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.

Live in Miami? Mark your calendar! Meetinghouse, a contemporary art space collective in the penthouse of the historic Huntington Building in Miami, announces the opening of its Fall 2016 exhibition series with Aurora Roomand Type-topia — two installations blending art and architecture, on the evening of September 22nd.

Type-Topia is an idealized and fictitious composite city created from the collaged combination of nine public institutional projects by Khoury Levit Fong (KLF), the firm of Associate Professor Robert Levit, Associate Professor Steven Fong, and former Daniels faculty member-turned Dean of the University of Miami's School of Architecture Rodolphe el-Khoury.

The interactive model calls attention to the iconic status of notable public spaces and buildings in shaping the identity of cities, highlighting the role that architecture can play in the constitution of a geography of monuments. Just as New York has been represented through its monumental icons such as the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center, or Paris by the Eiffel Tower and the Arc-de-Triomphe, Type-Topia is imagined through a series of graphic representations of its civic monuments. Using programmed QR tags, visitors can interact with each project proposal. The composite city becomes a historical metropolis in which the iconic elements instantaneously become memorabilia of this fiction, complete with travel posters and postcards.

Meetinghouse Fall 2016 Opening Night!
Thursday, Sept 22nd
from 7pm to 10pm

Exhibition Design by Robert Levit with Dorsa Jalalian (MUD 2016) and Nick Reddon (current MArch student)
Principals in Charge: Rodolphe el-Khoury and Robert Levit

Associate Professor Mason White will serve as the Jury Chair for this year’s Steedman Fellowship — one of the oldest and most prestigious awards in the United States. The 2016 Call for Proposals marks a shift for the biannual Fellowship from a design competition to an invitation to develop research proposals that respond to a particular theme. To go along with this change, White created the 2016 theme of Adaptation.

From the Steedman Fellowship website:

“Our age is increasingly defined by unpredictability and a need for contingency in design. However, the life of a building or design cannot always keep pace with changes in culture, context, or climate. How is the rigidity of architecture slackened? Where does the ability to adjust, modify, or respond to factors exist? Can (and does) Architecture adapt?  

This year, the theme of adaptation is offered as an area of enquiry. In biology, adaptation enhances the survival and fitness of organisms. Within design, demands for adaptive responses to climatic, cultural, or societal change have tested architecture’s transformative properties. More than ever, exciting new considerations of accessibility, sustainability, and flexibility are being incorporated earlier and earlier into design processes. It could be argued that an inability of architecture to adapt will be its demise.”

 

The Steedman Fellowship is open to practicing architects anywhere in the world who have received an accredited degree in architecture within the last eight years. Proposals are due November 1. The winning proposal will receive $50,000 to support up to a year of international travel and research. Other members of the jury include Deborah Berke, Elena Cánovas, Joyce Hwang, and Jeff Ryan.

White, along with Lola Sheppard, is a founding Partner at Lateral Office. Earlier this year, their firm won a Royal Architectural Institute of Canada Urban Design Award for Impulse — a playful installation created for the Place des Festival in Montreal. The artwork transformed Montreal’s arts district “into a space of urban play through a series of thirty interactive acoustic illuminated see-saws that respond and transform when in motion.”

Over the summer, Sessional Lecturer Marcin Kedzior coordinated a group of students from the University of Toronto, University of Waterloo, OCAD U, and Humber College in the design and construction of an accessibility ramp located within U of T's Massey College.

The finished project is a prototype that provides a needed accessibility ramp and peninsular seating. The design provides an accessible extension to the meandering path of the Massey College Quad while also adding additional seating. Kedzior writes that the design is a prototype to study how the community would use the space, and he welcomes thoughts, suggestions, and comments about the design. 

Kedzior’s involvement with the project stems from his interest in critical pedagogy and situated learning practice, which has led to several design build projects of a similar nature such as tree houses, and micro-urbanism projects. The extra-curricular initiative provided the students involved with an opportunity to participate on a situated design and build project. The project exhibits the expediency found in small-scale design and its potential for significant social impact.

The project was realized by Kedzior’s firm SITUATE | DESIGN | BUILD in collaboration with the Massey College Accessibility Committee and local builders.

Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee are founding principals of Johnston Marklee in Los Angeles — and this year’s Frank Gehry International Visiting Chairs in Architectural Design — have been announced the artistic directors of the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial.  

From The Architects Newspaper:

The second iteration of the first and largest architectural biennial in North America will be entitled Make New History. The biennial will focus on two central themes, “The axis between history and modernity and the axis between architecture and art.” The themes look to discuss the role that history has to play in the making of contemporary architecture, as well as the relationship of architecture to art. Chicago itself will act as a lens through which to raise and debate these issues.

JohnstonMarklee, the Los Angeles-based firm of Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee, has a substantial architectural portfolio including residential, commercial, institutional, and exhibition environments with a particular focus on the arts. Their work explores the relationship between design and building technology to create unique works of architecture, which vary in scale from master plans to buildings and temporary installations. The firm has garnered many notable awards including Progressive Architecture Design Awards, AIA Los Angeles & AIA California Council Honor Awards, the American Architecture Award, and an AR Award for Emerging Architecture.

Named in honour of Frank O. Gehry, this endowed Gehry Chair brings a highly recognized international architect (or two) to teach a graduate studio and deliver a public lecture at the Daniels Faculty each year. Graduate students in their third year of the Master of Architecture program or Master of Landscape Architecture program or second year of their Master of Urban Design program have the opportunity to study with the chair holder before they start their design thesis. The chair's public lectures are well attended by all our our students and the broader design community. Previous Gehry Chairs have also taught in the undergraduate program, mounted exhibitions in our gallery, joined undergraduate studio reviews, and given guest lectures as part of the core lecture courses for undergraduates.

After extensive renovations led by Associate Professor Aziza Chaouni and her firm Aziza Chaouni Projects, the Qarawiyyin library in Fez, Morroco is set to open within this year. On September 19, The Guardian featured the restoration of the library in its "cities" section.

Located in the old Medina of Fez, the library is widely considered to be the world’s oldest and joins the Qarawiyyin Mosque and the Qarawiyyin University as significant cultural artefacts in the ancient Medina of Fez. Citing its large pedestrian network and immense collection of historic buildings within its walls, Chaouni considers the potential of the Medina to become a model for sustainability. Her firm’s renovation is one of the projects leading the current restoration of Fez as a spiritual and cultural capital of Morocco.

Chaouni approached the renovation with a philosophy of sustainable architecture. Writes Kareem Shaheen in The Guardian: “for Chaouni [this] means that the library cannot be a relic of ages past, but a breathing part of the city, much like the old medina is still an inhabited living organism.” Apart from structural work, the library’s renovation also included restorative work on the library’s collection of books and manuscripts that date as far back as the ninth century.

Having begun work on the library in 2012, Chaouni was inititally surprised by the appointment given that architecture is, as The Guardian writes, “a field traditionally seen as a man’s province” in Morocco. That said, the Qarawiyyin library was founded by a woman, Fatima al-Fihri, the daughter of a wealthy Tunisian merchant in the ninth century. Chaouni’s personal attachment to the library extends to familial ties. She tells The Guardian stories of how “her great-grandfather travelled on a mule from his ancestral village in Morocco to study at Qarawiyyin University in the 19th century.”

Chaouni has also drafted a plan to restore the river in Fez. For a more in-depth article, visit the article by The Guardian.

Alumna Novka Ćosović (MArch 2013) takes part in this year’s line up for Nuit Blanche with a large-scale art installation that reminds us how media representations of trauma have become a background subject to daily life.

Entitled The Museum, the piece is closely linked to her graduate thesis of the same name. Accoring to Ćosović (and as described in an earlier article on her work):

Acts of violence and trauma captured in the media have one common denominator: their backgrounds. Prisoners of war have been held in school gymnasiums; dead bodies have been piled high in swimming pools; bathrooms have been turned into slaughter houses. The backgrounds in each setting include tiles, wallpaper, curtains — the architecture of our everyday lives. Normally benign settings, ‘domestic-institutional-communal spaces’ become perverted by war and violence.

At Nuit Blanche, Ćosović will present her idea of “perverted spaces” through an installation that appears to be a typical swimming pool. This pool, however, represents one that was once used as a morgue during the Yugoslavian war. Visitors are invited to lounge within her makeshift “pool” as they watch news clips of warfare played out within highly domesticated and communal backgrounds/spaces in places such as the former Yugoslavia, East Timor, Rwanda, and Syria.

Ćosović is an MArch graduate and currently splits her time between working for Community and writing for Site Magazine. The Museum can be viewed at Artscape Youngplace on the night of Nuit Blanche this October 1st.