviour by validating the use of what is known as dielectric permittivity sensors (a type of water-sensitive probe ordinarily used to test the moisture content of soil) to measure and track the amount of water present in the facades of buildings. 

The data collected in this research will be used to demonstrate the potential of the method’s use for in-situ moisture content assessments, and will be leveraged when applying for additional external funding in the coming academic year that will focus on sensing transient three-dimensional moisture flows through multi-layered building envelope assemblies. 

A guarded hot box measures heat flow through building envelope materials. It is currently under construction in Chung's lab, and will be used in the project supported by the Mayflower Research Fund. 

Since its establishment in 2018, the Mayflower Research Fund has supported research across a range of topics, from improving fresh-air circulation in multi-unit buildings (Bomani Khemet, 2022) and the effects of interior light on human psychology and physiology in Canada’s subarctic and polar regions (Alstan Jakubiec, 2021) to advancing research in computational design with a focus on robotics (Maria Yablonina, 2020) and an in-depth study of the design of suburban parks (Fadi Masoud, 2019).

Faculty members with full-time appointments at the Daniels Faculty are eligible to apply.    

A film created as part of Daniels Faculty architecture grad Batoul Faour’s thesis project two years ago is currently on view in a group show at Ottawa’s SAW art centre.

Faour, who has also been working as a sessional instructor at the Faculty since January 2022, graduated from the post-professional Master of Architecture program in 2021. That same year, she was awarded the Avery Review Essay Prize for her treatise on how architectural glass exacerbated the damage from the August 2020 port explosion in Beirut, Lebanon.

Faour’s thesis project comprised both the prize-winning essay and a film that she screened during the final review. The film, titled Shafāfiyyāh, which means transparency in Arabic, is one of the works being presented at SAW in the group show Beirut: Eternal Recurrence.

Co-curated by Daniels Faculty sessional lecturer Amin Alsaden, the exhibition features the work of about a dozen international contemporary artists, its title taken from a text by theorist-artist Jalal Toufic on the philosophical notion of “eternal recurrence.” The show proposes that time and events repeat themselves in an infinite loop—a concept especially resonant in the long-suffering Lebanese capital.

“The participating artists do not necessarily pass judgment about Beirut, its repetitions or how coming to terms with the cyclicality of certain phenomena could perhaps create a new consciousness that might begin to change the course of history,” the exhibition’s curators note. “But to observe their replications is to recognize parallels between a past and a future entangled in a difficult present.”

In her thesis project, Faour examines how both the narrative and material lifecycles of glass are entangled in Beirut’s history and politics.

In her essay and her film, she notes how, after the 2020 explosion, “Beirut’s windows and streets have become palimpsests of broken glass, telling of generational cycles of sectarian violence in a country still ruled by the same warlords who tore the city apart decades ago, erased their traces, and disguised this history in a dysfunctional present normality.”

In addition to disseminating her research among a wider audience, the exhibition, Faour says, is a great example for current students of alumni pursuing “alternative trajectories beyond commercial practice.”

Beirut: Eternal Recurrence, which opened on July 15, runs until September 23. SAW is located at 67 Nicholas Street just north of the University of Ottawa.

Top image of hand organizing pieces of glass: still from film by Batoul Faour. (Below) Exhibition images by Ava Margueritte.

Resolutions for the Antarctic: International Stations & the Antarctic Data Space, the multi-media exhibition on view in the Faculty’s Architecture and Design Gallery since March, has been reviewed by The Globe and Mail.

The newspaper’s architecture critic, Alex Bozikovic, calls the show, which includes a film, an open-access digital database and a timeline chronicling exploration and design on the remote southern continent, an “intriguing” one that “asks probing questions about climate change, science and global diplomacy.”

Curated by Italian architect Giulia Foscari and her non-profit research agency UNLESS, Resolutions for the Antarctic “opens up several major issues in architecture and spatial design,” Bozikovic notes, citing, among others, the creation of architecture “under the most extreme pressure” and the disassembly of buildings without leaving “ruins or waste.”

The exhibition, which runs until July 21, assembles the interdisciplinary research and design work of some 200 architects, landscape architects, artists and scientists, including Dean Juan Du, who ran the Polar Lab at the University of Hong Kong.

Located on the lower level of the Daniels Building at 1 Spadina Crescent, the Faculty’s Architecture and Design Gallery is free and open to the public from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Monday to Friday, closed on weekends.

To read the Globe and Mail review, click here.

Banner and homepage photo by Harry Choi

Between analog and digital, home workshops and design-build studios, Zachary Mollica has been using trees in all aspects of his teaching and research since joining the Daniels Faculty last year as an Emerging Architect Fellow. 

An architect, maker and educator, Mollica had previously been Warden of the Architectural Association’s woodland campus in England and founding director of the AA Wood Lab before returning home to Canada in 2022.

The two-year Emerging Architect Fellowship Award, a non-tenure appointment at the rank of Assistant Professor, was established by the Daniels Faculty to offer early-career architects an opportunity to teach in a supportive environment as well as the resources to develop focused research. 

Now entering the second year of his Fellowship, Mollica reflected recently on his first 12 months at U of T and shared what’s coming up. 

What area of research did you explore during the first year of your Emerging Architect Fellowship? 

My work this past year has been primarily concerned with trees (of all sorts), wood and building. These three have admittedly been my key focus areas for years now, but in returning home to Toronto for the inaugural Emerging Architect Fellowship at Daniels, I have taken the opportunity to study and begin to work with wood and tree pieces specifically found around the city. This has included both receiving big bits of trees from arborists and finding lots of interesting wooden furniture in need of repair or deconstruction near our school.  

I’ve also been working on a few large-scale maps and diagrams of the relations between Toronto’s trees, streets and history of landscape change. Throughout these kinds of works, I apply 3D scanning and other tools of close observation to work in reaction to specific rather than generic materials with minimal energy. 

The fellowships also involve teaching both undergraduate and graduate students. What courses did you teach and what has the experience been like? 

I had two courses in the first year. Last July, I had the opportunity to lead a two-week design-build studio in Wellington, Ontario. Joined by a crew of 12 motivated undergraduate students and a teaching assistant, Zakir Hamza, we had two weeks to sketch out, detail and construct a new gatehouse for a community-run beach. The result was a fantastic bright little yellow hut (pictured below) that unfolds to provide protection from sun and wind.  

Through the fall and winter, I then headed up the Using Trees in the City Master of Architecture research studio (@usingtrees), a third-year course that supports the development of students’ individual thesis projects over two terms.

In term one, students were led through a fast-paced series of hands-on projects during which their thesis topics emerged. Through term two, the students and I worked collaboratively on their main project, seeking out expert guidance from individuals within our diverse faculty and beyond. I was blown away by the results students achieved in our first year (shown in the slideshow below) and am looking forward to round two with a new group next year. 

Here’s what we did in short: 

• [Student] Chunying deconstructed and remade IKEA furniture to understand/expose its processes. 
• Jiashu engaged the characteristics of birch bark and traditions to propose a new cladding. 
• Jin exposed the qualities of old wood through a series of artifacts made from salvage. 
• Lulu exploited wood’s elastic properties to make temporary shelters with minimal material. 
• Pablo prototyped a tree-climbing machine to take photogrammetry scans in tree crowns. 
• Sam designed uses for the parts of conifer trees neglected by the industry. 
• Tingxu crafted staircases designed to take advantage of non-linear wood grain. 
• Xiaoyu imagined new programs for deteriorating wood barns across Ontario. 
• Xuansong studied the circular materials to be found in common Toronto house types. 
• Yi observed and engaged broadly with processes of soil erosion in the Don Valley. 
• Yinuo worked to develop long-life applications for the lowest-quality paper and wood fibre. 

Your fellowship project will ultimately be exhibited and disseminated within and beyond Daniels. Any hints on what it might look like or involve? 

My way of working is both very analog and very digital. In drawing (illustrated below), I use up a tonne of graph paper as well as straining my eyes interrogating high-resolution 3D scans of forests on a screen. In making, I use hand tools from my grandfather as well as digital fabrication equipment.

My intention for the exhibition and publication that will come out of this fellowship is to demonstrate all these methods together—and the value I see in their combination—through a series of Toronto-centric studies of landscape, trees and wood building. During the fellowship, I have set up a rather lovely home workshop tailored exactly to my range of methods (and pictured in the banner image at the top of this page) that I also have schemes to try to share an experience of with visitors to the exhibition.  

What have been some of the highlights of your time at the Faculty to date? 

There has been plenty of good this year, but a few come to mind. 

• Wrapping up last summer's design-build project at 9:00 p.m. on a Friday night on the beach with headlights pointed at the build was the right kind of way to jump into this new role. 
• In joining Daniels, I now work with colleagues who are old friends made in Halifax, Vancouver, Germany and London. And that’s a treat. 
• Our first project for the Using Trees studio, Stoop, was a special one. It saw each student tasked to find disused wood furniture on the streets, to bring these back to school and then have some fun interrogating them. 
• Participating in conversations and evening events organized by our students in groups like the FLL and AVSSU. I have been beyond impressed to find our students leading the push for critical discussions on the future of building. 

What’s on the horizon for your second year? 

Year two is exciting. For teaching, I have a design-build this summer where we are going to bring some big bits of tree to examine and create with together in the Daniels workshops. Then in the fall, I have the fun of teaching both first-year undergraduates and a second run through the research studio sequence with a new group of third-year MARC students taking on their theses. 

For research, I want to make a particular push on finishing up and making available a set of teaching resources for unusual wood design projects I have been working on. A sort of reflection on the last 10 years’ worth of unusual wood projects I have participated in, and an attempt to make these valuable to others.