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03.02.24 - MARC, MLA and MUD students take on decommissioned airfields in Integrated Urbanism Studio projects

Integrated Urbanism Studio (ARC2013Y, LAN2013Y, URD1011Y) brings together architecture, landscape architecture and urban design students to work on the same assignments throughout the semester. 

The focus area for the Fall 2023 studio, coordinated by Mauricio Quirós Pacheco, Rob Wright and Roberto Damiani, was the decommissioned airfield lands at Downsview in Toronto—currently one of the most significant urban transformation opportunities in North America.     

From proposals that address ecological connectivity and food scarcity to residential typologies and aforestation techniques, following are a selection of group projects from the MARC, MLA and MUD programs. 


The Spot 

Students: Mo Bayati, Valerie Hope Haddad, Julia Dronsejko 
Program: Master of Architecture 
Instructor: Mauricio Quirós Pacheco 

“Our Downsview proposal represents a comprehensive approach to urbanism grounded in an understanding of the site’s historical evolution, current conditions and the needs of both the local community and Toronto at large. The project synthesizes four critical issues facing the city. Firstly, it addresses the imperative of retaining and expanding industrial space, acknowledging the escalating demand in Toronto.

The introduction of a central node for entertainment and events aims to create a vibrant and engaging atmosphere, enriching the cultural fabric of the area. To confront Toronto’s healthcare challenges, our proposal strategically proposes a new hospital at Downsview. Additionally, the initiative tackles food scarcity by implementing urban agriculture, utilizing advanced techniques such as hydroponics. The design encompasses industrial zones, event space, health and wellness districts, and agricultural areas.” 


Process Based Landscapes 

Students: Rebecca Martin, Zhuanghyi Peng, María Alonso Novo 
Program: Master of Landscape Architecture 
Instructors: Rob Wright, Megan Esopenko 

“Process Based Landscapes questions what public open spaces could look like if they were positioned as key nodes of social, economic and civic life. These close-up plans translate large-scale concepts into site-specific strategies through an agricultural field, an ecological corridor and a residential neighbourhood. Within each context, design strategies were aimed to create engaging landscapes that invite residents into the processes taking place on the site.” 


Social Urbanism 

Students: Shivangi Chauhan, Rajvi Modi
Program: Master of Urban Design 
Instructor: Roberto Damiani 

“Social Urbanism: A paradigm of public space justice is an urban design project situated within the environs of Downsview neighbourhood in the city of Toronto. The conceptual framework embodies a holistic ethos in urban development, prioritizing the welfare of communities through nuanced responsiveness and enhancement of the site, local context and public realm. The term ‘Social’ within this context manifests a dual significance in the realm of urban development. On one facet, it connotes notions of communal cohesion and active engagement, while on the other it conveys an engagement with fundamental societal requisites like, housing, immigration and awareness centres, etc.” 


Change of Plan: STADIA City 

Students: Nezar Alkujok, Negar Mashoof, Yegor Konechnyy
Program: Master of Architecture 
Instructor: Aziza Chaouni

“In the evolving landscape of Downsview, Change of Plan: STADIA City, inspired by the Smithsons’ 1957 Hauptstadt entry, involves a habitable bridge complex. Drawing from 1960s megastructures, the proposal unites major sectors—YorkU Village, Sheppard Avenue West, Northwood Park, Yorkdale Mall and Sobeys Stadium—via interconnected elements, including a main stadium and multi-use stadia, strategically positioned as nodes within the sky bridge. This approach reimagines the site, transforming local and national events into an ever-growing, evolutive series of spaces, both at and above ground.”


Events, Ecology, Ephemera 

Students: Matt Arnott, Anh Luu, Seth Ramesra 
Program: Master of Landscape Architecture 
Instructors: Rob Wright, Megan Esopenko 

“Through the process of exploring the site’s history, what stood out to us was the longstanding pattern of strange events and massive crowds. The site’s history of sporadic occupation has been absorbed into its identity, creating a program defined by flux. Simultaneously, ecological presence and diversity have dwindled over time as people have come to occupy the site, rendering natural cycles invisible in favour of roads and runways. This project seeks to bring inhabitants of the site closer to the natural happenings that often go overlooked, foregrounding an urbanism rooted in ecological events.” 


The Urban Rooms 

Students: Anurag Panda, Pallavi Patil, Sakshi Thorat, Wenqian Han 
Program: Master of Urban Design 
Instructor: Roberto Damiani 

“The proposed development plan aims to turn Downsview into a growth centre with public corridors and mixed-use development. The current land-use segregation only focuses on residential or employment, lacking an equitable distribution of mixed-use development. The plan includes the concept of ‘urban rooms,’ grouping houses around open spaces to create a square. The green spaces will be better connected via a green spine and a series of intimate ‘outdoor’ rooms. Mixed-use corridors of higher densities are allocated along the exterior edge, and more intimate institutional areas are kept near Downsview Park. A central amenity transforms into a sport-focused room in the proposed layout.” 


Patchwork City: Reimagining Downsview as Urban Tapestry 

Students: Lily Lu, Owen Miu, Yunjung Park, Ghazal Elmizadeh
Program: Master of Architecture  
Instructor: David Verbeek

“Patchwork City is an urban strategy that challenges conventional urban planning in Toronto. It presents an alternate approach by introducing a dynamic interplay of urban composition on the Downsview Airport site, through extracting and overlapping different urban fabrics. From bungalows to skyscrapers, these fabrics span across countries, cities and centuries, both generic and specific, built and unbuilt. Rather than playing a numbers game, Patchwork City focuses on the creation of distinct morphologies and new urban experiences that celebrate the vibrancy of Downsview and Toronto.” 


Leading with Landscape  

Students: Evlyn Sun, Georgia Sa, Tracy Ngan  
Program: Master of Landscape Architecture 
Instructors: Rob Wright, Megan Esopenko

“As the benefits of greenspaces are now increasingly evident, this project investigates what it means to design a new Downsview community by putting landscape first. The proposed plan prioritizes ecological connectivity by concentrating density around transit stations and providing pedestrian-oriented circulation throughout an extensive network of greenspaces. Rather than continuing a history of urban development fragmenting the landscape, this plan recognizes that resilient landscapes are integral to support community and urban infrastructure.” 


Aboretropolis: Re-Centering the Forest 

Students: Khadija Waheed, Richard Schutte, Lhanzi Gyaltsan 
Program: Master of Architecture 
Instructor: Christos Marcopolus 

“Before Downsview Airport—and before Toronto’s urban monoculture was constructed—there was a native maple-beech forest that thrived for thousands of years. This project proposes a hybrid Miyawake-poplar afforestation technique to partially return Downsview to its pre-settlement forest state. Responding to Toronto’s desperate needs of both housing and natural forest area, a new urban form is envisioned merging a diverse ecosystem of building typologies with non-invasive branching road networks that allow the forest to grow into urban spaces. Transit-rich building clusters maximize walkability and provide access to the amenities of the 15-minute city, compressed into a five-minute urban forest.” 


Dirty Downsview 

Students: Nicole Hekl, Linjuan Dai, Bracha Stettin 
Program: Master of Landscape Architecture 
Instructors: Rob Wright, Megan Esopenko 

“This project aims to create an urban development where the toxic legacy of Downsview’s industrial past serves as a starting point for imagining a sustainable and regenerative site for urban living and industry. The contamination of a post-industrial airfield became the impetus for creating a site-wide plan for soil remediation, green industry development and thriving urban conditions. Through careful phasing, thoughtful layering and connecting to existing ecological conditions, our plan creates waste treatment centres, housing and jobs for 60,000 people. Remediate the past, anticipate the future.” 


Reimaging the Green Spine 

Students: Yanyu Feng, Nan Liang; Diane (Doehyun) Kim, KIM, Sylph (Peizi) Yu
Program: Master of Urban Design 
Instructor: Roberto Damiani 

“The green spine is proposed to one side of the site and a secondary, pedestrian-only network within the built-form area. This allows for green connectivity through and outside of the site and [for] superblocks that are pedestrian-oriented and create flexible building opportunities for developers. The organic block pattern has allowed us to explore high-density buildings, while maintaining the green and picturesque appeal of suburban neighbourhoods.” 


Reconnecting Downsview: an argument for patchwork urbanism  

Students: Avondale Nixon, Declan Roberts, Nikki Basford 
Program: Master of Architecture 
Instructor: Jon Cummings 
 

“Reconnecting Downsview aims to integrate the neighbourhood into Toronto’s urban fabric by weaving together the once severed gridded street network. A matrix of street types was devised, placing users and circulation type on one axis, and street sizes and characteristics on the other. The resultant eight street types were distributed across the site, creating a highly connective and fine-grained urbanism. At the block scale, this interest in the human-scale spaces manifests in atypically small parcel size that encourages micro-development and a rich patchwork urbanism.” 


Auntie Urbanism 

Students: Daniel Lam, Michelle Choi, Jared Leslie 
Program: Master of Architecture 
Instructor: Karen Kubey 

“Auntie Urbanism proposes a vibrant, just future for Downsview Park in Toronto. Inspired by Vietnamese Aunties, and supporting local immigrant families, the framework centers the often-overlooked roles that women and diverse cultures play in Toronto communities. The proposal promotes economic, social, and relational exchanges that build on an existing informal network of Aunties who cook and sell international cuisines. The design explores how the site can be activated during the day and night, featuring lanterns and a night market, to stimulate the Auntie side hustle economy. By implementing variations on the Vietnamese “tube home” – a tall, narrow, intergenerational rowhouse typology with a retail ground floor – the design bridges the gap between work and personal life. We seek to cultivate not only placemaking, but place keeping.” 


Geographies of Production

Students: Gladys Lee, Aastha Saihgal, Cameron Hendey, Rubin de Jonge
Program: Master of Architecture
Instructor: Mariana Leguía Alegría

“Our proposal looks at reestablishing connections of people, agriculture, and nature within a new model of self-sustained and community living, in conjunction with revisiting accessibility and affordability on site through a lens of equity. By introducing “hub” neighborhoods that address different modes of living, our proposal presents various geographies of production at different scales, encouraging spaces to co-live, co-work, and co-exist with the site and the broader context of Toronto.” 

using trees as they are exhibition

05.02.24 - Q&A with Zac Mollica: On using trees as they are and diversifying building with wood

If you’ve walked through the Larry Wayne Richards Gallery in the past month, you’ve likely noticed the collection of unusual bits of wood, smelled the faint aroma of pine needles or even caught Zac Mollica at work in a full-scale replica of his workshop.  

Together, these elements make up the exhibition USING TREES AS THEY ARE, an eclectic compilation of Mollica’s research working hands-on with trees over the past 10 years.

We caught up with him to talk trees ahead of his public lecture on February 26

The exhibition is part of the research and teaching that you have undertaken as an Emerging Architect Fellow. Can you elaborate on how the exhibition is a reflection of this work? 

The Emerging Architect Fellowship has provided me an exceptional opportunity to both continue to develop new work and, critically, to reflect on and learn from an absurdly productive period of ambitious building projects that I had the privilege to be involved in, and eventually to lead, while teaching at the Architectural Association.

Before coming back to Toronto in 2021, I spent seven years living in Hooke Park, a 350-acre working forest operated by the AA as an unusual second home. There I was immersed in an alternative world of wood building, simultaneously increasing my skills in using traditional tools and processes while also becoming an expert at applying new computational tools in parallel. In 2015, we finished the Tree Fork Truss, a central work in my career. In collaboration with a hugely diverse team of experts, in the following years we would deliver full-scale buildings annually, with each demonstrating research into how we might better build with wood. Despite this productivity, time was constantly short to step back from the work and reflect.  

At Daniels, I have had the privilege to digest the incredible amount learned in those seven years lost in the woods, and to explore what it means to continue to develop this research in an urban context. Initially defined by my relationship to trees standing around me, my thinking in the last year has adapted to seeing material all around me—harvesting furniture, tree limbs and anything else we can find to use carefully in designs. 

The exhibition currently on view presents all of this together. It starts with a series of short observations from the last 10 years working hands-on with trees. In the second section, I have selected 350 photographs that prefer process to finished product—quick snaps that capture an important building moment, wondrous trees and many other things.

Further on, I have recreated at full scale the home workshop that I have progressively built in a back bedroom in our home in Toronto. In the final area, I have presented 16 very particular pieces of wood for visitors’ consideration and touch. We have come too often to see wood as a rectangular-ish thing that comes from the shop. Central to this entire work is to remind and reflect on the fact that wood comes from trees, and that it can be worked with in many forms! 

You're working on-site in the gallery during the exhibition's run. Tell us a bit more about your intentions to turn the space into a functional workshop. 

This bit of the exhibition has been such fun. As I schemed up a plan for the exhibition I would install to mark my fellowship role at Daniels, it became essential to depict processes and messiness over cleaned up finished results. When I realized the middle bay of the LWR gallery was the exact same size as my home workshop, my mind was made up.

My desire in working in the space has been to demonstrate rather than describe the way that I work, and to be able throughout January and February to have conversations with visitors about the show. As well, I wanted the show to evolve throughout the two months, and believe that it will only be complete as we head into the lecture I will give on February 26. 

USING TREES has been a multifaceted endeavor for you while at the Daniels Faculty. Can you speak to how all of these elements have informed each other? And what do you hope to be the outcome of your research? 

@UsingTrees has become a big umbrella to cover and somehow bring together a wide range of efforts and small projects under one central idea. At the core is a desire to use raw materials in ways that are close to their natural forms and best properties. Surrounding this is an alternative approach showing how we can design starting from material and an array of what I have come to refer to as tools for close observation—processes and implements that enable incredibly close working.  

The MARC studio, summer design-build program and seminar courses have each provided an opportunity to share and test out new methods—critically, assigning work to students that I don’t know quite what to expect from. 

Asked several years ago, I would have told you that I hoped the outcome of my work would be to inspire and produce a range of wooden structures made from forked and otherwise weird bits of tree. With enough time to think, it has become clear that the ambition for me is far wider and a lot more diffuse. Though a rapidly changing climate has become a common part of our discourse in design schools, we don’t often acknowledge just how bad even the best of our green buildings continue to be for the planet. And so, while I don’t have an easy answer for how we lessen the harm of the act of building at the scale we need to, I believe that a fundamental contribution I can make is to train and demonstrate better ways of seeing, and to help students to develop closer relationships to materials and landscapes. 

At the end of the day, this work is me sharing in public my utter beguilement and love for trees and their products. Here are the oldest living beings on Earth who helped to create the atmosphere that allows us to breathe. There is far more that we can do to make the best use of the products they offer us. 

USING TREES AS THEY ARE is on view until February 26. Register for the corresponding public lecture here.

01.02.24 - Celebrate Black History/Black Futures Month at the Daniels Faculty

The national theme for Black History Month 2024 is Black Excellence: A Heritage to Celebrate, a Future to Build. 

This month is an opportunity to celebrate the contributions that Black individuals and communities have made to Canadian society, history and heritage—and for the Daniels Faculty to demonstrate its ongoing commitment to inclusion.  

The Faculty is marking Black History/Black Futures Month with public lectures that explore Black identity and the built environment, and by highlighting ongoing initiatives such as the Faculty’s Building Black Success through Design program, a curated book display in the Eberhard Zeidler Library, and an art installation that reflects interpretations of Black Flourishing.

Mark your calendar for public lectures

The Daniels Faculty’s Winter 2024 Public Program continues on February 1 with “I heard you were looking for me,” a lecture by architect and academic Germane Barnes (pictured above) exploring themes of community-oriented design, the expansion of architectural representation and alternative design authorship.  

Barnes’s award-winning research and design practice, Studio Barnes, investigates the connection between architecture and identity by examining architecture’s social and political agency through historical research and design speculation. Mining architecture’s social and political agency, he examines how the built environment influences black domesticity.  

Two weeks later, on February 15, architect Kholisile Dhliwayo of afrOURban Inc. will be at the Faculty to present “Black Diasporas Tkaronto-Toronto.” Dhliwayo (pictured above) leads the afrOURban project Black Diasporas, a community-led, geolocated oral-narrative mapping initiative that examines the experiences, spaces and places having meaning to Black people.

This lecture will outline how oral narrative, filmmaking and exhibition are both archival and aspirational—archival in their celebration of the spaces and places created by Black communities in Toronto and aspirational in the articulation of hopes and dreams and how these manifest in the built environment. 

Dhliwayo is a founding member of afrOURban Inc., an Adrian Cheng Fellow at the Social Innovation Change Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School and a 2023 resident at the Center for Architecture Lab in New York City.

Visit an installation of student artwork 

Head to the Historic Stairwell between the second and third floors of the Daniels Building to view Black Flourishing: Six Student Artworks, a temporary installation that reflects diverse interpretations of Black flourishing and Blackness in design and community. 

In response to an open call by the Daniels Art Directive and the Daniels Faculty during the Winter 2023 term, the six artists represented offer their creative expression of Black traditions and futures of excellence. In alignment with the broad objectives of the University of Toronto’s Anti-Black Racism Report (2021) and the Scarborough Charter on Anti-Black Racism and Black Inclusion in Higher Education: Principles, Actions and Accountabilities (2021), this installation celebrates and promotes Black art and representation in university spaces. 

Check out a curated display in the Library

Stop by the Eberhard Zeidler Library all monthlong to check out a display of books about Black architects who made history, like Norma Sklarek and Paul R. Williams, and those who are making history today, like Afaina de Jong and Tosin Oshinowo.

Curated by Master of Architecture students Jessica Chan and Justina Yang, the recommendations are grouped into books on the general history of Black architects and books about specific Black architects. 

Learn more about Building Black Success in Design 

Since 2021, the Faculty has taken a proactive approach to addressing the lack of diversity in the design industry through its Building Black Success through Design (BBSD) program: a 12-week mentorship program for Black high school students interested in architecture and design.

BBSD partners high school students with current Black students or alumni from the University of Toronto serving as mentors. The current cohort includes 36 high-school-aged mentees and 13 mentors. Participants hone their skills across various mediums and software, while also delving into topics that resonate with their experiences and identity. At the end of the program, mentees will take away practical technical design skills, be able to research and use community feedback to inform their designs, and confidently present their ideas to their peers and mentors.

Now in its third year, the program was originally founded by three Black undergraduate students, Clara James, Renee Powell-Hines and Rayah Flash, while in the Bachelor of Arts in Architectural Studies program together. James continues to lead the program as the Faculty's Public Programming and Outreach Coordinator, while Powell-Hines is now a second-year Master of Architecture student and Flash is slated to graduate this year.

Follow along @bbsd.daniels and keep an eye on Daniels News & Events for future updates on the program.  

02.02.24 - New book by Mauricio Quirós Pacheco and Hans Ibelings surveys modern Central American architecture

The Daniels Faculty’s Mauricio Quirós Pacheco and Hans Ibelings, along with contributor Andrés Fernández, recently published Modern Architectures in Central America, an overview of different forms of modern architecture in Central America since the outset of the 20th century. 

“The purpose of this book is to study modern architecture in Central America from within,” says Assistant Professor Quirós Pacheco. “And not only as a global, generalized phenomenon, but also as a complex and local one, where each region and country has an equally important story to tell.” 

Although modern architecture constituted only a small percentage of total building production in Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama, these buildings hold evident symbolic significance, functioning as models for desired societal, economic and cultural changes or as aspirational placeholders for a future state of modernity.  

Years in the making, the book features essays and contributions by Gloria Grimaldi, Sandra Gutiérrez, Martín Majewsky, Darién Montañez, Raúl Monterroso and Florencia Quesada Avendaño, plus a set of never-before-published images by Leonard J. Currie from his posthumous slide collection at Virginia Tech. 

The book is available for purchase online.

If you are in Toronto and want to pick up a copy locally, contact mauricio.quiros@daniels.utoronto.ca.  

film still from the spy who came in from the cold

06.02.24 - Peter Sealy publishes essay on the Berlin Wall and its appearance in films

Assistant Professor Peter Sealy recently published the essay “Angel in No Mans Land,” which explores the Berlin Wall as it appears in films. 

The essay is part of the Impostor Cities series, a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto within the context of its eponymous exhibition, which was initially commissioned by the Canada Council for the Arts for the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale.

Sealy begins his essay with the construction of an ersatz Berlin Wall in Dublin, Ireland for the 1965 Cold War thriller The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. This cinematic version of the Berlin Wall barely resembled the original, but this hardly mattered: The presence of cinder blocks, barbed wire and a sign declaring “You are now leaving the American sector“ was all that was needed to convince audiences they were looking at Berlin and not a market square in Dublin.

One hundred and fifty-five kilometres long, the Berlin Wall stood from 1961 to 1989, providing the most tangible manifestation of the “iron curtain” that divided Eastern and Western Europe during the Cold War.

For Sealy, “that part of Dublin could credibly stand in for part of Berlin...highlights the extent to which certain stereotypical features of Berlin’s Cold War landscape circulated around the world through film, television and other media, to the point that an idea of Cold War Berlin, removed from the immediacy and materiality of any actual place, took hold in the global imagination.”

Sealy documents other instances in which the actual Berlin Wall was used for filming—often with a twist. For one scene in the 1983 movie Octopussy (an otherwise forgettable James Bond film, notes Sealy), the crew painted over the ubiquitous graffiti covering the wall’s western face so that it could stand in for its inaccessible, eastern side. As Sealy argues, “one part of the wall stood in for another very different part, at least partially modifying its material condition and meaning in the name of cinematic illusionism.” After filming was complete, the crew left their own mark, painting “007 Was Here” on the whitewashed wall.

Using films to explore Berlin’s global image is one of Sealy’s passions. Last summer, he led a group of 18 Daniels students to Berlin for a summer course entitled Berlin, A City in Film. He will return with another group of Daniels students in August 2024.

Read the essay online or download a PDF.

Banner image: Philippe Le Tellier, shooting of the film The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, 1963. Source: Paris Match Archive. Courtesy of Getty Images.

Image of The Gateway installation at The Bentway Skate Trail

01.02.24 - Two Daniels Faculty alumni light up Toronto’s winter with Bentway installation The Gateway

Visitors to the Bentway Skate Trail in downtown Toronto have had added incentive to strap on their ice skates besides the thrill of gliding across frozen water this winter: A colourful procession of “woven” light arches, known as The Gateway, has illuminated the popular winter amenity since mid-December, bringing a facsimile of the northern lights to the underbelly of the Gardiner Expressway.

Chosen after a nationwide call for project submissions, the vibrant addition to the 220-metre-long, figure-eight-shaped Trail is the brainchild of two Daniels Faculty alumni: the multidisciplinary designers Yi Zhou (MLA 2013) and Carlos Portillo (MLA 2018).

Now based in San Francisco, Zhou (pictured below at left) is an associate landscape architect at Surfacedesign, Inc. and was previously a landscape architect at CCxA in Montreal. Portillo (pictured below at right) joined CCxA in 2018 and has worked on such projects as The Ring in Montreal and Love Park in Toronto.

The design partners were on hand when The Gateway’s lights—an interweaving of green, blue, violet and magenta—were first switched on on December 16. The nightly illumination will continue until February 19, when the Skate Trail closes for the season.

“…The Expressway’s large columns come alive as visitors move beneath them, the ethereal colours mixing, mingling and dancing overhead,” says the duo’s artistic statement.

“The Gateway evokes the movement and magic of the northern lights across the sky, which are most vibrant during the dark winter months. The many strands of [interlacing] jewel-toned cords…pay tribute to the diversity of vibrant cultures and peoples that make up Toronto.”

Like several of their previous artistic projects—Zhou’s immersive Language of Plants installation has toured several locations throughout Toronto and Portillo’s award-winning work Entwine was on display at the prestigious Jardins de Métis International Garden Festival from 2019 to 2021—The Gateway fuses “art, natural phenomena, the built environment and community encounters.”

Inspired by the installation, The Bentway Studio also hosted a pair of free public workshops in January—one on weaving and the other on astronomy and the northern lights.

In addition to the designers, members of the project team included the structural engineering firm Blackwell and the fabrication studio Steel & Oak Designs.

For more information on the Bentway Skate Trail, including hours of operation and equipment-rental prices, click here.

Banner image by Brandon Ferguson

Claire Zimmerman portrait

29.01.24 - Claire Zimmerman named director of PhD in Architecture, Landscape, and Design

The Daniels Faculty is pleased to announce that Associate Professor Claire Zimmerman has been appointed Director of the PhD in Architecture, Landscape, and Design, effective January 1, 2024. Her term is for three and a half years and concludes at the end of 2027. She takes over from Interim Director Peter Sealy.  

A member of the Faculty since July 2023, Zimmerman came to U of T from the University of Michigan, where she served first as an assistant professor and then as an associate professor of architectural history and theory at the Taubman College of Architecture and Planning and the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts.

The Daniels Faculty’s post-professional Doctor of Philosophy in Architecture, Landscape, and Design is a uniquely interdisciplinary program that trains students to pursue new research at a high level, in multiple specialties and disciplines related to architecture and design. Exploring the methodologies required by different disciplines produces graduates who advance current scholarship while also creating new models of research-based practice that can then be implemented in real-world settings.

Encouraging such collaboration to even greater degrees will be a focus of Zimmerman’s leadership.

“To me, a successful PhD program is one in which a team of researchers with very different specializations works together to fashion a highly versatile craft, one that can navigate the seas of our present, challenging knowledge environment.”

Zimmerman’s immediate priorities, she says, include “onboarding myself, attending to admissions, meeting with students and faculty, revisiting the basic protocols of the program, making some minor curricular adjustments, addressing the funding situation for PhD students, and laying out the plan for 2024-25.”

A particular focus of this semester, she adds, “is a public-facing ‘self-study’ of the PhD program on April 5 and 6, details to follow.”

Looking farther ahead, “I would like to see the ALD PhD program explore new potentials in doctoral education through at least two means. The first of these: multidisciplinary, multimodal doctoral projects that make the most of Daniels’s amazing faculty members, who span such a wide range of fields in the study of constructed and natural environments and visual culture. We might seed new knowledge constellations through collaborative partnerships with our students and among ourselves.”

The second means, she continues, is “pioneering a more engaged PhD program in which our students can find opportunities outside the architecture school as part of their doctoral education. This might include paid internships, community activism or engagement projects, or professional opportunities—all tailored to fit within the framework of their proposed doctoral study. This would supplement our current reliance on teaching and research assistantships with a more varied set of professionalization opportunities.”

Although the interdisciplinarity of the ALD PhD makes it unique among doctoral programs, Zimmerman sees potential for growth, evolution and even greater dynamism.

“It is up to us to make our PhD program special,” she says. “The materials to do so, I believe, are in our hands. They include: a multidisciplinary, multimodal group of colleagues, a great metropolis, and an architecture school with dedicated staff and faculty who are committed to working on the built environment. From these we might fashion a program that prioritizes new knowledge with new practices in our field, training our students to be future professors, certainly, but also to be engaged citizens capable of effecting change in in the future.”

design research internship student work collage

25.01.24 - Design Research Internship Program (DRIP) invites Toronto architecture firms to join experiential learning course this summer

The Daniels Faculty’s Design Research Internship Program (DRIP) invites local practitioners in architecture, landscape architecture and design to participate in a unique academic internship that partners upper-year Bachelor of Arts in Architectural Studies (BAAS) students with design professionals.

The experiential learning initiative, launched by Associate Professor Pina Petricone in 2021, is expanding its roster of participating firms and opening a call for practitioners for the first time.

Any Toronto-area firms interested in participating in DRIP this coming summer should contact p.petricone@daniels.utoronto.ca by February 16, 2024. 

Now in its third year, the LEAF-funded program bridges academic knowledge with professional practice. DRIP offers undergraduate students the opportunity to apply critical research and visual communication skills to focused work within a local firm and in turn exposes the rich community of design practitioners to the uniquely skilled students at U of T. 

Key to the DRIP model is the definition of design research projects by host firms in advance of the internship, as well as a weekly seminar delivered by Petricone that both presents models of design research to students and allows interns to position their work in a larger disciplinary context.

Information for interested students will be available in March 2024. 

Banner image: Collage of student work from the DRIP pilot project in 2021 at Gianonne Petricone Architects.

jocelyn squires wins arbor award for volunteering

18.01.24 - Four members of the Daniels Faculty community honoured with Arbor Awards

From serving as guest critics during reviews to providing mentorship to students and fundraising for scholarships, four esteemed Daniels Faculty community members have received Arbor Awards, the University of Toronto’s highest honour for volunteers, for their significant contributions to the University and the Faculty. 

“Our success is due in no small measure to the excellence of our alumni and friends, whose dedication is exemplified by our Arbor Award winners, past and present,” said President Meric Gertler at a January 16 ceremony honouring award recipients, the first in-person celebration since 2019.  

Congratulations to all awardees, including 2023 recipient Jocelyn Squires (pictured above with President Gertler), 2022 recipient Eha Mai Naylor and 2020 recipients Heather Dubbledam and Jane Welsh.

Jocelyn Squires
Master of Architecture, Daniels Faculty, 2016

Squires has consistently supported students and instructors at the Daniels Faculty for more than five years. Her contributions include volunteering as a guest critic, mentoring students, leading a faculty tour with visiting architects and participating in the Faculty’s accreditation review.

Arbor Award recipients (from left to right) Jane Welsh, Eha Mai Naylor and Heather Dubbeldam with President Gertler. 

Jane Welsh
Master of Science in Planning, Faculty of Arts & Science, 2000

Jane is a dedicated champion of the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design’s Student-Professionals Networking Event. As president of the Ontario Association of Landscape Architects, she acts as a bridge between the Faculty and the profession. 

Eha Mai Naylor
Bachelor of Landscape Architecture, 1980

For over 20 years, Naylor has generously supported the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design. Her many contributions include serving as a Faculty Council member and as a guest critic; mentoring and hiring Master of Landscape Architecture graduates; advising on governance and oversight issues; fundraising for student financial aid; and founding a scholarship. Recently, she was also named a U of T alumni governor. 

Heather Dubbeldam

Acclaimed architect Dubbeldam was pivotal in establishing the Daniels Faculty’s Student-Professionals Networking Event, which brings together graduate students and industry leaders. She also serves as a guest critic at Design Studio reviews. 

Portrait of Pina Petricone

17.01.24 - The Daniels Faculty’s Pina Petricone appointed to Waterfront Toronto’s Design Review Panel

Associate Professor Pina Petricone (BArch 1991) has been appointed to Waterfront Toronto’s Design Review Panel, the independent advisory body responsible for setting design standards across the city’s lakefront.

Formed in 2001 by the federal, provincial and municipal governments, Waterfront Toronto has a 25-year mandate to transform some 800 hectares of brownfield lands on the city’s lakefront into “beautiful, sustainable mixed-use communities and dynamic public spaces.” Comprised of experts in the fields of architecture, landscape design, engineering and planning, its Design Review Panel is responsible for establishing design standards across the waterfront and with helping Toronto achieve recognition as a centre of creativity and design.

“The Panel strives to add value to every project by providing expert advice that is professional, fair and constructive,” Waterfront Toronto says. “Its role is to promote design excellence, improve environmental performance, and ensure a cohesive approach to waterfront revitalization.” 

Petricone replaces the late George Baird on the advisory body. The professor emeritus and former dean of the Faculty passed away in October.

She also joins two other members of the Daniels Faculty—Professor Brigitte Shim and Associate Professor Fadi Masoud—already on the panel.

A founding principal with Ralph Giannone of Giannone Petricone Architects (GPA) in Toronto, Petricone teaches design and theory at all levels of the Faculty’s architecture programs and was recently awarded a LEAF Impact Grant by the Vice Provost for Innovation in Undergraduate Teaching.

The LEAF grant was awarded to assist in the development of a unique design research internship program (known as DRIP) for graduating Architectural Studies students. Centred around tectonics, craft and detail, Petricone’s work and research seek diversity and durability from the specificity of projects to define an approach to city-building at every scale. 

Among the award-winning projects that Petricone has executed with GPA are the Daniels Waterfront City of the Arts in Toronto and the Trinity College Centre for Ethics, an interfaculty and interdisciplinary initiative at U of T. Other projects include the Block 22 affordable housing complex for the Regent Park Revitalization Project, the Herman Miller Canadian Design Centre and the Royal Hotel and Annex in Ontario’s Prince Edward County.