New Circadia — the inaugural installation in the Daniels Building's new Architecture and Design Gallery — is closed for the moment, while the Daniels Faculty takes part in the necessary COVID-19 response.

But even while closed, New Circadia's relaxing, cavelike environs are finding new admirers in the design community, thanks to an article by Daniels Faculty dean Richard Sommer, out now in the latest issue of Canadian Architect.

Dean Sommer co-curated and designed New Circadia with New York–based designers Natalie Fizer and Emily Stevenson. In his Canadian Architect story, he explains the rationale behind the installation. He writes:

The modern university evolved from the religious cloister. The new subterranean Architecture and Design Gallery had a brutal, uncanny beauty to it. For the gallery’s inaugural installation, I thought, what about staging a radical play on the cloister-as-cave?

The result is New Circadia (adventures in mental spelunking) [...] The installation is modelled loosely on Dr. Nathaniel Kleitman’s 1938 Mammoth Cave experiment (the first scientific study of human circadian rhythm) and the Greek abaton (the sequestered ritual-sleeping temple at the origins of the modern hospital). New Circadia is a soft utopia created from CNC-milled plywood, mesh, and 1,850 square metres of grey felt, with integrated sound works, dim circadian lighting, and Oneiroi (a dream recording station) — all fabricated in-house with colleagues at the Daniels Faculty.

Read the rest of the dean's story on Canadian Architect's website.