Zanira Ali chose the University of Toronto to pursue her master's studies in architecture because it was a place that she could explore her community-based approach to the field.

“I enjoy the community engagement aspect of architecture,” she says. “I want to understand and hear from communities about how they interact with public spaces.”

This morning (June 12) Ali walked across the stage at Convocation Hall with a master’s degree from the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design determined to continue work that fuses advocacy, communities and architecture. Most importantly, she has her sights set on making her mark—and impact—in mentorship within the field, as she recently told the Black Research Network.

Read the full article on the Black Research Network website.

A Daniels Faculty tradition, the 2022/2023 End of Year Show showcases a wide range of student work from architecture, landscape architecture, forestry, urban design and visual studies.  

By the end of this academic year—the first since the Faculty’s full return to in-person learning—our studios, classrooms, labs, shops and galleries were flooded with objects and things. The return was met with exceptional enthusiasm, optimism and an unparalleled appetite to engage again with the culture of making. The models, artwork, plants and equipment left behind are a testament to the energy exerted in their production. 

Curated by Assistant Professor Mauricio Quirós Pacheco, the 2022/2023 End of Year Show not only displays what we produce as a school, but honours this work by inviting the community to experience its scope, range and quality. It is also an effort to invite the public into our walls to directly experience the nature of the output we create and the spaces we inhabit. This year’s exhibition coordination included Associate Professor Jeannie Kim, Taryn Magee, Sifei Mo and Kari Silver.  

The exhibition is on view in the Student Commons area of the Daniels Building until June 16. The building is open to the public 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Monday to Friday, closed on weekends. 

Image Credit: (1-2) Mauricio Quirós Pacheco; (3) Taryn Magee.

Reflecting her preservation work across three African countries, the exhibition Modern West Africa: Recorded was recently unveiled by Associate Professor Aziza Chaouni and colleagues at the 2023 Venice Biennale of Architecture.

Through her architectural practice—Aziza Chaouni Projects (ACP)—Chaouni has been leading, with support from the Getty Foundation and the World Monuments Fund, the conservation and adaptive reuse of three publicly owned modernist buildings from West Africa’s post-independence era: The Sidi Harazem Thermal Bath Station (Morocco, 1960–1965), La Maison du Peuple (Burkina Faso, 1965) and the Centre International du Commerce Extérieur du Sénégal (Senegal, 1974). 

Modern West Africa: Recorded explores these sites through oral histories and stakeholder testimonials in a short film and corresponding exhibition that invites viewers to understand the past and present of these spaces, in order to speculate on their futures.

“The complexity of each site necessitated a methodology based on listening and exchange, and a commitment to collaborative design with owners, operators and communities,” says Chaouni. “International conservation movements have decentered African modernism, with no works appearing on the UNESCO World Heritage List, leaving them unprotected and underfunded. Recognizing these histories is key at a moment when Africa faces change.”

This year’s biennale, curated by Lesley Lokko, focuses on the theme The Laboratory of the Future. “For the first time ever,” Lokko says in an exhibition statement, “the spotlight has fallen on Africa and the African Diaspora, that fluid and enmeshed culture of people of African descent that now straddles the globe.”

Led by Chaouni and Dana Salama, an associate at ACP, Modern West Africa: Recorded is included in Guests from the Future, a special project within the Biennale showcasing work that “engages directly with the twin themes of this exhibition, decolonization and decarbonization, providing a snapshot, a glimpse of future practices and ways of seeing and being in the world.”

The 2023 Venice Biennale of Architecture is open from May 20 to November 26. Learn more about the sites and watch the short film at modernwestafrica.org.

Banner images: 1-2: Sidi Harazem Thermal Bath Station (Morocco, 1960–1965), doublespace photography; 3-4: Modern West Africa: Recorded exhibition at the Venice Biennale courtesy Aziza Chaouni.

The Daniels Building at 1 Spadina Crescent will be open for self-guided tours as part of the 2023 Doors Open Toronto program this weekend.

More than 140 buildings and sites are on the roster of this year’s instalment of the popular annual event, which sees normally inaccessible local landmarks throw their doors open to the public.

The Daniels Building will be open to visitors from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. on both Saturday, May 27 and Sunday, May 28. Last admittance on each day is at 4:30 p.m.

In addition to taking in the architectural splendours of the revitalized 1 Spadina hub, participants have three on-site exhibitions to check out—Recent Work by Marina Tabassum Architects in the Larry Wayne Richards Gallery, Resolutions for the Antarctic: International Stations & the Antarctic Data Space in the lower-level Architecture & Design Gallery and the annual End of Year Show highlighting student work from across the Faculty’s disciplines—as well as the art installation on the north facade of the Building by Indigenous artist Que Rock. 

Admission to the Building and to all Doors Open venues is free. A dedicated brochure with map of the Daniels Building has been produced to hand out to visitors.

To view the Daniels Building’s Doors Open page, click here. To see the full list of Doors Open Buildings and Sites, click here. 

The biggest U of T alumni gathering of the year takes place across campus and online May 30–June 4. Check out what the Daniels Faculty has lined up for Alumni Reunion 2023.

Campus Tree Walk

Friday, June 2, 10:00-12:00, Huron Street and Willcocks Street

Join alumni for a guided walk around campus exploring different tree species. This tour runs rain or shine. This walk will be led by Jack Radecki (Registered Consultant Arborist, U of T B.Sc. Forestry alumni) and Eric Davies (Managed Forest Plan Approver, U of T Ph.D. Candidate in Forest Ecology). 

Building in a Forest 

Friday, June 2, 12:30-1:30 pm, Main Hall 
Free and open to the public

Join Assistant Professor Jay Pooley and Adam Gorgolewski of Haliburton Forest and Wildlife Preserve for a lecture on the Daniels Faculty Design Build Studio, a cornerstone of experiential learning at U of T. Uniquely powerful as the primary mode of hands-on building instruction, it offers lasting engagement opportunities and reflection within the design degrees.

Every summer, this Design Build Studio, which is now in its fifth year, hosts a group of undergraduate students at Bone Lake Research Camp at the Haliburton Forest, where they work to design and build a small piece of infrastructural architecture. The students engage faculty, community members, and Forestry staff to build with local materials while engaging in multiple aspects of design, construction, and forestry management.

Register for the in-person event.

Jay Pooley is a Toronto-based architect, art director and journeyman carpenter. His work demonstrates expertise in the design and rapid realization of technically complex set constructions, installations and special effects for film production on a global scale. Pooley is currently an Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, where he coordinates the first-year undergraduate design studios How to Design Almost Anything, a collaborative design studio with the Faculty of Applied Science: Design + Engineering I, and the fourth-year Design-Build Research Opportunity Program. 

Adam Gorgolewski is the Research Coordinator at Haliburton Forest and Wild Life Reserve. He established and runs Haliburton Forest Research Institute, and is in charge of facilitating and coordinating internal and external research projects at Haliburton Forest. He is an active member of the forest management team, and also runs Haliburton Forest’s maple syrup operation. He holds a Ph.D. in forestry from the University of Toronto, and is a registered professional forester in training.

How are forests managed and grown?

Friday, June 2, 6:00-7:00 pm, New College

What do you know about sustainable forest management and forestry? Come hear a forester talk about how they sustainably manage and grow forests! This lecture will be given by Catherine Edwards (Registered Professional Forester, and U of T Master of Forest Conservation alumna).

How will multiplexes address the growing housing crisis in Toronto? How can “citizen developers”   leverage changing housing policy? 

ReHousing—a research collaboration between Tuf Lab, led by Assistant Professor Michael Piper, and LGA Architectural Partners—contributed to policy change this week as Toronto City Council moved to approve multiplexes (see an excerpt from the commissioned report).

The project hopes to address the issue of housing affordability by offering 50 open-source architectural design templates to reconfigure the 13 most standard Toronto home types into multi-unit dwellings.

To empower citizens to take advantage of these new policy changes, ReHousing is working with non-profit housing creators and development advisors to create a guide for citizen developers, enabling non-professionals to take on these kinds of multiplex projects. 

Explore the Housing Catalogue.

Banner image and renderings courtesy ReHousing.

The colonial fishing villages and maritime infrastructure along the shoreline of early modern Newfoundland are the foci of an article by Assistant Professor Jason Nguyen in the international quarterly Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes.

Nguyen’s essay, titled “Encountering the Shoreline: Ecology and Infrastructure on the Early Modern Newfoundland Coast,” is part of a special issue, “Port Cities and Landscapes of the Sea,” edited by Kathleen John-Adler and Stephen H. Whiteman.

The issue also includes articles by Christy Anderson from the University of Toronto, Edward Eigen of Harvard University and Jeremy Foster of Cornell University. 

An historian of architecture, landscape and urban planning in the early modern world, Nguyen (pictured below) contends in his essay that, during the 17th and 18th centuries, the establishment of settlements and construction of seagoing vessels, preservation stations and other logistical sites at and across the littoral line supported the commercialization of the global cod market while fundamentally altering the coastal ecologies of North Atlantic waters. 

The Grand Banks of Newfoundland—the underwater plateaus that provided shallow feeding conditions for underwater life—made the sea shelf one of the richest fishing regions in the world. 

On a global scale, the commercial extraction and preservation of cod supported the expanding diet and political economy of the early modern imperial state. 

On a local scale, the construction of buildings along the shoreline intruded on the littoral ecosystem and impelled the relocation of the native Beothuk inhabitants to the island’s interior, thereby highlighting the genocidal ramifications of European coastal development. 

How, Nguyen’s article asks, might one conceptualize the logistical architecture of the Newfoundland fisheries as both a spatial node within a global network of trade as well as a material intrusion into the ecology of the North Atlantic coastline?

To read the article, click here. Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes is an open-access journal.

Banner image: Matthäus Merian’s “Richard Whitbourne and the Mermaid of St. John’s Harbour,” in Theodor de Bry’s Dreyzehender Theil Americae, 1628. The etching and engraving is in the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.

Miles Gertler (Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream) is among this year’s winners of the Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers, handed out annually by The Architectural League of New York.

The League Prize, open to North American-based architects and designers who are 10 years or less out of a bachelor’s or master’s degree program, is one of the continent’s most prestigious awards for young practitioners.

Established in 1981 as the Young Architects’ Forum, the prize is awarded on the basis of a portfolio competition and decided by a hand-picked jury.  

The 2023 competition theme, Uncomfortable, called on entrants to examine their discomforts.  “From climate change to labor practices,” the mandate noted, “the sources of our discomfort demand both critical reflection and collective imagination. Are you restless within the discipline’s status quo? How do you respond to discomfort? Whose comfort matters?”

Under the requirements of the prize, winners must both deliver a lecture and create an installation representative of their work. This year’s lecture series will be held online on Thursday evenings starting June 15 (the night that Gertler is slated to speak) on Zoom. Each lecture will feature presentations from two of the winners followed by a moderated discussion and q&a session.

The installations, meanwhile, will be presented either in the respective home bases of each winner or in entirely digital formats, all of which will be presented in an online exhibition on archleague.org.

In addition to Gertler (pictured below), this year’s League Prize recipients include Katie MacDonald and Kyle Schumann of After Architecture in Virginia, Joseph Altshuler and Zack Morrison of Could Be Design in Illinois, Daisy Ames of Studio Ames in New York City, Sean Canty of Studio Sean Canty in Boston, and Sarah Aziz and Lindsey Krug of Albuquerque, Chicago and Milwaukee.

Co-directed with Igor Bragado, Gertler’s design studio, Common Accounts, is based in Toronto and Madrid. The practice is an experimental one predicated on the idea that most design intelligence active in the world operates below the radar of the design disciplines. Their work is therefore concerned with expanding architecture’s scope to learn from the ingenuity embedded in the immediate present.

“Our practice is unique in the sense that inquiry itself becomes intervention,” Gertler and Bragado say. “The basis of our work, then, is to question, reorganize and intensify established realities which require re-thinking for the improvement of daily life.”

In 2021, the Common Accounts installation Parade of All the Feels was presented at Greater Toronto Art 2021, the Museum of Contemporary Art’s inaugural triennial exhibition.

Their work has also been showcased at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Milan Triennale and the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism.

Banner and homepage image: The Common Accounts installation Closer Each Day: The Architecture of Everyday Death (2022) is “a speculative work of architectural inquiry” initiated at Princeton University and further developed through a drawing commissioned by the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Photo by the Canadian Centre for Architecture

Portrait of Miles Gertler by Kirk Lisaj

The annual Thesis Booklet showcasing the final thesis projects of Master of Architecture (MARC), Master of Landscape Architecture (MLA), Master of Urban Design (MUD) and Master of Visual Studies (MVS) students at the University of Toronto’s John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design is now available for viewing.

Thesis booklets are a Daniels Faculty tradition, printed for and distributed to graduate thesis students, as well as thesis advisors, external reviewers and guests.

The booklet contains images and brief statements by students who are presenting thesis projects for the semester(s) listed at the culmination of their studies.

Flip through the latest booklet below or download a PDF here.

Black City Builders in Canada, Daniels Faculty sessional lecturer Kaari Kitawi’s new video series profiling some of the country’s leading Black design professionals, has launched.

The four-part series—for which Kitawi (pictured below) received a grant from the Landscape Architecture Canada Foundation (LACF) last year to produce—will be shown on her existing YouTube channel, called Careers Unboxed with Kaari.

That channel features interviews with Black professionals from around the world and a variety of fields about their respective career journeys. Black City Builders in Canada, by contrast, hones in on the experiences and perspectives of architecture and design professionals working in this country.

“It is important for us to tell our stories in order to change the narrative,” Kitawi said when she received the LACF grant, referring to the need for BIPOC students to see themselves reflected among those already making their mark in disciplines such as architecture, landscape architecture, urban design and planning.

Both her YouTube channel and the new series expand on the in-person outreach that she has also conducted, such as giving career talks to BIPOC high-schoolers in her Toronto neighbourhood and elsewhere.

The first, 50-minute instalment of Black City Builders in Canada, featuring Nigerian-Canadian landscape architect Emeka Nnadi, is currently available for viewing, as is a trailer offering sneak peeks of future subjects.

Among those who’ll be profiled in upcoming segments are architect and Daniels Faculty assistant professor Anne-Marie Armstrong, urban designer Eldon Theodore and landscape architect Kellie Spence.

To view the trailer for Black City Builders in Canada, click here. To watch the first episode of the series, click here.