Faculty, students, and alumni among the winners of the "Everyone is King" design competition

This week, people will have even more of a reason to visit King Street in Toronto's downtown core. The busy street is now home to a series of temporary "parklets" thanks to the "Everyone is King" design competition.

Among the many installations is Woggle Jungle, by Assistant Professor Victor Perez-Amado (of VPA Studio) with Daniels students Anton Skorishchenko and Michael De Luca, in collaboration with MAKE Studio's Dina Sarhane (MArch 2013) and Mani Mani (MArch 2012). Located where King Street intersects with Ed Mirvish Way, by Metro Hall, Woggle Jungle is made up of hundreds of colourful foam pool noodles that emerge from a wooden platform, where visitors may meander, sit, or rest.

"This parklet takes advantage of the flexibility of pool noodles and its modular elements which allow for different engaging configurations and expansion," says the Woggle Jungle design team.  "As the project title suggests, 400 foam buoyancy aids are bundled to create a multi-colored forest and seating destination that stretches across King Street."

The project and other winning entries will remain on King Street until October 1, 2018. The "Everyone is King" competition is part of the King Street Transit Pilot, which the City of Toronto launched in November 2017, to explore a new configuration for King Street that would improve transit service on the busiest streetcar route in the city.

For more information on the King Street Transit Pilot, visit the City of Toronto's website, where you will also find a list of the other winning entries.

Photos by Yasmin Al-Samarrai

First year Master of Architecture student Pedram Karimi and fourth year Master of Architecture student Parham Karimi (who happen to be brothers) received an honourable mention for their submission to BOUN: International Urban Furniture Design Competition.

The 2018 competition sought design for furniture that would enrich the built environment and improve the quality of the urban landscapes marked by "ever-increasing skyscrapers" that tend to overpower smaller elements.

The duo's proposal, titled GATHERING-TIME, is a series of modular urban furniture that encourages the discovery of interstitial spaces within urban university campuses.

Writes Pedram, "The design proposal intends to redefine the campus bench from a repeatable object into a distinct, expressive space that can attract and delight people, inviting them to gather in small and large groups."

Congratulations to Pedram and Parham on their successful competition entry!

The Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design is pleased to host Smartgeometry (sg), a widely-acclaimed biennial workshop and conference that investigates how digital tools and computation can serve architecture and design.  sg2018 will attract a global community of innovators in the fields of architecture, design, science, engineering and science to participate in four-day workshops followed by a two-day conference to explore new forms of architectural and structural expression.
 
The Workshop on May 7-10 enables professional architects, engineers, academics, and students to engage in high-level training and research in a collaborative environment with world-leading experts in architectural computation, digital fabrication, and artificial intelligence.
 
The Conference on May 11&12 will feature presentations by renowned designers and theorists on computational design and artificial intelligence.

(Please visit the Smartgeometry website to view registration fees, which include special rates for students.)
 
A new kind of intelligence is emerging and becoming a part of our everyday lives. The new mind will be able to learn at fantastic rates, have unbounded creativity, alter and adapt its own behaviour or experience, and perhaps even live forever — raising questions about how we live and experience the world. Whether humans are directly or indirectly collaborating with these computationally intelligent machines, they have the power to be an active partner or tool in design creativity, blurring the traditional relationship between a designer and their tools.
 
At sg2018, human and computational intelligences will interact with each other and the physical world through robotics, vision, sensing, language, materials, and design. The conference will explore the impact of computational intelligence on the future of architectural design, and how machine minds will improve the world we live in.
 
www.smartgeometry.org

A new app designed by Associate Professor Aziza Chaouni together with a group of architecture students from the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, could be the first step in protecting communities in Morocco’s Guelmim Province from being forced to flee their land, where the ravages of climate change have led to widespread drought and desertification.

Soon available through itunes, the app provides would-be tourists with information on routes, sites, and resources in the region. But it also doubles as a master plan for the Moroccan Ministry of Tourism, which partnered with Chaouni and her research platform Designing Ecological Tourism (DET) to determine how sustainable tourism could help local residents, including low-income farmers and craftspeople, stay in the area and support the conservation of the region’s sensitive ecology.

“When people in this region abandon their land for the cities, they are also leaving behind cultural practices,” says Chaouni, an architect and engineer who grew up in Morocco and whose research is focused on design issues in the developing world, particularly arid climates. “It feels like I am witnessing culture being erased.”

Chaouni’s research, combining architecture and ecotourism, grew out of her Master of Architecture thesis at Harvard, which proposed uncovering the Fez River in her hometown — a project she further developed after graduating and came to realize.

“I was really interested in the scarcity of water, and, later, through my research as the Aga Khan Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, I found that many innovations in Saharan regions were happening in the field ecotourism, because owners had the means and the motivation to mix traditional construction techniques with innovative technology and design,” Chaouni says. “Working in areas where you cannot take your natural resources for granted, you realize how wasteful  the design approaches you are accustomed to are. It completely redefined how I think about architecture and landscape architecture.”

Rendering by Yi Zhang, Agri-tourism centre

The Moroccan Ministry of Tourism reached out to Chaouni’s research platform to develop an ecotourism master plan for the southern Morocco province of Guelmim, where the Anti-Atlas mountain range, Sahara Desert and Atlantic Ocean meet. Although the unique landscape offers extraordinary hiking and trekking opportunities, beautiful beaches, and “is one of the best spots in the world for kite surfing,” Chaouni says it doesn’t receive as many tourist as other Moroccan destinations, in part because it lacks the infrastructure to support them.

Working with local politicians, villagers, ecologists, and landscape architects (including Associate Professor Alissa North), Chaouni and graduate students in her Winter 2017 research studio selected key sites identified by the Ministry and developed a program (which could include new built infrastructure such as a hotel, an interpretive centre, wayfinding, lookout points, or a combination of these elements) for each. Their research included a trip to the Guelmim Province where they visited the sites and met with locals.

“The student projects helped the Ministry and the local community better envision what could be built there and how it might support the fragile region,” explains Chaouni.

The following summer, Chaouni engaged the help of graduate students Mengie Cheng and Yiming Chen and undergraduate students Yi Zhang (now a Masters student) and Treasure Zhang, to map and rate the attractions, develop routes, and propose additional infrastructure that would need to be built to support them. The maps included existing hotels, homestay opportunities, and local cooperatives, where women have crafts for sale. Graduate student Eleanor Laffling and Undergraduate student Yasmine El Sanouyra provided editing and design assistance for the app this past fall.

With the help of developers at U of T, this information, along with some of the top student projects that illustrate a vision for the future, were incorporated into an app, which will be free to download. Design guidelines developed by Chaouni will inform the Ministry of Tourism’s request for proposals that will ultimate see infrastructure built across a total of 52 sites.

“I chose to do an app instead of a traditional publication because its impact on the livelihood of the local population will be more immediate,” says Chaouni. “The Ministry of Tourism is now interested in undertaking the same approach for other regions in Morocco.”

For more information on Designing Ecological Tourism, visit DET’s website.

Rederings, top:: 1) rehabilitation of Agadir Id Aissa, bu Treasure Zhang; 2) Birdwatching research station and lodge, by Kellie Chin; 3) rendering by Yiming Chen

What would happen if an iconic Housing Project from the 20th Century were to land, today, in downtown Toronto?

This semester 15 teams of undergraduate students have been working on 15 different design fictions — and their results were shared this week on instagram, using the hashtags #WhatIfToronto and​ #HistoryofHousing.

Each team constructed its own story using images from a seminal housing project as well as new drawings and short texts announcing its launching in downtown Toronto. The work was completed for the course History of Housing: Crisis, Visions, Commonplace (ARC354), taught by Assistant professor Petros Babasikas.

The housing projects the students drew from include: M. Brinkman's Justus Van Effen Complex (Rotterdam, 1921), M. Ginzburg's & I. Milinis' Narkomfin Building (Moscow, 1932), M. van der Rohe's Lake Shore Drive Apartments (Chicago, 1951), Le Corbusier's Unite d'Habitation (Marseille, 1952), M. Safdie's Habitat 67 (Montreal, 1967), K. Kurokawa's Nagakin Capsule Tower (Tokyo, 1972), A. & P. Smithson's Robin Hood Gardens and N. Brown's Alexandra Road Estate (London, 1975 and 78).

While remaining a design fiction, #WhatIfToronto sketches what might happen if global architectures were to land in Toronto in a 'non-Toronto way.' It also reflects on the city's real estate boom and on the contemporary housing crisis experienced by the students' generation. The project's alternate versions of 20th Century urban life — Modernist, Metabolist, Collective, Communal, Low- and Mid-Rise, High-Density — have been extremely influential in the history of architecture and in the making of cities.

In their ongoing research for History of Housing, students, using multidisciplinary sources and tools, have been discovering repeating patterns, building types, crises and visions of community, identity and public space realized by housing architecture over the past century. They now broadcast some of this work to a city that keeps changing, opening and closing, reinventing itself and asking questions about its global standing.

The posts, stories and collages of #WhatIfToronto #HistoryofHousing @uoftdaniels are meant to travel in the Cloud as public images of how we could live together.

To view the students' projects, search #WhatIfToronto​ #HistoryofHousing on instagram.

Matthew Jull, an assistant professor from the University of Virginia, has published a review of Many Norths, by Associate Professor Mason White and Lola Sheppard, in the most recent issue of the Journal of Architectural Education (JAE).

Given the dearth of books on architecture in the arctic, the 471 page volume, which "charts the unique spatial realities of Canada's Arctic region" is "a timely and critical contribution to design research on the Arctic," writes Jull. "As we seek to develop new ways of designing and adapting buildings and cities globally as a result of the impacts of climate change, the Arctic — and the research presented in Many Norths — will provide an important framework and reference."

White and Sheppard are co-founders of Lateral Office, which has been recognized for its extensive research in the north. In 2012 it won the Arctic Inspiration Prize. In 2014, Lateral Office represented Canada at the International Architecture Exhibition of Venice Biennale, and was honoured with a "Special "Mention" for "Its in-depth study of how modernity adapts to a unique climatic condition and a local minority culture."

Jull's review is available online via JAE's website: http://www.jaeonline.org/articles/reviews-books/many-norths-spatial-pra…

Photo, top: Iqaluit looking east, 2010. Photo by Ed Maruyama, courtesy of the City of Iqaluit.

Associate Professor Zeynep Çelik Alexander's book Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design "offers the first major intellectual history of kinaesthetic knowing and its influence on the formation of modern art and architecture and especially modern design education."
 

Is all knowledge the product of thought? Or can the physical interactions of the body with the world produce reliable knowledge? In late-nineteenth-century Europe, scientists, artists, and other intellectuals theorized the latter as a new way of knowing, which Zeynep Çelik Alexander here dubs “kinaesthetic knowing.”     

In this book, Alexander offers the first major intellectual history of kinaesthetic knowing and its influence on the formation of modern art and architecture and especially modern design education. Focusing in particular on Germany and tracing the story up to the start of World War II, Alexander reveals the tension between intellectual meditation and immediate experience to be at the heart of the modern discourse of aesthetics, playing a major part in the artistic and teaching practices of numerous key figures of the period, including Heinrich Wölfflin, Hermann Obrist, August Endell, László Moholy-Nagy, and many others. Ultimately, she shows, kinaesthetic knowing did not become the foundation of the human sciences, as some of its advocates had hoped, but it did lay the groundwork—at such institutions as the Bauhaus—for modern art and architecture in the twentieth century.
 

Published by University of Chicago Press, Kinaesthetic Knowing has received rave reviews.

"Zeynep Celik Alexander's stunningly original study of the intersection of emergent laboratory psychology, new pedagogical credos, and artistic practices in late nineteenth-century Germany, is a landmark analysis," said Barry Bergdoll of Columbia University.

Daniel M. Abramson of Boston University called the book extraordinary: "A critical history of design education, this book is exceedingly learned, smart, knowing, original, and, for all that, accessible and well-written. Its impact will be as broad and deep as the work itself."

The book can be purchased online, and is also available at the Daniels Faculty's Eberhard Zeidler Library.

Zeynep Çelik Alexander is an architectural historian whose work focuses on the history of architectural modernism since the Enlightenment. Her current research project explores architectures of bureaucracy from the Kew Herbarium to the Larkin Administration Building. Alexander is a member of Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative and an editor of the journal Grey Room.

Congratulations to the Daniels Faculty undergraduate students Dimah Ghazal, Ous Abou Ras, and Adriana Sadun on winning the 2018 TEDxUofT design competition. The competition called for installations that addressed the theme of the conference: Deconstruct. 

As the team writes in their proposal:

"The design consists of two sculptural pieces made from solid and semi-transparent cubes. Each cube is arranged in a specific orientation that conveys a whole. However, this whole is formed of two intersecting ideas, an artistic visualization of form and a physical interpretation of the deconstruction of light. The idea of intersection comes from the letter X, a sign of two lines meeting one another at a singular point. At the intersection is where the two lines deconstruct and reconstruct to form a new meaning. It is where different disciplines meet to form new relationships."

This year's TEDxUofT Conference held a design competition, where they reached out to aspiring U of T designers to design an installation for the intermission space in the St. Lawrance Centre for the Performing Arts. "We want this design to engage with the guests in a way that is both intriguing and thought-provoking, captivating them outside the traditional speaker-audience setting", said the TEDxUofT organizers in the Design Contest Brief.

The winning team was chosen based on their creative efforts to communicate the theme of the conference and their ability to engage guests with their work.

For more information about TEDxUofT and their events, head over to their Website and YouTube Channel.

Congratulations to Daniels faculty and alumni whose firms have been listed among the finalists for the OAA Design Excellence Awards. A total of 20 projects were shortlisted for the awards.

“The 2018 finalists have set a new standard for excellence in architecture and represent a dynamic range of bold and cutting-edge thinking that architects in our province are fast becoming renowned for. The projects demonstrate exciting new approaches to functionality that enhance the lives of Ontarians, Canadians and global citizens,” said OAA President, John Stephenson. “Once again, I’m pleased that through the OAA Awards we can celebrate the world-class design and vision of architects based in Ontario that are creating and inspiring powerful contributions for our future.”

The finalists were selected from 111 submissions based on the following criteria: creativity, context, sustainability, good design/good business and legacy. Over the month of March, each finalist will be featured on the OAA blOAAg.

Below is a list of the shortlisted projects by faculty and alumni firms. (Listed in same order as the photos in the gallery above.)

Bahá’í Temple of South America
Santiago, Chile
By Hariri Pontarini Architects, the firm of David Pontarini (Barch 1983) and Siamak Hariri

House on Ancaster Creek
Ancaster, ON
By Williamson Williamson Inc., the firm of Associate Professor Shane Williamson, director of the Faculty's Master of Architecture program, and Betsy Williamson

Collaborative Greenhouse Technology Centre
Vineland, ON
By Baird Sampson Neuert Architects Inc., the firm of Professor Emeritus George Baird and Professor Barry Sampson

Alta Chalet
Town of the Blue Mountains, ON
By Atelier Kastelic Buffey Inc., the firm of Kelly Buffy (MArch 2007) and Robert Kastelic

Casey House
Toronto, ON
By Hariri Pontarini Architects

Environmental Science and Chemistry Building, University of Toronto, Scarborough
Scarborough, ON
By Diamond and Schmitt Architects Incorporated, the firm of Donald Schmitt (Barch 1977) and A. J. Diamond

National Arts Centre Rejuvenation
Ottawa, ON
Diamond and Schmitt Architects Incorporated

Julis Romo Rabinowitz Building & Louis A. Simpson International Building, Princeton University
Princeton, NJ, USA
By KPMB Architects, the firm of Bruce Kuwabara (Barch 1972), Shirley Blumberg (Barch 1975), and Marianne McKenna

Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University
Evanston, IL, USA
By KPMB Architects

Remai Modern
Saskatoon, SK
By KPMB Architects (Design Architect) and Architecture49 Inc. (Architect of Record)

McEwen School of Architecture/ École d’architecture McEwen
Sudbury, ON
By LGA Architectural Partners Ltd., the firm of Janna Levitt (BArch 1986) and Dean Goodman (BArch 1983)

Visit the OAA website for a complete list of the shortlisted projects.

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In other OAA news, John Stephenson (Barch 1978) has been elected to serve as OAA President for a second one-year term.

From the OAA press release:

Stephenson is one of the founding partners of FORM Architecture Engineering, the largest architectural practice in Northwestern Ontario, established in 1986 as Kuch Stephenson Architects. After receiving his Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Architecture, he worked as an intern architect in Toronto, before relocating to Northwestern Ontario in 1980, where he continued his internship with Graham Bacon Welter Architects & Consulting Engineers prior to beginning his practice in Thunder Bay.
 
As OAA president, Stephenson is committed to building a strong profession that is valued and empowered to serve the public interest through excellence in design and professional practice.
 
“In addition to design excellence, the key to achieving this goal is recognizing that effective project and risk management is central to the architect’s role today,” he says.
 
Stephenson joined OAA Council in 2013. He had originally served a term in the early 1990s, continuing to volunteer with the Association afterward. Since then, he has participated in several committees, task forces and executive roles, serving as Senior Vice President and Treasurer for the two years prior to becoming President.
During his time on Council, Stephenson has taken part in several new and ambitious initiatives, many of which remain in progress, including the OAA Headquarters Renew + Refresh project, re-imagining the OAA Honours and Awards program, a new media content creation and communication strategy and, in collaboration with ARIDO, considering ways in which the practice of interior design could be regulated under the Architects Act.
Stephenson is particularly passionate about promoting continued public engagement and advocacy by architects on topics such as procurement, housing affordability and the role of the architectural profession in reconciliation with Indigenous peoples.
 
During his first year as President, Stephenson led the profession in a vigorous campaign refusing to participate in procurement processes that require architects to contract out of their professional obligations. He has also been a vocal advocate for more enlightened employment practices by architects and for the creation of a National Architecture Policy to guide the procurement of architectural services and the creation of a safe, healthy and uplifting built environment for all Canadians.
 

Congratulations to Stephenson on his election!

Daniels Faculty lecturer Katy Chey will be speaking about her new book Multi-Unit Housing in Urban Cities: From 1800 to Present Day at the California College of the Arts on February 19th. Her talk is part of the lecture and panel discussion "Housing the Multitude." Sarina Kennerly of Kennedy Architecture & Planning, and Matthew G. Lasner, of Hunter College, CUNY will be joining her on stage to discuss the relationship bewteen urban development and the production of new housing typologies.

Chey's new book was also recently announced on ArchDaily. Click here to read the full article.

Multi-Unit Housing in Urban Cities is available in-stores at the U of T Bookstore, Swipe Books + Design, Type Books on Queen Street, and Indigo in the Eaton Centre, and other major online retailers.