"Every family is different. Why are so many family homes the same?" asks Alex Bozikovic, architecture critic for The Globe and Mail.

He explores the answer to this question in a recent article that spotlights a multigenerational home in Ancaster near Hamilton, designed by Associate Professor Shane Williamson and Besty Williamson, principals of Williamson Williamson Architects. This isn't the first multigenerational home that the firm has built. Their Grange Triple Double house, designed for a three-generational family, has won multiple awards.

Williamson Williamson Architects' House on Ancaster Creek "provides the suburban virtues of privacy and comfort, while making room for the elders of a family to live and age in place," writes Bozikovic. "This model of domesticity scrambles the very ideas on which the suburbs were built, to beautiful results."
 

"Property values are so high that it's becoming an easy decision to consolidate multigenerational family resources under one roof," Shane Williamson says.
...

"Multigenerational living is not so intrinsic to our North American culture as it is elsewhere," he adds. "But given the diversity of our society," he argues, "it's coming." Part of that involves the arrival of new Canadians who bring a cultural norm of multigenerational living; Binh, the homeowner in Ancaster, is of Vietnamese descent. South Asian families have likewise brought this practice with them to the Toronto suburbs.
 

Visit The Globe and Mail to read the full article.

Launched last summer, StudentDwellTO is an 18-month-long joint-research project being conducted by the University of Toronto, Ryerson, OCAD, and York University to find solutions to one of the biggest issues facing post secondary students in the Greater Toronto Area: affordable housing.

As Romi Levine writes in U of T News, researchers — including Assistant Professors Mauricio Quirós Pacheco from the Daniels Faculty and Marcelo Vieta from OISE, U of T's faculty leads on the project — have developed a strong understanding of the challenges that students face and best practices from around the world.

"One of their early findings," writes Levine, "is that design greatly affects student experiences."

From the article:

The StudentDwellTO team is currently collecting census data with the help of faculty including David Hulchanski, professor at the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, and will be conducting focus groups with students and stakeholders to get a clearer picture of the current landscape and future possibilities.

In addition, faculty members are incorporating the study of student housing into their curricula, says Vieta.
 

This fall, Daniels Faculty undergraduate students will use the data and case studies collected to explore ideas for the design of student housing.

Visit U of T News to read the full story.

Image, top by Scott Carncross (March 2017). Part of his Master of Architecture thesis A new Housing through Symbiotic Performance.

The Daniels Faculty is pleased to announce the release of Lecturer Katy Chey’s new book: Multi-Unit Housing in Urban Cities: From 1800 to Present Day, published by Routledge. The book investigates the development of multi-unit housing typologies that were predominant in particular cities from 1800 to present day. It emphasizes the importance of understanding the direct connection between housing and dwelling in the context of a city, and the manner in which the city is an instructional indication of how a housing typology is embodied.

Each housing typology in each city begins with a characterization of the multi-unit housing type; analyzes the typology’s connection to the city; examines its housing policies, building codes and laws; presents case studies of the housing type; and ends with the typology’s circumstance in the city at present day. The typologies include back-to-backs in Birmingham; London tenements in London; Haussmann Apartments in Paris; New York tenements in New York; tong lau in Hong Kong; perimeter block, linear block and block-edge in Berlin; perimeter block and solitaire in Amsterdam; space-enclosing structures in Beijing; kyosho jutaku in Tokyo; and high-rises in Toronto.
 
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.

The Daniels Building has received another award: a 2018 Design Award from AIA New York. Congratulations to NADAAA, who led the project at One Spadina together with Adamson Associates Architects (the architect-of-record), and ERA Architects (the preservation architects).

The winning projects were granted either an “Honor” or “Merit” award. The Daniels Building was recognized with an Honor award in the Architecture category. Winning projects were chosen for their design quality, response to context and community, program resolution, innovation, thoughtfulness, and technique.

For more information on the awards, visit AIA New York's website.

Daniels Facutly Lecturer Ultan Byrne (MArch 2013) presented the paper "Point Cloud Paint: A Software Tool for Speculative Urban Design Using Three-Dimensional Digital Collage" at the 2017 Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA) Conferencein November.

From the abstract:

Beginning from a provocation in Auguste Blanqui’s "Eternity by the Stars", this paper reports on a new methodology of digital collage for urban design. The research is situated relative to the current discourses surrounding both voxelization and point-cloud data structures in order to motivate the concept of a recombinant approach to design in existing cities. Building on these sources, and with reference to recent developments in mesh shape composition techniques, the paper presents the resulting software implementation “Point-Cloud-Paint”: a tool that enables collage-based combinatorial experimentation with urban point-cloud data.

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The conference was hosted by the M.I.T. School of Architecture + Planning at the Media Lab.

A graduate of the University of Toronto's Master of Architecture program, Byrne also holds degrees in philosophy and architectural design, and is a computer programmer.

He recently published a review of The Internet Archive in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (JSAH).

The Daniels Building received a Best of Year award in the higher education category from Interior Design magazine. Winners of the Best of Year awards were announced in the magazine's December issue:

"Designing a space that will in turn inspire great design. That was the heady task that principals Nader Tehrani and Katherine Faulkner undertook at this undergraduate and postgraduate facility. What they accomplished is a rich mix of old and new, patina and polish."

Designed by Nader Tehrani and Katherine Faulkner, principals of the internationally acclaimed firm NADAAA — in collaboration with Architect-of-record Adamson & Associates, landscape architects Public Work, and heritage architects ERA — the Daniels Building at One Spadina includes dynamic, flexible learning and research environments for faculty and students, and will nurture the next generation of leaders in the field.

Other awards that the Daniels Building has received include:

• The Plan Awards, Honorable Mention (2017)
• CISC Ontario Steel Design Award of Excellence (2017)
• Society of American Registered Architects Silver Award of Honor (2015)
• Acknowledgement Prize Holcim Awards (2014)
• Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design: Green Good Design Award (2014)
• Boston Society of Architects: Unbuilt Architecture Award (2013)

2017 was a historic year for the Daniels Faculty, as we moved from our previous home at 230 College Street to our new location at One Spadina Crescent, one of Toronto's most iconic sites. The finishing touches will be put on our new building this winter and spring, when construction on some key spaces — including our Principal Hall and Architecture and Design Gallery — is scheduled to wrap up.

In the meantime, Torontonians, including Globe and Mail columnist Marcus Gee, are taking note of the new Daniels Building and its place in the city.

"The new home for the University of Toronto's architecture school at 1 Spadina Crescent is the kind of little miracle that makes it possible to believe that Toronto really can have nice things after all," writes Gee.

Following a generous donation from developer and U of T architecture alumnus John Daniels and his wife, Myrna, the school had been named the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design. Prof. Sommer told U of T leaders that moving to Spadina Crescent would give the school a striking new home and the university new visibility on its western flank. After another Daniels donation, the project got the green light. Architects Nader Tehrani and Katherine Faulkner of NADAAA collaborated on the design along with heritage architects ERA and landscape architects Public Work.

The results are spectacular. The old Gothic revival building has been brought back to its former glory, its yellow-brick façade all cleaned up, its windows renewed, its wood floors sanded and polished. The school's new Eberhard Zeidler Library is there, with space for its rare-book collection. So is a new reading room, in the college's old refectory.

Behind the original building, at the north end of the site, stands a three-storey glass-walled addition with galleries, a meeting hall, high-tech fabrication workshop and a huge, airy design studio with views to the north.
 

Visit the Globe and Mail's website to read the full article.

Learn more about the Daniels Building at One Spadina here.

Alumnus Kelly Doran (MArch 2008), Senior Director - East Africa Programs at the firm MASS, was recently profiled in The Globe and Mail.

"Mr. Doran joined MASS in 2014, in his mid-thirties, after a rise through the profession," writes The Globe's architecture critic Alex Bozikovic. That rise included  receiving the Prix de Rome in Architecture for Emerging Practitioners from the Canada Council for the Arts in 2009, and working for Toronto firms Williamson Williamson Inc. and regionalArchitects.

He is now working from Kigali in Rwanda, "designing an entire campus for an agricultural university, as well as a pair of hospitals in Rwanda and a library for another university in Uganda – among other things."

Yet, as Bozikovic writes:

The past few years have posed questions: How do you design a building in a place where you can't afford to import building materials? How do you build a cancer hospital in a country with no cancer hospitals? And, most important, how do you design a place that will make society better? "That's broadly our mission," Mr. Doran says. "To take the enormous amount of money that is involved in building and make it more equitable."

Visit The Globe and Mail to read the full article.

The Daniels Building's most photographed and celebrated detail is the signature ceiling that spans the third floor graduate design studio. But did you know that the award-winning ceiling almost never came to be? Catherine Osbourne of Azure spoke to NADAAA's  Katie Faulkner to learn how she and Nader Tehrani proved that moving forward with this design feature — which brings light into the center of the building and provides an inspiration place of learning — wouldn't break the bank.

Writes Osbourne:

Given that the ceiling looked complicated, they decided to build a section at full-scale. “We sat down and wrote up a list of what we would need, and almost everything we wrote down we could get at Home Depot. So we went shopping.”

Within a week, they had constructed a metal frame covered with ¼-inch ply, a thinner-than-usual option that could bend a bit more than thicker plys. They built a surface with two end points that tip either up or down, and which demonstrated that over a long distance, the framing could accomplish the desired curvature using straight lines.

NADAAA’s hyperbolic paraboloid solution, says Faulkner, was significantly different from how the contractor was envisioning it.

Visit Azure's website to read the full article.

First year Master of Architecture student Pedram Karimi was among the contributors to the exhibition Black Spaces Matter, now on at the Boston Architectural College's McCormick Gallery. Running until January 29, 2018,  the exhibit explores the "form and function of interracial neighbourhoods"  through an in-depth study of the abolitionist community new New Bedford Whaling national Historical Park in New Bedford, Massachusetts.

"In recent years we have seen a growing body of literature on race and architecture; however, this scholarship has focused mostly on the negative side of such built environments," explains the event listing. "This exhibit celebrates the aesthetics and architectonics of a neighborhood where many former slaves lived side-by-side with the rest of the population and engaged multiple aspects of the city's interracial architecture."

Karimi's contribution — which included help making a large-scale digitally fabricated urban model and diagram of the so-called Abolitionist Row of New Bedford  — stemmed from year-long research in New Bedford. Karimi also created several architectural drawings and panels, as well as visualizations of several architectural and landscape projects.

The exhibition was a collaborative project that involved filmmakes, VR specialists, architectural historians and community stakeholders.  Local New Bedford experts partnered with students and faculty from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and Boston Architectural College to highlight "a lesser-known progressive interracial neighbourhood in the United States."

From the event listing:

Massachusetts abolished slavery in 1783, more than 80 years before the Thirteenth Amendment; however, federal law supporting slave owners superseded this law and there were cases of slaves being "reclaimed" from Massachusetts in the years that followed. A strong network of abolitionists, both black and white, gave New Bedford its claim to fame that no slave was ever forcibly "reclaimed" from it.

New Bedford's architecture reflects a period of relative racial equality and tolerance in "the city that lit the world" during its whaling boom. This neighborhood includes a mixture of Gothic Revival, Federal, Greek Revival, and early Italianate homes, as well as modest cottages. Important historical figures, such as Fredrick Douglass and Lewis Temple, resided in these homes.
 

For more information, visit the UMass Dartmnouth website.