In 2016, the Toronto Star profiled Monica Adair (MArch 2005) among young architects who “have been turning heads in the profession, while Wallpaper listed her firm, Acre Architects, in its list of 20 “breakthrough practices from around the globe.”

How do Adair and her partner at Acre Architects Stephen Kopp (MArch 2005)  — also her husband, and yes they met here at the Daniels Faculty! — continue to achieve recognition and grow their small New Brunswick-based firm in such a competitive field? Master of Architecture student Ilana Hadad sat down with Adair to learn about her unique approach to business and design.

You describe your practice as developing “storied architecture.” What do you mean by that?
Storied Architecture, for us, is about helping people live great stories. It’s a way for architecture to have permanence beyond physical bricks and mortar. You may never see a building, but you may have learned about it. And rather than hear about a beautiful window or a really great façade, we want to hear: “this changed the way we live.” One of the best compliments we’ve ever received about one of our projects came from a client who said “We get along better as a couple.” That is a really big thing. If you can change the way people think, you can change the way they live their lives.

Why is collaboration so important in your practice?
It’s easy to talk about collaboration as a buzzword, but there are so many talented people out there; it’s really about corralling them. Things become richer when you incorporate other people’s skills and talents. Sometimes it feels we’re on the edge of something really great, but then we ask: “where does the frame start?” and we realize that we’re only looking at it relative to our own world. When you start collaborating with other people, you start to see the world through a new lens.  

Canadian Builder’s Quarterly wrote that every year you embark on a non-traditional project or competition to keep sharp. Why is this important to you?
There are few architects in New Brunswick, which limits our dialogue with others in the field, so we want to make sure that we’re not getting complacent or comfortable. Instead, we’ll challenge ourselves by entering a competition or going after a new project. We’re now doing fewer competitions, but pitching more projects. We look for a need and we propose a project for it. Instead of waiting for projects to come, we chase them.

How do you decide which projects to chase?
It’s something that evolves out of relationships. Sometimes I feel like the clients I’m going to be working for in the future are the people I’m just getting to know now. It takes years for people to trust you and to learn what you have to offer. You don’t just start a project. You hone a project. You develop a relationship. Even clients that I have today, like Picaroons Microbrewery — our relationship may have started five years ago, but it’s only now that we really feel like we’re on the same side of the table and asking, “where can we go together?” The owner knows we’re looking after helping him build a successful company.

We also recently broke ground on a wedding retreat outside of Austin, Texas. This was a relationship that started as a business mentor turned friend, turned client. At the end of the day, these meaningful relationships with people who are willing to think big are the grounding for all our projects.

How did it feel to receive the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada's 2015 Young Architect Award?
It’s definitely humbling. I remember we were just moving offices, and I got the letter and I gave it to Stephen and said “can you read this a couple times?” I just didn’t believe it. I’m used to opening letters and saying “oh yeah, we didn’t get accepted.” In life you don’t always get people to validate your work. You’re lucky when you do. So you take it when you get that. It’s really nice.

What do you like about living and working in Saint John?
It’s funny because I’m still getting used to saying that I live in Saint John again. It really is a great place to start and grow a business. It’s full of people that want great things to happen so there is a lot of support. It feels like a family, a great community. I’ve lived in Taiwan and Spain, and I’ve lived in Toronto and New York. I’m open to where the world is going to take me, but for now it’s a beautiful place to grow and we are excited to exercise the potential that Saint John has to offer.

Your first project as a firm was a 100-square-foot patio. What did you learn from that project that you still apply to projects you’re doing today?
The importance of good-quality craftsmanship. The patio was temporary, built to come down every year and get thrown in the back of a shed for the winter. If it hadn’t been built properly, the first year they took it down would have been the end of it. It wouldn’t have gotten published the next year. It wouldn’t have ended up in “top places to kiss in Saint John.” If you want something to last, you have to build the care to make it last.

We also learned that small projects are as important as big projects. A small project is still somebody’s dream. It’s still important to their business. So treating small projects with the same value, regardless of the scale, is important.

How did your time at U of T help inform the work you are doing today?
I loved architecture school. I think as a student you don’t realize it, but the stuff that you do in school stays with you forever. And it touches other people. If you work really hard on one project, that project will influence all your other projects forever. Your thesis work follows you. It’s part of who you are. I’m proud to be an alumna here.

Do you have any advice for current students?
Don’t be entitled; be engaged. Entitlement kills creativity. Engagement, in a way, is the opposite. It says that you’re willing to make a contribution and listen to the people around you and hear what they have to offer. It’s an active position versus a passive one. Be open to the world. See what it has to offer. Be open to be perpetually learning.

Image credits, top to bottom:

1:  Into the Wild. Saint John, NB | Photo by Mark Hemmings 
2: The Centennial. St. Andrews, NB | Photo by Sean McGrath
3: Tinkers Orchard, Kingston Peninsula, New Brunswick | photo by Mark Hemmings
4: LeParc - Petanque. Part of Third Shift Sait John, NB | Photo by Mark Hemmings

2. "A Place that Fits: Landscape Architecture" with Kathryn Gustafson (March 4, 2014)

3. "Fish pluralities, refraction and decolonization in amiskwaciwâskahikan" with Zoe Todd (March 14, 2016)

4. "Walking Your Talk - Integrating Walkability in Urban Design" with Jennifer Keesmaat (November 7, 2013)

5. Green Roof Gurus Panel (March 6, 2014)

6. "Every building implies a city" with Bruce Kuwabara (January 22, 2013)

7. "Sustainable Drainage" with Laura Solano (November 15, 2012)

8. "Working in Mumbai" with Rahul Mehrotra (March 19, 2013)

9. Uber Urbanism (October 22, 2015)

10. 125th Anniversary Dialogues: Practice in an Expanded Field (May 30, 2015)

More videos can be found on the Daniels Faculty Youtube channel.

Master of Architecture students in their last semester of the program presented their thesis projects to faculty and guest critics on December 14 and 15, 2016. Congratulations to everyone on who completed their final presentation before the holiday break! And thank you to the esteemed guest critics from Toronto and beyond who provided feedback to our students.

We have created a photo album on Flickr showcasing the projects and discussions that took place. Photographs from all the student reviews that took place from December 6 to 19 have also been shared on our Facebook page.

Photographer Peter MacCallum has been documenting the construction of the Daniels Faculty's future home at One Spadina Crescent since the spring of 2014. Designed by NADAAA, the new Daniels Building includes a renewal of the south-facing 19th century Gothic Revival building (now complete) and stunning contemporary addition, which will house studio space, an advanced fabrication lab, and an architecture and design gallery.

Below are photos MacCallum took this past November and December. Visit the UofTDaniels Flickr page to view construction images from April 2014 to present.

On November 8, myself and 27 other Daniels Faculty students from this semester’s ARC201 class embarked on a day trip, led by Assistant Professor Jeannie Kim, to see architecture in Buffalo, New York. The majority of the trip was spent at Silo City where, upon arrival, everyone was astounded by the massive scale of the buildings on site. The gargantuan grain elevators were once instrumental in the economic growth of Buffalo, but gradually came to be abandoned by the 1990’s.

In recent years, the site has been re-invented as an art space where installation and performance art are juxtaposed within the derelict state of the silos.

The tour provided an opportunity to see the spatial and experiential conditions of an architectural typology that inspired Le Corbusier and his ideas about modern architecture. The silos provided a good case study in understanding relationships in massing, and addressing architectural space whether it is a conscious production or a by-product of one’s chosen form(s).
 
We were also treated to a brief tour of the Darwin D. Martin House by Frank Lloyd Wright, which helped us realize the great potential for architects to be deliberate and uncompromising about our designs in realizing a vision for space and living.

Just before heading home, we visited downtown Buffalo to see Louis Sullivan’s Guaranty Building and ponder the architect’s most famous line “form (ever) follows function.” Everyone was excited to see the richly ornate exterior of one of North America's earliest skyscrapers.

To see more photos from the trip, head over to the Daniels Faculty's Facebook page.

This Thursday, alumnus Jesse Colin Jackson (MArch 2009) launches the solo exhibition Marching Cubes at the Pari Nadimi Gallery. Marching Cubes is a large collection of 3D printed components that can be assembled together through magnetic interlocking geometries. The shapes of the individual components are based on an eponymous computer algorithm developed in the 1980s.

From the gallery's website:

Drawing inspiration from an eponymous computer algorithm, Marching Cubes is part sculpture, part playground. In the 1980s, researchers devised a method of generating mesh graphics from medical scan data that featured an underlying grammar of faceted cubes. Jackson has taken this digital syntax and refined it into a language for assembly, produced as a family of 3D printed components with interlocking geometries and magnetic connections—and invited people to help build with them. The participants enact the algorithm in the real world, becoming a collective computer in service of sculptural form-making.

The exhibition originally began as a series of events at the Experimental Media Performance Lab at the University of California, Irvine where Jackson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art. Marching Cubes at the Pari Nadimi Gallery showcases the result of these events. On display will be a two-channel video showing the collaborative construction performances, an accompanying refined sculpture of the most successful assembly, and an inventory of the components involved in the original events.

The exhibition will be on display from November 17, 2016 to January 14, 2017 with an opening reception happening November 17 from 6:00-8:00pm.

Pari Nadimi Gallery is located at 254 Niagara Street in Toronto.

Two years ago, Jackson launched an exhibition at the Pari Nadimi Gallery titled Radiant City. Focused on Toronto’s tower apartment neighbourhoods, Radiant City explored the evolving presence and status of these sites in our city: arrival destinations for incoming immigrant populations, essential housing for one quarter of the city’s population, the decaying location of much of Toronto’s urban poverty, products of modern ideologies gone awry, and locations of past glory, current dynamism, and future potential.

The Daniels Faculty’s public programming has a tradition of bringing together scholars, professionals, and leaders in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, art, and urbanism. This year, as we prepare for our Faculty's big move to One Spadina Crescent, we decided to take a different approach to the staging of our events.

For the 2016-2017 season, we will mostly forego the traditional monographic lecture format for one that presents interdisciplinary discussions and debates that promise to deepen the discourse on the role our disciplines play in creating more culturally engaged, ecologically sustainable, socially just, and artfully conceived artifacts, cities, and environments.

To this end, we have organized seven signature events in venues throughout the University of Toronto’s St. George Campus.

The first event will take place today, October 17th. Co-organized with the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), “What comes after the environment?” — this year’s George Baird Lecture — will feature a discussion between award-winning author and filmmaker Naomi Klein, and the director of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Mirko Zardini at Convocation Hall (31 King's College Circle).

The events that follow include this year’s Frank Gehry International Visiting Chairs in Architecture Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee in conversation with Michelle Addington from the Yale School of Architecture (“When do looks matter more than performance?”), contemporary media artist Walid Raad on the role of narrative in our understanding of reality (“How can fiction replace reality”), and the 2016-2017 Michael Hough / OALA Visiting Critic Pierre Bélanger in conversation with NYU Environmental Studies scholar Jessica Green, (“What is the geography of energy?”) — among others. Each presentation considers problems that cannot be solved by any one discipline or singular expertise, highlighting the role of architects, artists, and designers in facilitating new modes of research and practice tuned to our changing planet and the evolving needs of society.

For our full schedule of public events, visit daniels.utoronto.ca/events, where you may also find information on our Building, Ecology, Science, and Technology (B.E.S.T.) Lectures, midday talks, Master of Visual Studies Proseminar Series, and other public lectures.

For more information on our public lectures, contact Pam Walls at pamela.walls@daniels.utoronto.ca or 416-978-2253. 2016-2017 Public Lectures
 
MONDAY, OCTOBER 17 | 6:30PM – 8:30PM
What comes after the environment?
Convocation Hall, 31 King’s College Circle
George Baird Lecture
Co-organized with the Canadian Centre for Architecture
Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
Mirko Zardini, director of the CCA and author of the forthcoming book It’s All Happening So Fast — A Counter-History of the Modern Canadian Environment
 
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 3 | 7:00PM – 9:00PM
When do looks matter more than performance?
Innis Town Hall, 2 Sussex Avenue
Gehry Chair Lecture
Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee, Johnston Marklee, Los Angeles
Michelle Addington, Yale University, New Haven
 
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 21 | 6:30PM – 8:30PM
What shapes the city?
Isabel Bader Theatre, 93 Charles Street West
Richard Florida, University of Toronto
Adam Greenfield, Urbanscale, London
 
THURSDAY, JANUARY 19 | 6:30PM – 8:30PM
What is the geography of energy?
Isabel Bader Theatre, 93 Charles Street West
Michael Hough / Ontario Association of Landscape Architects Visiting Critic Lecture
Pierre Bélanger, Harvard University, Cambridge
Jessica Green, New York University, New York
 
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 9 | 6:30PM – 8:30PM
How can fiction replace reality?
Isabel Bader Theatre, 93 Charles Street West
Walid Raad, The Cooper Union, New York
 
TUESDAY, MARCH 14 | 6:30PM – 8:30PM
When is a model a beginning or an end?
Innis Town Hall, 2 Sussex Avenue
Amale Andraos, Columbia University, New York
D. Graham Burnett, Princeton University, Princeton
 
FRIDAY, APRIL 7 | 6:30PM – 8:30PM
Where is the critical voice in architecture today?
Innis Town Hall, 2 Sussex Avenue
Co-organized with the Canadian Centre for Architecture
Kenneth Frampton, Columbia University, New York
Keller Easterling, Yale University, New Haven
Craig Buckley, Yale University, New Haven

On Wednesday, September 21st, the City of Toronto will be holding a party to celebrate the multiple award wins of the recently finished Nathan Philips Square Revitalization — including, most notably, the Governor General’s Medal in Architecture awarded by the RAIC. The event’s program will include speeches, music, and site tours. 

With a scheme entitled AGORA/THEATRE, PLANT Architect won the NPS Revitalization Design Competition in 2006. The project has also received a Toronto Urban Design Award and a Canadian Architect Award of Excellence. Perkins + Will Canada served as venture partners for the project.

The founding partners of PLANT Architect Inc., Lisa Rapoport, Mary Tremaine, and Chris Pommer, have all served as sessional lecturers at the Daniels Faculty. 

“In built form, Toronto looks at first glance like many other large North American cities. But up close, the city reflects the various and often conflicting urban planning and urban design ideas that shaped it.”

Filmmaker Ian Garrick Mason’s latest documentary interviews some of the city’s experts on design, urbanism and history as he unpacks the conflicting visions that have shaped the city of Toronto over the years. He writes: “[The film] explores how the city came to look like it does today -- and the processes likely to determine its future form.”

The faculty’s director of the Master of Urban Design program, Mark Sterling, appears as one of the interviewees, along with a number of Daniels alumni who now serve as leading design and planning practitioners in the city including Anne McIlroy (BArch 1986), Lorna Day (BArch 1984), and Kim Storey(BArch 1978) and James Brown (BArch 1978) of Brown + Storey Architects. UofT Canadian History instructor Richard White joins the panel of experts. As part of the project, Mason will release extended selections from the interviews.

The film was presented at the "Toronto Dialogues 1" symposium last October 4, 2016, and is also available for viewing through Mason’s website.