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.

A recent article by CityLab highlights the expansive, detailed, and beautifully illustrated research in the book Third Coast Atlas: A Prelude to a Plan by Clare Lyster, Charles Waldheim, Daniel Ibañez, and  Daniels Faculty Associate Professor Mason White.

Filled with maps, plans, diagrams, timelines, photographs, and essays, the large, hardcover book offers a multi-layered description of the process of urbanization throughout the Great Lakes region: North America’s “Third Coast.”

CityLab provides "The Story of the Great Lakes in 8 Maps," referencing illustrations from the book.

Writes Zach Mortice:

The Great Lakes were where the skyscraper and the shopping mall were invented. The urban street grid was perfected here, and the field of urban planning took some of its earliest steps here toward becoming a formalized profession. Its ports and shipping distribution districts were trendsetters. And all manner of Modernist campus and quasi-megastructure experiments took root in the humble middle of North America. Think of Mies van der Rohe’s campus at Chicago’s Illinois Institute of Technology and his Lafayette Park neighborhood in Detroit; Bertrand Goldberg’s city-within-two-towers Marina City, also in Chicago; and Moshe Safdie’s influential Habitat 67 in Montreal.

It is a vast legacy, matched by the physical dimensions of the Great Lakes themselves.

Visit CityLab to read the full article.

Daniels Faculty lecturer Ultan Byrne recently published a review of The Internet Archive in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (JSAH).

The Internet Archive, writes Byrne, is “an openly accessible electronic repository of public domain and free-license cultural materials launched in 1996 by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Brewster Kahle.”

Why does it matter that an archive has a shape, or that its shape be apprehensible? Without understanding the methodology by which a collection was assembled, whether by the expert knowledge of the professional archivist, the unsystematic contributions of individual users, or the automatic operation of autonomous web crawlers, we might never be sure of the biases embedded in its boundary shape.
 

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

Visit the JSAH website to read the full review.

On December 5, as Toronto City Council voted in favour of moving forward with planning for Rail Deck Park, Master of Architecture, Master of Landscape Architecture, and Master of Urban Design students presented design ideas for this new public space, which would be built over the rail corridor that cuts through the southern edge of the downtown core.

"Toronto city council voted 36-4 in favour of pushing ahead with planning work for the park, which is now estimated to cost some $1.665 billion although only five per cent of the design is complete," reported CBC News. "If built, the park would span the rail corridor from Blue Jays Way to Bathurst Street, creating more than eight hectares (21 acres) of green space in the middle of the city."

Above are photos of some of the projects that were presented on December 5.

Congratulations to all Superstudio students on completing your final review!

Congratulations to Aziza Chaouni Projects. The firm of Associate Professor Aziza Chaouni was part of a winning team in an international competition for the extension of Lycée Paul Valery, a school in Meknes in Morocco. The team included the Paris-based architecture firm LAPS, Pyramide Engineering, and Transsolar.

The team at Aziza Chaouni projects included Verónica Acprojects, Aziza Chaouni, Treasure Zhang, Pedram Karimi, Parham Karimi and Yi Zhang, Wendy Wang and Daniel Xu. Lecturer Adrian Phiffer’s firm, The Flat side of Design, created the renderings.

The college’s extension will include a new boarding school, arts centre, and scientific building.

"The future is certainly wood," says Shane Williamson, a principal at the architecture firm Williamson Williamson Inc. in Toronto, and Associate Professor at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design.

The director of the Master of Architecture program at the University of Toronto was recently interviewed for a Globe and Mail article on the revival of timber-framed construction. The piece was inspired by George Brown College’s plans to build a 12-storey tower framed of wood.

"It's a cost-effective approach to building tall," Williamson told writer Adam Stanley, who noted “wood’s green and efficiency virtues.”

Williamson’s Toronto-based firm Williamson Williamson Inc. (previously Williamson Chong) travelled the world to study the application of engineered wood known as cross-laminated timber (CLT) after winning the Professional Prix de Rome in 2012. This research culminated in, among other things, an exhibition at Corkin Gallery in 2014 that explored wood’s material history.

Building on research and a creative practice that employs advanced digital tools as a means to critically engage and transform traditional modes of construction and tectonic expression, Williamson’s work seeks to situate digital fabrication and wood construction in a broader cultural context. He links theories of design and technology to sustainable building strategies.

"CLT in some ways can be considered a replacement for concrete," Williamson told the Globe and Mail. "In many ways, it provides similar characteristics while offering tremendous benefits."

To read the full article, visit the Globe and Mail’s website.

Earlier this month, graduate students in Peter Sealy’s course, ARC 3309 “The Photographic Mediation of Architecture,” travelled to Montréal to view photographs from the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s collection. The students were asked to research a photograph from the collection in advance of the trip. While there, they gave a presentation to the class in the presence of the actual researched piece. Louise Désy, curator of photographs at the CCA, took the students on a tour of the Centre’s underground photography vault. The class also visited Phyllis Lambert’s Greystone exhibition of photographs, taken with Richard Pare in the early 1970s.

While in Montreal, the class also visited  a number of buildings with local architects as guides, including: U, by Atelier Big City with architect Howard Davies; the Stade de Soccer de Montréal by Saucier + Perrotte, with Lia Ruccolo and Olivier Blouin; and The Schulich School of Music by Saucier + Perrotte, with Vedanta Balbahadur.

An elective course at the Daniels Faculty, “The Photographic Mediation of Architecture” provides a broad survey of architecture’s contemporary and historical relationship with photography.

From the course description:

From  Julius  Shulman’s  idealizations  of  California  modernism  up  to  Helène  Binet’s present-day interpretations of Zaha Hadid’s and Peter Zumthor’s buildings, architectural photographs tell us much about architecture in its cultural and intellectual  contexts. Sometimes  images  correspond to the intentions of architects, their clients and the imagined publics for whom buildings have been designed; in  other  cases, photographs reveal previously hidden  aspects of built space and invite new interpretations. While the relationship between buildings  and their representations is necessarily complex, themes including space, subjectivity, materiality, ornament, mimesis, interiority and otherness all find their expression in architectural photographs.

Peter Sealy is an architectural historian who studies the ways in which architects constructively engage with reality through indexical media such as photography. He holds architecture degrees from the McGill University School of Architecture and the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. He is currently completing his PhD at Harvard on the emergence of a photographic visual regime in nineteenth-century architectural representation.