COVID-19 has architects speculating on how cities and architecture might change during the pandemic and in the post-pandemic world. Robert Levit, an associate professor and associate dean at the Daniels Faculty, joined Carie Penabad, director of the Bachelor of Architecture program at the University of Miami, for a conversation (conducted online, naturally) about the effects of the lockdown on how we think about our built environments. Video of their talk is embedded above, or you can watch it on YouTube.

Their encounter was part of "Architecture and the Great Confinement," a video interview series being produced by the University of Miami School of Architecture. Recent participants in the series include another University of Toronto luminary: the Rotman School of Management's Richard Florida.

The full series playlist is here.

When Tye Farrow (BArch 1987), a Daniels Faculty alumnus and president of the University of Toronto Alumni Association, first heard that cities and countries around the world were building temporary hospitals for COVID-19 patients, he was impressed by the initiative — but he was underwhelmed by the design. The makeshift patient rooms were frequently small, dark, and spartan. Many were little more than curtained-off areas inside retrofitted convention centres. He wondered: what if there was a way to design a hospital ward that was quick to build, but that still provided a high-quality environment for patients and medical workers, with ample space and light?

Then it occurred to him: there was a way.

For the past few years, Farrow's practice, Farrow Partners, has been experimenting with Grip Metal, a super strong, velcro-like material made by Nucap, an automotive brake manufacturer. Grip Metal uses tiny metal hooks to securely attach itself to a variety of materials, like wood, concrete, and plastic. Two-sided Grip Metal — a metal strip with hooks on both its upper and lower surfaces — can be used as a substitute for chemical adhesives.

Before the pandemic, Nucap and Farrow Partners had jointly developed a way of using Grip Metal to bind scraps of wood into sturdy wooden bricks, about the size and shape of concrete blocks. The bricks are assembled with Grip Metal and then subjected to enormous pressure by an industrial press, which causes the Grip Metal's tiny hooks to form a permanent mechanical bond with the wood. The bricks' tops and bottoms are lined with more Grip Metal, which allows them to be securely stacked, without any need for skilled carpentry or masonry. They're like Lego bricks — except they're large and stable enough to be used in full-sized, real-world construction.

Top: a wooden brick, with Grip Metal surface. Bottom: a close-up of a strip of Grip Metal.

Farrow decided that he would attempt to use these wooden bricks as the basis for a new type of quick-assembly hospital for COVID-19 care.

Within a few weeks of the onset of the pandemic, Farrow Partners had arrived at a design that achieved the hoped-for standard of quality — and, crucially, was easy to build with a minimum of involvement from skilled trades. Farrow calls the design the "Solace Rapid Assembly High Performance Covid-19 Inpatient Bed Solution."

"Right now, if you build a building, approximately 80 per cent of the cost of the building is labour," Farrow says. "With these wooden bricks, the skilled labour cost is brought down significantly. I could stack the walls myself. You can build something rapidly that's as strong as it would be if you were using concrete blocks, and it has the feel of a permanent building."

Unlike many other designs for temporary hospital spaces, Farrow's design does not repurpose an existing structure, like a convention centre or a shipping container. The entire frame of the temporary hospital ward is made from Grip Metal–equipped wooden bricks. Once stacked, the velcro-like surfaces of the bricks interlock, holding the bricks tightly together. Tie rods secure the structure, allowing it to resist physical stress.

Farrow's goal with the design was to create an interior that "causes health" by immersing patients and healthcare workers in a (relatively) pleasant environment, with plenty of natural light.

"Sitting in a black box is really bad for your health," Farrow says. "There are studies that show if you take a patient that has had heart surgery, and you put them in an inpatient room that has a view of the sky, they heal faster, they use less medicine, they have better outcomes, and they have shorter stays in the hospital."

Drawing on considerable past experience designing hospitals and other healthcare facilities, Farrow Partners' architects came up with a U-shaped floor plan. On the edges of the U are 12 patient rooms, each one 12 by 14 feet. The generous square footage ensures that medical workers can move freely around a patient's bed, which greatly eases the process of performing medical procedures.

The Solace Rapid Assembly floor plan.

In the centre of the U is a clinical workstation, where medical staff can don or remove protective equipment and perform other work functions. All the patient beds face inward, toward the workstation, in order to allow medical staff to monitor their charges at all times. This arrangement created a design problem: if the only thing in a patient's line of sight was the workstation, how would it be possible for them to see natural light?

To address this, Farrow's designers added a row of windows around the ceiling of the workstation. A patient reclining in a bed would be sitting at precisely the right angle to see a sliver of sky.

A section of a patient room, showing the sightline from bed to window.

Farrow's designers also gave some thought to the space's mechanical elements. Each room in an intensive care unit requires numerous electrical and gas connections. Maintaining those connections in a COVID-19 ward presents an obvious hazard to technicians, who might be exposed to the virus while fixing some machinery. The Farrow Partners design addresses this problem by putting all of the structure's mechanical and electrical systems in a corridor behind the patient rooms, separated by a wall.

The floor plan is designed to be repeatable. Two of the U-shaped 12-bed wards could be linked together to form a 24-bed, square-shaped ward. Two or more of those 24-bed squares could be linked with corridors to create even larger hospital floor plans.

At the end of the temporary hospital's service life, Farrow says it would be possible to reuse much of the structure. The Grip Metal bricks can be pulled apart, much like Lego blocks, and saved for future use.

Nucap is currently manufacturing thousands of Grip Metal bricks, using wood salvaged from wooden shipping pallets. Farrow Partners, for its part, has already used some of the bricks to build a full-sized mockup of three intensive-care patient rooms inside a barn in King City.

According to Farrow, there is considerable interest from government and industry in using the bricks to construct temporary hospital spaces. "We've had discussions not only with hospitals, but in education and long-term care," he says. "And that's not only locally, but in the United States and Israel."

During the 2019 school year, fourth-year undergraduate architecture students were given the option to undertake thesis projects. (Previously, thesis projects were exclusively for graduate students.) These undergrads were required to attend seminars tailored to their area of study — design, history and theory, or technology — and they were encouraged to develop projects that were thematically related to schools and education. They were otherwise free to pursue their own research interests. Each project was developed over the course of an entire academic year.

The optional undergraduate thesis program is open to all incoming fourth-year architecture undergrads. If you're an undergrad who's interested in applying, you can find information on prerequisites and eligibility in the Architectural Studies academic calendar. Applications for the 2020/2021 academic year are due on June 1, 2020. Application forms are available from the Office of the Registrar and Student Services.

What did this year's undergraduate thesis students produce? Here's a brief look at three projects.

Raphael Kay and Kevin Nitiema

Raphael and Kevin's thesis project was born long before the start of the school year, in April 2019. Raphael had received an NSERC Undergraduate Student Research Award, which provided him with a stipend for working as a research assistant to associate professor Benjamin Hatton.

Hatton works in the University of Toronto's Department of Materials Science and Engineering's Functional and Adaptive Surfaces Group. Among his lab's many research projects was one of particular interest to Raphael: an experimental technique for using microfluidic devices (devices capable of precisely manipulating very small amounts of liquid) to create windows that can automatically adapt to changing climate conditions. By pumping liquid into tiny channels between a sandwiched pair of window panes, Hatton's research group believed it might be possible to change the thermal properties of the glass.

For their thesis project, Raphael and Kevin decided to work together on developing a different type of fluid-filled window for use in architecture. Hatton's research is often inspired by biological forms and processes. Raphael and Kevin decided to pursue a similar tack. They became interested in krill, tiny crustaceans that live in oceans around the world. Certain species of krill react to intense sunlight by changing the colours of their exoskeletons. Under high magnification, the change is obvious: tiny orange pockets in a krill's chitinous skin expand and expand until the krill, initially almost completely transparent, takes on the pinkish colour of cooked shrimp. The pinkish pigment blocks the sun's ultraviolet rays, protecting the krill's internal organs from radiation damage.

The exoskeleton of a krill, from Raphael and Kevin's project presentation. They sourced these images from a study published in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

Raphael and Kevin wanted to take that basic mechanism — a skin that deploys a layer of protective pigment to ward off excessive sunlight — and put it on a building. “Building skin should be designed like animal skin,” Raphael says. "We think we can scale biology architecturally."

Over many months of collaborative work, they modified a working prototype of Charlie Katrycz’s (a PhD student within the Functional and Adaptive Surfaces Group, who had spent a decade developing systems of the kind in which Raphael and Kevin were interested). This prototype window consisted of two layers of plexiglass. They suspended small amounts of liquid, like oil or molasses, in between the two layers. Then, using a piece of tubing, they pumped a small amount of a thinner material, like water or air, into the pocket between the plexiglass panes. Because the two materials in the middle of this plexiglass sandwich had different levels of viscosity, their interaction produced a snowflake-like, spreading pattern. The effect is known, in materials science, as "viscous fingering." Raphael also learned about the fingering phenomenon from Charlie. The results were very reminiscent of the spots on the krill.

A demonstration of viscous fingering between panes of glass, from Raphael and Kevin's project presentation, first designed by Charlie Katrycz. The dark areas are molasses, and the light areas are air.

Raphael and Kevin demonstrated, through their testing, that a technique like this one can produce windows with a built-in ability to adjust the amount of light passing through them, just like the exoskeleton of a krill. A light-blocking liquid — for example, water suffused with reflective titanium dioxide — can be pumped between the window panes to reduce light exposure, and then that liquid can be withdrawn to increase light exposure. Raphael has recently received another NSERC Undergraduate Student Research Award, and will use that funding to continue working with the Department of Materials Science and Engineering on related research.

Raphael and Kevin are hoping to co-author two peer-reviewed publications about their work, one for a science journal and one for an architecture journal*. "There needs to be a lot more testing, and a lot more data collection before we get there," Kevin says. "It's going to be a substantial amount of work."

*Note: Journal of Building Engineering published their work in 2022.

Saige Michel

Saige was interested in the relationship between young children, environmental education, and architecture. "The younger children are when they're exposed to environmental education, the bigger the impact on them later in life," she says.

Her thesis project, titled "Non-Anthropocentric Ways of Learning," consisted of a series of designs for primary-school learning environments. Each environment was intended to instil an early respect for nature in young students.

"I went fairly deep into the pedagogy of environmental education," Saige says. "Specifically in a physical sense, because that's what architecture is able to help with."

She decided to design her learning environments along four different themes: atmosphere (air), biosphere (plants and animals), hydrosphere (water), and lithosphere (rock). By representing all these different types of natural elements in her classroom spaces, she hoped to create a learning experience that would be representative of the earth's diverse landscapes.

Saige ended up designing 20 different learning environments. For each one, she meticulously hand-crafted a 16-by-16 centimetre scale model out of foam core, museum board, and other materials. She decided not to use laser cutters or 3D printers. "When you fabricate something on a machine, like a laser cutter, to a certain extent you need to have already finished your design," Saige says. "By hand-building, I found that I was able to change the design as I went along."

Saige's learning environments are subtle; her version of environmental pedagogy is not heavy-handed. One of her designs, which she calls "Boulder Threshold," is a cluster of large rocks that bridges the inside and outside of a school building, allowing children to gain an intimate familiarity with natural stone.

A rendering and model of "Boulder Threshold."

Another learning environment, "Untamed Forest," is exactly what it sounds like: a wilderness area where children can engage in unstructured learning about plants and animals:

Saige envisioned her 20 different learning environments being used as a toolkit of sorts: educators could deploy them as necessary, in mix-and-match fashion, on school grounds. Here's a rendering she created of what that might look like:

In this image, Saige's various design interventions are used in conjunction, to form a continuous learning area.

Joyce Sandoval

Early on in her thesis research, Joyce became interested in the Academy for Global Citizenship, a charter school located in the southwest Chicago neighbourhood of LeClaire Courts. The school was preparing to break ground on a new facility — a modern new building designed by Studio Gang.

As a student in the architecture program's history and theory stream, Joyce was fascinated by the history of LeClaire Courts. The neighbourhood was built in the middle of the 20th century as a public housing project. Then, about a decade ago, its housing units were largely demolished for redevelopment. Residents were scattered across the city. They were promised that they would be able to return to LeClaire Courts eventually, once the redevelopment process was complete. In this politically fraught context, The Academy for Global Citizenship has become a source of controversy. Some former residents of LeClaire Courts who were displaced for redevelopment see the school's expansion plans as a colonial-style incursion on land that used to be theirs.

Joyce decided to focus her thesis on developing design proposals for the future of LeClaire Courts. Her goal was to use her skills as a designer to speculate on ways of healing the neighbourhood's political divides — especially the divide between public housing residents and their new, more affluent neighbours.

While researching the neighbourhood, Joyce reached out to local experts. She spoke on the phone with a journalist who has covered LeClaire Courts, and with a representative of the CHA, Chicago's public housing authority. She visited Chicago twice, first on a group trip with other Daniels Faculty undergraduate thesis students, and then on her own, so she could spend time in the LeClaire Courts area and meet with locals. She held a stakeholder meeting with the principal of the Academy for Global Citizenship, neighbourhood residents, and community activists.

Her final project was a website, in which she detailed the history of LeClaire Courts and presented a series of speculative drawings. The drawings illustrate a vision, based on Joyce's discussions with stakeholders, of how the neighbourhood might address its many political and economic fault lines in years to come.

One thing Joyce heard repeatedly from stakeholders was that the neighbourhood lacked a grocery store. This drawing imagines a future in which the neighbourhood's food supply is secure:

This drawing imagines the Academy for Global Citizenship's current building — which will be vacant after the school moves into its new facility — being transformed into a community workshop:

Joyce also imagined parts of the former Academy building being transformed into a community kitchen:

"This school year took me out of my comfort zone," Joyce says. "I got to do different things that weren't architecture related. I got to build a website from scratch. I got to hold a stakeholder meeting. I got to travel to Chicago and do site observations. It definitely informed what I want to do in the future. I want to do urban design, ultimately."

Welcome to our new cohort of undergraduate students coming this fall. The Daniels Faculty has a long and distinguished 125-plus year history. There have been other times when we have had to cope with unpredictable circumstances. Our past and our present are replete with stories of our students, faculty, and staff rallying together for the greater good. Together with our faculty, undergraduate students in our Architectural Studies program have assembled some of those moments in the video above. You will also see previews of some of the exciting things you will be engaged in as a Daniels student.

We look forward to meeting everyone soon.

Jeannie Kim, Undergraduate Director, HBA Architectural Studies

Drew Adams (MArch 2011), at the age of 35, has already had a distinguished career in the nine years since he graduated from the Daniels Faculty. Now he has something else: the 2020 Emerging Architect Award, from the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada.

The award, formerly known as the "Young Architect Award," is given each year to a young architect who has demonstrated excellence in design, leadership, or service to the profession. Adams sees the win as a heartening vote of confidence in his career path, which has focused mostly on design for nonprofit clients. "What stands out to me is that it affirms a type of community-focused work that is too often under-recognized," Adams says. "More than ever, I'm optimistic about community-impact work and what we can still achieve together through collective action."

Adams is currently an associate at LGA Architectural Partners, where he has worked for the past seven years. He was the project architect for LGA's Evergreen Brick Works' Future Cities Centre, a former kiln building that now serves as a multifunctional event space. The project is known as one of Toronto's best and most prominent examples of adaptive reuse.

The Evergreen Brick Works' Future Cities Centre. Photograph by James Morely/A-Frame.

Adams also had a leading role in creating LGA's design for Eva's Phoenix, a transitional housing centre for homeless youth, located in downtown Toronto. The building's 10 townhouse-style units provide a supportive environment for young people who need a safe, temporary place to live, learn, and recover from trauma.

The RAIC jury noted Adams's frequent conference appearances and university guest lectures, as well the quality of his design work.

The jury writes: "Drew’s work displayed an impressive commitment to the benefits of material research, technical explorations of building systems, energy modelling, and daylight studies all in the service of designing and building a more inclusive living environment for those most in need in our communities."

Adams received the 2011 Irving Grossman Prize for his final thesis on innovative and sustainable housing design. Before entering the Daniels Faculty's Master of Architecture program, he graduated from the University of Waterloo, with a bachelor's degree in urban planning.

The COVID-19 pandemic has abruptly transformed university life, turning what used to be an intensely communal experience into a marathon of videoconference calls and work from home. As part of a series of "field notes on pandemic teaching" in Places Journal, associate professor Jesse LeCavalier and assistant professor Fadi Masoud have written some reflections on what it all means.

A screenshot of an online meeting of Fadi Masoud's section of "LAN1022: Visual Communications." The work shown is by student Elva Hu.

Masoud writes that, despite the evident downsides, the pandemic has led to some unexpected opportunities for creative growth:

"In my thesis studio, there is a real sense of grief that capstone projects won’t be celebrated through reviews and exhibitions. But in the other course I’m teaching — an intro to visual communication for first-year masters students — we are practicing core skills that will be relevant throughout the students’ careers. Now there is greater emphasis on constructing narrative. Often student presentations are put together at the last minute, with an unrehearsed script that presents a lackluster 'biography' of a project (first I did this, then I did that). But the new reality compels better storytelling, and so we are taking inspiration from how filmmakers and literary artists arrange and synthesize information."

(Read the rest here.)

LeCavalier, meanwhile, worries that the shift to distance learning will set a harmful precedent:

"In this unsettling new context, the shift to remote instruction could well be exploited by universities to package and promote the targeted distribution and discrete 'delivery' of courses as a new kind of educational service or branded product. So we need to be vigilant — to be wary of any effort to normalize this 'pivot.' Large lecture courses might — might — survive a change of platform. Back in the old days, a couple of months ago, I’d gaze out at the 200 or so students in my lecture class; all were looking intently at their screens, energetically typing notes (at least that is what I told myself) even as I was searching for the best ways to connect with them, either individually or collectively. While streaming platforms and communication channels create new opportunities for sharing, they also promote the isolated and individualized consumption of educational 'content.'”

(Read the rest here.)

The rest of the "field notes" series can be found on the Places Journal website. It includes contributions from instructors in architecture and design programs around the world, including Columbia GSAPP, the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, the Bartlett School of Architecture, Taubman College, the Pratt Institute School of Architecture, and others.

Top image: the work-from-home setup of Daniels Faculty lecturer Hans Ibelings.

During this past academic year, a few Daniels Faculty undergraduates were participants in the first-ever School of Cities Multidisciplinary Urban Capstone Project, a full-year design program in which students from different disciplines work together on a complex project for a government or nonprofit client. The program is a chance for students to learn firsthand about the complexities of delivering a real-world design project in an urban context.

Six Daniels students worked with students from other university departments on four different design projects for four different clients. Below, some details on two of those projects, the students who worked on them, and what they learned in the process.

(If you're a Daniels Faculty student entering your fourth year of undergraduate architecture studies and you'd like to apply to participate in next year's Multidisciplinary Urban Capstone Project program, see the School of Cities website for details. To undertake a School of Cities capstone project, students must first have applied to — and been accepted into — the Daniels Faculty undergraduate thesis program.)

Ghalia Alchibani Alnahlawi and Lucas Siemucha

The School of Cities placed Ghalia and Lucas, both architecture undergrads, in a work group with Jonathan Mo, a senior at Rotman Commerce. Their client was John Lyon, a senior city planner who acts as a liaison between the city of Toronto and public school boards.

Lyon's problem had to do with schoolyards: because of a lack of funding and limited maintenance staff, many schools around the city struggle to keep their outdoor spaces safe and pleasant for students and teachers. Some schools also have difficulty figuring out how — and to what extent — to allow people from surrounding communities to make use of school-owned outdoor spaces when class isn't in session. Ghalia, Lucas, and Jonathan were tasked with studying these problems and coming up with a suite of solutions that could be applied throughout the city.

The three students approached their task like professionals. They attended monthly meetings with Lyon and representatives from the Toronto District School Board and the Toronto Catholic District School Board. After getting a sense of the client's needs, they selected four specific schools to use as case studies. They visited those schools and conducted questionnaires with leadership figures at each one.

They discovered some unexpected obstacles. "Funding is a huge issue," Lucas says. "School boards don't have enough money to put new equipment in the schoolyards or repave them. Some schools actually do get some funding from parent councils, whereas there are high-needs schools that don't gain enough support."

Through research and consultation, the students refined their problem down to a series of key priorities that needed to be addressed at each school: safety, cost efficiency, sustainability, community engagement, student learning, and opportunities for public-private partnerships.

Next, the students spent some time thinking about design solutions that could help schools achieve those priorities in their outdoor spaces. They developed a guidebook of ideas — a sort of toolbox full of design solutions that they could apply as necessary, depending on the needs of a specific school.

With Jonathan focusing on funding, financing, and third-party outreach, Ghalia and Lucas set about tackling the design component of the project. For each of their four case-study schools, they developed a detailed design proposal.

A site plan, showing trees used as a natural perimeter at Chalkfarm Public School.

One of the group's case studies was Chalkfarm Public School, in North York. The school's administration expressed concern about the safety of the schoolyard, which is open to the surrounding neighbourhood. Ghalia and Lucas suggested using rows of trees to create a natural perimeter around the yard, which would add some privacy without the cost or unsightliness of a fence. The trees, they suggested, could be sourced at low cost from a partner organization, like the Highway of Heroes Tree Campaign.

In order to enhance community engagement at the school, Ghalia and Lucas suggested adding planters to an existing outdoor play area. The planters would become the basis of a community garden, which could be used as a pedagogical resource. A few trusted members of the public would be able to volunteer in the garden, and a lockable gate would keep strangers away, ensuring the safety of young students.

Ghalia and Lucas's combined play area/community garden.

They delivered their final design guidelines and case studies to their client at the end of the academic year. Now it will be up to the city government and the school boards to decide how to implement the students' recommendations. Regardless of whether their designs are implemented, Ghalia and Lucas say the learning experience was worthwhile.

"This project was eye-opening," Ghalia says. "I learned a lot about urban design and landscape, which are very new to me. And it was really interesting to work on something that could potentially make a change for people."

Sara Ghorban Pour and Evan Guan

Sara and Evan, both architecture undergrads, teamed up with Sarika Navanathan, a student at the Rotman School of Management, to take on an urban design challenge on a (much) smaller scale.

Their client was the city of Toronto's urban planning division. For the past 30 years, the urban planning division has maintained a scale model of Toronto's downtown core. The model is large — it's 1:1250 scale — and it's on permanent display in the rotunda of Toronto's city hall, where it's frequently seen by tourists and dignitaries.

Maintaining the display has been a problem for the city's urban planners. The model is composed of thousands of handmade miniature buildings. Because the process of creating and adding new miniatures is so laborious, and because the city has transitioned to using digital models for most planning purposes, the scale model has rarely been updated over the past three decades, even as Toronto has added countless new tall towers and experienced considerable change to its neighbourhoods and street grid. The scale model is now badly out of date.

The scale model, in the city hall rotunda.

Sara, Evan, and Sarika were given the job of figuring out a way to revive the scale model without spending an inordinate amount of taxpayer dollars. The client was also interested in developing a plan to engage outside organizations in the model's upkeep.

While Sarika worked on the community partnership aspect of the project, Sara and Evan set about figuring out how to physically upgrade the model and bring it up to date. It soon occurred to them that model-making technology has progressed considerably in the three decades since the scale model was originally built. They decided that their design solution would take advantage of modern 3D printing.

Every 3D-printed model starts as a digital file — a 3D computer object that the 3D printer replicates in some kind of physical material, like plastic or starch. Sara and Evan needed to figure out a way of gathering those digital files for hundreds of new buildings that had sprouted in downtown Toronto in the years since the scale model last received a comprehensive update.

They found a solution in the city of Toronto's "open data" portal, a website where ordinary citizens can download large sets of municipal data, like building permit records and 311 logs.

Among the open data provided by the city is a vast repository of so-called "3D massing" files — digital 3D models of city buildings. The files are accurate, up-to-date representations of the shapes of the city's newer structures — but they're not ideal for 3D printing. They have a number of technical formatting inconsistencies that would interfere with a normal printing process — and, to complicate matters even further, they're solid masses. (The cost and duration of a 3D printing process is determined by the amount of material to be printed, so it's cheaper and faster to print a hollow object.) Sara and Evan devised a process for taking the massing files, cleaning them up, hollowing them out, and resizing them to the proper scale.

Massing models.

Their next step was figuring out who, exactly, would be doing all this 3D printing. The city doesn't have the resources — but, the students realized, the Daniels Faculty does. The Daniels Bulding's Digital Fabrication Labratory has 3D printers capable of extruding durable ABS plastic, an ideal material for long-lasting architectural models.

The group's final proposal was a partnership between the city's urban planning division and the Daniels Faculty, in which architecture students would earn course credit for using the Faculty's 3D printers to help update the scale model. (The city and the Daniels Faculty have not yet responded to this proposal.)

For Sara and Evan, the project was a welcome opportunity to expand their horizons.

"It was less creative than what we usually do at Daniels," Sara says, "but it was actually more work, because you have to research a lot more, and you have to convince your client. It was a great opportunity for us to experience this kind of work."

"Normally at Daniels we focus on one building, our own design," Evan says. "This time we were working with digital massing data the size of the entire city. It was a breath of fresh air."

New Circadia — the inaugural installation in the Daniels Building's new Architecture and Design Gallery — is closed for the moment, while the Daniels Faculty takes part in the necessary COVID-19 response.

But even while closed, New Circadia's relaxing, cavelike environs are finding new admirers in the design community, thanks to an article by Daniels Faculty dean Richard Sommer, out now in the latest issue of Canadian Architect.

Dean Sommer co-curated and designed New Circadia with New York–based designers Natalie Fizer and Emily Stevenson. In his Canadian Architect story, he explains the rationale behind the installation. He writes:

The modern university evolved from the religious cloister. The new subterranean Architecture and Design Gallery had a brutal, uncanny beauty to it. For the gallery’s inaugural installation, I thought, what about staging a radical play on the cloister-as-cave?

The result is New Circadia (adventures in mental spelunking) [...] The installation is modelled loosely on Dr. Nathaniel Kleitman’s 1938 Mammoth Cave experiment (the first scientific study of human circadian rhythm) and the Greek abaton (the sequestered ritual-sleeping temple at the origins of the modern hospital). New Circadia is a soft utopia created from CNC-milled plywood, mesh, and 1,850 square metres of grey felt, with integrated sound works, dim circadian lighting, and Oneiroi (a dream recording station) — all fabricated in-house with colleagues at the Daniels Faculty.

Read the rest of the dean's story on Canadian Architect's website.

LAMAS, an architecture studio co-founded by Daniels Faculty associate professor Wei-Han Vivian Lee and lecturer James Macgillivray, has built a stellar reputation on the strength of projects like its Townships Farmhouse and its recent revamp of Avling Kitchen and Brewery.

Now, Domus, an influential architecture and design magazine based in Italy, has named LAMAS one of the year's best architecture firms.

LAMAS was one of 50 practices named on Domus's 2020 best-firms list. The jury of international experts who vetted the contenders selected just one other Canadian firm for inclusion: Winnipeg's 5468796 Architecture.

Avling Kitchen and Brewery. Photograph by Felix Michaud.

Domus praised LAMAS for exemplifying "the trend among architects to distance themselves from the pure formal work that preceded them throughout the course of the past century in order to concentrate on issues that are now central in architectural design, namely materials and finishes."

(Anyone interested in learning more about LAMAS can check out Lee and Macgillivray's recent interview with The Architect's Newspaper.)

Social distancing is hard for architects. Studios and reviews are inherently social, and design work often requires the use of bulky tools — like 3D printers and laser cutters — that most students and practitioners don't have in their homes. With the University of Toronto in online-only mode for the foreseeable future, Daniels Faculty instructors and students have had to find ways of taking all that in-person creative energy and fitting it into the confines of their computer screens.

As always, the Daniels community has risen to the challenge.

For "The Pleasure of Ruins: The Allure of the Incomplete — Drawing as Thesis" (ARC3016), a graduate research studio with an associated thesis prep component, associate professor John Shnier took students on a trip to Rome, as he does every year. This year, as the group was preparing to head back to Toronto, there were news reports of a coronavirus outbreak in northern Italy. The group made it back safely, but soon afterward the university cancelled all in-person classes.

After some deliberation with his students, Shnier moved the studio's meetings and reviews to Blackboard, an online learning platform. Students now show their work using screen-sharing, and the class discusses the work using Blackboard's videoconferencing features. "We did an interim review two weeks ago," says Shnier. "We invited two guest reviewers, and it worked out to be pretty good."

Even before COVID-19, Shnier was a prolific Instagrammer of his students' work — but now, with in-person reviews suspended, he has redoubled his efforts to put student work online. His Instagram feed is currently full of videos made by students in response to some of the architectural inspiration they picked up during the Rome trip. (The ghostly, holographic effect is a result of Shnier's method of adding the videos to Instagram, which involves pointing his phone's camera at his computer monitor.)

This one is by Enica Deng:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Kohn Shnier Architects (@kohnshnierarchitects) on Mar 29, 2020 at 3:13pm PDT

And this one is by Steven Chen:

View this post on Instagram

#distancelearning continued with #architecturestudent #films for #drawingssthesis with @stevenchen_yc rumination in #filters and #lenses @uoftdaniels

A post shared by Kohn Shnier Architects (@kohnshnierarchitects) on Mar 29, 2020 at 2:07pm PDT

...

In assistant professor Adrian Phiffer's undergraduate course, "Reality and its Representation" (ARC465), some students have taken the shift to internet-based coursework into their own hands.

The course is heavily focused on readings. Before the pandemic, student groups would give presentations on their assigned readings in front of the class. Post-COVID, a different approach was required.

Students Thomas Buckland, Sara Ghorbanpour, Sam Shahsavani, Lucas Siemucha, Peter Dowhaniuk, and Stuart Thomson decided to create an Instagram account with videos of their reading presentations. That way, their classmates would be able to access the discussion from their home computers and respond in the comments on each Instagram post.

Here's one of the group's videos, featuring Lucas Siemucha and Thomas Buckland:

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A post shared by BigFlatNow (@bigflatnow) on Mar 23, 2020 at 5:00pm PDT

The use of Instagram dovetailed nicely with the week's readings, which were on the theme of "flatness" — the non-hierarchical, decentralized way information travels online. "Anyone with an interest can access and hear these presentations," Phiffer says. "I think there's a benefit to that. Plus, the students came up with, for lack of a better word, 'cool' ways of making the presentation, given the medium."

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Phiffer's class isn't the only one learning to love Instagram's distance-learning capabilities. Assistant professor Petros Babasikas' undergraduate course, "History of Housing: Crisis, Visions, Commonplace" (ARC354) has been using the medium to its fullest. Groups of students have been posting elaborate photomosaics of their work — like this one, by Ozlem Bektas, Nicole Zohorsky, Patricia Prieto, Trumon Tse, Kenzie Burke, and Christopher Schaefer:

Each student group was tasked with imagining what it would be like if a seminal work of 20th century architecture from elsewhere in the world were to be built in Toronto, in the present day.

Here's Casa Bloc (the real structure, by architect Josep Lluis Sert, is in Barcelona). Work by Tasneem Murtaza, Vinati Kokal, Amelie Liu, Anna Jasinska, Catherine Joung, and Franklin Tang:

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A post shared by Casa Bloc Toronto (@casabloctoronto) on Mar 29, 2020 at 10:59am PDT

And another one from the group that did the mosaic, above. Their assignment was the Jeanne Hachette Complex (Jean Renaudie, Paris):

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The Jeanne Hachette Complex will be a place for people to breathe in open space and greenery. #whatiftoronto #historyofhousing #designfiction #uoftdaniels #toronto #visions #crises #commonplace @uoftdaniels @petrosbabasikas

A post shared by Mountainous Insurgence (@mountainousinsurgence) on Mar 29, 2020 at 1:44pm PDT

This isn't the first time professor Babasikas has asked his History of Housing students to create work on Instagram, but it's the first time he has done so in the midst of nationwide school closures and social distancing. "Our current lockdown, ongoing virtual coursework, and isolation within our respective living quarters make it especially relevant," he says.