This fall, as students and faculty at the University of Toronto’s John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design start school in their new home at One Spadina Crescent, questions around the changing nature of the disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, art, and urbanism and their evolving pedagogical approaches have become especially urgent.

To celebrate the school’s new home and speculate about how to make best use of it in the coming years, the Faculty is mounting a series of discussions, lectures, and workshops, as well as a symposium. These events will explore the relationship between our workspaces and the pedagogies, research projects, and forms of public outreach in which we engage.

What kind of a pedagogical instrument is a school? What is its scope and reach? How do we conceptualize its relationship to the public? How can a school be a both a place where ideas are cultivated and where they are subject to continuous experimentation? And what implications does this productive tension have for the politics at play in our approach to art, architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design? The series will host a rich array of educators, theorists, historians, and practitioners and will culminate in a symposium in the spring that will bring together thinkers who are at the forefront of conceptualizing and designing our schools.

“My mantra has been that architecture and its allied disciplines are as much a way of finding the world, as they are of forming it, and how it follows that a great design school models practice by acting as a hinge between study and action,” says Professor Richard Sommer, Dean of the Daniels Faculty. “With our new platform at One Spadina, we have an unprecedented opportunity to explore and demonstrate this.”

Upcoming lectures include:

• Daniels Faculty Associate Professor and founding partner of Lateral Office Mason White, architect and urbanist Charles Waldheim, research manager at Harvard’s Urban Theory Lab Daniel Ibañez-Moreno, and architect, educator, and writer Clare Lyster, who will talk about their new book Third Coast Atlas, which strives to capture emergent and shifting forms of urbanization, increasingly understood as socio-spatial and political processes that defy conventional modes of description,
   
• Associate Professor and architectural historian Mary Lou Lobsinger and Joaquim Moreno, guest curator of the exhibition The University is Now on Air: Broadcasting Modern Architecture at CCA from Novebmer 14, 2017 to April 1, 2018, who will discuss how schools disseminate knowledge and what role mass media play in the transformation of the culture of architecture and design in conversation with Associate Professor John Harwood,
   
• Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture Liat Margolis and President of the Nunavut Association of Landscape Architects Chris Grosset, who will address the ongoing dialogue between Canadian landscape architecture practices and indigenous culture, and how this discussion informs how we might train the next generation of landscape architects.

For more information about this series, visit www.daniels.utoronto.ca/events/what-is-a-school

The new home of the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design is the cover story of Canadian Architect this month. The article, written by former Director of Urban Design and Architecture for the City of Toronto, Ken Greenberg (BArch 1970), looks at the place of One Spadina in the city.

“It is fitting that the urban design catalyst for the western edge of the campus should be an architecture school,” writes Greenberg of the new Daniels Building, noting the landscape, which includes a promenade that encircles the site, bike parking, and a raised belvedere that when complete will act as an outdoor event space with views down Spadina Avenue to the lake. “These convivial gestures speak to a new understanding of the university’s place in the city as committed steward and active contributor.”

Greenberg calls the Daniels Building “a remarkable feat of form-making, site planning, and city building.”

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 houses the University of Toronto’s programs in architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design.

Visit Canadian Architect’s website to read the full article, available via an electronic copy of the magazine published via issue.

The Canadian Architect article is one of a number that have recently been published about the Daniels Building. The New York Times, the Globe and Mail, Abitare, Architectural Digest, and Toronto Life, among others, have reviewed One Spadina as it nears completion.

Read what people are saying about One Spadina.

Assistant Professor Erica Allen-Kim contributed the chapter "Condos in the Mall: Suburban Transnational Typological Transformations in Markham, Ontario" to the book Making Cities Global: The Transnational Turn in Urban History, now available from University of Pennsylvania Press. 

Edited by A. K. Sandoval-Strausz and Nancy H. Kwak, Making Cities Global argues that "combining urban history with a transnational approach leads to a better understanding of our increasingly interconnected world. In order to achieve prosperity, peace, and sustainability in metropolitan areas in the present and into the future, we must understand their historical origins and development."

The publication was recently featured in The Metropole.

"One of the features of the Chinese-dominated ethnoburb in North America has been the densely configured shopping center, in many cases an enclosed plaza or minimall that serves as a social gathering space for a decentralized population," says Allen-Kim. "Condo malls, which were developed and marketed primarily to Asian and Hispanic immigrants in North America, have occupied an unusual position in that qualities of informality and looseness were cultivated rather than repressed by local and transnational developers, investors, and entrepreneurs."

Erica Allen-Kim is an historian of modern architecture and urban design. Her work on global cities and cultural landscapes focuses on issues of memory and citizenship. She is currently completing her first manuscript, Mini-malls and Memorials: Building Little Saigon in American Suburbs, and has published on Vietnamese-American war memorials and the transnational politics of Chinatown gates. Her current book project, Chinatown Modernism, situates the architectural and urban projects of American Chinatowns within the broader context of modern architecture and planning.

Images, top by Luke Duross (MArch 2016) as part of his thesis Retail Revisions: Ownership, Authorship and the Ethnic Mall: 1) Current Ground Floor Expansion, Pacific Mall 2) Original Ground Floor Expansion, Pacific Mall

Associate Professor Mason White was recently interviewed by urbanNext on Lateral Office’s participation in the inaugural Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism. Lateral Office's contribution to the Biennale titled States of Disassembly envisioned seven architectural typologies for a techno-commons that would manage our electronic waste stream.

“We were given the theme of recycling, which is interesting because it sounds like a very functional, utilitarian thematic, but there are people, labour, and architectural possibilities within recycling,” said White in the interview with urbanNext. ‘We wanted to look at e-waste’s geopolitics and material politics because the future of waste will be mining precious materials that are embedded in discarded products."

The seven architectural typologies were represented in an axonometric drawing. Each type illustrated is involved in upcycling discarded technology: a port for e-waste, a campus for knowledge exchange, an electronics market, and other building types or public spaces that might exist once we better incorporate the end-of-life materials into our economy.

Our culture currently celebrates the assembly of products, but the un-making, the disassembly will be part of our future, says White. The earth has a finite resource for these precious materials, so eventually we will have to explore urban mining to continue the use of these resources.

Daniels Faculty students Kearon Roy Taylor, Genevieve Simms, and Brandon Bergem, assisted Lateral Office with research and work on the States of Dissassembly exhibit.

View the full interview on Vimeo.

The Daniels Building at One Spadina is now bustling with hundreds of architecture, art, landscape architecture, and urban design students, but many may be unaware that the building's contemporary addition was constructed with some help from an unusual building material: recycled kayaks. The repurposed kayaks make up the “bubbles” in One Spadina's bubbledeck floors — an innovative structural detail that incorporates spherical voids (i.e. bubbles) into what would otherwise be a solid concrete slab.

A traditional concrete floor slab is made up of concrete poured into a solid form with steel reinforcements (called rebar) laid throughout. The thickness can vary depending on the type of occupancy, the span in between beams, and a variety of other factors. However, because of the nature of forces moving through a floor, it is actually unnecessary for it to be solid concrete.

Building a solid concrete floor is a simple and well-known practice, but it can result in an excessively heavy floor. As Tom Beresford, Project Manager at NADAAA explains on the firm's blog, introducing spherical voids (i.e. "bubbles") reduces the concrete’s weight while maintaining its structural integrity, which allows the floor slab to achieve longer spans. The bubbledeck slab performs like several “I-beams” stitched together: the concrete mass is concentrated at top and bottom of the section, where compressive and tensile bending stresses are greatest and where they are most needed.

Writes Beresford, "Voided slab’s longer, beam-less spans, combined with its smooth ceiling finish, allowed the [One Spadina] design team to transform spaces that would have otherwise been cluttered with concrete beams and drop panels into clean architectural volumes."

Bubbledeck systems allow designers and builders to produce and use less concrete and more recycled materials, lowering energy consumption and carbon emissions.

But why kayaks?

When we told visitors during Doors Open in May about the bubble deck beneath their feet, they were curious: Why were old plastic kayaks were used? Was there something special about their material? Was there a large recall in the recent past? How many kayaks are people discarding these days, anyway?  We asked Jerry Clarke-Ames at BubbleDeck North America for answers.

He explained that the bubbledecks used at One Spadina come from Metelix Products Inc, based out of Brampton, Ontario. Metelix manufactures molded products with High Density Polyethylene (HDPE) which is used to create kayaks. Occasionally, a kayak will be rejected by quality control, and this rejected kayak will be regrinded and saved to make the "bubbles."

"There is no reason to specifically use kayaks," he says. "It's a matter of coincidence."

Fun fact: One recycled kayak can produced fourty bubbles.

Visit NADAAA’s blog for a full description on the construction process and materials used in the bubbledeck slabs.

Photos by Peter MacCallum; Images courtesy of NADAAA.

In one of their first "Superstudio" assignments this year, graduate students were asked to overlay ideas onto a supergraphic of the city of Toronto initially created for the Design Exchange’s inaugural EDIT Festival. The students looked at the city through a specific lens in an exercise to imagine alternative futures.

Questions addressed in the exercise include:

• How can the process of looking at and drawing the city at a very large scale inform the way we design the city at other, smaller scales?
• What infrastructural, landscape, and building features should be highlighted in drawings of the kind?
• How might designers participate in imaging processes of city-wide and regional urbanization in a serious yet inventive way that can offer compelling, future-oriented alternatives?
• What kind of big pictures might inspire the public imagination in ways that might compel citizens to participate in making meaningful change?

The Daniels Faculty's  Superstudio course is an opportunity for architecture, landscape, and urban design students to discover shared concerns, approaches, and design solutions, and to model the kinds of collaborative, creative, and technical processes required to successfully address the complex demands (political, social, cultural, environmental, formal, infrastructural, etc.) of urban projects today and into the future. Graduate students in architecture, landscape, and  urban design work on the same set of assignments throughout the semester, allowing each discipline to bring its range of approaches to urban-scale exercises so they can be identified and speculated upon across the whole “super” studio.

For the full album, visit the Daniels Faculty Flickr page.

The Graduate Architecture, Landscape, and Design Student Union (GALDSU) will launch this year’s issue on Friday, October 6. This issue will explore “the multiplicity of ways in which the graduate students of Daniels confront the realities of our world – and their worlds – as a way to imagine and create space for multiple futures.” How, Co-Editors and Alumni Jasper Flores, Elise Hunchuck, and Dayne Roy-Caldwell ask, do the “practices of architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, and visual studies suggest ways for us to design with and for each other?”

The launch party will take place at OFFSITE Concept Space at 867 Dundas Street West. There will be music, food, and a cash bar. Copies of the new publication will be available to purchase. For more information, visit the Eventbrite page.

A note from the editors on the cover image (pictured above): “The moon was installed at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto in April 2016, alongside Gillian Dykeman (MVS 2016)'s video 'Dispatches from the Feminist Utopian Future,' watercolour schematic drawings of the earthworks, and a keystone covered in tachyon particles. For more, please see 'Dispatches from the Feminist Utopian Future (page 13-18) and Psychic Strata: Land, Art, Subjectivity (page 19-26). Both works are by Gillian Dykeman. The cover photograph was taken by Jesse Boles (MVS 2015), courtesy of Gillian Dykeman (2015).

Other photos (in order of appearance): 2-On Spheres by Ekaterina Dovjenko, 3-Wasting Futures by Elaine Chau, 4-To Melt Into Air, Slowly by Vanessa Abram, 5-∆ Museum by Melissa Gerskup and Ray Wu

On October 27, Lecturers Adrian Phiffer, Alex Josephson, and Monica Adair will join discussions on marketing and promotion of architecture at this year’s POP // CAN // CRIT symposium. In its second year, POP // CAN // CRIT 2017 will bring together Canadian architects, marketing professionals, photographers, advocacy groups, and media to discuss and debate the vital roles that architects, media, marketing personnel, and the public play in shaping the general discourse surrounding architecture.

Featured Panel Discussions

Panel 2: advocacy + activism
Moderator: Matt Blackett (Spacing)
Speakers: Toon Dreessen, Susan Algie, Monica Adair, Johanna Hurme

Panel 3: image + architecture
Moderator: Adrian Phiffer
Speakers: Ben Rhan, Younes Bounhar, Amanda Large, Norm Li, Naomi Kriss

Panel 4: architecture as icon/ branding + Toronto condo revolution
Moderator: Nicola Spunt (PARTISANS)
Speakers: Alex Josephson, Alex Bozikovic, Adrian Phiffer

In these discussions, participants will be answering questions such as, “In what ways do we market architecture?" "How can we best advocate for the profession?" "And what impact does a photograph have on our understanding of the built environment?” The event will take place at the Design Exchange in Toronto with $45 general admission and $35 student admission. Tickets can be purchased on Eventbrite.

For more information, visit http://spacing.ca/popcancrit/

Listen to audio from last year’s discussions:

Photo, top: Tinker's Orchard by Acre Architects, founded by Monica Adair and Stephen Kopp.

“It is commendable when a design student tackles a tough building typology, and exceptional when the author discovers real invention within that typology. The developer-driven world of mid-rise residential housing requires just such invention and new thinking.”

This summer, a group of students worked together to tackle issues of sustainable and affordable housing through straw bale design. Master of Architecture student Sarah Hasan writes about the first project undertaken by the new University of Toronto student group: Future-Living Lab.
 
Future-Living Lab consists of architecture students at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design; U of T’s Department of Civil Engineering; and Ryerson University’s Department of Architectural Science.
 
Earlier this year, the students set off to design a 1000 square feet home in Callander, Ontario. The design brief provided by their client called for affordability, ease of construction, and sustainability within the home’s environmental context. The students researched and consulted with multiple design and engineering firms before settling on a Structurally Insulated Panel (SIP) system that uses straw bale as the main insulation material.
 
In August, the group acquired building permits and held a build workshop where interested students gathered and assembled the SIP’s. This process consisted of layering clay and straw bale in specific proportions within pre-fabricated wooden formwork. In the upcoming weeks, the panels will be lifted up into position to form the house walls.
 
The Future-Living Lab aims to continue fostering collaboration among students from different disciplines for a common goal. Going forward, the group also hopes to have an influence on the future of dwelling through ongoing research and design projects.
 
You can view their website at: Futurelivinglab.ca