Assistant professor Alstan Jakubiec has been named the latest beneficiary of the Mayflower Research Fund, an endowed research fund established at the Daniels Faculty in 2019. Jakubiec will use his grant to fund research into the effects of interior light on human psychology and physiology in Canada's subarctic and polar regions.

"Mayflower funding is going to be super helpful in pushing this project forward," Jakubiec says. "It's great because it allows me to focus specifically on design questions, which I think a lot of this type of work doesn't look at very rigourously."

The Mayflower Research Fund was established by a generous donor to encourage and stimulate research in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design. Each year, the Daniels Faculty's research committee recommends a top applicant for consideration and selection by the dean. Daniels faculty members with full-time appointments are eligible to apply for the annual $10,000 grant.

Jakubiec, who is the third faculty member to receive Mayflower funding since the fund's inception, plans to take the opportunity to fill what he sees as a glaring gap in the existing research on the relationship between far-north residents and light.

"The research that has been done has been mostly through the eyes of people working at climate monitoring stations or in the military, not long-term residents of the north," Jakubiec says. "I really want to understand how long-term residents perceive and react to light."

Jakubiec's Mayflower project will build on his earlier research into light and human biology. In 2017, Jakubiec worked with the software development firm Solemma, where he's the director of engineering, to create ALFA, a computerized tool that lets designers simulate the effects of various lighting conditions on human health and cognition. In 2020, he worked with a research assistant to scour the latest research on light, sleep, and human health.

An example of spectral daylight simulation in a dwelling, from Jakubiec's previous research.

From these investigations, Jakubiec has concluded that the presence or absence of light in buildings can have profound effects on the wellbeing of occupants. "We have this internal biological clock, which is regulated by some subcomponents of the hypothalamus," he says. "In places where there's very little light exposure for parts the year, it can have impacts on your mood and cognition. It can make you feel more sleepy throughout the day."

"Excessive light exposure, on the other hand, has been shown to have significant impacts on things like blood sugar. You can effectively have the symptoms of type-two diabetes."

The reason Jakubiec has chosen to focus his latest research on Canada's far north is that it's a part of the world where lighting conditions are especially variable — and therefore especially challenging to the human psyche. Iqaluit, Nunavut, for instance, gets more than 20 hours of daylight in summer and fewer than four hours of daylight in winter.

Working with a graduate student, Jakubiec will gather data on existing structures in Canada's subarctic and polar regions, and also conduct interviews with permanent residents of those regions, in order to get a sense of how they feel about the levels of light exposure the receive in their homes and workplaces throughout the year.

Using all that data, Jakubiec hopes to create a computational model that will allow architects and engineers to evaluate tradeoffs between natural light and energy efficiency in far-north building design. This computerized tool will, Jakubiec hopes, interface with 3D-modelling software to help designers figure out, for example, whether the potential heat loss from a large window is worth the potential benefit of increased natural light during the dark winter months — or whether it's better to make up some of the light deficit with artificial illumination.

"My goal is to have a standalone user interface that could work on top of a model for fixed geometry to give you outputs about circadian performance, or non-visual lighting performance," Jakubiec says.

While Jakubiec gears up for his research, the two previous Mayflower Fund recipients are putting their grants to work.

Assistant professor Fadi Masoud, the grant's inaugural recipient in 2019, used his funding to launch an in-depth study of the design of suburban parks, with a view towards creating a primer that would help designers, public agencies, and private developers create green spaces that respond to contemporary social and environmental needs. “The Mayflower funding enabled my research team at the Centre for Landscape Research to spend the summer documenting and analyzing a network of public parks along the Black Creek sub-watershed in Toronto –– a region that faces chronic social and environmental stresses,” Masoud says. You can view the group's findings on their website.

Assistant professor Maria Yablonina, who received the grant in 2020, is using her funding to advance research in the field of computational design and digital fabrication with a focus on innovative ways to use robotics in architecture and the environment.

Samantha Eby, who graduated from the Daniels Faculty's Master of Architecture program in 2019, has been named the recipient of the 2020 Prix de Rome in Architecture for Emerging Practitioners, a prestigious $34,000 prize awarded annually by the Canada Council for the Arts to a recent architecture graduate who has demonstrated potential in contemporary architectural design.

This is the third year in a row that a Daniels Faculty alumnus has won the prize. The other two recent Daniels Faculty recipients were Kinan Hewitt, who graduated in 2018, and David Verbeek, who graduated in 2017.

Samantha Eby.

The Prix de Rome prize money can be used to finance travel to sites of architectural research interest. Once pandemic-related travel restrictions are lifted, Eby plans to use her new funding to make research trips to Australia, Germany, and Austria, so that she can visit and document examples of collective and non-profit housing developments. She hopes to gain a deeper understanding of the ownership models, financing practices, and planning policies that have made such developments possible.

Her interest in collective housing stems from her Daniels Faculty thesis project, for which she investigated new ways of adding affordable multi-unit housing to Toronto's single-detached neighbourhoods. "My research is looking for unrealized opportunities in Canada for new forms of housing that are outside the current practices of financing and site development," she says. "I'm looking at questions of how housing in Canada can be more than just a commodity, and how, by using communal financing and development practices, we can make multi-unit housing more accessible, sustainable, and desirable."

Images from Eby's Daniels Faculty thesis project.

"As an architect, Samantha balances a deep curiosity for the economies that contribute to architecture and urbanism with a provocative and tangible design sensibility," says Eby's thesis advisor, assistant professor Michael Piper. "Her thesis research about collective development models, the calculus of site selection, and the design of beautifully sensible housing demonstrates this unique combination of skills."

Eby says this fully funded travel opportunity will be a rare chance for her to elaborate upon some of the design concepts she studied during her time at Daniels. "I think, as architects, we often have very idealistic approaches, where we think we can change the world with our ideas — which is something that is amazing in school and often gets crushed when you get out into the real world," she says. "This is a really good opportunity for me to challenge myself to push back against those real-world constraints, and consider thoughtful and convincing ways to understand pro formas for development, how different ownership models actually work, and what the barriers are to these new architectural typologies."

Even as she has continued to pursue her research, Eby has been working in the architectural field. For the past two years, she has been an intern architect at Toronto-based Batay-Csorba Architects.

The pandemic-era shift to remote learning forced many Daniels Faculty students to get extra creative with their thesis projects. Milan Nikic, who presented his thesis in fall 2020, was no exception.

He had originally planned to display models for his thesis presentation, but the lack of a physical presentation space made him rethink the way he'd present that work. Instead, he ended up creating a 15-minute short film, titled Raft Islands.

Now, that film has gained Milan some international recognition. It was accepted by the International Architecture Film Festival Barcelona, where it will make its international debut as part of a short-film program on May 13.

"New and creative ways of representing architecture have emerged as a result of this pandemic," Milan says. "I never really explored storytelling and film as a medium before my thesis, but I found it to be a powerful tool to communicate the experience and atmosphere of the built environment. There is a lot you can show with just a simple pan of a camera."

The inspiration for Milan's short film came from a trip he took with his thesis advisor, assistant professor Adrian Phiffer, and the other members of Phiffer's thesis-prep studio. The group visited Tofino, British Columbia and made a stop at Freedom Cove, a giant floating home located off the shore of Vancouver Island.

The home — which is so sprawling and complex that it could be considered more of an artificial island — is an agglomeration of 12 floating platforms, cobbled together from salvaged materials. On top of those platforms is an off-the-grid homestead, complete with a cottage, gardens, dance floor, and artificial beach. The owners, Wayne Adams and Catherine King, are a pair of artists who began building the Freedom Cove complex in 1991. They welcomed the students and showed them around.

"I found it really fascinating to see how these two individuals lived in their environment, and how they managed to be self-sufficient atop this piece of floating infrastructure," Milan says.

He decided to use Freedom Cove as a jumping-off point for an imaginative exercise. His thesis project used film to weave a narrative about a future world where entire communities live on floating barges that are tailored to the needs of inhabitants. "I wanted to tell a story about a fictional future community that was inspired by Freedom Cove," Milan says. "As I was building physical models, a specific architecture evolved out of the necessity for them to actually float on water. I was quite interested in telling a story about how collective life was negotiated amongst individuals. Imagining a community on a floating island was a way to amplify that negotiation."

His film is an impressionistic mixture of water imagery and shots of his scale models. "I wanted the designs to feel like they were attainable to almost everybody, in the spirit of Freedom Cove," he says.

The Raft Islands trailer is embedded above. The International Film Festival Barcelona is not open to viewers outside of Spain, but Milan plans to make his full film available online at the conclusion of the festival.

Victoria Cardoso, Erman Akyol, and Eugenia Wong, all first-year students in the Daniels Faculty's Master of Architecture program, jointly created a design project that has been named one of five honourees in this year's SHIFT Challenge, a biennial competition, hosted by the Ontario Association of Architects, that invites students and architects to address social challenges through design.

Their winning project is a proposal for a community-oriented redesign of Ontario Place, the disused public amusement park located on a small chain of artificial islands off Toronto's western shoreline. They originally created the design for a fall semester course at Daniels, professor Ted Kesik's Building Science 1 (ARC1041).

Victoria Cardoso, Erman Akyol, and Eugenia Wong.

Cardoso, Akyol, and Wong, along with the four other groups whose designs were selected by the 2021 SHIFT jury, will present their work during the OAA's Virtual Conference. The online SHIFT event will begin at 4:30 p.m. on May 20, and will be viewable online on the OAA's YouTube channel.

"This was really an opportunity for us to open ourselves up to the field," Eugenia says. "We'll get to present our project not just to teachers and our colleagues, but also to architects, landscape designers, and urban designers. We're hoping to get our proposal out to decision makers and important stakeholders for the site."

The group's project, titled "Ontario Place: On-to-our Next Adventure," is a master plan for the revitalization of Ontario Place, a publicly owned piece of land that operated as an amusement park and exhibition ground from 1971 until 2012, when it was shuttered by Ontario's provincial government.

Although Ontario Place has fallen into disuse, it still has a number of architecturally significant buildings and landscapes designed by architects Eberhard Zeidler and Michael Hough.

Victoria, Erman, and Eugenia's master plan would attempt to draw diverse groups of users back into the site by adding a variety of new amenities, but without destroying or disfiguring any of the existing historic structures. They approached the problem by splitting the Ontario Place site into five different zones, each tailored to a different group of users.

A rendering of the group's proposed sports facility.

In the "play" zone, there would be indoor and outdoor public recreational spaces, including beaches and boardwalks. The "exhibit" zone would preserve two of Ontario Place's most important existing structures, Zeidler's iconic Cinesphere (a ball-shaped Imax theatre) and his "pods," large diamond-shaped structures that hover above Lake Ontario's waters on sets of stilts. Each of the five pods would get a modest interior retrofit for a different type of programming. (For instance, one pod would be an exhibition hall, and another would be a digital arts museum.)

The plan also calls for the addition of new sports facilities and the preservation of the Budweiser Stage, an existing concert venue on Ontario Place's central island.

A rendering of the group's proposed research campus.

But the most radical change proposed in Victoria, Erman, and Eugenia's plan is in the "innovation" zone, where they would add a university research campus to the southern edge of Ontario Place's east island. The campus would include student residences, which would give Ontario Place a permanent population, transforming it from a tourist destination into a neighbourhood.

"For Ontario Place to be sustainable financially, there's no point to just introducing new programming," Eugenia says. "The innovation hub can provide a source of economic activity that can sustain the island without casual visitors. So when casual visitors come there will be restaurants and other amenities available to them."

Top image: A rendering of Ontario Place's pods and Cinesphere.

Starting in June, high schoolers will have a unique opportunity: as part of the Daniels Faculty's first-ever Architecture and Film Camp, an online summer program for students entering grades 11 and 12, they'll learn how to use the principles and techniques of architecture to make spectacular short films.

Leading the new online camp will be Jay Pooley, a Daniels Faculty assistant professor whose life story proves the camp's architecture-is-film thesis. "I was designing sets for independent theatre companies, and then I went to architecture school and really fell in love with architecture," he says. He earned his Master of Architecture from Dalhousie University in 2011, then worked at a few architecture firms before deciding to take his career in a different direction. He's now a production designer for film, with an extensive resume of award-winning work.

One of several "Sick Kids Vs." spots that Pooley worked on.

Pooley was the production designer for Sick Kids hospital's "Sick Kids Vs." campaign — a series of commercial shorts that used clever sets and costume design to portray the hospital's young patients as fierce fighters against childhood disease. The campaign won four awards at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.

Pooley's Jedi: Fallen Order commercial.

Pooley's other notable credits include an ADCC-award-winning ad spot for the Canadian Olympic Committee. In 2019, he was the production designer for a commercial for the video game Jedi: Fallen Order, for which he oversaw the design and fabrication of a miniature sci-fi universe, down to the lightsabers.

Although film and architecture are usually considered to be separate disciplines, Pooley doesn't see them quite that way. For him, buildings and films are different means of imparting similar ideas and feelings. "When you finish watching a movie, you find yourself struck by the environment you were immersed in, and the story you psychologically took part in," he says. "I think it's the same thing with great buildings. When we leave a space that we find very moving, we have a similar feeling of being immersed. We remember moments inside it. We remember textures and smells and the way that light bounced off surfaces. I have always felt that the type of skill sets we teach in architecture are a close jump to making films."

Jay Pooley.

The Architecture and Film Camp will teach students to deploy architecture in the service of film, and vice versa. During each one-week course, Pooley and the other camp instructors will use videoconferencing software to remotely mentor students through a creative exercise that marries the two mediums. The setup is pandemic-friendly: there will be no need for anyone to gather or leave their homes.

Each week will have a slightly different theme. At times, students will use film to document real architectural spaces and objects within them. At other times they'll point their camera lenses at abstract worlds where the normal laws of physics and reason don't apply.

"Each of the weeks will end with students having made a short film," Pooley says. "But each week the approach to making that film will be different. For example, week one will be more about documentation. Week two will be about abstracting an existing world — so maybe taking the work from the first week and saying: okay, now your room exists without gravity. So what does that look like?"

Students will be able to sign up for as many (or as few) one-week courses as they choose.

The camp's participants will produce their films using only the equipment they have on hand. None of them will be expected to use anything more sophisticated than a smartphone camera. Each week of the program will consist of a mixture of guided tutorials, workshops, and independent work.

The Architecture and Film Camp is just one of several remote-learning camp programs the Daniels Faculty will be offering this summer. To find out about the others, which include programs for younger students, visit the "outreach" section of the Daniels Faculty website.

The Daniels Faculty's Architecture and Film Camp will begin the week of June 28. For more information, or to reserve your spot in the program, click the link below.

Sign up for the Daniels Faculty's Architecture and Film Camp

Top image: Still from a commercial for the Canadian Olympic Committee. Production design by Jay Pooley.

Batoul Faour, a student in the Daniels Faculty's post-professional architecture program, has been named the first-prize winner in the 2021 Avery Review Essay Prize competition. Her winning essay is a distillation of her Daniels Faculty thesis project, which critically examines the role of architectural glass in exacerbating the damage from last year's catastrophic port explosion in Beirut.

The essay, which won Batoul a $4,000 prize and top billing in the Avery Review's April issue, describes the way shattered window glass piled up in Beirut's streets after the blast. It traces the historical and contemporary uses of glass in Lebanon to reveal the politics behind the fragile material.

Batoul writes:

Desired for its transparency in a country that has none to offer its people, glass in Beirut is a valuable form of absence: it provides unobstructed views of the city beyond. Windows permit one to see without having to smell, hear, or touch the power structures at play beyond the transparent panels. As political and economic corruption flourishes and the outside world grows exponentially more inhospitable, glass proliferates across the city. Glass, in all its many iterations, was the last line of defense for a people attempting to make a life within and around the failures of the Lebanese state.

A material designed to uplift quality of life through light and views, glass has instead become a weapon wielded by a corrupt state. On August 4, it splintered and stabbed for miles across Beirut’s homes and streets — disfiguring, blinding, and murdering. Some victims, left with dozens of stitches, described how the glass hit them like “shooting guns.” Shattered and splintered glass was blamed for causing an overwhelming number of the recorded injuries and deaths.

The Avery Review is a monthly architecture journal published by the Office of Publications at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture. The April issue is readable online.

Read Batoul Faour's winning essay here

Top image: A pile of broken glass in Beirut, after the blast. Photograph by Batoul Faour.

The Daniels Faculty delegation to the 2021 Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism keeps growing.

GAMBJTS, an interdisciplinary collaboration between Daniels alumni and lecturers, will be exhibiting a joint project, titled "Beneath the City: Rivers," at the biennale.

This will make them one of at least two groups with Daniels connections at the event. Another project group, made up of Master of Architecture graduates from 2020, announced that its installation had been selected for the biennale in January.

GAMBJTS consists of Pooya Aledavood (MArch 2019), Nicolas Mayaux (MArch 2019), Brandon Bergem (MArch 2019), Vincent Javet (MLA 2018), Robbie Tarakji (MArch 2019), and Elly Selby (MArch 2019), who are all recent graduates of the Faculty, and Jeffrey Garcia, who isn't a Daniels alumnus. Javet and Garcia teach at Daniels as sessional lecturers.

A GAMBJTS group photo.

The Seoul Biennale, which takes place in the South Korean capital, is a major international showcase for architecture and design, with a competitive entry process. Teams submit proposals and are invited — or rejected — based on the merits of their designs and the applicability of them to the biennale's chosen areas of focus. The theme of this year's event is "building the resilient city."

Beneath the City: Rivers addresses resiliency in a unique way. Rather than propose definite solutions to environmental ills, the project engages in speculation: What if, it asks, Toronto "daylighted" some of its hidden water infrastructure, including the long-buried creeks that channel the city's stormwater? Could these hidden waterways be remade into sustainable leisure landscapes?

“Toronto’s seen and unseen natural systems can provide a framework for how we might think about resilient urbanism.” Javet says. "The idea is to expose these buried hydrological systems to promote resiliency through landscape as a means of infrastructure."

The group's installation at the biennale will consist of a large, 3D-printed model of downtown Toronto, suspended upside-down over a convex mirrored surface, with the buried creeks represented as translucent slashes across the city grid. The topsy-turvy presentation will encourage viewers to think about what lies beneath the city's streets.

Around the perimeter of the circular model will be renderings of a series of design exercises intended to show what the city might look like after its water infrastructure was thoroughly daylighted.

Each rendering shows a speculative city scene. In one, the familiar parkland in front of the Ontario Legislative Building is flooded with water. The legislature's statue of John A. Macdonald, Canada's first prime minister, is shown immersed in the flood, with only its head poking above the waterline. In this instance, water infrastructure isn't the only thing being revealed.

"This is an acknowledgement that the land does not belong to us," Garcia says. "It is a depiction of colonization, because the statue sits on territory taken from many nations, including First Nations and Indigenous peoples.”

Another rendering shows one of Toronto's Victorian neighbourhoods, its streets excavated to expose the ancient creeks that, in reality, flow through subterranean culverts. The area around the creeks is transformed into a public park.

The group took the opportunity to reinterpret one of the most sacred sites in Toronto architecture, Mies van der Rohe's modernist TD Centre Plaza. A rendering shows the plaza's sleek grey pavers replaced by a pool of water, with a tree growing proudly amid the monumental cluster of dark towers. The group was aware that this might create controversy. "It's quite telling that people have a visceral response to the excavation of this relatively recent cultural landscape," Javet says. "The plaza has occupied the land for a little over 50 years, where many of Toronto’s waterways were of ecological and cultural importance for thousands of years. It’s the same reaction.”

The group also gave its speculative treatment to one of the city's most laid-back leisure landscapes: the nude beach at Hanlan's Point, on the Toronto Islands. A rendering shows the beach transformed into a hybrid landscape, where leisure and infrastructure are practically indistinguishable. Nude bathers lounge in the mouths of large concrete drainage pipes.

The Seoul Biennale begins on September 16 and runs through the end of October. Its organizers are currently planning to hold the event in person, pandemic permitting. For more information, visit the biennale's website.

Each semester, the Daniels Faculty publishes a booklet with short descriptions of every graduate thesis project being presented during final reviews. The Winter 2021 Thesis Booklet is an easy way to get an overview of the work produced by the latest cohort of Master of Architecture, Master of Urban Design, and Master of Landscape Architecture students before you attend their presentations on April 21, 22, and 23.

The booklet can be read in its entirety below. (Download a PDF to read offline by clicking the "download" button in the upper righthand corner.)

The Urban Land Institute Hines Student Competition is a prestigious annual contest in which student teams compete to create the best solution to a complex urban design problem. In the past, the grand prize has always gone to students from American universities. That streak ended this week when a Canadian team, including two students from the Daniels Faculty, took the competition's top spot for 2021.

The winning team included Ruotian Tan, a Daniels Faculty Master of Urban Design student, and Chenyi Xu, a Daniels Faculty Master of Architecture student. They had three teammates from other Toronto universities: Frances Grout-Brown and Leorah Klein, urban planning students at Ryerson University, and Yanlin Zhou, a student in York University's Master of Real Estate and Infrastructure program. The group was supervised by Steven Webber and Victor Perez-Amado, both assistant professors at Ryerson's School of Urban and Regional Planning. Raymond Lee, a senior associate at Weston Williamson + Partners, and Christina Giannone, vice president of planning and development at Port Credit West Village Partners, acted as advisors.

The group made its final submission to the competition's jury on April 8, in a videoconference presentation. The Urban Land Institute, which holds the competition, announced the win on Monday.

The all-Toronto team bested a field of 104 other entires from schools around North America. The four other finalists represented a number of America's top schools, including Penn State, Columbia, Berkeley, and the Georgia Institute of Technology.

In addition to the bragging rights that come with having impressed the competition's high-powered jury of practitioners from the fields of design, land use, and real estate, the students will get something a little more tangible: a $50,000 (U.S.) prize to split.

"Reflecting on this experience in its entirety, it’s surreal how much we’ve learned along the way," the team said in a statement to the Urban Land Institute. "Though each member of the team brought different skills to the table, we were strongly aligned in our aspirations for the site and were proud to present our proposal rooted in enabling physical and social connectivity and achieving economic and environmental resilience."

The group's master plan includes a 107,000-square foot community centre.

The ULI Hines Student Competition asks students to form multidisciplinary teams and tackle a multifaceted urban design project. This year's competition brief called for groups to develop master plans for the East Village, a neighbourhood in Kansas City, Missouri. Student proposals had to take into account a number of goals, including positive economic impact, sustainability, housing affordability, and access to transportation. Teams were required not only to design ways of transforming the neighbourhood, but also to develop phased implementation plans and financial pro formas.

The Daniels/Ryerson/York team's design, titled "Fusion," was unique among the competition's finalists in that it didn't include any tourist infrastructure. Instead, the group chose to focus on building a lively pedestrian promenade for locals, lined with mixed-income residences, office space, retail, and a 107,000-square-foot community centre with housing for seniors inside.

The Fusion site plan.

The group's master plan also included a network of green infrastructure intended to control the flow of stormwater across the site. Permeable pavement and street bioswales would allow the East Village to absorb rain and store it for reuse in a series of local gardens and green roofs. A vertical farming greenhouse would make it possible for the neighbourhood to produce some of its own food.

This attention to environmental sustainability and agriculture won the competition jury's approval. "Fusion stood out as it pushed a new paradigm for an urban neighborhood based on the strong regional legacy of agriculture," ULI Hines jury chair Diana Reid wrote in a statement. "Their financing plan and design enabled economic resilience through small scale food growth and distribution, local culinary incubation, and research-driven employment opportunities."

Learn more about Fusion and the other ULI Hines Student Competition 2021 finalists on the Urban Land Institute Americas website.

Top image: The group's design for a vertical farming greenhouse.

Visiting lecturer Kelly Alvarez Doran spent the fall semester leading a research studio in which he and his students investigated the environmental impact of "embodied carbon" — the energy used to create building materials. Embodied carbon ratchets up a building project's greenhouse gas emissions before shovels so much as pierce the ground, and those emission levels are permanent. They can't later be mitigated through retrofits.

Now, Doran has written an open letter to Canada's municipalities, architects, engineers, and planners, in which he summarizes his studio's findings and pleads for limits on embodied carbon in buildings. The letter appears in the April 2021 issue of Canadian Architect, and it can be read on the magazine's website. In the letter, Doran writes:

Canada, as well as a growing number of its jurisdictions, has set necessarily ambitious carbon reduction targets as part of an increasingly urgent global bid to achieve climate stability. While the spotlight often falls on the transportation and energy production sectors, 40 percent of global carbon emissions comes from the construction and operation of buildings. We are becoming increasingly aware that a big part of the issue — 11 percent of global emissions — comes from the embodied carbon of the materials that go into the new buildings constructed each year.

The AED sector is just starting to understand the immense carbon impact of building materials. To drastically reduce this impact, greater knowledge, and firm embodied carbon benchmarks and targets, must become part of building standards and planning policies that govern construction across Canada.

Read the full letter at Canadian Architect

Image: Sectional diagrams indicate the percentage of project embodied carbon emissions below grade, showing the embodied carbon impact of foundations and underground parking.