In Architecture Studio 4, undergraduate architecture students were required to design a multi-unit student residence for the University of Toronto campus, with a focus on communal living, integration of nearby historic buildings, and material expression.

Jacob Henriquez

Jacob's precedent was the Nagakin Capsule Tower. "My design has an intricate scaled ground plane with glass pavilions, which act as foils to the heritage homes on the site," Jordan writes. "The parti for the building is a pair of sensitively scaled slab towers united by a dynamic courtyard and bridge circulation system. The units are envisioned as clusters of townhouses, each expressed as a modular unit linked to its neighbours to form a vertical steel bridge structure resting upon the giant concrete truss and transfer structure."

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(Instructor: Jonathan Cummings)

Jamie Latimer

"My design aimed to create a pleasant student living environment — with accessible and diverse communal spaces, landscaping, and ample opportunity for social interaction — that integrated sensitively into the context of the existing heritage, surrounding campus, and the resident neighbourhood," Jamie writes.

"The staggered floor plates and distinct jogged sectional profile of the interlocking units play an important part in the overall rhythm and logic of the project. Staggered mezzanines in the social atria of each bar and the lofted spaces of the units establish a variety of overlook conditions and compelling views throughout the project."

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(Instructor: Jonathan Cummings)

Maya Freeman

Maya's design features a grand exterior arcade and a monumental façade with adjustable wood screens projecting from the exterior walls of the upper floors. Two interior light wells aren't visible from the street. "I wanted the light wells to be carefully concealed, allowing them to become a grand reveal upon entering the building," Maya writes. "I designed specific points from which the apertures in the brick façade allowed only glimpses of the foliage of white birch trees in the courtyards, but not the entirety of the light wells themselves."

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(Instructor: Jonathan Cummings)

Sahar Hakimpour

"I wanted the building’s atrium to have a direct relationship with the park behind it through greenery and landscaping," Sahar writes. "The organic forms that define the atrium are in contrast to the orthogonal geometry of the bar structures on the north and south sides. The glass enclosure of the atrium acts as a thin membrane stretching between the two structures, encapsulating the social programming inside and providing unencumbered views to the surrounding urban context."

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(Instructor: Jonathan Cummings)

Jill Lee

Jill titled her design "Urban Valley."

"Each resident is provided with a private gardening space where fruits and vegetables can be grown, allowing the student to learn about nutrition and gain autonomy as they care for the garden," she writes.

Instagram: jill1117

(Instructor: Dina Sarhane)

Yuki Creighton

"Glass Garden is a student residence designed for 330 people," Yuki writes. "Its purpose is to provide a year-long communal green space for both the residence and the community, countering the cold and grey colour palette of Spadina Avenue. In order to provide all-year green space in Toronto, the ground floor of the Glass Garden is a large greenhouse."

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(Instructor: Dina Sarhane)

Lucy Baird

Lucy took inspiration from the many small alleys and laneways that surround the site. "The ground floor plan essentially consists of three separate indoor areas with an alley running through the site," she writes. "Interior and exterior spaces become blended, public and private spaces have channels of communication between them. The current modular condo unit that we see in Toronto today fails to provide residents with a unique space [...] thus, the goal for the project was to create a system that allowed for no two units to be the same. While units varied from the number of bedrooms to the number of storeys, a large part of ensuring that no two units were identical was by attaching varying sizes of the bay window typology to the facade."

Instagram: lucy.baird

(Instructor: Dina Sarhane)

Isobel Mclean

Isobel titled her project "Eudaemonia."

"Eudaemonia acts on the basis that university is not only a place for study, but one where students are exposed to new value systems, allowing them to start solidifying their own beliefs," she writes. "Given these two important aspects of the institution, the student residence creates two separate circulation paths — one for work, the other for introspection — where students are taken through a linear progression of spaces that start from the large scale, allowing for many casual human interactions, and narrow down to the individual level."

Instagram: isobel.g.mclean

(Instructor: Dina Sarhane)

Zainab Wakil

Zainab's aim was to capture the feel of a suburban neighbourhood in a dense, downtown structure. "Through a series of studies of suburban neighbourhood plans, a design was created in which each student will occupy their own 'lot' consisting of a one bedroom unit and a shared 'porch' or social pathway," she writes.

Instagram: wakilwalks

(Instructor: Dina Sarhane)

Xinyu Gao

Xinyu's design creates a "sense of place" by wrapping residences with green space. The unusual design is intended to remind inhabitants of childhood memories of nature.

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(Instructor: Dina Sarhane)

Declan Roberts

Declan writes: "Serving merely as a means of expediting the passage from the outside world to the domestic sanctuary, the corridor contributes nothing to users' experience and creates a spatial no-man's-land void of ownership. In this project I sought to reimagine these transitory spaces, not as a way to a place but as a place in their own right."

Instagram: declanrobrts

(Instructor: Dina Sarhane)