ARC1100H F
Instructor: Adrian Phiffer
Meeting Section: L0101
Wednesday, 6:00pm - 9:00pm

I would like you to imagine the following scenario.

Person wakes up. Extends hand. Finds the phone. Stops the alarm. It is late already. One should never be late, person thinks. Taking a shower is out of the question. But eating is a must. No meat today. Still drowsy, starts to work. The noise of others is audible. The room is empty. A chair, a table, a laptop, and a painting. A few books lay on the floor without any purpose. It is one of the many working rooms in the new city of Toronto. From inside everything looks centuries old, but outside one possible future is visible.

The following seminar proposes an intimate, personal and experiential approach to the idea of housing in Toronto, and it will ask the students to imagine inhabitation schemes via storyboarding and moving images. By building narratives and animating images first, rather than drawing shapes and moving CAD furniture blocks around, the participants will engage in the production of short videos as a way to explore alternative housing design methodologies. The objective is to introduce cinematic / close-up modes of design thinking in architecture that challenge the typical top-down approach which, in general, manifests itself through the design of exterior forms followed by stuffing the “turkey” actions. It should be noted here that the outside will not be off-limits or simply the outcome of the interior work, but an integral part of the design development. We will begin our narratives from the inside, portraying the daily life of a resident, and proceed to the outside, to the larger context of the city: a front yard, a street, a neighborhood.

This seminar is associated with the upcoming Winter 2020 Exhibition at Daniels. The intention is to make students’ films an element within the overall exhibition. Existing research and design studies developed by the exhibition team would be made available to the class and will constitute the primary basis of the seminar explorations. More precisely, the premises would be a series of scenarios that imagine Toronto undergoing a growth by another 6 million inhabitants in specific areas of the GTA, such as the Yellow Belt (e.g. residential areas zoned for single-family detached homes) or the Industrial Employment Areas.

The seminar will meet once a week and will take the form of a short and intense design studio. Each session will develop in an open format via screenings, dialogue and direct critique. The students will work in groups of 2 to 3. Technical support associated with the making of moving images (i.e. Adobe Premiere, After Effects) and sound editing will be provided via a series of optional workshops in the first part of the semester. Regular screenings of relevant movies would be held throughout the semester.