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.