Alumni, future students, and members of the public are welcome to join us online for final reviews (April 15-23). Daniels Faculty students in architecture, landscape, and urban design will present their final projects to their instructors, as well as guest critics from the professional community and local and international academic institutions.

Daniels On Air is the Faculty’s online platform to navigate through final reviews. Here you’ll sign up, browse the schedule, and learn more about each studio. Daniels On Air will re-launch in time for reviews beginning on April 15. All reviews will take place over Zoom (create a free account here).

Current students do not need to sign up for Daniels On Air to access reviews. Check the Review and Examination Schedule for all dates and times.

Follow UofTDaniels on Twitter and Instagram and join the conversation using the hashtag #DanielsReviews. Reviews take place 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. unless otherwise stated. Please note that the times and dates may change, and there may be scheduled breaks in a Zoom throughout the day.

Undergraduate 

Thursday, April 15 

Design Studio I | JAV101 
Time: 9 a.m. – 1 p.m.
Instructors: Jay Pooley (Coordinator), Alex Josephson, Danielle Whitley, Peter Sealy, Jennifer Kudlats, Katy Chey, Luke Duross, Chloe Town, T. Jeffrey Garcia, Mauricio Quiros Pacheco, Nuria Montblanch, Scott Sorli, Anne Ma, Marcin Kedzior, Avi Odenheimer 

Friday, April 16 

Design Studio II | ARC201 
Time: 9 a.m. – 1 p.m. 
Instructors: Fiona Lim Tung (Coordinator), Daniel Briker, Carol Moukheiber, Tei Carpenter, Maria Denegri, Alex Josephson, Mauricio Quiros Pacheco, Andrew MacMillan 

Drawing and Representation II | ARC200 
Time: 2-6 p.m. 
Instructors: Michael Piper (Coordinator), Jon Cummings, David Verbeek, Reza Nik, Fiona Lim Tung 

Monday, April 19 

Architecture Studio IV | ARC362 
Instructors: Dina Sarhane (Coordinator), Chris Cornecelli, Sam Ghantous 

Landscape Architecture Studio IV | ARC364 
Time: 9:30 a.m. – 1 p.m. 
Instructor: Alissa North 

Technology Studio IV | ARC381 
Time: 10 a.m. – 3 p.m. 
Instructors: Tom Bessai (Coordinator), Tomasz Reslinski  

Thursday, April 22 and Friday, April 23 

Senior Seminar in History and Theory (Thesis) | ARC457 
Instructor: Jeannie Kim 

Senior Seminar in Design (Thesis) | ARC462 
Instructor: Jeannie Kim 

Senior Seminar in Technology (Thesis) | ARC487 
Instructor: Nicholas Hoban 

Graduate 

Monday, April 19 

Design Studio 2 | ARC1012 | MARCH 
Instructors: Adrian Phiffer (Coordinator), Tei Carpenter, Petros Babasikas, An Te Liu, Brigitte Shim, Tom Ngo, Aziza Chaouni, Mauricio Quiros Pacheco 

Design Studio 2 | LAN1012 | MLA  
Instructors: Liat Margolis (Coordinator), Elise Shelley, Terence Radford 

Urban Design Studio Options | URD1012 | MUD 
Instructors: Ken Greenberg, Simon Rabyniuk 

Tuesday, April, 20 

Design Studio 4 | ARC2014 | MARCH 
Instructors: Sam Dufaux (Coordinator), Carol Moukheiber, James Macgillivray, Chris Cornecelli, Aleris Rodgers, Maria Denegri, Anne-Marie Armstrong, Francesco Martire 

Design Studio 4 | LAN2014 | MLA 
Instructors: Behnaz Assadi (Coordinator), Todd Douglas 

Wednesday April 21 

Architectural Design Studio: Research 2 | ARC3021 | MARCH 
Instructors: Adrian Phiffer, Vivian Lee, Mason White 

Architectural Design Studio: Research 2 | ARC3039 | MARCH 
Instructors: Jesse LeCavalier, Mauricio Quiros Pacheco 

Architectural Design Studio: Research 2 | ARC4018 | MARCH 

(L9101) Redeployable Architecture for Health—Pop-up Hospitals for Covid-19 
Instructor: Stephen Verderber 

(L9109) Towards Half: Climate Positive Design in the GTHA 
Instructor: Kelly Doran 
 

Design Studio Thesis | LAN3017 | MLA 
Instructors: Liat Margolis (Coordinator), Behnaz Assadi, Fadi Masoud, Peter North, Alissa North, Jane Wolff, Elise Shelley, Matthew Perotto, Megan Esopenko, Aisling O’Carroll 

Urban Design Studio Thesis | URD2015 | MUD 
Instructor: Angus Laurie 

Thursday, April 22 

Architectural Design Studio: Research 2 | ARC3021/ARC4018 | MARCH  

(L9103) STUFF  
Time: 1-6 p.m.
Instructor: Laura Miller 

(L9105) ARCHITECTURE ♥ MEDIA 
Instructors: Lara Lesmes, Fredrik Hellberg 

(L9106) Designing Buildings with Complex Programs on Constrained Urban Sites that include Heritage Structures 
Time: 1-6 p.m. 
Instructor: George Baird 

(L9107) What is Inclusive Architecture (Landscape Architecture, Urban Design)? 
Time: 9 a.m. – 12 p.m. 
Instructor: Elisa Silva 

(L9108) The Usual Suspects  
Time: 8:30 a.m. – 5 p.m. 
Instructors: Filipe Magalhaes, Ahmed Belkhodja, Ana Luisa Soares 

Design Studio Thesis | LAN3017 | MLA 
Instructors: Liat Margolis (Coordinator), Behnaz Assadi, Fadi Masoud, Peter North, Alissa North, Jane Wolff, Elise Shelley, Matthew Perotto, Megan Esopenko, Aisling O’Carroll 

Post-Professional Thesis 2 | ALA4022  
Time: 12-4 p.m. 
Instructors: Mason White (Coordinator), Adrian Phiffer, Maria Yablonina, Carol Moukheiber, Jesse LeCavalier, Paul Harrison 

Friday, April 23 

Architectural Design Studio: Research 2 | ARC3021/ARC4018 | MARCH  

(L9110) Anthropocene and Herd 
Instructor: Gilles Saucier, Christian Joakim, Gregory Neudorf 

(L9103) STUFF  
Time: 1-6 p.m.
Instructor: Laura Miller 

Architectural Design Studio 7: Thesis | ARC4018 | MARCH 
Time: 10 a.m. – 4 p.m. 
Advisors: Petros Babasikas, Michael Piper 

Architectural Design Studio 7: Thesis | ARC4018 | MARCH 
Time: 1-6 p.m. 
Advisors: John Shnier, Mauricio Quiros Pachecho, Carol Moukheiber, An Te Liu 

Design Studio Thesis | LAN3017 | MLA 
Instructors: Liat Margolis (Coordinator), Behnaz Assadi, Fadi Masoud, Peter North, Alissa North, Jane Wolff, Elise Shelley, Matthew Perotto, Megan Esopenko, Aisling O’Carroll 

Photo by Harry Choi.

After an 18-month search and many interviews with outstanding candidates, the Daniels Faculty is pleased to announce the appointments of three new tenure-track faculty members. Daniel Chung will join the Faculty as an associate professor of building science. Bomani Khemet, who began teaching building science at the Daniels Faculty in 2018 on a limited-term appointment, will now join the Faculty permanently, as an assistant professor. And Zach Blas will join as an assistant professor of visual arts.

"The search committee was struck not only by the candidates' abilities in their respective areas of research and creative practice, but in each case by the possibilities of their participation in the Faculty’s multi-disciplinary future in which our diverse programs and disciplines benefit from each other," says Robert Levit, the Daniels Faculty's associate dean, academic. "As individuals, they are outstanding pedagogues who will be able to teach at all levels, addressing the curricular goals of our doctoral, professional masters, and undergraduate programs."

Bomani Khemet

Bomani Khemet began his career as a design engineer. He worked for Texas Instruments, Honeywell Inernational, Siemens, and Dryvit Services Canada before transitioning into higher education in 2012. He holds two patents.

Khemet earned his Master of Engineering from Howard University in 2003, and his Master of Building Science from Ryerson University in 2012. In 2019, he completed his PhD in civil engineering, also at Ryerson. His primary research focuses are building enclosures, airtightness, and ultra-low-energy buildings. The aim of his work is to find new and innovative ways of measuring, documenting, and controlling interior airflow, in order to promote human comfort and energy efficiency in built environments.

Since arriving at the Daniels Faculty, Khemet has conducted extensive research on building envelope performance. In 2018, he performed a large-scale analysis of airtightness in Canadian single-detached homes, using data culled from a Natural Resources Canada survey of over 900,000 properties. The resulting peer-reviewed article was published in Building and Environment.

Photo: Sarah Bodri

In recent months, Khemet has turned his critical eye on the Daniels Faculty itself. In 2020 he orchestrated a series of tests on the airtightness on the Daniels Building. By measuring airflow, he was able to determine that the building's southern, heritage wing leaks three times as much air as the new-construction northern wing. He is now investigating the airflow impacts of various heritage restoration approaches. He expects the results to have wide-ranging implications for designers, owners, and contractors that are planning partial and full restorations of large historic buildings.

"Building science has always been an important facet of architecture, but its importance has never been more clear, especially with the pandemic and its implications for the designing of enclosures," Khemet says.

Zach Blas

Zach Blas earned his Master of Fine Art from UCLA in 2008 and his PhD in literature from Duke University in 2014. He spent a year as an assistant professor at SUNY Buffalo's Department of Art before moving to the U.K. to lecture at Goldsmiths, University of London.

In addition to his teaching duties, Blas has maintained a busy research and artistic practice. His work deals with queerness, power, and digital technologies — specifically, the ways digital technologies can be used either to exert social control or resist it.

Facial Weaponization Suite.

His best known work is Facial Weaponization Suite, in which he led a series of workshops in locations around the world. Using aggregated facial data from participants, he created a series of surreal face masks designed to subvert and defeat facial-recognition technologies.

Contra-Internet.

Contra-Internet, a solo exhibition of Blas's work, first mounted at London's Gasworks gallery in 2017, used sculpture and film as means of engaging with the increasingly totalitarian style of capitalism practiced by American tech magnates. A centrepiece of the exhibition was Contra-Internet: Jubilee 2033, a video work in which Ayn Rand and her followers take a psychedelic journey through a devastated future version of Silicon Valley.

The Doors.

Blas's most recent commission, The Doors, is currently on view at the de Young Museum in San Francisco and the Van Abbemuseum in the Netherlands. The work is an immersive installation. Its centrepiece is a multichannel video, which was produced only partially by Blas. His co-creator was an artificial intelligence that he trained on a diet of psychedelia, ASMR keyboard noises, and Jim Morrison speech samples. The result, a 50-minute video loop, is a complex commentary on the kinship between the modern tech industry and California's 1960s counterculture.

In 2018, Blas was the recipient of a Leadership Fellowship from the United Kingdom Arts and Humanities Research Council. In 2022, his work will appear in the British Art Show, one of the U.K.'s most important touring exhibitions of contemporary art.

"I'm really excited to be able to teach visual art at a research university," Blas says. "Daniels provides a unique opportunity for arts education at the intersections of practice and theory, and I look forward to exploring the connections between visual art, architecture, and design."

Daniel Chung

Daniel Chung comes to the Daniels Faculty from Drexel University's Westphal College of Media Arts and Design. He began teaching architecture there in 2014, earned his PhD in architectural engineering in 2019, and, in 2020, attained the rank of associate professor. Before he did any of that, he worked in the field. He earned a Master of Architecture at Yale in 2006 and then spent several years as a project architect at MGA Partners.

Chung researches building envelope performance, with a focus on the way moisture moves through materials. Recently, he has been working on methods of using dielectric permittivity sensors — a type of water-sensitive probe ordinarily used to test the moisture content of soil — to measure and track the amount of water present in the facades of buildings. The slender probes might one day be usable as alternatives to more destructive methods of testing for building envelope moisture, like core sampling.

A thermal imaging study of a building envelope.

During his time at Daniels, Chung hopes to use his moisture-sensor research to develop a way of creating a fully self-monitoring building envelope that can automatically adjust its internal properties to keep moisture out.

Chung also works on moisture from a more theoretical angle. In a recent paper he co-authored for Building Simulation, he describes a method of simulating the behaviour of moisture in building envelopes using open-source software. He has also completed statistical studies of building envelope performance, in order to forecast the effects of moisture over time and in different climate conditions. "I'm asking, if the climate is very different in 50 years, do we have a problem with our existing buildings and designs? I don't just look at the worst-case conditions or the best-case conditions. I look at what might happen over a wide distribution of cases," he says.

Each year, hundreds of student teams from across North America make submissions to the ULI Hines Student Competition, in which entrants are challenged to tackle a complex urban planning and design exercise. Only four teams advance to the competition's final round. This year, one of those teams includes two Daniels Faculty students: Ruotian Tan, a student in the Faculty's Master of Urban Design program, and Chenyi Xu, a Master of Architecture student.

Ruotian and Chenyi are working as part of a five-member, multidisciplinary crew. The other three students on the team are Frances-Grout Brown and Leorah Klein, both Ryerson University urban planning students, 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 students will give their final presentation during a video call with the ULI Hines Student Competition jury on April 8. The competition's winning team receives a prize of $50,000. The three runner-up teams receive $10,000 each.

The competition is a rare opportunity for students to work with people in disciplines other than their own. "It was a great multidisciplinary learning experience for me," Ruotian says. "It was a very good chance for me to practice and get some good results before I actually go into a professional career."

The competition brief called for each student group to develop a detailed master plan for the East Village, a neighbourhood in Kansas City, Missouri. The East Village is a lightly developed 16.2-acre site located within the city's central business district. The student proposals had to take into account a wide variety of ambitious goals, including positive economic impact, sustainability, housing affordability, and easy access to transportation. In addition to redesigning the site, students had to produce implementation plans and financial pro formas that described exactly how their designs might be made into reality.

The Daniels Faculty/Ryerson/York team designed its master plan, titled "Fusion," around two central ideas: connectivity and resilience. Although the East Village is a relatively blank slate, with plenty of room for megaprojects, the group's plan doesn't contain any large tourist attractions, like stadiums or museums. "One thing that distinguished our proposal from the other finalists is that we wanted to create a community for people who are actually living there, rather than attracting tourists or visitors to the site," Ruotian says.

In the first phase of the group's three-step implementation plan, the city would build a new pedestrian promenade at the centre of the neighbourhood, then line it with the beginnings of a dense new urban neighbourhood. The plan calls for an initial 615 mixed-income rental units, a 107,000 square-foot community centre with some seniors housing inside, plus office space and ground-floor retail.

The group's site plan.

Over two subsequent phases of redevelopment, the neighbourhood would evolve into a continuous row of mixed-use housing, office, and retail structures. The community centre and an adjacent water-feature park would serve as gathering points not only for neighbourhood residents and workers, but also for other Kansas City residents, who would be channeled into the East Village by cross streets and bus routes parallel to the pedestrian promenade.

The "resilience" piece of the group's plan manifests in the form of a neighbourhood-wide network of green infrastructure aimed at allowing the site to gracefully accept rainwater. Permeable pavement would allow precipitation to seep into the ground. Street bioswales would collect rainwater for reuse. A series of rain gardens, community gardens, and green roofs would use stormwater for irrigation. And a vertical farming greenhouse would allow the neighbourhood to produce food at scale, in an environmentally friendly way.

The vertical farming greenhouse.

"Kansas City has a long history with agricultural industries," Leorah says. "We noticed to the east of the site, they have really strong community networks with urban agriculture, so we wanted to build on networks that were already existing and provide a place for them to build up their networks and build up their businesses. And COVID really showed the importance of a local food system."

Visit the ULI Americas website to learn more about this year's ULI Hines Student Competition finalists.

Radio National, Australia's public radio broadcaster, invited a few local experts to educate the antipodean listening public about the city of Toronto. One of those Torontonians was Mason White, a professor of architecture at the Daniels Faculty.

White appeared on Lost and Found, a program hosted by Jonathan Green. Every week, the show picks a different city or neighbourhood and explains it through the lens of art, architecture, food, and culture.

Amid interviews with Raptors superfan Nav Bhatia and freelance writer Ivy Knight, White pipes in to explain Toronto's architectural heritage. "Toronto does not have a distinct architectural style," he tells Green. "I'd say its style is best described as ad-hoc eclecticism. Which is probably quite fitting given that Toronto has really been defined by waves of immigration, and these immigrants are really the ones who have shaped and formed the identity of the city, brick by brick and timber frame by timber frame."

To listen to White's full interview — which also includes some discussion about Ontario Place, the Bentway, the PATH, and the Eaton Centre — visit Radio National's website.

Listen to Mason White on Radio National

Top image: Ontario Place's aquatic pods.

When a new and frightening viral infection began spreading around the world last year, healthcare agencies raced to keep up with demand for hospital beds. In very short order, dozens of experimental, hastily assembled healthcare facilities began to sprout in unlikely locations.

As all of this was happening, professor Stephen Verderber, director of the Daniels Faculty's Centre for Design + Health Innovation, was keeping a careful eye on all the new construction. He has now released a white paper in which he reviews four different categories of built and unbuilt rapid-deployment healthcare facilities, including some designed by Master of Architecture students in his fall 2020 Architecture + Health research studio.

The white paper, titled "Pandemical healthcare architecture and social responsibility — COVID-19 and beyond," identifies several key inadequacies in existing designs for COVID-inspired healthcare facilities. Verderber argues for future rapid-deployment facilities to be designed in ways that allow them to be both therapeutic and socially responsive. He writes:

Effective rapid response requires personal conviction, perseverance, and appreciation of timeless Vitruvian precepts calling for architecture as the provider of commodity, firmness, and delight in a civil, democractic society. The first two precepts alone are insufficient, if architecture is to be a meaningful participant. An advocacy-based architecture for health in the public, civic interest is worthwhile and achievable — especially in trying times.

Read the full white paper

Image by Emily Moore and Jiawen Lin.

Professor Emeritus Larry Wayne Richards, former dean of the Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design (1997-2004), reflects on the importance of visiting appointments and 19 years of the Frank Gehry International Visiting Chair in Architectural Design.  

When I became dean of the Faculty in 1997, the notion of establishing an international visiting chair in architecture came to me naturally. Several decades before, as a graduate student at Yale University, I was privileged to study with the acclaimed British architect James Frazer Stirling, who held the position of William B. and Charlotte Shepherd Davenport Visiting Professor of Architectural Design. Established in 1966, and first held by Robert Venturi, the Davenport is one of more than 10 visiting professorships at Yale’s School of Architecture. Those positions enable students to learn first-hand from the world’s leading architects.  

Precedents such as this were on my mind when colleagues and I embarked on expanding the Faculty’s international outlook and comprehensively restructuring its academic programs. Fortuitously, the University of Toronto had launched its Great Minds Campaign in 1995, which prioritized the establishment of endowed academic chairs by private donation. Assisted by Maude McCarty, the Faculty's director of development, I formed a small working group that included Bruce Kuwabara, Daniels Faculty alumnus and founding partner of KPMB Architects. He, too, was excited by the idea of creating a visiting chair. In his words, “The experience of working with significant international architects gives students invaluable interaction, insight, and inspiration in their development.” 

The project gained momentum when I approached the distinguished architect and Toronto native Frank Owen Gehry, seeking to honor him by having his name grace the chair. Frank agreed, and it was a major turning point for the initiative. Bruce, Maude, and others worked closely with me, securing gifts from enthusiastic donors. But we were moving slowly towards the goal of raising $1 million as required to receive the university’s matching funding and thereby achieve the $2-million endowment. Happily, Heather Reisman, founder, chair, and CEO of Indigo, came forward with a generous lead gift. This led to more contributions – 43 in all – sending us well beyond our $1-million goal in private donations. The university provided a match of $1 million, and the Frank Gehry International Visiting Chair in Architectural Design –– the Faculty’s first endowed chair –– was realized in 2002.   

Image caption: Architect Daniel Libeskind was the first appointment in 2002, and Frank Gehry participated in one of Professor Libeskind’s studio reviews.   

(The following year, in 2003, the Daniels Faculty’s Michael Hough/OALA Visiting Critic in Landscape Architecture position was established with support from the Ontario Association of Landscape Architects and named in honour of Michael Hough [1928-2013]. Professor Hough was a Toronto urban ecologist and founder of the landscape architecture program at the University of Toronto. Landscape architect and urbanist Walter Hood [Oakland, California] will be the Hough/OALA Visiting Critic for 2021. More information on the 2021 Michael Hough/OALA lecture is forthcoming.) 

The terms establishing the Gehry Chair, as approved by the university and funded annually by a portion of the endowment investment income, are to “appoint at least one highly recognized international architect for a period of approximately four months, annually.” Typically, the chair holder presents a public lecture and conducts an advanced graduate studio with about 12 students.  

To date, the Faculty has attracted 18 international architects to the Gehry Chair: 

2002-03 Daniel Libeskind, New York  

2003-04 Preston Scott Cohen, Cambridge, Massachusetts  

2004-05 Merrill Elam, Atlanta  

2005-06 Diane Lewis, New York  

2006-07 Will Bruder, Phoenix  

2007-08 Jürgen Mayer H, Berlin  

2008-09 Wes Jones, Los Angeles  

2009-10 Mitchell Joachim, New York  

2010-11 Nader Tehrani, Boston  

2011-12 Hrvoje Njiric, Zagreb, Croatia 

2013-14 Josemaría de Churtichaga, Madrid  

2016-17 Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee, Los Angeles  

2017-18 Amale Andraos and Dan Wood, New York  

2019-20 Aljoša Dekleva and Tina Gregorič, Ljubljana, Slovenia  

2020-21 Douglas Cardinal, Ottawa 

Image caption: Studio reviews with Josemaría de Churtichaga (2013-14 Gehry Chair).

Each Gehry Chair holder arrives with an impressive list of professional achievements and awards. To cite one example, when Phoenix-based Will Bruder came to teach in the Faculty in 2006, his resume included more than 60 state, national, and international awards, including the American Academy Rome Prize, the Chrysler Design Award, the Architectural Record Award of Excellence for Design, and the Educator of the Year Award from the Arizona chapter of the American Institute of Architects. Professor Emeritus George Baird, former dean of the Daniels Faculty (2004-2009), invited Bruder and adds: “It was a huge benefit to be able to bring prominent architects from other parts of the world to the school for a term, especially after my positive experience of so many enriching visiting professorships at Harvard, where I taught for several years before becoming dean at U of T.” 

Occasionally, architect-partners are appointed to the Gehry Chair. Student Phat Le recalls his experience studying with Aljoša Dekleva and Tina Gregorič in 2019: “It was fantastic to study with them. The research phase included a trip to Venice, Ljubljana, and Vienna to tour examples of affordable housing and methods of collective housing practices. Then Aljoša and Tina focused our studio project on Toronto’s ‘missing middle’ in the ‘yellowbelt’ – that area constituting about 70 per cent of Toronto’s residential areas zoned for detached and semi-detached housing. They trusted the students, combining our experiences in Toronto with their knowledge of housing practices in their home base of Slovenia. This created a unique dialogue. The Gehry Chair studio was a huge catalyst for my master’s thesis, wherein I’m examining aspects of collectivity, ownership, and community power in Toronto’s downtown Chinatown.” 

Richard Sommer, former dean of the Daniels Faculty (2009-2020), made seven Gehry Chair appointments. He sees international visiting appointments as key to challenging the status quo, allowing dynamic individuals from practice to bring their thinking into a school, cutting across the grain of established pedagogy and curricula. Professor Sommer says, “The impact of the Gehry Chair visitors on our school reflects the changing role and influence of the practitioner/teacher. In this light, we can see how our visitors over the past two decades have confronted shifting interests and curiosities during a period when the field of architecture and our school were rapidly changing." 

Image caption: Public lecture with Amale Andraos and Dan Wood (2017-18 Gehry Chairs). 

Indeed, this kind of healthy confrontation has come forward boldly from Douglas Cardinal, the renowned Canadian architect who holds the 2020-2021 Gehry Chair. Celebrated for his pioneering use of computers in architectural practice, advocacy for the rights and dignity of indigenous peoples, and inspiring building designs, the appointment of Cardinal is momentous.  

Given the current global pandemic and resulting remote learning, Cardinal is presenting a series of four online lectures and conversations, reaching an expanded student audience, as well as the public. The third event, Douglas Cardinal: Talks with Students, on February 25, will be led by James Bird, an Indigenous student at the Daniels Faculty. The conversation will focus on the teaching of architecture. In the final session, on March 25, Cardinal will narrate a video tour of the Canadian Museum of History in Hull, Quebec — an energetic, curvaceous structure with integral landscapes that he designed during 1984-89. The museum exemplifies the kind of “spiritual organicism” for which Cardinal has become known internationally. 

Image caption: Douglas Cardinal (2020-21 Gehry Chair) hosts an online public lecture on January 14, 2021. One of his seminal works, St. Mary's Church in Red Deer, Alberta, is shown on screen. 

Over the past 19 years, hundreds of students have been inspired through the instruction of Gehry Chair visitors –– a unique experience that has helped shape their personal and professional development. Endowed in perpetuity, the Frank Gehry International Visiting Chair in Architectural Design will continue to bring distinctive visitors with diverse viewpoints to our Faculty and its extended communities. We can look forward to the future opportunities and surprises that the 20th year of the Gehry Chair will bring in 2022.

In the Daniels Faculty's Integrated Urbanism Studio, students from the Master of Architecture, Master of Landscape Architecture, and Master of Urban Design programs spend a semester working together on shared, large-scale projects.

The studio is one of the most complex in the Daniels Faculty's curriculum and is a staple of its interdisciplinary design pedagogy. Now, it has a web presence to match its importance. The new Integrated Urbanism Studio website launched last semester, and will be the studio’s permanent online home.

The new site, designed under the direction of studio coordinators Fadi Masoud, Michael Piper, and Mason White, is a clearing house of information. “It is a repository of the incredible research and design work produced by over 100 graduate students across 11 teaching sections," Masoud says. "It is our hope that we can continue to build on the rich work presented here year after year."

Visitors to the website can view an interactive map of the city of Toronto, browse through an extensive catalogue of urban precedents, and view project proposals.

In the first week of the studio, students mapped the locations of various social, environmental, demographic, and infrastructural policies as well as a wide list of geospatial conditions. By combining various research and mapping layers, students identified a series of “design action zones” — areas of the city that are especially vulnerable to environmental, economic, and social pressures, and are therefore particularly ripe for design intervention.

These design action zones became sites of urban transformations. Students imagined projects that followed prompts from the international Green New Deal Superstudio to create designs that bring new, equitable, and environmentally sustainable forms of housing, mobility, and social services to their study areas.

All of the studio's final projects from the fall 2020 semester are available for viewing online.

Take me to the Integrated Urbanism Studio website

Yi Ran Weng and Felix Chun Lam, both 2020 Master of Architecture graduates, formed their own design practice, naïvepeopledesign, while they were still students at the Daniels Faculty. They immediately began entering competitions together.

Now, all that extracurricular work is starting to pay off. A project Weng and Lam created in collaboration with another 2020 Daniels Faculty alumnus, Abubakr Bajaman, and Mariya Krasteva, a graduate of the Bartlett School of Architecture, has earned them a precious spot at the upcoming 2021 Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism.

Clockwise from top right: Yi Ran Weng, Felix Chun Lam, Mariya Krasteva, and Abubakr Bajaman.

The biennale, which will take place in the South Korean capital in September (it's unclear, at this point, whether COVID restrictions will allow the event to happen as planned), is a major international showcase for the latest innovations in architecture and urban design. Designers from around the world compete for a limited number of invitations to build official pavilions for the event.

The title of the 2021 biennale will be "Crossroads: Building the Resilient City." When Weng, Lam, Bajaman, and Krasteva began thinking about ways to address that theme, it occurred to them that cities are often only as resilient as their smallest businesses. "Small businesses are often owned by people of colour, or people who don't necessarily have a lot of money to run a store — or even people who have money, but who have been greatly affected by COVID," Weng says.

They knew their design intervention, whatever it was, would have to be applicable in cities around the world. They needed to base their project on something universal — something that could be found just as easily in Canada as in Bulgaria or Hong Kong. That's when it hit them: parking spots.

Renderings of the group's vending stall, installed curbside. Click to view a larger version.

The group designed a new type of mobile, curbside vending stall that could be deposited in a street parking spot, where it would act as a temporary home for a small business. From the outside, the structure looks a bit like a repurposed shipping container. Inside is a bare-bones counter where a vendor could store a few items for sale. Rows of windows provide easy access to customers on the sidewalk or the street. A ladder on the side allows customers to climb onto the roof, where a set of minimalist benches and loungers make it possible to wait for service in relative comfort. The designers called the project "Secret Societies," a nod to the informal social networks that coalesce around small businesses in urban areas.

But their work wasn't done. "We really wanted to use the biennale as not just a place to show beautiful drawings," Weng says. "We wanted to use the platform to provide an answer to how to be resilient. We believe that resiliency comes from the people. If people can find their own resiliency, cities will become much more resilient."

An image of the group's app design. Click to view a larger version.

To show how these miniature curbside stalls could make small businesses more resilient, the group designed an interface for a smartphone app. The app — which is only a mockup, not a usable product — would be a tool for both small business owners and their customers. Owners would use the app to book vending stalls, and customers would use the app to request the presence of particular businesses at vending stalls located in parking spots near their homes.

This app-based booking system would allow small businesses to operate with little or no overhead, wherever their customers happen to be, for however long those customers happen to be there. The designers theorize that this would help these businesses cope with COVID-like economic shocks. The resilience of the business owners would increase, and so would the resilience of the communities that depend on them.

For their pavilion at the biennale, the designers plan to build a full-scale vending stall. They also intend to develop a demonstration version of their smartphone app for attendees to download onto their phones.

To find out more about the Seoul Biennale, visit the event's website.

With phase three of the revitalization of Regent Park continuing under the experienced stewardship of The Daniels Corporation, the Toronto Community Housing Corporation recently announced its decision to partner with another developer on the final two phases of the revitalization of the downtown neighbourhood.

In an open letter, published as an advertisement in Saturday's Toronto Star, Daniels Corporation president and CEO Mitchell Cohen remarked upon his company's intensive 15-year investment in the transformation of the challenged downtown neighbourhood, since recognized as a model of inclusive urbanism and city-building worldwide, before going on to address TCH’s change in developer partner for the final two stages of the project.

"Although we are deeply disappointed, we wish TCH and their new partner well," Cohen wrote. "We also want to reassure local residents of our long-term commitment to the Regent Park community. Our work has never been just about sewers, roads, buildings or district energy systems. It has been about building community."

To read the rest of Cohen's letter, visit the Daniels Corporation website.

In addition to their work in Regent Park, The Daniels Corporation's leadership team has mentored first-generation university students and acted as campaign volunteers and generous benefactors, both at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design and at the University of Toronto.

Starting on Thursday, for the second time since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Daniels Faculty will be holding its thesis reviews online. Students from the Master of Architecture program will be logging into Zoom to present projects that represent the culmination of their time and studies at the school.

Those presentations will be open to the public (click here to find out how to join) — but, with 62 students presenting, it's not going to be possible for anyone to attend all of them.

That's where the Fall 2020 Thesis Booklet, the latest edition of our biannual thesis guidebook, comes in. The booklet contains a short description of every student thesis project being presented this semester. Because we can't hand out copies in person, we've put it online.

Flip through it above, or download a copy to browse offline.