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.

The Art, Architecture, Design Film Festival will bring a week's worth of design-related documentary features to the Hot Docs Cinema, on Bloor Street. And, as the festival's official education partner, the Daniels Faculty will be there every step of the way.

That will be especially true on opening night, January 22, when the Daniels Faculty's dean, Richard Sommer, will be participating in a Q&A about Neutra: Survival Through Design, a documentary about the groundbreaking Austrian-American architect Richard Neutra.

Sommer will be joined on stage by the documentary's director, P.J. Letofsky. The conversation will be moderated by former Toronto Star architecture critic Christopher Hume.

For tickets to that screening, or for information about the other films showing at AADFF, visit the Hot Docs website.

Photo: Richard Neutra's Kaufmann House, in Palm Springs, California.

During reading week, which begins on February 17, Daniels Faculty students have an opportunity to do something quite a bit more exciting than hitting the books: associate professor Aziza Chaouni will be taking a few Daniels graduate students along with her to an international design workshop she's leading in Dakar, Senegal.

The focus of the workshop will be the Centre International du Commerce Exterieur du Senegal (CICES), a 19-hectare fairground designed in the early 1970s by French architects Jean-François Lamoureux and Jean-Louis Marin. The modernist regional pavilions at CICES expertly reference traditional African building styles, and the grounds and exhibition halls have hosted countless regional and local events. But age and lack of upkeep are starting to take their toll on CICES, leaving its future uncertain.

Participants in Chaouni's workshop will visit CICES, attend lectures by local and international experts, and tour key landmarks in and around Dakar. The group will work with local stakeholders to imagine ways of revitalizing CICES and restoring it to its place as an icon of modern architecture in the region.

The workshop will include students from the Daniels Faculty, the Mackenzie Presbyterian University of Sao Paulo, the Collège Universitaire d'Architecture de Dakar, and the Université Polytechnique G5 of Dakar.

Daniels graduate students interested in joining the workshop have until Friday, January 10 to sign up. Students are responsible for paying their own airfare, but accommodation and transportation in Dakar will be provided free of charge. Some financial assistance may be available through the Office of the Registrar and Student Services. The workshop begins on February 17 and ends on February 21.

If you're a Daniels graduate student who's interested in reserving a spot, claim your place by emailing Aziza Chaouni as soon as possible.

For more details, download the brochure.

By 2003, Don Mills Centre was a relic. It was a large indoor mall marooned amidst sprawling parking lots — a midtown Toronto monument to the excesses of 20th-century suburban planning.

Over the past 15 years, Giannone Petricone Associates, an architecture firm founded by Daniels Faculty associate professor Pina Petricone and alumnus Ralph Giannone (BArch 1987), has worked with the mall's owner, Cadillac Fairview, to redevelop Don Mills Centre into an outdoor, modern shopping destination organized around major public spaces and punctuated by residential towers, including a repurposed 1970’s office building. The former mall is now the heart of a neigbourhood. With that project finally complete, Giannone Petricone is creating new designs for other retail-focused sites across Toronto, including Cloverdale Mall in Etobicoke and the Golden Mile in Scarborough.

On January 18, students and members of the public will have a rare opportunity to find out about this type of suburban intensification directly from the source, when Giannone Petricone joins with DesignTO for an afternoon of learning about the Don Mills redevelopment.

Participants will start the afternoon at Giannone Petricone's offices in downtown Toronto. From there, they'll board a chartered bus and be driven directly to Don Mills, where they'll attend a panel discussion at the Don Mills library branch. On the panel will be Pina Petricone, Ralph Giannone, city planner Leo Desorcy, Metrolinx chief development officer Leslie Woo, and Daniels Faculty assistant professor Michael Piper as moderator. The discussion will focus on the successes of the Don Mills redevelopment, as well as its failings. Attendees can also expect to learn about the ways Metrolinx's Eglinton Crosstown light-rail line, now under construction, will change the design calculus in midtown Toronto by introducing rapid transit to formerly car-dependent precincts.

After the panel, staff from the offices of Giannone Petricone will lead guided tours of the Shops at Don Mills. Attendees will be able to gain firsthand knowledge of the area's redevelopment.

Tickets — which cover the bus ride from downtown, the panel discussion, the walking tour, and a return trip to downtown — are $30 and can be purchased on DesignTO's website. The event will take place on Saturday, January 18, from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.

Athens, the capital of Greece, is an old city with some very typical modern-day problems: it struggles with gridlock, and with providing appropriate housing to its citizens.

But Athens also has some urban issues that are specific to its context. A debt crisis in 2010 cast a lasting pall over the Greek economy, leaving Athens with a number of abandoned buildings. And the city's historic centre, which has been in continuous use for thousands of years, has evolved into a tightly packed cluster of narrow streets lined with postwar concrete apartment blocks, making large-scale redevelopment difficult.

Last year, Athens Anaplasis, a Greek government organization responsible for overseeing urban renewal projects in Athens, held a competition to create a new master plan for the city's historic centre. Daniels Faculty assistant professor Petros Babasikas answered the call. His design, developed in collaboration with Athens-based engineers and a research team made up of Daniels Faculty students, won an honourable mention.

Babasikas has a strong personal connection to Athens: he lived and worked there for 10 years before coming to Toronto. "A good part of my work and research is on the Mediterranean metropolis, and how to deal with the changes that are coming, in terms of the climate crisis and the general decline of the commons," he says. "How do you revitalize public space, and at the same time how do you create resiliency for climate change?"

When he was considering ways of driving renewal in central Athens, he knew that creating iconic public buildings and grand public spaces would be practically impossible: the city's street grid is too tight, its administration is too fragmented, and public investment is too scarce. Instead, he came up with a network of smaller interventions aimed at creating new pockets of green space within the grid and bringing new life to existing buildings. The idea was to replace some of Athens' outmoded concrete multiresidential buildings and car-focused amenities with new, ecologically friendly infrastructure that would help prepare the city for impending environmental and economic challenges. Babasikas titled the project "Athens 2030: The City as a Resilient Waterscape."

The linchpin of the redevelopment proposal is a series of new communal parks built within existing vacant lots and underused spaces in the city core. Some of these parks would be what Babasikas refers to as "parking gardens" — surface parking lots that would be reengineered to serve as public recreational spaces. About two thirds of each parking lot's surface area would be replaced with grass and trees, while the other third would remain as parking space. Cars and park-goers would coexist.

Within these new parks, and also underneath the city's streets, Babasikas and his team envision a renewed network of water infrastructure — including reservoirs, basins, channels, and water towers — which would capture storm runoff while also providing a vital supply line for new, water-based public amenities, like water fountains and splash pads.

A parking garden, with an on-site concrete water tower.

Underground water tanks inside a reprogrammed parking garage.

"The point of this is to give an architectural identity to water," Babasikas says. "Usually infrastructure is hidden. To build a water tower out of a type of concrete that weathers well is a very cheap intervention. But as an expression of these new commons, it's quite important."

Babasikas's plan also has a solution for the city's abandoned buildings, many of which are sturdy concrete mid-rises built after the second world war. Rather than letting them languish, Babasikas and his team would turn them into community hubs by filling them with entrepreneurs. "Each building becomes a co-op," Babasikas says. "There would be work-live scenarios. There would be other places where you would have incubators and high-tech uses, as well as traditional commercial activity." A former bus depot, for example, would become a marketplace.

Although the Athens Anaplasis competition is over, Babasikas's work on his team's proposal continues. He hopes to refine a few of the ideas in the master plan enough that they can be implemented in Athens in a piecemeal fashion, possibly as pilot projects.

The student researchers who assisted Babasikas with Athens 2030 were Miranda Fay, Niko Dellic, Ambika Pharma, Phat Le, Anne Kwan, Thomas Huang, and Marienka Bishop-Kovac. The team's Athens-based engineering consultants were Kyriakos Tyrologos (traffic), Mania Lambrou (planning and environment), and Leto Christodoulopoulou (landscape).