Anyone searching for King William Street, a major dining and entertainment strip in Hamilton, Ontario, will soon have a new landmark to navigate by. Make Studio — a design-build practice led by sessional lecturer Dina Sarhane, Daniels alumnus Mani Mani (MArch 2010), and Tom Svilans, a designer and researcher at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen — has won a competition to build a tall, functional piece of public art at the street's eastern terminus.

Make Studio was announced as the winner of Hamilton's King William Street Beacon and Gate Public Art Project competition on October 16. The studio's winning design, titled "Wood Gate," consists of a series of custom wood glulam arms, arranged to resemble a tall tree that has been splintered, as if by lightning. ("Glulam" is short for glued laminated timber, a durable engineered wood product.) The design is intended to complement the surrounding urban streetscape while symbolizing Hamilton's transition from a manufacturing town to an arts and hospitality hub.

The eight-metre-tall structure satisfies the "beacon" part of the city's design brief, and it also acts as concealment for a utilitarian element: an internal pulley system allows one of the glulam arms to be lowered to street level, so it can serve as a barricade to vehicle traffic during pedestrian-focused public events. (That's the "gate.")

Make Studio's proposal was one of six to make the city's shortlist. The competition jury, in its public report, praised Wood Gate for the way its design "creates a welcome connection to nature, speaks to evolution and growth and brings a unique warmth to the street."

Wood Gate is scheduled to be installed during summer 2021. "We are thrilled that municipalities are welcoming the use of wood in our public spaces," Sarhane says. "We are advocates for the use of wood in the public realm because we see the material choice as sustainable, local and inviting. It is a humble and tactile material that is readily available in our country. With advances in digital fabrication, it can be transformed into infinite possibilities."

The Wood Gate design includes a number of innovative touches, starting with the wood itself. Make Studio will be using yellow cedar to create a custom, free-form glulam material designed to resist weather and wear. Recessed within the glulam arms will be strips of high-intensity LED lights. The lights will serve a dual purpose: they'll illuminate the beacon with white light and also serve as a warning system, by flashing red when the barricade is being lowered.

The design also includes a public bench, which will be installed on the other side of King William Street, opposite the beacon. The bench will double as a locking mechanism for the barricade, and will also conceal a storage area for the barricade's pulley handle and "road closure" sign.

Designing and building public works projects out of engineered wood is a specialty of Make Studio, which was founded by Sarhane and Mani in 2016. (Sarhane is also the founder of DS Studio, a separate architecture and urban design practice.) The studio's other recent projects include "Turtle Tower," a beacon-like wooden public sculpture that resembles an elongated turtle shell, now under construction in Kelowna, British Columbia. And Make is currently at work on developing a system of wooden playground equipment for public use.

In a normal year, one of the highlights of the semester for instructors and undergraduate students in Architecture Studio III (ARC361) is midterms, when students present elaborate physical models that creatively reinterpret a famous home somewhere in the world. This year, with everyone studying from home, that collective experience couldn't happen. But studio coordinator Petros Babasikas and studio instructors Anne-Marie Armstrong and Adrian Phiffer still found a way to replicate some of the creative joy of in-person presentations: they had students make videos.

Each ARC361 student made a model using whatever physical or digital materials were available to them at home, and then used that model as the basis for a short film. The goal of each was film was to give the viewer a sense of what it would be like to be inside the model. "Students tried to get a point of view and tell a story through that," Babasikas says. "We also talked about genre, and whether there was suspense in the films they made."

Students proved so adept at creating architectural drama in their short films that Babasikas is planning to make video a permanent part of ARC361's syllabus, even after the pandemic ends. "We usually represent architectural design as finished, vacant drawings and images. But architecture is never finished and always occupied: it's a time-based process, creating atmosphere and stories," Babasikas says. "Filmmaking is just a natural next part of this process. It is very close to the premise of the studio, which is about architecture and domesticity. Working between model-making and filmmaking, the students have produced design fictions."

Here's a look at a few videos from the studio.

Hazel Gao, "I Wish I Were a Flying Whale..."

Hazel took on the Eames House, by Charles and Ray Eames. The home is now a museum, its interior still packed with the Eames's ultra-stylish furniture and personal possessions. Hazel chose those household objects as the focus of her video exploration. "She made physical models, very carefully and delicately, of all these domestic pieces," Babasikas says. "And she started setting up different domestic arrangements. Each one is very dramatic, as if something has just happened there. And then there's this character, a whale, which is a prominent piece of Indigenous artwork in the Eames House and Office. She animates this whale and has it fly through and connect these different domestic interiors."

Carissa Tzeng, "The Wanderers of the Void"

Carissa's video is a reinterpretation of Manuel Aires Mateus's House in Leiria, a home that is distinguished by a large central void. "She built a model of that void, and then she started inhabiting it," Babasikas says. "It's no longer the void of a house. It's a kind of transparent space that she lights, and then she starts populating it with these characters that appear and disappear, like ghosts."

Yuhan Zhang, "BREATH"

Yuhan studied Lina Bo Bardi's Glass House, in Sao Paolo. To capture some of the original home's transparency, she made a model out of parallel plexiglas sheets. The video shows the sheets being added and removed in stop motion, which gives the viewer a feeling moving through the house's interior. Midway through the video, Yuhan submerges the model in water and uses pigment to create a strange, atmospheric effect.

Nezar Alkujok, "Through the Window"

Nezar reinterpreted Edwin Lutyens' Orchards, an Arts and Crafts home located in the English countryside. His video takes elements from the original house — windows, a vaulted ceiling, a loggia — and recombines them to tell a story.

Eric Wang, "Overlapping"

Eric's precedent was Pezo von Ellrichshausen's Poli House, a residence and cultural centre located in Chile that looks, from a distance, like an unfinished concrete shell. Eric's video shows off an alternate-reality version of the house that consists of a series of sliding, overlapping planes.

Soroush Ehsani-Yeganeh, "The Study of a Precedent — Casa Gaspar (1992)"

Soroush studied Alberto Campo Baeza's Casa Gaspar, a modern courtyard house in Spain. In Soroush's video, the property becomes a planetoid where the laws of physics and geometry don't apply. By the end of the video, the house seems to become the focal point of an alternate universe.

Chenxi Cai, "Moriyama House Revisited"

Chenxi's video is based on SANAA's Moriyama House, an experimental housing complex in Tokyo that is characterized by square volumes and a modular, multi-unit arrangement. "She built a model of certain axes, certain voids, and certain spaces in the Moriyama House," Babasikas says. "You get views that penetrate across the block. And then she started repopulating the interior. What's really interesting is the way she creates weightlessness. There are a lot of people floating in intermediary spaces."

Melody Ekbatani, "SUPERYAMA"

Melody's video places a version of SANAA's Moriyama House inside an arcade-style crane game. The arm of the crane traverses the property, dropping people and objects as it goes.

Professor Richard Sommer, who was dean of the Daniels Faculty before the conclusion of his term last summer, has co-authored a story for the latest issue of Cabinet, a Brooklyn-based arts and culture magazine.

The piece, which Sommer wrote in collaboration with Natalie Fizer, of Pillow Culture, is titled Glossary of Dream Architecture. It consists of a series of capsule essays about words and concepts that guided the creation of New Circadia, the immersive, cavelike installation that Sommer and Pillow Culture staged in the Daniels Building's Architecture and Design Gallery in late 2019.

New Circadia consisted of a dimly lit, felt-lined space suffused with soft, calming sound. Visitors were invited to linger, rest, and lose track of time.

Sommer and Fizer write:

The glossary gathers buildings, landscapes, events, films, stories, drawings, and other projects that can also be understood to constitute a makeshift history of dream design. Its contents are organized under the following headings: Air, Bricolage, Cave, Cloister, Glass, Grotto, Model, Mountain Aerie, Phantasmagoria, Stone, Temple, Test Bed, Vehicle, and Water. The history the glossary imputes is provisional to our own purposes and guides our ideas about how architecture models time to shape a space of dreams through the measuring, marking, and bounding of various human practices. The dream-inducing architecture of New Circadia begins with a search for tempos within the various and overlapping versions of time we inhabit. These include, but are not limited to: geological/deep time, mechanical/industrial time, wasted/idling time, broken/discontinuous time, organic/biological time, and mythical/story time.

Read the full glossary on the Cabinet website.

Take me to Cabinet magazine

Top image: Inside New Circadia. Photograph by Bob Gundu.

The Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture — better known as ACADIA — has been hosting annual conferences for almost as long as personal computers have existed. This year's edition, which begins on October 24, is exceptional for two reasons: one, it's going to be taking place entirely online, and two, one of the event's co-chairs is a Daniels Faculty assistant professor, Maria Yablonina.

Yablonina, whose area of expertise is computational design and digital fabrication, joined the Daniels Faculty earlier this year after several years at the Institute for Computational Design and Construction, in Stuttgart. She's a member of ACADIA's board of directors.

ACADIA had originally planned to hold this year's 40th-annual conference at the University of Pennsylvania — but, when the pandemic made that impossible, Maria banded together with a few other members of the ACADIA board (Viola Ago, Matias del Campo, Shelby Elizabeth Doyle, Adam Marcus, and Brian Slocum) to develop an alternative plan.

Transforming the conference into a fully digital event required the co-chairs to rethink some of the basic elements of a professional gathering. The conference's title, "Distributed Proximities," hints at some of the changes that needed to be made. For starters, all of the lectures, workshops, and presentations will (obviously) be taking place on Zoom. But the adjustments didn't end there.

"We've made quite a few changes to the traditional format of the conference," Yablonina says. "One of the big changes that I'm really looking forward to is that we've rethought the whole format of the keynote. Traditionally you would have a single person talking about their work, which in our feeling is a very egocentric format. So we've replaced that with conversations. Every single keynote will have anywhere from two to five participants."

Among this year's keynotes will be "A Conversation on Ecology and Ethics," with Jennifer Gabrys, chair in media, culture, and environment at the University of Cambridge's department of sociology. Gabrys will be sharing a virtual stage with Molly Wright Steenson, the K&L Gates associate professor of ethics and computational technologies at Carnegie Mellon. "The keynote event will feature a presentation of work from both participants as well as a conversation between these two incredible scholars," Yablonina says.

Another keynote, titled "On Data and Bias," will be a discussion between Ruha Benjamin, an associate professor of African American studies at Princeton; Orit Halpern, an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia; and David Benjamin, an associate professor at Columbia GSAPP. The three will talk about the way computation relates to our assumptions about race and gender.

"With this year’s conference lineup we are aiming to extend the range of conversations by speakers from a broad range of fields beyond architecture," Yablonina says. ”For every keynote panel there is an architect as part of the conversation or in the role of respondent. Through this pairing we are hoping to initiate a dialogue about larger societal implications of technology in design."

And the Daniels Faculty will have some representation at the conference. Assistant professor Mitchell Akiyama will be holding a workshop on October 24 and 25 in which he'll be leading participants through a series of guided writing exercises using "Under the Dog Star," a website he created for that purpose. John Nguyen, a student of assistant professor Brady Peters, will be presenting a paper about computational fluid dynamics in building design. Yablonina herself will be presenting a paper, titled "Designing [with] Machines," about the development of task-specific and site-specific robotic systems for architectural purposes.

Pre-registration is required to attend to the ACADIA Distributed Proximities conference. Students can register for free, thanks to support from Autodesk, an ACADIA sponsor. For everyone else, admission starts at $125.

Take me to the Distributed Proximities registration page

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