On Wednesday, May 16^th, the Daniels Faculty was proud to host the Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate Lecture: “Paths Uncharted” with Balkrishna Doshi.

Professor Doshi has been instrumental in shaping the discourse of architecture throughout India and internationally as an architect, urban planner, and educator. Influenced by masters of 20th century architecture, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier, and Louis Kahn, he has been able to interpret architecture and transform it into built works that respect eastern culture while enhancing the quality of life in India. His ethical and personal approach to architecture has touched lives of every socio-economic class across a broad spectrum of genres since the 1950s.

Tickets for Doshi’s lecture sold out in minutes, and people from around the world watched his presentation live via Instagram and facebook. For those who missed it, the livestream is available on the Daniels Faculty’s YouTube page. (Dean Richard Sommer’s introduction starts around the 20:00 mark.)

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Pritzker Prize, and the first time that the international award was presented in Canada. The private award ceremony took place at the Aga Khan Museum on May 18.

Each year, the Pritzker Prize honours a living architect whose built work demonstrates a combination of those qualities of talent, vision and commitment, which has produced consistent and significant contributions to humanity and the built environment through the art of architecture.

View more photos on the Daniels Faculty's Facebook page.

The University of Toronto’s John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design in partnership with The Pritzker Architecture Prize is honoured to welcome Professor Balkrishna Doshi, the 2018 Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, to present the public lecture "Paths Uncharted" on Wednesday, May 16, 2018.

While registration is full for this event, there will be a rush line for non-ticket holders, and any unclaimed seats will be made available on a first-come, first served basis. Overflow spaces with some visibility into the hall will also be available. If you are a ticket holder, remember to arrive 10 minutes before the start of the event to claim your seat!

Professor Doshi’s lecture will also be recorded and streamed live on Facebook and Instagram via @UofTDaniels. Following the event, the recording will be made available on the Daniels Faculty’s YouTube channel, youtube.com/UofTDaniels.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Pritzker Prize, and the first time that the international award will be presented in Canada. Its purpose is to honor annually a living architect whose built work demonstrates a combination of those qualities of talent, vision and commitment, which has produced consistent and significant contributions to humanity and the built environment through the art of architecture.

An architect, urban planner, and educator, for the past 70 years Doshi has been instrumental in shaping the discourse of architecture throughout India and internationally. Influenced by masters of 20th century architecture, including Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier, and Louis Kahn, Doshi has been able to interpret architecture and transform it into built works that respect eastern culture while enhancing the quality of living in India. His ethical and personal approach to architecture has touched lives of every socio-economic class across a broad spectrum of genres since the 1950s.

Doshi's architecture explores the relationships between fundamental needs of human life, connectivity to self and culture, and understanding of social traditions, within the context of a place and its environment, and through a response to Modernism. Childhood recollections, from the rhythms of the weather to the ringing of temple bells, inform his designs. He describes architecture as an extension of the body, and his ability to attentively address function while regarding climate, landscape, and urbanization is demonstrated through his choice of materials, overlapping spaces, and utilization of natural and harmonizing elements.

Image, top: Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore (photo courtesy of VSF)

2012 Daniels Faculty graduate Mohamed Serour will have his Master of Architecture thesis published as part of the Egyptian national pavilion's exhibition at the 2018 Venice Biennale, May 26 to November 25.

Curated by architects Islam El Mashtooly and Mouaz Abouzaid, with architecture professor Cristiano Luchetti, art director and producer Giuseppe Moscatello, and art director Karim Moussa, the Egyptian Pavilion will focus on "Roba becciah: The informal city."

"Having grown up in Cairo, I have always found informal settlements very interesting in terms of the socio-economic and political space they inhabit and, more importantly, the opportunities that informality has created to re-shape these settlements’ social and urban landscapes," says Serour.

For his thesis project, Serour examined the role that architecture could play in increasing the autonomy and self-sufficiency of informal settlements, though an exploration of Ezbet El-Nasr, an informal settlement in Cairo.

His research involved developing an understanding residents' most pressing needs and reviewing the existing technologies they rely on to provide basic services, such as the use of low-tech solar heating systems to provide hot water. His proposal for new, decentralized infrastructural systems in the form of towers builds on opportunities that already exist within the dense neighbourhoods and aims to bring the informal settlement communities back from the margins.

Serour grew up in Cairo and moved to Toronto in 2002 to attend the University of Toronto. He is currently an architect at the Toronto-based firm Superkül.

For more information on Egypt's pavilion at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, visit: www.robabecciah.com

For more information on the Venice Biennale, visit: http://www.labiennale.org

This week (May 7-12), the Daniels Faculty is hosting Smartgeometry — a biennial workshop and conference that investigates how digital tools and computation can serve architecture and design. Attracting a global community of innovators in the fields of architecture, design, science, engineering, and science, this year's events will explore the relationship between architecture and AI.

Globe and Mail architecture critic Alex Bozikovic wrote about some of the novels ways that computation and new fabrication technologies are altering the how architects design spaces in a recent article (now available to subscribers online). His piece features The Living, a New York studio among the pioneers in the field of generative design.

Bozikovic also spoke to Assistant Professor Brady Peters, a director at Smartgeometry who helped organize this year's workshops and conference at the Daniels Faculty:
 

"Smart geometry is not just about computation,” Daniels assistant professor Brady Peters says, “but increasingly about fabrication – the relationship of the design process to the fabrication and construction process.”

Peters, a long-time participant in the biennial event, speaks from experience. While working at Foster & Partners in London, he participated in the design of complex structures – including the glass-and-metal roof of a courtyard at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, which appears to ripple like a sail.

Making such forms has been the most visible application of software in architecture, and 20 years ago, it meant serious technical challenges. Frank Gehry’s office was able to design his famous Guggenheim Bilbao by customizing software intended for aircraft production.

At this point, “the software problem has gotten solved,” Peters says. “The tools” – software including Grasshopper and Rhino – are widely available, and they allow users to “design a series of relationships between geometric forms that then combine into architecture.”

The question, then: Where can tech take us? At this year’s Smartgeometry – which begins with a five-day workshop, “a chance for people in practice to get together, geek out and develop new technology” – the territory is artificial intelligence. One possible application: tracking and interpreting data from building sensors that reveal how a build performs. “Now, it’s about energy being measured on an hourly basis or minute-by-minute basis – and that can serve as part of the design of new buildings,” Peters says. “This is research that hasn’t yet been done in architecture – a real living lab, and seeing how building can evolve.”
 

Tickets for the Smartgeometry conference are available online via eventbrite. A list of speakers and the schedule can be viewed on the Smartgeometry website.

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.