Assistant professor Carol Moukheiber, like many Lebanese people living around the world, was blindsided by August's explosion in Beirut, which injured thousands of the city's residents and left thousands more homeless. That's why she and NMinusOne, the architecture studio she founded with Christos Marcopoulos, have donated a work of art to Architects for Beirut.

Architects for Beirut is a charitable initiative that has solicited artwork from an international crew of architects. The group is donating proceeds from the sale of all that art to Beirut Urban Lab, a research space, affiliated with the American University of Beirut School of Architecture, that is leading several rehabilitation projects in the city.

Moukheiber's immediate family in Beirut were spared the brunt of the blast, but not everyone in her circle of acquaintances was as fortunate. "A lot of my friends and friends of friends were severely affected," she says. "It was traumatic not to be able to go there because of the pandemic and the country's political instability."

NMinusOne/Ari Marcopoulos's photo contribution to Architects for Beirut.

Her contribution to Architects for Beirut is a photographic print by renowned photographer Ari Marcopoulos (he's Christos's brother), of a domestic scene inside a home that NMinusOne designed for a site in Whistler, British Columbia. In the photo, the home's owners, former professional snowboarder Marc Morisset and his partner, Dominique Pampin Els, are shown lounging in a sparsely furnished living room.

"What's interesting about Ari's style is, it's not about objectifying the architecture," Moukheiber says. "It's not about fetishizing the object. It's about revealing the serenity of the domestic space."

The print is being sold in an unlimited edition for the duration of the Architects for Beirut sale, which ends at 9 p.m. EST on November 17. The cost of each print is $150. "This is a chance to collect great artwork and provide critical support to Lebanon's people,” Moukheiber says.

Architects for Beirut was conceived by architects Makaram el Kadi and Ziad Jamaleddine of LEFT, with Amale Andraos, dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. The sale is being conducted in partnership with Design Miami.

Visit the Architects for Beirut website

Moukheiber also recommends donating to the following organizations:

• Nusaned
• Arab Image Foundation
• The Nation Station

The Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design is pleased to announce that the 2020-21 Frank Gehry International Visiting Chair in Architectural Design is Douglas Cardinal, OC, FRAIC, a renowned Canadian architect known both for his inspiring designs and for his advocacy for the rights and dignity of Indigenous peoples.

Cardinal will give a series of four public lectures, in collaboration with the Daniels Faculty, throughout his appointment as Gehry Chair. They will take place on January 14, February 4, February 25, and March 25.

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic and safety protocols on campus, these events will be held online. Instructions for joining Cardinal's Gehry lectures will be posted on the Daniels Faculty website as soon as they become available.

Douglas Cardinal.

Cardinal's career has been an active one. Over a span of more than 50 years, he has completed buildings, master plans, and land use plans throughout Canada and in the United States. He is best known for his institutional commissions, particularly his seminal St. Mary’s Church in Red Deer and two of his museums: the Canadian Museum of History, in Gatineau, and the National Museum of the American Indian, in Washington D.C.

He continues to be an influential voice in the architectural discipline. In 2018, he led a team of Indigenous architects and designers who represented Canada at the Venice Architecture Biennale.

“The vicissitudes of Douglas Cardinal’s life are one of those larger-than-life tales — from the nurture of home, to the trauma of residential schools, and then perseverance and a precocious commitment to architecture and the evolution of a unique idiom of design,” says associate professor Robert Levit. “We are thrilled to have him joining us this year at the Daniels Faculty to share his thoughts on architecture, and to host conversations with our students.”

Cardinal is known as the inventor of an architectural style influenced by his prairie upbringing and his Indigenous heritage. Cardinal, who is of Blackfoot and German descent, attended St. Joseph Convent, a residential school in Red Deer, Alberta, before enrolling in the University of British Columbia School of Architecture in 1952. In 1956, Cardinal went to Taliesin West in Arizona with the intention of training under Frank Lloyd Wright and learning from his principles of organic architecture —  but the school offered no accreditation that Canada would recognize at the time. And so Cardinal sought out another school, the University of Texas at Austin, where he pursued his Bachelor of Architecture. It was there that he was introduced by his German-Jewish émigré professor and mentor, Hugo Leipziger-Pearce, to another formative influence: the work of the German expressionist architect Rudolf Steiner. It was also at the University of Texas that Cardinal began his life of political activism, during the early days of the U.S. civil rights movement. He graduated with honours in 1963.

St. Mary's Church.

Soon after founding his practice in 1964, he received a commission that would become one of his signal works: St. Mary's Church, in Red Deer. Cardinal's design for the church was dramatic in its use of curvilinear form, and it was an inaugural event in his commitment to organic architecture. The church represented a synthesis of the unique visions articulated by Father Werner Marx, a progressive priest who had been influenced by the reforms of Vatican II, and Cardinal’s own innovative style. The building was one of the first in the world to be designed with the aid of computer software. The values and techniques embodied in the St. Mary's design — the earthy material choices, the careful attention to site and surroundings, and the bold, naturalistic curves — would continue to define Cardinal's work for the rest of his career.

The Canadian Museum of History.

The Canadian Museum of History, completed in 1989 (when it was known as the Canadian Museum of Civilization), is typical of Cardinal's approach, with undulating curves that resemble a rocky landscape. "I asked myself how nature would have carved this form," Cardinal told the Toronto Star in 1988. "So I looked at the forms of nature, especially rocks and the stratification of rocks moulded by glaciers, wind, and water. It evolved from the land. I wanted people to remember that man and nature are related to each other."

The National Museum of the American Indian. (Image credit: Andrew Weiss Photography)

Cardinal's National Museum of the American Indian, which was inaugurated in 2004, occupies a site on Washington's National Mall, placing it among the most prominent structures in America's capital. The museum won critical praise for its sinuous limestone facade, which pays homage to natural rock formations while at the same time referencing the stone construction typical of D.C.’s public edifices. The museum's monumental east entrance faces the U.S. Capitol Building, just a few hundred paces away. "The [museum] building affects your spirit," architecture critic Benjamin Forgey wrote in the Washington Post. "It is intimidating but also exhilarating."

In addition to his contributions to the field of architecture, Cardinal has been a steadfast advocate for human and Indigenous rights. In 2016, he filed applications with the Ontario Superior Court, the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario, and the Canadian Human Rights Commission in an attempt to block the Cleveland Indians from displaying their name and logo — both of which had been deemed offensive by Indigenous groups — during appearances in Toronto. (The team retired its "Chief Wahoo" logo from on-field use after the 2018 baseball season, and it recently announced its intention to rename the franchise.)

Cardinal has been a recipient of many awards and honours. He was made an officer of the Order of Canada in 1990; he received the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada's Gold Medal in 1999; and, in 2020, he received an honorary degree from the University of Toronto — the latest of 20 such degrees to be awarded to him by various universities since 1983.

About the Frank Gehry International Visiting Chair in Architectural Design:

Named in honour of Frank O. Gehry, this endowed chair brings a highly recognized international architect to the Daniels Faculty to deliver a public lecture and enrich the student learning experience each year. Heather Reisman, founder of Indigo Books and Music, and 45 other donors contributed $1 million, matched by U of T, to establish the chair in November 2000. It's named for the Toronto-born designer of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain; the Experience Music Project in Seattle; and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.

Andrea Kinsella and Gabriela Sciortino, both fourth-year undergraduates at the Daniels Faculty, have created an aesthetically pleasing new way of encouraging people to keep their distance from one another during the COVID-19 pandemic.

"The Ripple Effect," a system of sidewalk markings that they developed in collaboration with artist Peter Gibson, is one of 44 projects included in the Canadian Urban Institute's new Main Street Design Challenge Playbook, a handbook of design techniques intended to help revitalize urban main streets during and after the pandemic.

Andrea heard about the playbook's call for submissions on social media and enlisted Gabriela and Peter to help with a design. "As architecture students, we felt like the pandemic was something we should be responding to," Andrea says.

Andrea, Gabriela, and Peter were interested in creating a design proposal that would be equal parts artistic and practical. The idea they settled on was a new type of sidewalk marking: two-toned concentric circles, reminiscent of ripples on a pond. The shapes, which would be applied to pavement using either acrylic latex paint or spray paint, serve several purposes. They work as social-distancing indicators, by reminding people to maintain a circle of personal space around themselves at all times. And their pie-shaped colour cut-outs act as directional indicators, reminding pedestrians to keep to one side of the sidewalk, in order to keep foot traffic flowing and avoid any accidental contact.

A rendering of "The Ripple Effect," as it would appear if it were installed in Toronto's Chinatown.

But the markings also work on another, more symbolic level. "The 'ripple effect' is a metaphor for our individual actions during the pandemic," Gabriela says. "The image of the ripple is a reminder that our individual actions have effects on our entire community."

Andrea, Gabriela, and Peter's ripple design has yet to be deployed on an actual city sidewalk, but the three have begun talking to local neighbourhood business associations in the hopes of finding a test location.

All designs included in the Main Street Design Challenge Playbook, including "The Ripple Effect," can be used free of charge, with or without permission from the creators. As part of their submission to the Main Street Design Challenge Playbook, Andrea and Gabriela developed detailed plans for organizing a group of volunteers to install the sidewalk markings. Those plans can be found on the Bring Back Main Street website.

The choices architects make when they're designing buildings can have long-lasting consequences, not just for the people who live and work in those buildings, but also for the global natural environment. That's why, starting in the Winter 2021 semester, the Daniels Faculty will begin giving students the ability to enrol in a new curricular pathway, leading to a new academic designation: a Certificate in Sustainability of the Built Environment.

The new certificate program, the first of its kind at the University of Toronto, will be open to all current students in the Daniels Faculty's undergraduate architecture and visual studies programs. In order to earn the certificate, a student will be required to take at least four different Daniels courses that have been deemed, by the university, to be aligned with the UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals. The full list of eligible courses can be found in the Daniels academic calendar.

In taking this sustainability-focused sequence of courses, students will gain understanding of sustainability's social, ecological, and economic dimensions. They will also learn about the ways sustainability practices in architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, and art intersect with larger global issues like climate change, ecological preservation, and social justice.

The new certificate program is an outgrowth of U of T's President's Advisory Committee on the Environment, Climate Change, and Sustainability. The university's sustainability pathways initiative was announced as one of eight sustainability measures in "Beyond Divestment: Taking Decisive Action on Climate Change," the university president's administrative response to the report of the President’s Advisory Committee on Divestment from Fossil-Fuels, in March 2016. The goal of the pathways initiative is to allow every undergraduate student at the university the opportunity to experience sustainability learning in their program.

The President's Advisory Committee on the Environment, Climate Change, and Sustainability is currently hosting the Adams Sustainability Celebration — a four-month series of events designed to pay tribute to U of T's sustainability-minded students, faculty, and staff. The celebration includes the Adams Sustainability Innovation Prize, a competition for student-led innovation projects. The winners will split a $25,500 pot of prize money, which they'll use to further develop their ideas. The competition is open to all U of T students and recent alumni, and entries are due on October 23. See the Adams Sustainability Innovation prize website for more details.

More information on the Certificate in Sustainability of the Built Environment program will be available in March 2021. Enrolment will start the following spring. Watch the Daniels Faculty website for updates.

Imagine experiencing the summer of 2020 as a child: constant uncertainty, limited entertainment options, and few opportunities to play with other kids. Under normal circumstances, the solution to childhood summer boredom is summer camp, but most summer programs were cancelled this year.

The Daniels Faculty took a different approach: it created a new type of summer experience for kids, based on the popular video game Minecraft. The Daniels Minecraft Camp, which held eight one-week sessions throughout July and August, was delivered entirely over the internet.

Unlike most video games, Minecraft doesn't tell players what to do. The game is built around a Lego-like system of block-based crafting. Gamers are free to ignore the rules and build anything they want. And the game has multiplayer capabilities, meaning a group of several players can all gather on a single Minecraft server and work together on collaborative building projects.

The Daniels Minecraft Camp aimed to use this sandbox-style multiplayer functionality to create a social, creative environment that young campers could enjoy from behind their computers, without leaving their homes.

The camp was an all-day program, designed to replicate the rhythms of a regular day camp. Campers logged on at 9 a.m. each morning and gathered in a virtual environment inside Minecraft. The setting was a computerized playground with mountains, forests, abandoned temples, a tree fortress, and even a network of underground tunnels. This virtual world had been painstakingly designed and created over a period of weeks by the camp's councillors — skilled Minecraft players, all of whom were members of U of T eSports, a student club devoted to competitive gaming.

Paolo De Guzman, a neuroscience and physiology undergrad, heads U of T eSports's Minecraft division and helped design the Daniels Minecraft Camp program. "The thing I'm most proud of is the way all these kids were able to make friends," he says. "On the first day of each session, the kids were kind of shy. But, by the last day, the amount of trust that they had with each other was awesome to see."

Campers and councillors communicated using videoconferencing software. Each day began with an ice-breaker activity, after which campers split into small groups, each led by a different camp counsellor. In these groups, campers worked on collaborative design exercises, all leading up to a show-and-tell session at the end of the week.

Milena Kako, a behavioural therapist from Toronto, enrolled her two sons, 11-year-old Julian and 13-year-old Tristan, in the camp for four weeks. "I was working, and my husband works as well," she says. "We wanted the kids to be involved in something that would be fun, but also beneficial for them. We thought this camp would give them opportunities to interact with their peers. At the same time, they would be doing something that they enjoy a lot. Both of them love Minecraft."

She noticed immediate benefits. "I found that they were able to connect with their peers quite well," she says. "The camp was set up in a way where interaction was stimulated and encouraged. There were a lot of collaborative games that were built into the different activities."

A city created in Minecraft by Julian and Tristan during their final week of the Minecraft camp.

For the kids, the camp was a welcome relief from the monotony of isolation. "The games and the building were really fun," Tristan says. "But one of my favourite parts was finally getting to interact with other kids after the long pandemic." The two brothers received expert Minecraft instruction from their councillors. After learning about different architectural styles, they began building a series of ancient-Greek-style temples that became more and more elaborate with each passing week. Now, with camp finished for the year, Tristan and Julian are continuing to experiment with Minecraft builds on their own. And they have remained friends with some of their fellow campers.

For Anna Shternshis, a University of Toronto professor, the Daniels Minecraft Camp was a way to give her youngest son, eight-year-old Avi, some badly needed intellectual stimulation. "Avi spent a lot of April and May on his devices, playing different games," she says. "He got interested in Minecraft. It seemed like a good game, but I was thinking: he should be doing something useful with his brain."

The camp helped turn Minecraft into an intellectual exercise. "They came up with a story," Anna says, "and they directed kids in thinking creatively about things they were building. They actually put thought into a curriculum. As an educator myself, I appreciated that very much."

The Daniels Faculty is now planning a winter session of its Minecraft program. For details and registration, click here.

And the full-day Daniels Minecraft Camp will return next summer. Watch the "outreach" section of the Daniels website for updates.

In 2017, associate professor Georges Farhat co-organized a symposium with the Garden and Landscape Studies program at Dumbarton Oaks, in Washington D.C. Now, three years later, he has finished editing a book that expands on the presentations delivered during that event.

The book, titled Landscpaes of Preindustrial Urbanism, consists of ten copiously illustrated essays by a group of multidisciplinary contributors. It can be ordered from its publisher, Harvard University Press.

The book's chapters are organized according to three technical themes — "Earthworks", "Waterscapes," and "Forestry" — which cover different types of intersections between landscapes and urbanism. Temporalities and materialities foreign to Western modernity require specific methods of analysis on each of the sites studied. To do this, the authors combine remote sensing and geoarchaeology with historical geography, ethnohistory, and ecological anthropology. The result is an open and pluralistic approach to the history of urban landscapes.

In his introductory essay, Farhat writes:

Environmental conditions, under which regional types of preindustrial urbanism formed, developed, and declined, have been lately reframed by geoarchaeology. The latter, which integrates a host of earth sciences, now benefits from larger, more reliable, or previously unavailable sets of data (from ice cores and speleothems to DNA and tree rings). It enables researchers to more accurately reconstruct paleoenvironments as well as long-term climate dynamics; to correlate environments and societies; and to retrace land cover, land use, and associated foodways.

Better understood, monsoon variability, droughts, floods, and warming cycles are now identified among factors that contributed to the collapse of urban systems under constant climatic stress. Owing to urban population growth and agricultural needs, ensuing deforestation, soil exhaustion, and erosion would combine with siltation of hydraulic infrastructure while overflows interacted with earthworks (terraces, bunds, mounds, causeways). In cases as diverse as Cahokia (United States), Caracol, Angkor, and Anuradhapura (Sri Lanka), climate variation and ecological instability conflicted with economic constraint and rigid management patterns. The result was failure of complex, large-scale infrastructure networks and urban collapse or, alternatively, peripheral dispersal and reconfiguration of settlements.

Pre-Columbian earthworks and geometric geoglyphs, Bastião da Mata, Amazon, Acre, Brazil. Photograph by Diego Lourenço Gurgel.

Obviously, scholars’ interests in such phenomena are driven by a quest for solutions to current environmental crises, for which they hope to learn from the past. However, more significant for our present consideration is the fact that preindustrial urban settlements are now holistically studied as environments that can no longer be dissociated into built and unbuilt or core and hinterland areas. More important still is a rethink of human and nonhuman agencies based on archaeological finds. This has enabled historical ecology to frame a more integrative matrix accounting for the dynamics of long-term, human-environmental interactions — rather than a deterministic one-way adaptation as in cultural ecology. Entwined in such a matrix, one finds material practices of design and ecological processes. Two opposite cases, one of sterile terrain formation and the other of organic soil creation (pedogenesis), should suffice to illustrate this interaction. Semiarid plains across the world are scattered with mounds and hills (“tells”), measuring up to one kilometer across and forty meters in elevation, that once were urban settlement mounds in wetter climates. Now an integral part of their regional landscapes, these reliefs have emerged through subsequent phases of collapse, reconstruction, and abandonment. Returning to clay after melting, mud bricks formed hills that, in turn, were subject to ecological cycles. Under completely different conditions, across the Amazon, raised fields and anthropic “dark earths” accompany extensive precontact settlement earthworks and artificial islands. Vast swaths of the oft-fantasized pristine wilderness and biosphere turn out to have been human-managed forests. Their fauna and flora were domesticated, selected, and reshaped for more than two millennia into what could ultimately be described as descendants of urban landscapes.

Find out more about Landscpaes of Preindustrial Urbanism

A new design competition is asking students across Canada to propose alternative futures for Ontario Place, a former recreational complex located on Toronto's western waterfront whose future has been cast into doubt by a recent redevelopment push.

The student competition, titled "Ontario Place: A Call for Counterproposals" is an initiative of The Future of Ontario Place, a collective of architects and designers, brought together by a partnership between the World Monuments Fund, the Daniels Faculty, and Architectural Conservancy Ontario. The group's goal is to prevent Ontario Place's unique modernist structures and landscapes, designed in the late 1960s by Eberhard Zeidler and Michael Hough, from being altered or demolished in the name of redevelopment. And that isn't a far-fetched scenario: the Ontario government is actively considering a number of redevelopment proposals from private companies. One of the leading contenders is said to be an Austrian company known for building large indoor thermal spas.

Students who participate in Ontario Place: A Call for Counterproposals will be required to submit alternative designs for Ontario Place that work to preserve and supplement — rather than erase or replace — the site's existing architectural heritage.

Ontario Place first opened to the public in 1971. The complex, owned and developed by the government of Ontario, was originally an exhibition ground, intended to act a summer retreat for Ontario families who didn't own cottages. Among the park's Zeidler-designed structures is the now-iconic Cinesphere, a dome-like enclosure built to house the world's first permament IMAX theatre. Near the Cinesphere is another daring piece of architecture: five large "pods" that are anchored, with columns, directly into Lake Ontario. (The pods were originally used to house public exhibitions, but were later retrofitted into private event facilities.)

Top: Ontario Place's pods. Bottom: A view of the Cinesphere.

Ontario Place's family-fun days came to abrupt end in 2012, when the Ontario government shuttered the site, citing declining revenues. Ever since, the park has remained in planning limbo, with successive provincial governments promising revitalization but failing to deliver detailed plans. The current provincial government, led by premier Doug Ford, accelerated the redevelopment process in 2019 with a new request for proposals. Amid the push to determine a future for the area, the fate of Zeidler and Hough's designs remains uncertain.

The competition's design brief divides Ontario Place into three distinct zones. Zone one — the "core heritage zone," where most of Ontario's Place's existing structures are located — is to be preserved as-is. Zone two is a "buffer zone," where only small-scale additions are permitted. Zone three, an area that includes an 1990s-era performance venue and a few parking lots, is set aside for larger-scale interventions.

The competition brief asks student entrants not only to preserve Ontario Place in their designs, but also to do some thinking about the site's future as a public attraction. Entrants are forbidden from including private uses, like condominiums or big-box stores, in their designs. Instead, the brief calls on students to consider the needs of diverse public stakeholders. Entrants can also score points for developing program strategies that integrate Ontario Place with surrounding communities, for finding ways to preserve nearby ecological systems, and for developing public outreach strategies to raise awareness of the site's heritage value.

The competition is open to undergraduate and graduate students at Canadian schools who are studying architecture, urban planning, urban design, business, or related disciplines. Students who graduated after January 1, 2017 are also eligible to enter.

All entires will be judged by a jury of a respected architects, designers, and urbanists, including urban designer Ken Greenberg, OMA partner Jason Long, and Shim-Sutcliffe Architects principal Brigitte Shim.

Students interested in entering the competition must register by October 12. For more details, key dates, or to download the detailed design brief, visit the Future of Ontario Place website.

Take me to the Future of Ontario Place website

The Daniels Faculty will be one 12 Canadian schools of architecture participating in the Canadian Council of University Schools of Architecture's first-ever pan-Canada lecture series.

The series, titled "Global Perspectives," will consist of 12 lectures at schools of architecture across Canada. All of the lectures will be open to the public and accessible online, via videoconferencing software. And they will tackle a common theme: diversity, as it relates to the architecture profession.

The lecture series will be split into to two parts: a fall 2020 edition and a winter 2021 edition. The Daniels Faculty's lecture will take place during the winter edition. (The Daniels Faculty has not yet set a date or topic for its pan-Canada lecture. Those details will be published on the Faculty's website as soon as they're available.)

“With the forced move online, CCUSA saw an opportunity to connect across the country and beyond," says Anne Bordeleau, CCUSA's chairperson. "I have high hopes that this first pan-Canada lecture series will set up a new trajectory for how the 12 schools of architecture across Canada can come together to engage in thought-provoking discussions.”

The lectures scheduled for the fall edition of Global Perspectives are:

September 14: Mariam Kamara (University of British Columbia, School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture)

September 23: Panel discussion with Albrerto de Salvatierra, Martina Jileckova, Vivian Ton, Wandile Mthiyane, and Craig Wilkins (University of Calgary; School of Architecture, Planning, and Landscape)

October 26: Joar Nango (Laurentian University, McEwen School of Architecture)

November 10: Syrus Marcus Ware, Tiffany Lethabo King, Sara Zewde (Waterloo University, School of Architecture)

November 19: Anupama Kundoo (Ryerson University, Department of Architectural Science)

For information about how to join these lectures online, visit the CCUSA website.

A pair of Daniels Faculty students have won an international award for a pavilion they designed, which uses coloured panes of glass to raise awareness of global air pollution.

Rick Schutte and Mina Onay, both architecture undergraduates, were named regional winners in the "daylight investigations" category of the 2020 International Velux Awards — a biannual competition run by Velux, a manufacturer of windows, skylights, and blinds. In addition to a cash prize, Rick and Mina have won the right to present their design at this year's World Architecture Festival, where they will compete with four other regional winners for the grand prize in their category.

"It's so amazing, and so we're so grateful," Rick says. "We've been on cloud nine for weeks."

Rick Schutte and Mina Onay.

Participants in the daylight investigations category of the 2020 International Velux Award competition were required to submit designs that investigated the physical properties of light, using new materials and technologies.

Rick and Mina realized that they would need to take an unconventional approach in order to make their project stand out from hundreds of other entries. Both of them are minoring in visual studies, and it occurred to them that a visual arts perspective could be precisely the thing to give them an edge. The competition's rules required them to pick a faculty advisor, so they chose J.P. King, a sessional lecturer in the Daniels Faculty's visual studies program. J.P. is a working artist who specializes in printmaking.

"When Rick and Mina came to me, they didn't necessarily want architectural thinking to guide their project," J.P. says. "They were looking for someone who was more process oriented, who could guide them through the stages of thinking through a piece of public artwork."

The design process was complicated by the fact that the project team's members were located on different continents. Rick and J.P. were both in Toronto, but Mina had left the city for her home in Turkey in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and was unable to return. She and Rick ended up doing most of their collaborative design work on Miro, an online whiteboarding platform that has become popular with designers over the past few months.

Despite the distance, the pair were able to develop a sophisticated design that they titled "AQIP," or "Air Quality Index Pavilion." They developed the concept using parametric design methods.

The pavilion, which they envisioned being installed on a site on the Toronto Islands (this project, like most student competition entries, will not actually be built), is made almost entirely of four-inch-thick panes of glass that are precisely curved to create a maze-like environment that looks, from above, like the bloom of a flower. The striking structure straddles the line between architecture and public art, in the vein of large-scale sculptors like Richard Serra.

A chart, created by Rick and Mina, that shows the air quality indices of various cities around the world.

Under J.P.'s guidance, Rick and Mina researched the air quality index, a standard measurement of air pollution used in population centres around the world. They surveyed the air quality of several of the world's largest countries and took note of the cities within those countries that had recorded the worst pollution.

Once they had compiled a table of air quality index scores from around the world, they set about finding a way to represent the data within the built form of their pavilion. They researched the visual effect of particulate matter in the atmosphere and realized that excessive pollution typically causes the sky to take on an orange tint — a fact now familiar to anyone who has been following news of the California wildfires.

Rick and Mina decided that each glass panel in their pavilion would represent a different global city. Each of the panels would be tinted orange in proportion with the air quality of its corresponding city: the worse the air quality, the deeper the orange hue.

Top: A rendering of the view from inside the pavilion. Bottom: A view of the skylight at the pavilion's centre.

A visitor to the Air Quality Index Pavilion enters from the outer edge of the "flower," where the lightest-orange glass (representing the least polluted cities) is located. As the visitor progresses towards the centre of the pavilion, he or she encounters glass panes that are deeper orange, representing cities with poorer air quality. At the centre of the pavilion, in the middle of the whorl of glass, the orange is so intense that it's almost opaque. Bathed in orange light, the visitor has a visceral experience of the effect of air pollution on the earth's atmosphere.

At the very centre of the pavilion, the glass petals part, leaving a round, open portal through which a visitor can look up and see blue sky. "This element of the design was inspired by James Turrell's skylights," Rick says. "Visitors have the ability to look up and see the bright blue sky when they're covered with this orange light filtering through the glass. It's a hopeful moment at the centre of our installation."

The World Architecture Festival, where Rick and Mina will present their design and vie for the grand prize in their category, will take place in June 2021.

As the world's political scene grows more and more volatile, architects are increasingly considering ways of using their work to lend support to activist movements. Bracket [Takes Action], a new book co-edited by Mason White, a Daniels Faculty professor, and Neeraj Bhatia, an associate professor of architecture at the California College of the Arts, aims to introduce readers to new ways of making change in the world through design.

"The interest was in understanding architecture and design's activist agency today," White says. "We wanted to compile writing on how architects and the impacts of design in the public realm foster or interact with modes of activism. This could be through the act of design, the design process, or through thematic investigations."

[Takes Action] — the fourth in a series of publications in the Bracket series, which White co-founded in 2008 — consists of 43 different essays and design projects. The contents are split into six different thematic groups: ReAction, CounterAction, InterAction, FAction, InAction, and RetroAction. Each theme highlights a different way designers are responding to the socio-political moment.

The book's segmented structure enables it to include submissions on a variety of topics, from many different sources. Its contributors include Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, from Atelier Bow-Wow; Mariam Kamara, of the Niger-based firm Atelier Masōmī; and Matthew Mazzotta, an American artist who frequently incorporates activism into his work. Another contributor is Azadeh Zaferani, a graduate of the Daniels Faculty's Master of Urban Design program, who wrote about the transformation of public space in Tehran.

"The contributors are looking at anything from housing rights, to social media's impact on public space, to squatting," White says. "And some contributors are looking at refugee camps, or contested access to energy. And sometimes they're just asking what role technology plays, looking at how the internet gets used in public space to advocate for overlooked voices or oppressed peoples."

Bracket [Takes Action] is now available for purchase on Amazon, or from the publisher at a 30 per cent discount — but buying the book isn't the only way to engage with its contributors' ideas. Throughout the fall, the Daniels Faculty and the California College of the Arts will be co-hosting a series of online talks with Bracket's writers and editors. The first one, on ReAction and CounterAction, took place on September 16. Two more are planned: InterAction and FAction, on October 7, and InAction and RetroAction, on November 11. These events will be free of charge and open to the public.