Architects aren't used to social distancing. The field is collaborative, with an emphasis on close-quarters work in open studios. Drew Sinclair, a sessional lecturer at the Daniels Faculty and managing principal of SvN Architects and Planners, wrote for Toronto Storeys about some of the challenges (and successes) he has encountered as he has shifted his practice to a work-from-home routine in order to mitigate COVID-19 risks.

Drew writes:

Is it working? In some ways, yes. We have found early success using Google hangouts for working sessions, Jamboard for collective drawing (while also sending trace paper and pens to staff who need it at home). We’ve implemented a communication rhythm, mimicking our typical office habits, starting with a Partner huddle every morning, immediately cascading into various project team huddles. We also brought our usual all-staff social and status meetings online from the Weekly Forum to "The Kitchen" — a new digital environment that simulates the daily lunch crush in our office each day at noon.

But we are still finding our footing in other areas, presumably the same issues many creative workplaces are experiencing. We need to rely on the imperfect infrastructure of our homes. The situation in the world has disallowed us from addressing or changing the shortcomings of internet service or physical environment, so our key staff are having to make do. Sometimes with great impacts on productivity (and morale!!). Our methods of managing the work and flowing tasks from our project leads through to our professional teams, is evolving slowly as we figure out ways of reproducing the efficiency of a list written or pinned to the wall. There are digital tools to help with this but it’s hard transferring something that happens so naturally in our physical space to something we have to diligently monitor ourselves and translate into a set of digital behaviours. And lastly, the learning environment and constant exchange of ideas, described above, has not yet been perfectly replicated in the new online environment we’re working in, but we’re definitely "Doing our F*cking Best."

Read the full story on Toronto Storeys.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, during the University of Toronto's mid-February reading week, a handful of Daniels Faculty students accompanied associate professor Aziza Chaouni on a trip to Dakar, capital of the West African nation of Senegal. There, they linked up with an international crew of students from the University of Zaragoza, the Collège Universitaire d'Architecture de Dakar, and the Université Polytechnique G5 of Dakar. The group's mission was to spend one week participating in a workshop, in which they would study the Centre International du Commerce Exterieur du Senegal (CICES), a 19-hectare fairground and convention centre that some consider a modern masterpiece.

CICES was designed in the early 1970s by French architects Jean-François Lamoureux and Jean-Louis Marin. The facility was originally intended to be an expression of the aesthetic ideals of Senegal, which had achieved independence from France just a decade prior. According to Chaouni, Léopold Sedar Senghor, Senegal's first president, personally participated in the design process. The complex's many individual buildings are unified by a common motif: triangular and trapezoidal forms that jut out from rooflines and adorn the sides of exterior walls.

The ensuing decades were not kind to CICES: the complex fell into disrepair, and renovations gradually chipped away at the original design. And then came the coup de grâce: the completion of the Dakar Expo Centre, a new convention centre, which began to compete with CICES and sap it of its remaining clientele.

The purpose of the workshop was to collaborate with local stakeholders to imagine ways of raising awareness of CICES and restoring it to its former modernist glory. The international student group attended lectures, toured the city, met with stakeholders, and worked on-site at CICES before developing detailed preservation proposals, which they presented to a panel of professors, officials, and locals.

Here are a few photos of the Dakar trip, with commentary from Chaouni.

"On our first afternoon in Senegal, we had a tour of modern Dakar, organized by the Collége Universitaire d'Architecture de Dakar," Chaouni says. "Our first stop was The Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar, which has many amazing buildings that were built from the colonial time to after the independence of Senegal. Designed by Henri Chomette, this building is a set of auditoriums accessible by a raised platform."

"When we toured Dakar, we visited a market. This was a street stall selling some African masks. Some of them are representative of divinities. Some are used during religious ceremonies. They have a lot of different uses, and each one is from a different tribe. The angular wood carvings on the masks were a source of inspiration for Senegalese and foreign architects, who strived to express a national identity in their work after independence."

"Here we're at the private residence for the ambassador of Canada to Senegal. He invited us for cocktails. It was the first time he'd welcomed Canadian students. He was very interested in the CICES complex. He had never visited it before. He thanked us for introducing him to the complex and its unique architecture. On the last day of the workshop, we gave him a tour of CICES, and he saw the work of students."

"This is the courtyard of the administrative building in CICES. The landscape is not original. It was added in later years. Most of the other elements of this building are original, though."

"The main auditorium is a glulam structure that spans 28 metres — which, at the time, in the 1970s, was quite a stunning architectural innovation. It originally had 1,200 seats, and it has this incredible drop ceiling made out of wood struts. The middle yellow piece on the ceiling is a recent addition, from 2002. In the original design, the wood struts met and intermingled, which was one of the architectural highlights of the whole complex."

"The 'orange pavilion' is a concrete structure with an open floor plan. Its roofscape is composed of alternating high and low pitch roofs. The floor plan is flexible and can be adjusted depending upon the event being held there."

"When CICES was built, there were seven regions in Senegal. And so CICES has seven regional pavilions, which originally displayed craftwork from each region. Materials characteristic of each region were used on the facades. The reddish stone that you see here is called laterite. The fresco is made of sand and concrete."

"Every morning, we had lectures by invited local architects, international conservation experts, historians, and the staff of CICES. Here, I'm presenting the methodology for the workshop."

"This is the entrance of CICES, but it's not the original entrance. It was changed in 2002. The Daniels students here are Clara Ziada, Tarek Mokhalalati and Emily Lawrason."

"We were given a studio space on-site at CICES. Imagine that you're studying an amazing piece of architecture and you're given a space to work inside of it. It's not that you go, see it, and then go to a school or hotel. You're basically embedded. You really get yourself immersed in the architecture. These Daniels students are Clara Ziada, Diana Franco Camacho, Saif Malhas, Noor Alkhalili, and Tarek Mokhalalati."

"Sadly, this photo shows how decrepit the CICES exhibition halls have become, mainly due to lack of funds and knowledge about modern heritage maintenance and conservation. In 2014, the Senegalese government built a gigantic convention centre outside of the city, which further exacerbated the downfall of CICES. CICES is now forced to rent some of its exhibition halls for rice storage just to make ends meet.

"The workshop allowed architecture and engineering students from Senegal, Spain, and Daniels to share ideas about how safeguarding the original architecture can become a driving force for CICES’s future. Showcased in local news and newspapers, the workshop had a strong impact in Dakar. It has unveiled a possible, exciting future for CICES and raised awareness about the necessity to protect it as a whole."

Photographs by Saif Malhas, Christian Paez Diaz and Noor Alkhalili. Video by Christian Paez Diaz.

Near King and Dufferin streets is a pair of crumbling semi-detached houses where nobody has lived for quite some time. The site is an increasingly rare piece of unoccupied space in the west-end Toronto neighbourhood of Parkdale, where waves of gentrification are transforming what used to be a community of affordable-rental apartment towers and rooming houses into the type of place where raw juice bars outnumber laundromats.

In the fall 2019 semester, for the second iteration of his course "Guided Distractions" (ARC465), sessional lecturer Reza Nik tasked his students with studying those abandoned semis, as well as the neighbourhood around them. The class's semester-long assignment was to use the site as inspiration for a diverse series of creative projects.

Nik became interested in Parkdale last year, when he was working at an architectural firm with offices in the neighbourhood. He got to know some local nonprofits that were working to ensure low-income members of the Parkdale community weren't excluded from the area's increasing prosperity — like the Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust, which is involved in buying and preserving old rooming houses that might otherwise be demolished or converted into single-family dwellings.

"I really wanted to learn from that," Nik says. "I wanted to see how designers can look at the community as an important aspect of the architectural process. My criticism is that generally the community and the people get abstracted. We focus so much on the building itself and the site. As architects and designers, we often choose to be apolitical, or believe it's possible to be."

Nik asked his students to engage in a series of creative experiments. First, they made one-minute short films about the site. The following week, they all wrote poems. Then they made drawings and sculptures before refining all that experimental work into their final design projects.

Students aimed to explore the neighbourhood's issues creatively. The resulting work comments incisively on Parkdale's situation, but without any pretence that design alone can solve all of the intractable problems that come along with economic and social change in a neighbourhood.

Nik was pleased with the results. "I was trying to take the pressure off of design being the thing that will solve everything," he says. "We were learning to think about design as a powerful tool that lets you reflect on and view things through a different lens. And through that process you may be able to find an answer to some issue that's happening."

Here are a few projects from the fall 2019 iteration of Guided Distractions.

(For more images of ARC465 coursework, visit the Guided Distractions Instagram, or buy the book.)

Made by: Emily Lawrason, Pablo Espinal Henao, Christian Paez Diaz, Lucas Siemucha, and George Wang

The image shows a collection of commonplace items from Parkdale — stop signs, barbecues, dumplings, cats — hovering protectively over the area's street grid. "If gentrification and development happens with Parkdale, these important pieces are above it all, so they're not getting destroyed," Nik says. "This piece was taking the concept of everyday objects and putting them above the ongoing issues surrounding gentrification."

Made by: Andrea Sanchez, Vanessa Parodi Silva, Justin Morandin, Jamie Latimer, and Patricia Castaneda Prieto

"This group was dealing with sound and nature," Nik says. "This piece was an experiment in physically expressing the relationships at play between built form, nature, and sound in Parkdale. The white plexiglas forms are about showing sound waves. The concrete is the site, and the green is nature, growing sporadically." (The "concrete" is actually a lightweight material that the students painted.)

Made by: Elizabeth Liao, Angela Gou, Jill Lee, and Larissa Ho

For their final project, this group of students produced a line of unusual, brightly coloured playground equipment intended to address a shortage of community gathering spaces in Parkdale. They built a 1:1 scale model of one of their designs, an orange lounger with a curvy profile. The other structures on display here are reduced-scale models. There's a picnic area that the students called an "ogre's hut" (green), a "novel arch" public bookshelf (red), a "potty pod" public washroom (blue), and some "slice theatre" public performance stages (purple).

"This was one of the projects that really followed through on the group's previous experiments," Nik says. "The end result was something that could be practical. And it was playful. They really had the community in mind throughout the whole process."

Made by: Jasper Chen, Eric Espinosa, Gabrielle Lamanna, and Jennille Neal

This group created a bench, but not an ordinary one. The design had three separate pieces — two cardboard seats and a concrete support block — that would only function as a bench if assembled in a particular way. The piece was intended to symbolize the way Parkdale's community holds the neighbourhood together. "This was one of the most effective conceptual projects," Nik says. "The bench is only functional if it comes together. They were one of the only groups who took their design out to the site. And they photographed it beautifully."

Ontario Place, the former amusement park on Toronto's downtown lakeshore, is currently hosting the third-annual edition of its Winter Light Exhibition, a public art showcase.

The curatorial theme of this year's exhibition is "Cocoon." Daniels Faculty assistant professor Victor Perez-Amado, along with MArch students Anton Skorishchenko, Robert Lee, and Shamim Khedri, banded together to produce their own take on that concept: a glowing sculptural installation that's meant to fool the eye.

Lumina is a tunnel made up of a series of brightly coloured ellipse-like forms, all crafted using equipment in the Daniels Faculty's Digital Fabrication Lab. A hidden system of LED black lights illuminates the surfaces of the ellipses, causing them to glow with an iridescent pinkish light. When a visitor walks up to the installation and peers inside, the interior geometry appears to shift and rearrange itself as they view it from different perspectives. The effect is like being enveloped in a tiny world — a cocoon.

A first-person view of Lumina's interior.

This isn't the first time the Daniels Faculty has been represented at the Winter Light Exhibition. Last year, a group of MArch students, including Skorishchenko and Lee, created an installation called Obscura.

Lumina will remain on view at this year's Winter Light Exhibition until March 29. For details and hours, visit the Ontario Place website.

Photographs by Yasmin Al-Samarrai.

On Thursday evening, the main hall at the Daniels Building was full to capacity. Throughout the crowd, people were chattering excitedly in American Sign Language. The evening's guest of honour was Christine Sun Kim, a multimedia artist whose work frequently draws inspiration from deafness and deaf identity.

Kim was born deaf, and she often uses sound as an artistic medium. This isn't as paradoxical as it seems. Game of Skill 2.0, an installation she staged at MoMA PS1, was an interactive system in which museum visitors could hear a story read aloud from an electronic device, but only by maintaining physical contact between a sensor-equipped probe and an elevated strip of velcro. (It's easier to understand if you just watch the video.) The awkwardness of the arrangement made it necessary for visitors to acquire a skill in order to hear the story — and that was precisely the point. Kim has created lullabies and operas. Even when she does visual art, it often explores ideas about the way sound behaves in the world — like her famous pie charts, which cleverly quantify the irritations of navigating a hearing-oriented world as a deaf person.

Her work is starting to become better known. A giant mural of hers hung on the outside of the Whitney Museum in 2018. Earlier this month, she sang The Star-Spangled Banner and America the Beautiful in sign language at the Super Bowl — then wrote a New York Times op-ed in which she critiqued Fox's decision not to air the majority of her performance.

During her appearance at the Daniels Building, which was part of the Daniels Faculty's "Hindsight is 20/20" public programming series, Kim presented a multimedia piece of performance art called Spoken on My Behalf. The work consisted of three large video projection screens that displayed white captions on plain, black backgrounds. As the captions flashed by, they began to accrete into an essay about what it's like for Kim to rely on family, friends, and acquaintances to speak for her in social situations. The experience, she seemed to suggest, can be both frustrating and liberating.

The hall was darkened, and the performance was silent, except for occasional recorded voices saying the kinds of things that deaf people sometimes ask (or don't ask) others to say for them: "She'll have a pilsner." "She needs to go the bathroom." Each time one of those voices spoke, Kim would step into a lighted area on the stage and gesture along. The nature of the complex relationship between the artist and her many surrogate voices was left to the audience to contemplate.

Here are a few photos from the night.

Many members of the audience were deaf, so dean Richard Sommer's introductory speech was interpreted into American Sign Language:

A trio of projection screens displayed captions and images, making the performance equally accessible to deaf and non-deaf audience members:

The only sounds were occasional recorded voices that seemed to be speaking for — or through — Kim. The sound captions on the upper screen were mostly drawn from TV shows Kim had watched, and weren't referencing actual sounds in the room. (There were no seagulls squawking when this photo was taken.)

Without signing a word, Kim eloquently communicated some of the frustration that is part and parcel of negotiating differences in communication style:

After the performance, she gave an artist talk in which she showed slides of some of her other work. As Kim signed, an interpreter voiced her for hearing audience members:

During a Q&A session, a few audience members posed their questions in sign language:

And at the end of the presentation, the audience applauded in sign language:

Photographs by Harry Choi.

Toronto's condos are tiny, and they're only getting tinier. As of 2017, according to Statistics Canada, the median size of a condominium apartment in Ontario was just 665 square feet, about one third smaller than similar units built in the 1980s and 1990s.

Recently, the builders of a new south Etobicoke condo tower called Reina — a partnership between Urban Capital and Spotlight Development — announced a student competition aimed at getting young designers to think about new ways of using the very limited amount of living space inside a typical condo. The competition brief called on student entrants to devise innovative, space-saving designs for condo interiors and tower amenity spaces.

Late last week, Reina's project team announced the winners of the competition's $2,500 grand prize: Keenan Ngo and Ozyka Videlia, a pair of Daniels Faculty students.

Keenan Ngo and Ozyka Videlia.

Ngo and Videlia met this summer, during a two-week workshop at the Daniels Faculty. Ngo is in the first year of his Master of Architecture studies, and Videlia is a second-year architecture undergrad. The pair quickly became friends. When Videlia learned about the competition, she asked Ngo to team up with her, and he agreed.

"I've dabbled in tiny houses," Ngo says. "So this was a point of interest."

The two designers began by trying to pinpoint the things about apartments that had annoyed or inconvenienced them in the past.

"In typical condos, the ratio between the kitchen and the living room is nonsense to me," Videlia says. "The kitchen will be really small and the living room will be huge, and the cabinetry is very small." They also had issues with the cramped layouts in condo bathrooms.

After some deliberation, they decided to focus their efforts on those two spaces.

For their kitchen, their first innovation was a system of cabinets that could slide up or down on the wall, in order to enable the condo's occupant to access upper shelves without need for a stool. They envisioned built-in counterweights to ensure that the cabinets could travel smoothly up and down, with hidden catches to lock the assembly in place at the desired height.

Ngo and Videlia also came up with a solution for a problem that has vexed many condo owners: kitchen counter space. Rather than a permanent, full-sized breakfast bar, they devised a skinny bar top that could fold away, accordion-style, into the wall of the unit. The condo's occupant could fold out the bar when it was needed, and then stash it to clear up precious floor space.

Ngo and Videlia's prize-winning bathroom design.

For their bathroom design, Ngo and Videlia came up with a floor plan that allows for a tub, a separate shower, and a partitioned-off toilet-and-sink area, all within a 40-square-foot envelope. The door to the bathroom is a wooden screen, inspired by Ngo's travels in Japan.

This was Ngo and Videlia's first-ever entry in a student design competition, and their first win. "It put a big smile on our faces," Ngo says.

And they weren't the only Daniels Faculty students to win honours in Reina's competition. Ivy Chan and Wesley Fong, a pair of MArch students at the Faculty, were named semi-finalists for their kitchen and bathroom designs. They won $500.

Top image: Ngo and Videlia's prize-winning kitchen design.

Architect Jerome Markson graduated from the University of Toronto's architecture program in 1953 and went on to a six-decade-long career designing modern structures throughout the city, including private homes, social housing, and cultural and institutional buildings.

Now, Daniels Faculty associate professor Laura Miller has curated "A Quite Individual Course: Jerome Markson, Architect," a new public exhibition on Markson's work. The exhibition, currently on view in the Daniels Building's Larry Wayne Richards Gallery, coincides with the release of Miller's new book, Toronto's Inclusive Modernity: The Architecture of Jerome Markson, which traces Markson's career against Toronto's emergence as a global city. (It's available at the University of Toronto bookstore.)

The exhibition opened Wednesday night with a reception attended by hundreds of guests, including Markson and his wife, Mayta. "A Quite Individual Course" will remain on view in the Larry Wayne Richards Gallery until March 13.

Here are a few photos from opening night.

Jerome and Mayta Markson at the book-signing table:

Jerome and Mayta Markson with dean Richard Sommer, associate professor Laura Miller, and professor emeritus George Baird:

And a few more from the evening:

Photographs by Harry Choi.

As Master of Architecture student Christian Huizenga gets ready to defend his thesis project at the Daniels Faculty, he's simultaneously putting the finishing touches on an extracurricular architectural feat.

In 2018, Huizenga and his brother, Aaron, entered a competition to design a multi-use pavilion for Tait Waterfront Park, a new public green space located on the south bank of the Fraser River, in Richmond, British Columbia. Theirs was one of 19 submissions. A few months later, following a juried selection process, they found out that they had won. Richmond city council soon approved a $130,000 budget for design and construction.

The pavilion's design references the nearby river, with an undulating aluminum roof. "It draws on vernacular architecture in the area," Huizenga says. "And also on formal notions of movement of water. The roof structure is a series of wave-like figures coming together. It all funnels into a native garden that will surround it."

The design was strongly influenced by Huizenga's graduate studies at the Daniels Faculty. "Because of my comprehensive studio, I was pretty excited about trusses and the merging of timber with structural steel," he says. "This project utilizes some very unique Vierendeel trusses that connect to Douglas fir structural rafters."

"And I've learned a lot of technical skills at Daniels. Before coming here, I had not really used 3D modelling software. This project was completely designed digitally."

Photo: Huizenga at work, at Fabrikaat Custom Fabrication.

Huizenga is now making periodic trips to the west coast to help fabricate the pavilion at Fabrikaat Custom Fabrication, his brother's Vancouver-based metal shop. The in-house fabrication process puts him in complete creative control, and it's also less expensive than contracting out the carpentry and metalwork, meaning he'll be able to realize his complex roof design without exceeding the city's budget.

The pavilion is scheduled for completion in July.

To view more of Huizenga's work, visit his website.

Architecture education isn't always about designing buildings. Students at the Daniels Faculty are frequently asked to expand their imaginations beyond bricks and mortar, often with surprisingly beautiful results. That was the case last semester, when sessional lecturer Andrew Bako led fourth-year undergraduates through the first-ever iteration of his design course, Lazy Computing (ARC465).

Bako, a recent graduate of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, joined the Daniels Faculty as a part-time instructor in 2019. (He's also an intern architect at Adamson Associates, where he's working on the firm's high-profile CIBC Square project.) With Lazy Computing, he wanted to make students think about and critique the way architecture is defined by digital drafting tools, which he contends promote a kind of "laziness" (hence the course title) by greatly easing the design process. Bako also wanted students to reflect on the internet's rampant image culture — particularly the way social media overwhelms architectural practitioners with unfiltered information about new styles and trends.

"One of the major criteria for success in the course was whether or not students were able to make a cohesive argument," Bako says. "Each piece of their work had to have some kind of conceptual clarity." The best projects, according to Bako, also had an element of timeliness about them. To succeed, students needed to develop real-time responses to the rapidly changing world around them.

Bako divided his students into teams of two or three, then began assigning them readings that covered various contemporary design-theory topics. The readings served as inspiration for a trio of design projects over the course of the semester. Students were free to create drawings, physical models, or computer animations.

The resulting student projects are visually striking, whimsical, and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny. Here are few of them, with commentary from Bako.

 
Made by: Alex Tomasi and Marta Zinicheva

"The course was called Lazy Computing, and this project was definitely the 'laziest,'" Bako says. "It's comical and a bit satirical. And there is a certain timeliness to it. The same way Marcel Duchamp would turn a urinal into a piece of high art, Alex and Marta were looking for easily downloadable content on the internet to see if the rapid transmission of files and content could produce a new architectural proposal, and a new aesthetic."

Made by: Amira Babeiti, Jeremy Chow, and Jasper Choi

"This team was trying to manipulate concrete. It was a formal experiment, but also an experiment in how we work back and forth between digital media and the physical environment. They used spray foam insulation as formwork to create this almost grotesque cavelike grotto. At the same time, they were embedding 3D-printed and laser-cut forms into it. They were also 3D scanning the physical model and entering their 3D-scanned point cloud back into the computer and continuing to manipulate it digitally. I found this back-and-forth workflow to be quite successful."

 
Made by: Haadiah Kahn and Yuanrui He

"These students were trying to provide a commentary about the use of augmented reality in architecture. They were tapping into how image culture allows people to comment on almost anything nowadays. Really, the world is your critic."

 
Made by: Noa Wang and Tasneem Shahpurwala

"When I saw this animation, I was floored and delighted. They used images of Toronto to provide a mental image of a city without the actual form of the city. They were trying to capture the cultural zeitgeist of image culture in Toronto through the rapid transmission of images."

 
Made by: Zirong Liu and Shengfang Gao

"These students were inspired by the work of Andrew Kovacs, whose writings we discussed in the course. What they were trying to do was critique the way in which our design software behaves, and the commands that are ingrained within that software, which dictate the way we design. If the cartesian grid system suddenly became unstable rather than acting as a unifying grounding element, what sort of reverberative impact would that have on design?"

Anthony Mattacchione didn't enrol in architecture school intending to make furniture. And yet, his architecture education ended up being excellent preparation for the task.

As a work-study student in the Daniels Faculty's Digital Fabrication Labaratory, the 21-year-old fourth-year undergrad had plenty of time and opportunity to master the use of CNC mills and waterjet cutters — computerized crafting tools that make it possible to cut and shape materials in incredibly precise ways. About a year ago, it occurred to Mattacchione that he could use these tools for things other than coursework.

"I started dabbling, designing my own furniture," he says. "It was a hobby."

Eventually, he developed a way of creating beautiful, minimalist stools and tables using lengths of cantilevered steel. Now, he and his business partner, fellow Daniels undergrad Temi Adeniyi, have entered sales mode. Their furniture design company, which is called Mattacchione, made its public debut earlier this month at this year's Interior Design Show, at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.

The company's initial line of furniture, titled "Inserire," consists of a trio of similarly styled pieces: a side table, a stool, and a coffee table. Each item has a cantilevered base made of powder-coated steel and a top made of solid maple. Grooves in the wood allow it to integrate smoothly with the metal. The items are sturdy and functional, but their liberal use of negative space prevents them from appearing bulky. Mattacchione and Adeniyi are fabricating everything at a workshop in Etobicoke, using Canadian materials.

"Steel is meant for structure, wood is for beauty and elegance," Mattacchione says. "How do you connect the two together? That's how I came to the title, 'Inserire.'" (It's Italian for "to insert.")

The Daniels Faculty's fabrication lab was the perfect place for him to cultivate his furniture-making skills. "I would never have gotten into wood shop and metalworking if I hadn't been working down in the lab," he says. "Most designers don't actually know how their products are made. My involvement in fabrication makes things a lot easier."

Mattacchione and Adeniyi are already starting to see results. Mattacchione says that their company's booth at the Interior Design Show attracted interest from several potential buyers and business partners.

To view Mattacchione's furniture designs, or to inquire about buying his work, visit his website.

Photo: Temi Adeniyi (left) and Anthony Mattacchione, at their booth at the Interior Design Show. Courtesy of Anthony Mattacchione.