Toronto Ravines—CREATURE
LAN3016Y F
Instructor: Alissa North
Meeting Section: L9101
Synchronous
Tuesdays, 9:00AM - 1:00PM, 2:00PM - 6:00PM
This option studio will perceive landscape through the eyes of a nonhuman creature to produce innovative landscape designs.
The studio will make use of sites within Toronto’s ravines to apply the LA+ CREATURE competition, and will then imaginatively apply these detail visions at the expanded scale of the ravines encircling Toronto’s core.
What if Toronto’s ravines were thought of as a system of flows, rather than delimited non-dimensional green shapes on maps? How would their relationship with the city change? Could they productively erode and deposit, change shape, or even spread? Could the ravines be held accountable for the ecosystems services they provide to the city? Would this enhance their value, resiliency, and appreciation? How could the city’s ravines be imaginatively visualized to ignite new perceptions, understandings, and interactions? How can the ravines support the symbiotic existence between all creatures?
The LA+ CREATURE competition is the third international design ideas competition for the Interdisciplinary Journal of Landscape Architecture, which is published by the University of Pennsylvania. From the competition website:
The competition explores how we can use design to open our cities, our landscapes, and our minds to a more symbiotic existence with other creatures. LA+ CREATURE asks entrants to choose a nonhuman client and design something—a place, a structure, a thing, a process, a system—to improve its life. Your creature can be any species, any size, and live anywhere.
In this first project part entailing the competition, studio members will investigate, compile, and apply research to individually chosen ravine sites, based on a selected ‘creature,’ with the aim to positively restructure environmental, social, and infrastructural realities. In this phase, students will focus their design efforts in one key location along the ravine loop around the city that is formed by the Humber River in the west and the Don River in the east. Design efforts should strive to operate as catalysts for ravine connection and ecological transformation.
After the competition submission, the second project part will entail an exploratory mapping and model making phase, where studio members will form groups to apply their collective detail design findings at the scale of the larger ravine loop. Through atypical inventory and analysis of the ravines, the teams will determine connective corridors to improve ecological integrity and strengthen creature symbiosis—including human. The physical models of this exploration will transform mapping representations into three-dimensional abstract visualizations, to demonstrate urban-ravine scale proposals. Students will be encouraged to produce unconventional and explorative representations for the purposes of seeing design potentials anew, while maintaining clear communication of their regional design intentions.
The third project will be individual, where each student will look back at their work of the semester, and formulate a concise visual presentation from selections and / or reworks of this content, along with the creation of new graphics to fully complete the evolved narrative.
Through the eyes of their creature, and with the overriding idea that rivers are dynamic systems, studio participants will be asked to imagine and represent the pressing issues within the ravine in new and novel ways—beyond outdated preservation or restoration techniques. Always thinking about how dynamics can be accommodated in support of diverse flora and fauna, the option studio intends to imagine new urban-ravine relationships toward a system of symbiotic ecological integrity.