Alumna Ridhima Khurana (MArch 2015) recently published a calendar featuring photos taken on a field trip for ARC1012Y, a first year Masters of Architecture course. Taught by Associate Professor Rodolphe el-Khoury and coordinated by Associate Professor Shane Williamson, the students visited architectural sites within the Great Lakes area to better understand the environment, building, culture, and symbolic aspects of the sites.

“I started capturing the details of all the buildings we visited around the Great Lakes,” says Khurana.“[I refrained] from revealing too much information about where each building stands, [and instead focused] on the smaller pieces that make up the complete design.”

The course asked students to analyze and interpret one of several buildings in terms of natural light, circulation, structure, geometry, symmetry and balance, and unit to whole relationship. Khurana was assigned the Milwaukee Art Museum designed by Santiago Calatrava.

‘The field trip provided an opportunity to photograph the details of this building that would otherwise not have been available to me,’ says Khurana. ‘Seeing Calatrava’s architecture up close and in-person completely left me in awe.’

Khurana incorporated the photos taken from this field trip into a calendar published through RK Studios — her recently established photography and architectural design firm. The calendar, which can be purchase online, also includes photography of Toronto, which she plans to make into an exhibition later this year.

Photos above of the Milwaukee Art Museum, by Ridhima Khurana

On February 14 in New York, Daniels Faculty Assistant Professor Wei-Han Vivian Lee presented recent work — and jokes! — as part of Storefront for Art and Architecture's Cabaret Series. The event, entitled ha ha ha (The Funny, the Witty, and the Grotesque) explored the intersections between humour, art, and architecture through performance and discussion.

From Storefront for Art and Architecture’s website: “Laughter, giggles, grins, and smirks — actions that often originate as spontaneous and instinctive expressions of amusement — create a sense of self-awareness. That which we find funny can be genuinely ground-breaking, changing people’s perspectives by signalling common spaces of understanding"

For those who weren’t able to attend, a video of the full event is now up on Storefront for Art and Architecture’s Youtube page. Lee’s set starts 22 minutes and 14 seconds in.

The Rosemary House designed by Kohn Shnier Architects — the firm of Associate Professor John Shnier — was one of five residential projects featured in Azure Magazine’s Annual House Issue. Blending in with its pseudo-Tudor style neighbours, Rosemary House is innovative in its flexible programming and sensitive use of materials.

“Rosemary House encourages modern family living that is interactive, open to choices and growth, [which is achieved with] spaces that are zoned, yet not necessarily enclosed,” describes Kohn Shnier Architects. “An innovative use of custom solid limestone masonry is tonally sympathetic with other homes, yet demonstrates how contemporary design can contribute difference.”

For a copy of Azure’s 2017 House Issue, visit shop.azuremagazine.com/products/the-annual-houses-issue

Photos by Amanda Large & Younes Bounhar, Doublespace Photography.

A group of masters students from ETH Zurich — including Daniels Faculty Adjunct Lecturer and Digital Fabrication Coordinator Nicholas Hoban (MArch 2012) — have created the world’s first two-storey wooden pavilion using robots. The group was based out of ETH Zurich's Gramazio Kohler Research lab. Hoban recently completed his MAS in Architecture and Digital Fabrication at ETH Zurich during a leave from the Daniels Faculty. A detailed description of the project can be viewed online at Dezeen.

"The goal was to develop adaptive robotic processes which were able to handle unknown material dimensions and surface quality, and therefore limit material waste resulting from using standardised pre-processed (engineered) timber products," Philipp Eversmann, Head of Education for the NCCR Digital Fabrication at ETH Zurich, told Dezeen.

The pavilion was designed for the Zurich Design Biennale, which will feature the project at its festival in September 2017.

Hoban is a designer and fabricator based in Toronto. As the Coordinator of the Daniels Faculty’s Digital Fabrication Lab, he oversees faculty fabrication research projects and the operation of its digital fabrication facilities. He teaches digital fabrication methodologies and software to Daniels Faculty masters students.

“In Toronto alone, the number of official noise complaints to the City has more than doubled since 2011, rising roughly in tandem with the new skyscrapers that are causing endless construction commotion downtown” writes Matthew Hague of The Globe and Mail.

He describes how designers such as Pierre-Emmanuel Vandeputte have taken inspiration from this nuisance to create noise-blocking and sound-dampening solutions like Diplomate, a desk-partition for offices, and Cork Helmet a dome on a rope that lowers onto the user’s head.

Hague's recent article, "Sound off," profiles Daniels Faculty Assistant Professor Brady Peters, who believes that sound/noise can be made more pleasant through the design of the physical environment. Peters’ research focuses on auralization, that is, exploring ways to communicate and investigate sound.

“While architects have many tools to help draw, investigate and explore the way buildings look, there aren’t similar technologies to test and understand how a space might sound," Peters tells Hague. "Visualization is easy, auralization not so much.”

Peters worked with an international team to build the FabPod, a meeting room that showcases the innovations of acoustically driven design. Hague describes it as a cavernous space seemingly made up of a cluster of bubbles. The meeting room is located in the open-plan office of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology Design Hub in Melbourne Australia.

Peters teaches graduate level courses in design studio, computational design, comprehensive building design, and visual communication focusing on parametric modelling and digital fabrication. He also teaches computation and design in the undergraduate program.  He completed his PhD at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts School of Architecture in Copenhagen focusing on computational methods for predicting, measuring and evaluating sound in architectural spaces. Prior to this, he was an associate partner at Foster + Partners. One of his most notable projects with the firm is the new roof enclosure for the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC.

Recently, Peters has received a Connaught New Researcher Award from the University of Toronto and a grant from the Federal Natural Sciences and Research Council which will go towards furthering his research on sound.

For the full article on Peters and his work, visit the Globe and Mail's website.

On January 24th, first year Master of Architecture students in ARC 1012 participated in reviews for their first assignment of the studio. For this project, titled "Split/Twins," students were asked to develop a “double-house” on a shared site for two different residents. The class was instructed to think of the residents as twins, separated at birth; or as reluctant mutualistic collaborators. While some of the activities would be shared between the two residents, most of their activities would be apart. As architects, the students had to negotiate the desires of the twins spatially and ensure that the two houses were equal.

Click here to learn more about the Daniels Faculty's Master of Achitecture program.

Montottone Barchessa, a project by Daniels Faculty Assistant Professor Vivian Lee and Lecturer James Macgillivray will be featured in an upcoming exhibition at Syracuse University in Florence.

Lee and Macgillivray are cofounders of the firm LAMAS, an interdisciplinary studio focused on issues of craft traditions and perception in architecture and the fine arts.

A bed and breakfast near the small town Montottone in the Marches of Italy, Montottone Barchessa takes the form of the barchessa, an agricultural appendage of 16th Century Venetian villas. Write Lee and Macgillivray, “this historical reference is complicated by its programmatic mutation from empty storage to the individuated privacy of rooms.

The exhibition will be on view at 25 Piazzale Donatello, Florence starting February 16th.

In other news, Lee and Macgillivray's MoMA PS1 entry Underberg (pictured, above) will be featured in the inaugural issue of The Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture's journal WASH, titled "Utopia”.

Lee’s research focuses on the role of craft and labor practices in architecture and building. Her writings, teaching, and design work have touched on the concept of craft in several diverse subjects including professional practice, labor, vernacular traditions, and ornament.

A filmmaker, Macgillivray has published on film, architecture, and projection in Scapegoat, ACSA Journal, The Journal of Modern Craft, the Canadian Journal of Film Studies and Tarkovsky, a collection of writings on the work of Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky.

Function and Fantasy: Iron Architecture in the Long Nineteenth Century, published by Routledge, explores iron architecture in the 19th century, offering a study of iron’s architectural reception as an emerging building technology. Daniels Faculty lecturer Peter Sealy co-edited the new book and authored “Dreams in Iron: The Wish Image in Émile Zola’s Novels,” a chapter exploring the immaterial descriptions of 19th-century iron-and-glass buildings in Zola’s novels.

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.

Prior to beginning his PhD, Sealy worked at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) on exhibitions including Actions (2008) and Journeys (2010). At Harvard, he is a Frank Knox Memorial Fellow, and his dissertation research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. For 2016-17, he has been named as a Mellon Researcher at the CCA, where he will study the resurgence of photomontage in contemporary architectural representation.

Last year, Sealy wrote “The Hospital, Future and Past” for Canadian Architect, which explored how hospitals can “adapt to the demands of ever-changing medical technology.” Previous to this, he wrote an article for Domus titled “At the end of the Earth,” which looked at the utilization of “contemporary art and architecture as instruments in the revitalisation of the local economy” on Fogo Island.