George Baird is many things to the Daniels Faculty: a graduate (BArch 1962), a long-time professor, and a former dean. But Baird's influence extends well beyond the university. A new book, The Architect and the Public: On George Baird's Contribution to Architecture, attempts to explain how Baird's conception of "the public" in architecture and urbanism impacted the development of those fields.

The book, edited by Daniels Faculty lecturer Roberto Damiani and published by Italy-based Quodlibet, is an outgrowth of "George Baird: A Question of Influence," a 2012 symposium hosted by the Daniels Faculty. The finished volume consists of 19 essays and interviews about Baird's work and his contributions to architectural theory.

Among the book's group of essayists and interview subjects are international architecture luminaries like Kenneth Frampton and Peter Eisenman. But much of the writing and talking is done by voices from closer to home, like KPMB's Bruce Kuwabara, who studied under Baird in the 1960s; Michael Piper, director of the Daniels Faculty's Master of Urban Design program; and Richard Sommer, who just completed his appointment as the Daniels Faculty's dean.

"In choosing and arranging the book's elements, I wanted to highlight Baird's intellectual commitment to envisioning architecture as a social and political construction," Damiani says. "It became clear to me that Baird's conceptualization of public space is much broader than the design of the physical environment of public streets and squares. His thinking assesses architecture as a medium of cultural representation that embodies the potential of engaging and empowering spontaneous forms of social life."

Baird has had a storied career in private practice. He's the founding principal of Baird Sampson Neuert Architects, which is known for its many public space and institutional commissions, both in Canada and abroad. Baird's early work included an influential report on design guidelines for Toronto's downtown. His firm's more recent highlights include the Old Post Office Plaza, in St. Louis, and York University's new McEwen Graduate Study and Research Building.

The book places Baird's accomplishments in context with the evolution of architectural thought during the latter half of the 20th century. "The reader will find critical references to the formation of what we now define as architectural theory," Damiani says, "as well as the transatlantic intellectual exchange between North America and Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, the development of architectural pedagogy in North America, and finally the design guidelines that shaped downtown Toronto."

The Architect and the Public is available from the publisher's website, and will soon be for sale on Amazon.

The Centre International du Commerce Extérieur du Sénégal (CICES) is unlike anything else in sub-Saharan Africa. The 19.5-hectare convention centre, located in the city of Dakar, is characterized by daring triangular and trapezoidal forms. Traditional Senegalize motifs blend seamlessly with the modernist, early-1970s designs of architects Jean-François Lamoureux and Jean-Louis Marin.

In recent years, the architecture at CICES has begun to deteriorate, largely as a result of neglect. Now, Daniels Faculty associate professor Aziza Chaouni will have an opportunity to help reverse the site's decline, thanks to a $190,000 (U.S.) Keeping it Modern grant from the Getty Foundation.

The Keeping it Modern grant was established in 2014 to address a worldwide lack of expertise in preserving modernist buildings. These structures are often misunderstood by their owners, which can lead to them being damaged in renovations or demolished altogether. And many of them were built using experimental systems and materials that simply don't stand the test of time.

As the principal investigator of CICES's Keeping it Modern grant, Chaouni will work with a Senegalese architect, Mourtada Gueye, to enact a multi-step preservation process. Chaouni and Gueye will perform research and data collection, conduct an in-depth diagnostic study of CICES's buildings and infrastructure, and develop a comprehensive conservation plan for the complex.

This won't be Chaouni's first time championing CICES's built heritage. In February, she led an international workshop in which students from three countries, including a contingent from the Daniels Faculty, convened at CICES to study the site. The success of the workshop helped raise awareness of CICES's value as an exemplar of African modernist design. (Daniels students Clara Ziada, Cheryl Wei, Christian Paez Diaz, and Noor Alkhalili, who joined the workshop, will be releasing a publication about the trip in August.)

Chaouni was a recipient of a previous Keeping it Modern grant, in 2017, for the purpose of developing a conservation plan for Morocco's modernist Sidi Harazem bath complex, designed by architect Jean-François Zevaco.

The Daniels Faculty and Dean Wright are pleased to announce that Vivian Lee has been appointed to the position of director of the Master of Architecture program. She brings a wealth of teaching experience and the insights of a well-regarded professional to the position. We look forward to her leadership at the Faculty.

Wei-Han Vivian Lee is a registered architect in the U.S. and Canada, and an assistant professor at the University of Toronto's Daniels Faculty. As founding partner of LAMAS, Lee brings to the studio her research on the role of craft in the age of digital architecture as related to issues of labour, professional practice, vernacular traditions, and ornament.

LAMAS was named one of the world's 50 best architecture firms by Domus in 2020. The firm was included by Architect Magazine in its series “Next Progressives" in 2017. LAMAS has won awards for both its built projects and its speculative research. In 2019, the firm was awarded Best Research Project by Architect's Newspaper for its project “Delirious Facade.” LAMAS also won Frame Magazine’s Bar of the Year Award in 2020 for Avling Brewery. The studio was shortlisted in 2014 by MoMA PS1’s Young Architects Program. Prior to LAMAS, Lee practiced as a project manager at SHoP Architects and LTL Architects in New York City. While at SHoP Architects, she co-led her team to earn a P/A Award for the NYC East River Waterfront project in 2008.

Lee received her Master of Architecture from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. She holds a BA in studio arts from Wesleyan University, where she was awarded the Jessup Prize in 1999.

For the second time in the past few weeks, Archinect has featured a thesis project by a recent Daniels Faculty graduate — part of a series of stories on student thesis projects completed within the past year. This time, the featured project is "Everyday Data," which was presented in fall 2019 by Rachel Chan.

"Everyday Data envisions how data aesthetic and infrastructure will infiltrate our domestic lives both culturally and physically in our visionary future," Rachel writes. "The internet continues to require an ever-growing network of physical data space – undersea cables, mega data centers, and so on – and an increasingly visible part of the rural landscape. If the internet is so prominent in our everyday lives, how can its infrastructure and aesthetic infiltrate our domestic lives both culturally and physically in the future?"

Read the full story on Archinect

Assistant professor Brady Peters is known for his work on architectural acoustics — the art and science of controlling the way sound travels in built environments. Earlier this week, Research2Reality, an organization co-founded by U of T professor Molly Shoichet to highlight university research online, released a short YouTube video featuring Peters and his work. The video, shot in the Daniels Building prior to the COVID-19 lockdown, is embedded above. You can also watch it on YouTube.

In 2017, assistant professor Carol Moukheiber was in Lebanon, teaching at the American University of Beirut. She and a Beirut-based colleague, AUB instructor Rana Samara Jubayli, were struck by the way the city's approach to planning left certain parts of its urban fabric looking threadbare.

Beirut's zoning rules mandate that plots of land be a certain minimum size in order to be developed into tall buildings. Privately owned lots that aren't large enough for development tend to remain vacant for long periods of time. "These lots are noticeable when you're in Beirut," Moukheiber says. "There are all these gaps. They're sometimes interesting places where informal activities take place, but a lot of times they're places where people are just dumping things. Sometimes they add to public life, but sometimes they do the opposite."

That observation became the basis for a 2019 research studio, in which third-year Daniels Faculty graduate students, under Moukheiber's supervision, collaborated with AUB students studying under Samara Jubayli and guest professor Christos Marcopoulos (who previously taught at the Daniels Faculty).

Over the course of the semester, students at both universities worked to design architectural solutions to the problem of Beirut's underutilized lots. Moukheiber and her colleagues at the AUB have now collected some of those designs in a new book, titled Inhabiting Invisible Plots.

Top: Infill lot typologies in Beirut. Bottom: A map of land use in Beirut. Both images taken from Inhabiting Invisible Plots.

A print edition is in the works, but for now the book can be read in its entirety online.

The principal aim of the research studio was to find ways of using Beirut's small, undeveloped lots to address the city's housing affordability crisis. Students were tasked with developing new types of collective housing that could exist on oddly shaped bits of vacant land — but without sacrificing life essentials like privacy, access to air and light, and access to common areas.

The book details the research conducted by the studio's participants. Daniels Faculty students did an intensive study of architectural precedents, in order to gain a sense of how other cities around the world have developed collective housing. At the AUB, meanwhile, students analyzed and mapped Beirut's infill lots. At one point in the semester, Moukheiber took her students on a class trip to Lebanon (this was pre-COVID, and before the onset of Lebanon's recent economic and political crisis), where they met their AUB counterparts in person.

The book concludes with a selection of architectural designs by students at both universities. Each design is a distinct response to the studio's design prompt, tailored to fit an actual vacant lot located somewhere in Beirut.

Section of Linnea Coveney's "tall row."

Daniels student Linnea Coveney designed a new housing type she called a "tall row" — essentially an extra-tall row house complex, designed to fit three households onto a narrow lot. The housing units are placed side-by-side in such a way that all of them have ground-level access and city views. The structure is topped with a greenhouse, which Coveney designed to be reminiscent of a Babylonian hanging garden. All three units share a central guest bedroom — an innovative touch of collectivity.

Coveney's design is just one of 18 student projects included in Inhabiting Invisible Plots. Eight are by Daniels students, and the other 10 are by students of the AUB.

Click here to read Inhabiting Invisible Plots now

Adrian Phiffer, an assistant professor at the Daniels Faculty, didn't come up with the name for his newly released book, Strange Primitivism, entirely on his own.

"'Strange primitivism' is a characterization that I've heard friends using when they speak about my design work. It's not my own invention," he says. "The reason I'm embracing this characterization is that I do think my designs aim towards a sense of primitivism — meaning, a sense of legibility and honesty in the way that form, materials, and program are being manipulated."

The book, a collection of 35 essays about Phiffer's architectural design practice and his experiences teaching design students at the Daniels Faculty, went on sale yesterday. It includes autobiographical notes, brief treatises on architectural theory, and thoughts on life and design in Toronto.

The volume was published by The Architectural Observer, a small publishing house run by Daniels Faculty lecturer Hans Ibelings.

In his writing, Phiffer has attempted to replicate some of the forthrightness that he strives for in his architectural practice. "Overall," he says, "the book is characterized by a sense of honesty that maybe is typical for someone who has grown up in Eastern Europe." (Phiffer is from Romania.)

"My ambition was to unearth parts of the process of working in the architectural realm that sometimes are not fully revealed, because designers would feel uncomfortable revealing them."

The book's intentionally fragmented layout and its four different covers (which Phiffer says are a way to "engage with readers in a visual dialogue about having, or not having, an image") were created by Haller Brun, a Dutch designer. The pages are filled with images of Phiffer's projects, as well as his students' projects.

Strange Primitivism's cover price is $37.50, and it's now available on Amazon.

Jessica Ying (MArch 2019) presented her Master of Archiecture thesis project, titled "Reading Between the Lines," during the fall 2019 review period. Her series of graceful, 3D-printed forms — produced under the tutelage of her advisor, associate professor John Shnier — was recently featured on Archinect, as part of a series of stories on student thesis projects completed within the past year.

Read the full story on Archinect

Image: Jessica Ying's thesis project, on display at the Daniels Building in fall 2019.

Associate professor Aziza Chaouni has recorded a free public lecture about her work restoring Sidi Harazem, a modernist bath complex in Morocco.

Chaouni's lecture, part of "Space, Health, and Care," an online lecture series co-hosted by her and Toma Berlanda, of the School of Architecture, Planning, and Geomatics at the University of Cape Town, is available on the APG UCT Vimeo channel, and is also embedded above. Chaouni will also be conducting a live online conversation about Sidi Harazem, beginning at 10 a.m. EST on Wednesday, June 3. The chat will stream on the the University of Cape Town's Bachelor of Architectural Studies Instagram, which can be found right here.

The Space, Health, and Care online lecture series will also include video lectures and live chats with the following other architects, all of whom will be speaking on topics related to the creation of new futures amidst a global pandemic:

• James Mitchell and Carolina Larrazábal (BuildX Studio, Nairobi)
• Baerbel Mueller ([applied] Foreign Affairs, Vienna)
• Christian Benimana (MASS Design Group, Kigali)
• Rachel Lee (Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich)

For more details, and to view the lectures and livestreams, visit the APG UCT Vimeo and Instagram pages.

Yahya Abdullah, a Master of Architecture student, took the year off from his studies at the Daniels Faculty in 2019. He travelled to Italy to take a course on architectural restoration. There, he met a new friend, Claudio Araya, an architecture student at the Universidad Finis Terrae, in Chile. Soon afterward, Yahya and Claudio both landed internships at OMA, the renowned Rotterdam-based architecture firm.

"As rigorous as OMA is, we found that we had some weekends where we needed something to do," Yahya says. "So we figured we'd enter a few competitions."

Eventually, Yahya and Claudio came upon a competition that seemed to play to their strengths: a Young Architects Competitions contest that called upon entrants to design a way to restore Craco, a medieval Italian town that was abandoned in the late 20th century as a result of natural disasters, and that now lingers on as a picturesque ruin, frequented by tourists and film crews but otherwise devoid of human life.

Yahya and Claudio had just been in Italy, studying restoration, no less. The brief seemed tailor-made for them. And yet, the ideas weren't flowing. They spent a week thinking about the problem with few results. They were considering giving up.

Then, finally, they hit upon what seemed like a workable concept. And in the end, it was more than just workable: their competition entry, titled "Traces," won first place, netting them a cash prize of 8,000 euros (approximately $12,000) and the esteem of a jury of prominent international architects.

Yahya (left) and Claudio (right).

Yahya and Claudio's design solution was intentionally minimal. Their goal was to provide amenities for visitors to Craco without dramatically altering any of the ruined buildings. "The town is so rooted in its history," Yahya says. "It would be a shame to take a modernist brush and get rid of a lot of the town's legacy. We didn't want to take away from that."

Yahya and Claudio's design proposes building guest accommodations within some of Craco's ruined homes. Their design calls for the homes to be stabilized with a "nesting" of wood frame and wire mesh. The smaller homes would become modest shelters for day trippers looking for places to relax. Some of the larger structures would have their interiors converted into villas — hotel-like environments where families or groups of friends could spend a few days in relative comfort.

A shelter structure, nested within one of Craco's ruined buildings.

The pair also designed a corridor of public amenity structures that revive the town's centre without erasing the damage wrought by years of abandonment. For example, a ruined church, with only minor upgrades, becomes a performance space:

Yahya and Claudio's site plan also includes a "gallery path" (a type of linear art gallery that runs through a series of ruined buildings), a restaurant, a library, and a wellness centre. They envisioned transforming the town's tallest structure, a small tower, into a scenic overlook. "We did studies on travel," Yahya says. "The idea was to not have people walk more than five minutes to get somewhere. We kept everything very close, while still maintaining levels of privacy."

A section showing the relationship between the tower overlook and the town below.

Now back in Toronto, Yahya is preparing to enter the third year of his Daniels Faculty MArch studies in the fall.