The lineup for the University of Toronto’s 2024 Alumni Reunion has been revealed—and it includes an intrigiung lecture at the Daniels Faculty.

On Friday, May 31, the Faculty will host “Constructing Health: How the Built Environment Enhances Your Mind’s Health,” a lecture and book talk by alumnus Tye Farrow, whose new volume of the same name will be published next month by University of Toronto Press.

A globally recognized expert in how the intentional shaping of our environment can support our physical and neurological well-being, Farrow acquired his Bachelor of Architecture degree at U of T in 1987 and was the first Canadian architect to earn a Master of Neuroscience Applied to Architecture (University of Venice IUAV), and has a Master of Architecture in Urban Design from Harvard University.

He is a currently a senior partner at Toronto-based Farrow Partners Inc., a full-service architecture and master planning firm known internationally for “creating architecture that lifts the human spirit.”

Among the firm’s projects is the SZMC Helmsley Cancer Center in Jerusalem, Israel’s flagship facility for cancer treatment. Realized in partnership with Rubinstein Ofer, the 7,500-square-metre complex (pictured above and on the cover of Farrow’s new book) provides physical, psychological, social and spiritual care services in addition to patient assessment and treatment.

Farrow’s lecture, which will explore how recent discoveries in cognitive psychology and neuroscience can help form “health-giving person-to-place relationships that are similar to healthy and meaningful person-to-person relationships,” will take place from 11:15 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. in the Main Hall of the Daniels Building at 1 Spadina Crescent.

To register for this free event, click here.

Copies of Farrow’s book will be available for purchase at the University of Toronto Bookstore (at 214 College Street on the St. George Campus) as well as at the lecture, where the author will be available for signings.

For the full roster of 2024 Alumni Reunion events, click here.

Wednesday, April 10 – Friday, April 26
Daniels Building
1 Spadina Crescent

Whether you're a future student, an alum, or a member of the public with an interest in architecture, landscape architecture or urban design—you're invited to join the Daniels Faculty for Winter 2024 Reviews. Throughout April, students across our graduate and undergraduate programs will present final projects to their instructors and guest critics from academia and the professional community.

All reviews will take place in the Daniels Building at 1 Spadina Crescent from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. (unless otherwise stated). Follow @UofTDaniels on social media and join the conversation using the hashtags #DanielsReviews and #DanielsReviews24.

Please note that times, dates and locations are subject to change.

Wednesday, April 10 | Undergraduate

Design Studio I (JAV101H1)
Coordinator: Jay Pooley
Instructors: Kara Verbeek, Mariano Martellacci, Phat Le, Sifei Mo, Katy Chey, Scott Sorli, Reza Nik, Harry Wei, Brian Boigon, Danielle Whitley, Jamie Lipson, Jeffrey Garcia
Rooms: 215, 230, 240, 330, 340, Main Hall A, Main Hall B, Main Hall C

Thursday, April 11 | Undergraduate

9 a.m.–1 p.m. ET
Design Studio II (ARC201H1)
Coordinator: Fiona Lim Tung 
Instructors: Dan Briker, Shane Williamson, Carol Moukheiber, Kara Verbeek, Mauricio Quiros Pacheco, Behnaz Assadi, David Verbeek, Maria Denegri, Francesco Martire
Rooms: 209, 215, 230, 240, 315, 330, 340, Main Hall A, Main Hall B, Main Hall C

Friday, April 12 | Graduate & Undergraduate

Design Studio 2 (LAN1012Y)
Instructors: Liat Margolis, Terence Radford
Rooms: 230, 330

Urban Design Studio Options (URD1012Y)
Instructors: Samantha Eby, Zahra Ebrahim
Room: Main Hall B

9 a.m.–1 p.m. ET
Drawing and Representation I (ARC200H1)
Coordinator: Roberto Damiani
Instructors: Jon Cummings, Dana Salama
Rooms: 215, 240

Monday, April 15 | Graduate & Undergraduate

Design Studio 2 (ARC1012Y)
Coordinator: Behnaz Assadi
Instructors: Chloe Town, Anne-Marie Armstrong, Mauricio Quiros Pacheco, Brian Boigon, Aleris Rodgers, Julia DiCastri
Rooms: 230, 330, Main Hall A, Main Hall B, Main Hall C

Design + Engineering I (ARC112H1)
Coordinator: Jay Pooley
Instructors: Jennifer Davis, Clinton Langevin
Room: 200

Tuesday, April 16 | Graduate & Undergraduate

Design Studio 4 (ARC2014Y)
Coordinator: Samuel Dufaux
Instructors: Brigitte Shim, Steven Fong, Chris Cornecelli, James Macgillivray, Maria Denegri, Francesco Martire
Rooms: 230, 330, Main Hall A, Main Hall B

Landscape Architecture Studio IV (ARC364Y1)
Instructor: Peter North
Room: 315, 340

Wednesday, April 17 | Graduate

Design Studio 4 (ARC2014Y)
Coordintor: Samuel Dufaux
Instructors: Brigitte Shim, Steven Fong, Chris Cornecelli, James Macgillivray, Maria Denegri, Francesco Martire
Rooms: 230, Main Hall A, Main Hall B

Design Studio 4 (LAN2014Y)
Instructors: Todd Douglas, Reinaldo Jordan
Room: 330

Thursday, April 18 | Graduate & Undergraduate

Design Studio Thesis (LAN3017Y)
Coordinator: Elise Shelley
Instructors: Behnaz Assadi, Peter North, Alissa North, Liat Margolis, Francesco Martire, Matthew Perotto
Rooms: 209, 230, 242, 330

Architecture Studio IV (ARC362Y1)
Coordinator: Jon Cummings
Instructors: Chloe Town, Mauricio Quiros Pacheco
Rooms: Main Hall A, Main Hall B, Main Hall C

Friday, April 19 | Graduate & Undergraduate

Design Studio Thesis (LAN3017Y)
Coordinator: Elise Shelley
Instructors: Behnaz Assadi, Peter North, Alissa North, Liat Margolis, Francesco Martire, Matthew Perotto
Rooms: 209, 242, 330

Urban Design Studio Thesis (URD2015Y)
Coordinator: Mason White 
Room: 230

Technology Studio IV (ARC381Y1)
Instructors: Paul Howard Harrison (Coordinator), Suzan Ibrahim
Rooms: Main Hall A, Main Hall B

Monday, April 22 | Undergraduate

Senior Seminar in History and Theory (Thesis) (ARC457Y1)
Instructor: Petros Babasikas
Room: Main Hall B

Senior Seminar in Design (Thesis) (ARC462Y1)
Instructor: Laura Miller
Room: 230

Senior Seminar in Technology (Thesis) (ARC487Y1)
Instructor: Nicholas Hoban
Room: 330

Tuesday, April 23 | Undergraduate

Senior Seminar in History and Theory (Thesis) (ARC457Y1) 
Instructor: Petros Babasikas
Room: Main Hall B

Senior Seminar in Design (Thesis) (ARC462Y1)
Instructor: Laura Miller
Room: 230

Senior Seminar in Technology (Thesis) (ARC487Y1)
Instructor: Nicholas Hoban
Room: 330

Wednesday, April 24 | Graduate

9 a.m.–1 p.m. ET
Post-Professional Thesis 2 (ALA4022Y)
Coordinator: Mason White
Room: 242

Architectural Design Studio: Research 2 (ARC3021Y)
Instructors: Jeannie Kim, Stephen Verderber, Lukas Pauer, Carol Moukheiber
Rooms: 209, 230, 315, 330, Main Hall B

Thursday, April 25 | Graduate

9 a.m.–1 p.m. ET
Thesis 2 (ALA4022Y)
Coordinator: Mason White 
Room: 242

Architectural Design Studio: Research 2 (ARC3021Y)
Instructors: Petros Babasikas, John Shnier, Miles Gertler, Brady Peters
Rooms: 200, 209, 230, 240, 330, Main Hall A, Main Hall B, Main Hall C

Friday, April 26 | Graduate

Architectural Design Studio: Research 2 (ARC3021Y)
Instructors: Petros Babasikas, John Shnier, Shane Williamson, Zachary Mollica, Laura Miller
Rooms: 209, 230, 240, 241, 242, 330, Main Hall A, Main Hall B, Main Hall C

Associate Professor Claire Zimmerman, Director of the Faculty’s PhD in Architecture, Landscape, and Design, has been named Associate Editor of the prestigious Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, the main peer-reviewed journal in the U.S. in the field of architectural history.

Announced last month, Zimmerman’s term as JSAH Associate Editor will begin on June 1, to be followed by a two-year term (January 1, 2026 to December 31, 2027) as the JSAH’s Editor.

As Associate Editor, Zimmerman will assist current editor Alice Y. Tseng in reviewing manuscripts, securing blind peer reviews, communicating decisions to authors, soliciting content and preparing materials for four issues of the journal per year.

Her duties will also include supervising the review editors and the JSAH Managing Editor, and working with staff at the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) and at University of California Press to ensure timely publication of the journal.

Zimmerman’s academic work focuses on “protocols of modernization and modernity” in architecture and the built environment. Her current teaching includes courses on multi-species consciousness in the built environment and studies of the intersections of class, race and ethnicity in the industrialization of the world.

In 2014, she authored Photographic Architecture in the Twentieth Century (University of Minnesota Press). Her latest book, Albert Kahn Inc.: Architecture, Labor, and Industry, is forthcoming from MIT Press this year.

In addition, Zimmerman has contributed to numerous books and publications, co-editing, with Jean-Louis Cohen and Christina Crawford, 2023’s Detroit Moscow Detroit: An Architecture for Industrialization, 1917-1945 (MIT Press), as well as Architecture against Democracy: Histories of the Nationalist International, forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press in 2024, with Reinhold Martin.

Zimmerman has also contributed peer-reviewed articles to Architectural Histories, Footprint, Architectural Theory Review, Art History, the Journal of Architecture and the JSAH. 

She has been a member of the SAH since 1998 and served on the SAH Board from 2016 to 2019.

Three members of the Daniels Faculty—Nicholas Hoban, Reza Nik and Phat Le—are among those on the shortlist of candidates vying to represent Canada at the 2025 Venice Biennale of Architecture.

Hoban (pictured below) is part of the Living Room Collective in the running to show in Venice. A computational designer specializing in the fields of digital fabrication, robotics and computational workflows, he is currently a lecturer at the Faculty and Director of Technology Services.

Led by biodesigner Andrea Shin Ling of ETH Zurich, the Living Room Collective is a group of architects, scientists, artists and educators who work at the intersection of architecture, biology and digital fabrication technologies. 

The collective seeks to move society away from exploitative systems of production to regenerative ones by inventing design methods and processes that centre on natural systems.

The Living Room Collective’s proposed Venice project is an ambitious, large-scale living pavilion that utilizes materials embedded with biologically active, living cells in an architectural context. 

Nik and Le, meanwhile, are part of the Mixtape Collective aiming to show in Venice. Nik (pictured below) is an Assistant Professor in the Teaching Stream at the Faculty, while Le is a sessional lecturer at Daniels and alumnus of the school.

Composed of architects, urban planners, artists and cultural curators who are “passionate about exploring the intricacies of art, culture and the built environment,” the Mixtape Collective is “a diverse crew of cultural instigators who are leading the global discourse in architecture and urbanism as it intersects with and conveys the complexities of multidisciplined artistic expression.

Seeking to answer the question of how “radical acts of listening and reciprocity [can] (re)imagine our sense of belonging,” the collective’s proposed Venice project “challenges the politics and policies of sound shaping our cities while learning from the sonic landscapes of Indigenous and marginalized communities as they offer alternative pathways to designing shared spaces of belonging, resistance and joy.”

In addition to teaching at the Faculty, Nik is the founding director of the experimental art and architecture studio SHEEEP. Le (pictured below) is also an architectural designer for the Infrastructure Institute at U of T’s School of Cities.

The 19th International Architecture Exhibition will be held in Venice from May 24 to November 23 in 2025. In December, it was announced that Italian architect Carlo Ratti would serve as Curator of the 2025 Biennale.

For a full list of the five shortlisted Canadian teams, visit the Canada Council for the Arts website by clicking here. The chosen team and proposal will be announced in May of this year.

Photo of Nicholas Hoban by Nick Iwanyshyn/U of T News. Photo of Reza Nik by Mohammad Bayati. The homepage and banner image depict the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2023.

The 2024 edition of Lumière: The Art of Light has opened at Ontario Place and once again the Daniels Faculty is represented with a dynamic installation.

A free outdoor light-based art exhibition, Lumière welcomes visitors to Toronto’s Trillium Park to experience bold and imaginative public art created by Ontario artists from all artistic streams. Its theme this time around is CONNECTIONS, a catalyst for exploring “the various ways in which light can create connections between people, the environment and different aspects of our lives.”

Geosphere, the Daniels Faculty installation, is a large-scale timber reciprocal frame pavilion designed, fabricated and installed by a team of students and faculty led by John Nguyen, Nicholas Hoban, Rahul Sehijpaul and Paul Kozak.

One of 17 installations on display in the park, the pavilion is designed to create an immersive experience, allowing visitors to see and appreciate the structural capabilities of a reciprocal frame.

“Through computational geometry and robotic fabrication,” the Geosphere team explains, “individuals can explore this robust unique geometric system…rarely constructed at pavilion scale. A reciprocal frame is a grid of discrete linear timber elements where each timber element simultaneously supports and is supported by its neighbouring elements. The elements are structurally interdependent and in a hierarchy of equal importance.”

During the daytime, the length and width of the timber elements comprising Geosphere are on full display. At dusk, the UV light reveals the short side of the timber element, allowing the structure to seem weightless in space, and demonstrating how short-length timber can be used to span large distances in compression.

The fabrication and assembly team for Geopshere consisted of Cameron Manore, Liam Cassano, Ala Mohammadi, Sadi Wali, Kosame Li-Han, Selina Al Madanat, Zhenxiao Yang, Sophia de Uria, Mucteba Core, Shannon Dacanay, Nicole Quesnelle and Olivia Carson.

This is the second year in a row that a Daniels Faculty team has had a project featured at Lumière. Last year’s entry, Aeolian Soundscape, was created and installed under the leadership of Nguyen, Hoban, Sehijpaul and Brady Peters.

To view Geosphere this season, visitors have until Saturday, April 20, when the Lumière exhibition ends. All 17 light installations can be experienced seven nights a week from sunset to 11:00 p.m.

Every Friday and Saturday, bonfires will also be hosted at the Trillium Park firepit from 5:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m., weather permitting.

For more information on Lumière, click here.

Photography by 6ix Films

The Daniels Faculty’s Michael Piper, Assistant Professor of Urban Design and Architecture, is among the co-recipients of the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s 2023 President’s Medal for Outstanding Housing Research.

Co-won with Janna Levitt, Principal of LGA Architectural Partners, and Samantha Eby, a sessional instructor at the Faculty, the prize was bestowed for ReHousing.ca, an online housing platform the trio co-created.

The award recognizes innovative and impactful research in Canadian housing, and includes a $25,000 prize to fund further knowledge mobilization and outreach.

The ReHousing initiative was developed by the joint academic and professional team to help make “missing middle” housing more attainable, showing “citizen developers” how to transform single-family homes into multiplexes.

Characterized by clear language and easy-to-read drawings that explain various types of multiplex housing as well as a step-by-step guide to how they can be achieved, the website offers options for a range of prospective users, including those looking to get into the housing market, mature homeowners who would like to remain in their homes while earning rental income for retirement, and those aiming to build additional housing for extended family, friends or rent-paying tenants.

“We’re excited that our housing catalogue has received national recognition, especially as all three levels of government are promoting design catalogues as a key approach to realizing small-scale infill housing,” Piper said on behalf of the winning team. “The CMHC grant will help us to expand awareness of the ReHousing project by creating more how-to videos and to share our research further through social media.”

Elements of the ReHousing plan were featured in Housing Multitudes: Reimagining the Landscapes of Suburbia, the 2022-23 Daniels Faculty exhibition that Piper co-curated with Professor Richard Sommer.

Last year, Piper, Levitt and Eby used their research to contribute design analysis to the City of Toronto’s potentially game-changing multiplex-zoning legislation, and they are currently working on a second Toronto commission to study alternative neighbourhood densities.

ReHousing has also been funded by a grant from the Neptis Foundation, an independent charitable foundation that conducts and disseminates nonpartisan research, analysis and mapping related to the design and function of Canadian urban regions.

For more details about ReHousing, click here.

A rendering from the award-winning website ReHousing.ca envisions the addition of secondary housing on the site of a postwar bungalow. Image courtesy ReHousing.ca

Taught by Professor Richard Sommer, Exploring Design Practices (ARC302) introduces students to the practice of architecture and its allied disciplines through a series of presentations by an array of leading practitioners and scholars. 

The conversations go beyond the case studies and examples of architecture and design typically presented in lecture-based courses to probe the ideas and influences that design and planning professionals have drawn on, whom they collaborate with, and the background frameworks to the work they do. 

The following lectures are open to all members of the Daniels community as well as the public. All lectures take place in Main Hall in the Daniels Building at 1 Spadina Crescent. Registration is not required.

Winter 2024

February 28, 12:30 p.m.
Dana Cuff
UCLA Architecture and Urban Design; cityLAB

March 6, 12:30 p.m.
Brandon Donnelly
Slate; Globizen Group

March 13, 12:30 p.m.
Peter Clewes
architectsAlliance 

March 20, 12:30 p.m.
Marshall Brown
Marshall Brown Projects

March 27, 12:30 p.m.
John Bass
UBC School of Architecture + Landscape Architecture

Earlier in the semester, students heard from Amy Whitesides, Võ Trọng Nghĩa, Germane Barnes and Georgeen Theodore.

From investigating and designing agrarian prototypes in Costa Rica to a design-build studio on Toronto Island, internships with top firms in the city and more, the Daniels Faculty is offering a diverse array of summer courses to undergraduate students this year.

Watch the Summer 2024 Info Sessions on YouTube and read the full Course Descriptions to learn more.

Interested students must submit the online application form by 11:59 p.m. on Monday, February 19.

Design Research Internship Program (DRIP)

The Design Research Internship Program (Instructor: Pina Petricone) places third- and fourth-year BAAS students with leading Toronto design practices for a period of six weeks during the May-June summer period.

Studio Abroad

Learn more about the Faculty’s three global studios this summer:

X-Athenas: Architecture & Public Space Stories in Contemporary Athens
Instructor: Petros Babasikas

Berlin, a City in Film
Instructor: Peter Sealy

Costa Rica: No Artificial Ingredients
Instructor: Mauricio Quirós Pacheco

Design Build

Design Build offers a hands-on approach to course material:

Robot Made
Instructors: Nicholas Steven Hoban
Aryan Rezaei Rad (U of T Engineering), AnnaLisa Meyboom (UBC SALA)

Lake, Ferry < Island > Flood, Design - Demarcating public space on Ward’s Island after flood protection
Instructor: Chloe Town

Circularity (of People and Place)
Instructor: TBD

Professor Mason White, Sessional Lecturer Kearon Roy Taylor and Assistant Professor Karen Kubey have been recognized by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) with 2024 Architectural Education Awards. The trio won for two separate projects in the category of Faculty Design. The Faculty Design Awards acknowledge work that advances the reflective nature of practice and teaching through creative design and design investigation and by promoting work that expands the boundaries of design. 

Colleagues at the Toronto-based practice Lateral Office, co-founder White (pictured above at right) and associate Taylor won for “Contested Circumpolar: Domestic Territories,” an installation that examines domestic life in eight Arctic nations by situating it within broader sociocultural, economic and geopolitical contexts. Their partners on the winning team include Lateral Office co-founder Lola Sheppard of the University of Waterloo and Matthew Jull and Leena Cho of the University of Virginia. 

Exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2021, “Contested Circumpolar: Domestic Territories” presents eight narratives of inhabitation from each of the countries that lay claim to the Arctic—Canada, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the U.S.—to reveal deep and complex connections between domestic space and the larger territory.  

A series of rooms within eight houses juxtaposes the distinct artifacts and architectures of everyday life in the Arctic with territorial narratives that expose the interlinked far-flung contexts shaping the domestic scenes. 

In the process it addresses issues of transnational politics, Indigenous self-determination and radical socio-environmental adaptation in one of the 21st century’s most complex and contested regions.  

The installation “Contested Circumpolar: Domestic Territories” was exhibited as part of the Across Borders series at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale. Models were arranged as a roundtable assembly representing different regional challenges. Photos by Giorgio Lazzaro

An urbanist specializing in housing design and social justice, Kubey (pictured at left in the banner) won her ACSA Award, along with Neeraj Bhatia of the California College of the Arts and Ignacio González Galán of Barnard College, for “Aging Against the Machine,” a research project that looks at aging not as a problem to be solved but as a life stage facing a range of barriers—physical, social, financial and cultural—that make it difficult to grow older with dignity and in community. 

Part of a 2022 Center for Architecture exhibition entitled Reset: Towards a New Commons, the project builds on past and ongoing work in the California community of West Oakland, a culturally diverse and historically activist neighbourhood where older residents nonetheless face precarious living conditions, insufficient public amenities and limited caregiving options.  

It was developed by examining, connecting and expanding on existing initiatives there and by consulting with and amplifying the voices of its residents, who contributed through a series of roundtables and conversations. 

“Aging Against the Machine,” a commissioned research project overseen by the Daniels Faculty’s Karen Kubey and others, was part of a 2022 Center for Architecture exhibition entitled Reset: Towards a New Commons. Photos by Asya Gorovitz and Miguel de Guzman

Among the project results were proposals in a range of scales, from interior home renovations to collective land-ownership models and intergenerational housing projects. In particular, diverse spaces for commoning and networks of care at the scale of the building and the neighbourhood are integrated with public social programs and mutual aid initiatives, ultimately contributing to an intersectional, community-based approach to aging. 

According to ACSA, award winners are selected for their ability to inspire and challenge students, to expand the architectural profession’s knowledge base and to extend their work beyond academia into practice and the public sector. 

Winners of the Faculty Design Award are chosen in particular for how their work expands the boundaries of design through formal investigations, innovative design processes, addressing justice, working with communities, advancing sustainable practices, fostering resilience and/or centering the human experience. 

For a full list of 2024 ACSA Award winners, click here. 

Lukas Pauer, an Assistant Professor and inaugural Emerging Architect Fellow at the Daniels Faculty, has been awarded the 2024 AIAS/ACSA New Faculty Teaching Award.  

The annual award, sponsored jointly by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) and the American Institute of Architecture Students (AIAS), recognizes excellence and innovation in teaching during the formative years of an architectural teaching career. 

Pauer, who originally joined the Faculty as an Adjunct Professor in 2021, is also the founding director of the Vertical Geopolitics Lab (VGL), an investigative practice and think-tank at the intersections of architecture, geography, politology and media dedicated to exposing intangible systems and hidden agendas within the built environment. 

“All of my courses relate to aspects of space and power in the built environment but range in scale from the built object to the city or the polity,” says Pauer. “A key component of my academic practice is to serve the empowerment of marginalized, underrepresented, and vulnerable individuals and communities.” 

A scene from the Counterhegemonic Architecture thesis research studio course during a visit to the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal.

When it comes to his pedagogical approach, Pauer emphasizes removing hierarchical barriers between instructors and students. “I focus on the fact that they [students] will soon become my colleagues, often in just a few years’ time. Rather than a rigid hierarchy with instructors and critics being the sole possessors of knowledge, I want to open it up and make more horizontal dialogues possible.” 

This dialogue proves particularly useful in the context of studio-based learning. “Especially in design, there are often multiple approaches to solving problems, which is why I tend to actively encourage my students to challenge me,” he says, adding: “I often ask students to comment on each other’s projects individually. By inviting students to have just as much of a voice, the studio not only becomes an inclusive but also an authentic environment in which future practitioners can meet to inspire and learn from each other.” 

At Daniels, Pauer teaches at both the graduate and undergraduate level, including a year-long Master of Architecture (MARC) design research studio that investigates space and power in an effort to expose, challenge and reconstitute the pervasive and ongoing reality of imperial-colonial expansion.  

MARC students in the Counterhegemonic Architecture (ARC3020) studio have produced diverse theses (snapshots of which can be seen above) that range from a proposal for a pavilion at an international horticultural exposition that comments on the Turkish state’s colonial displays of progress to protest on behalf of the Kurds of Hasankeyf (“An Archive of Memories Washed Away” by Liane Werdina) to a temporary gallery exhibition on the cyclical push-pull nature of countries seeking to actively control the physical manifestation and collective memory of their national identity and history (“Forward Not Back, Reconsidering the Past in a Future Ukraine” by Bryson Wood) and a design for a mixed-use high-rise building and accompanying professional practice manual intended to empower residents of Toronto’s Chinatown (“Seeing through Transit-led Displacement in Toronto’s Chinatown” by Christopher “Chris” Hardy).  

In the Bachelor of Arts in Architectural Studies (BAAS) program, Pauer teaches Close Readings in Urban Design (ARC253), which has the overarching hypothesis that public space isn’t actually “public” for everyone—a theme that Pauer considers a throughline between research and teaching.  

“In many ways this award feels full circle,” says Pauer. “Given the integration of my practice, research, and teaching.” He adds: “A few years back I had planned my doctoral dissertation as a stepping stone toward achieving particular mid and long-term objectives; (a) to develop an original didactic-pedagogical approach to an emerging academic field at the intersections of architecture, geography, politology, and media as well as (b) to develop a business plan-like framework for a non-profit investigative practice and think-tank. So my think-tank’s upcoming research-based debut exhibition is another outcome informed by this integrated approach to academic practice.” 

On March 6, Pauer will open the exhibition “How to Steal a Country,” which will transform the Larry Wayne Richards Gallery into scenes from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Scale- and life-size dioramas, vignettes and tableaus will create an immersive experience, revealing the key role architecture plays in the ongoing sovereignty dispute. A corresponding public lecture, “Recognizing Facts on the Ground,” will take place on March 14.