The transformation of the West Don Lands in Toronto into a sustainable, mixed-use community has been recognized with a 2017-2018 Global Award for Excellence from the Urban Land Institute (ULI). The award-winning pedestrian-friendly community — a 79-acre site nestled between the Don Valley and Gardiner Expressway, near the Distillery District — was designed with the help of a number of faculty and alumni from the Daniels — including the Director of the Faculty’s Master of Urban Design program Mark Sterling.

Sterling was the Urban Design Lead for the Public Realm Master Plan led by David Leinster (BLA 1985) of The Planning Partnership.

Writes Batel Yona for the ULI’s website:

Innovative and high-quality parks and public realm are among the area’s hallmarks, each incorporating robust biodiversity and natural landscapes. Corktown Common is positioned atop a flood-protection land form that protects 519 acres (210 ha) of downtown Toronto and unlocks the area’s development potential. Underpass Park transformed an unused area into a family-friendly recreational community space. The Front Street Promenade, a linear park that constitutes the spine of the new neighborhood, is programmed with curated public art installations and linked to the district’s secondary network of mews, courtyards, and pathways to create a healthy, walkable, integrated new community. Toronto’s first woonerf streets are also found here.

The team for the West Don Lands project includes:

Master developer: Waterfront Toronto; precinct plan: Urban Design Associates
Developers: Urban Capital (River City), DREAM Unlimited, Kilmer Group (Canary District), Toronto Community Housing
Public realm and urban designers: the Planning Partnership with PFS Studio plus &Co., Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates Inc.
Landscape designers: Claude Cormier & Associates, NAK Design Strategies Architectural design: (River City) Saucier & Perrotte, ZAS Architects; (Canary District) architects Alliance, KPMB Architects, Page + Steele/IBI Group Architects, Daoust Lestage, MacLennan Jaunkalns Miller Architects, (Shade Pavillion) Maryann Thompson Architects
Design/builder: (Canary District) EllisDon Inc., Ledcor Group
Retail designer: Live Work Learn Play

For more information, visit the ULI website.

November 17, 2017 — Today, the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design celebrated the official opening of its new home — the Daniels Building — at historic One Spadina Crescent.

Located on the western edge of the University of Toronto’s St. George campus just north of College Street, the iconic neo-gothic building and stunning contemporary addition, currently nearing completion, is now poised to become an international focal point for education, research, and outreach on architecture, art, and the future of cities.

University of Toronto President, Professor Meric Gertler; Dean of the Daniels Faculty, Professor Richard Sommer; and Chair of the Governing Council at the University of Toronto, Claire Kennedy welcomed donors, alumni, faculty, students, and other esteemed guests to commemorate the Daniels Faculty’s new home — which the Globe and Mail’s architecture critic has called “one of the best buildings in Canada of the past decade” — with an official ribbon cutting ceremony and reception.

Photo, top (left to right): graduate student Lydon Whittle, Dean Richard Sommer, undergraduate Student Farah Michel, Chair of Governing Council Claire Kennedy, Professor Ron Daniels, Myrna Daniels, John H. Daniels, President Meric Gertler, Mitchell Cohen, graduate student Mahshid Shahrjerdi

Referring to Canadian and international reviews of the building, President Gertler said, “This global standing ovation for the Daniels Building is contributing to U of T’s reputation as a world-leading centre for the study of architecture, landscape architecture, and design; as one of the world’s greatest universities, and as a city-building institution of the first rank. And it heralds a new era of local, national, and international impact on the part of our professors and students, whose work is already helping to re-define urbanism in the 21st Century.”          

The proceedings took place in the heart of the new building in the Faculty’s new Principal Hall, a prismatic, polychrome, multi-dimensional space, soon to become one of Toronto’s premier public venues for public discussion and events showcasing leaders in the fields of art, urbanism, and the built environment.

In addition to housing the Faculty’s expanded undergraduate and graduate programs in architecture, visual studies, landscape architecture, and urban design, the new Daniels Building will allow for enhanced interdisciplinary research and greater public outreach and engagement, elevating the role that the design arts and visual thinking can play in addressing the critical challenges of our time.

“Toronto, like many cities around the world, has to contend with unprecedented growth. How we develop a compelling set of visions for the future, stage better discussions and debate about how to grow, and model ways for a diverse set of actors to work together to realize these visions, is vital to the success of our city, and every city” says Professor Sommer. “Over its 127 –year history, our Faculty has made many creative and intellectual contributions to this city and the profession, but the school has never really had a home worthy of its ambitions. Thanks to our community of generous supporters, we now have a major platform.“

Mr. John H. Daniels, Mrs. Myrna Daniels, and Professor Ron Daniels | Photo by Lisa Sakulensky

Following the announcement of a historic $14 million benefaction in 2008 (the largest of its kind in Canada to a school of architecture) and another $10 million in 2013, John H. Daniels (BArch 1950, LLD Hon. 2011) and Myrna Daniels today witnessed the vision for U of T’s architecture and design students become a reality. The new Daniels Building is named in their honour.

Toronto architecture firms, development and business leaders, faculty, friends, and alumni have also come together to support the project through philanthropic gifts totaling more than $30 million. To date 85% of the fundraising goal has been met. With a number of naming opportunities still available, the Faculty plans to announce additional gifts from donors in the coming months. The project is part of the University of Toronto’s unprecedented 2.4 billion Boundless campaign.

Key spaces in the Daniels Building include the Graduate Design Studio, with a column-free span of over 34 metres that incorporates an undulating ceiling with 11 clerestory windows; the Eberhard Zeidler Library, with collections in architecture, landscape architecture, art, and urban design that are unrivalled in Toronto; an extensive workshop and double-height Fabrication Lab, and the Commons, an interior “main street” and gathering space that runs east-west through the center of the building, linking “town and gown.”

The Daniels Faculty’s award-winning Green Roof Innovation Testing Laboratory (GRIT Lab) whose work helps inform the City of Toronto’s green roof standards, will open a second site on the roof of One Spadina, where it will study the integration of rainwater harvested on site, while a new 8,000-square-foot Architecture and Design Gallery — the only exhibition space devoted exclusively to architecture and design in Ontario — will be complete by next year.

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 building has already received broad critical acclaim. Former Director of Urban Design and Architecture for the City of Toronto Ken Greenberg (BArch 1970) declared it “a remarkable feat of form-making, site planning, and city building,” in a recent review of the building in Canadian Architect. During Doors Open, the new Daniels Building was among the most popular destinations in Toronto, welcoming over 8,000 visitors.

Daniels students helped make the Building Opening event a huge success | Photo by Lisa Sakulensky

“A hinge between ideas and action, Architecture is as much a way of finding the world, as it is of forming it,” says Professor Sommer. “As we celebrate the opening of this spectacular new building — we are reminded about what better architecture, landscapes, and cities writ large should afford society. It is not just about the glass, steel, and concrete, but what we can and will do with these things — what more thoughtful and beautiful environments inspire. We have received a great gift in this new site and building, but this is just the start. “

The main phases of the One Spadina Project will be completed in 2018. Future phases/additions are planned. For more information, visit the Daniels Faculty’s website at www.daniels.utoronto.ca

Photo, top: by John Horner

Last month, the Canada Council for the Arts announced that the Indigenous design project UNCEDED was selected to represent Canada at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale.

Members of the 2018 peer-assessment committee that selected the winning team included, among others, Daniels Faculty Associate Professor John Shnier, founding partner of Kohn Shnier Architects; and Lola Sheppard, founding partner of Lateral Office, the firm that represented Canada at the Biennale in 2014. Associate Professor Mason White is also a founding partner of Lateral Office.

The shortlist for the 2018 Canadian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale included Daniels faculty and alumni. The shortlisted teams included:

• Scapegoat Journal, co-founded by Instructor Marcin Kedzior. Daniels Faculty Instructor Manar Moursi is one of the editors of the journal.
• Ja Architecture Studio, the office of Daniels Faculty alumni Nima Javidi (MUD 2005), Behnaz Assadi (MLA 2008), and Hanieh Rezaei (MUD 2004)
• Patkau Architects, from Vancouver

UNCEDED is led by architect Douglas Cardinal along with Anishnawbe Elders and Indigenous Co-curators Gerald McMaster and David Fortin. They are supported by a decorated group of Indigenous architects from across North America. The winning team plans to emphasize and celebrate the work of Indigenous architects and designers throughout Turtle Island. The exhibition will be on view at the Arsenale in Venice from May 26th to November 25th, 2018.

Titled Arctic Adaptations, Lateral Office's exhibition at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale presented proposals by five design teams for Nunavut, Canada's largest territory. Each team was made up of representatives from a Canadian school of architecture, a Canadian architecture office with extensive northern experience, and a Nunavut-based organization. Each team’s proposal examined one theme — housing, health, education, arts, or recreation — and was rooted in Nunavut’s distinct land, climate, and culture.

The exhibit was honoured with a Special Mention at the Biennale’s awards ceremony for “its in-depth study of how modernity adapts to a unique climatic condition and a local minority culture.”

Photo, top: Arctic Adaptations exhibition by Lateral Office at the Venice Biennale, 2014.

Professor Ted Kesik is a member of a multi-disciplinary team that made a successful application for funding under the 2017 University College London – University of Toronto Call for Joint Research Projects and Exchange Activities. University College London (UCL) and the University of Toronto contributed matching funds to support collaborative education and research initiatives through a joint call for proposals for the development of collaborative activities.

The 2-year research project entitled Best Practices Guidelines for Tower Block Refurbishment is a response to the Grenfell Tower tragedy in North Kensington, West London in June 2017, which resulted in numerous deaths and injuries.

Kesik was the principal researcher for a major technical guide in support of Toronto’s Tower Renewal program in 2009. The guide focused on overcladding and briefly outlined the need for a more comprehensive approach to the refurbishment of tower apartment buildings based on the ‘building-as-a-system’ approach. Technological advances, performance gaps, and recent disasters are among the many reasons updated guidelines and regulatory protocols need to be developed and transferred to the housing sector.

The research team is led by Professor Marianne Touchie, an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Civil Engineering and Mechanical & Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto, and includes Dr. Nicole Zimmermann and Dr. Ian Hamilton, who are both part of the Bartlett School of Environment, Energy and Resources at University College London. Dr. Kesik is a professor of building science at the Daniels Faculty.

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.