Being a magazine cover model is great, but Ja Architecture Studio, a practice co-founded by assistant professor Behnaz Assadi and Nima Javidi, has achieved something that is arguably even better: a model they created is on the cover of a magazine.

Anyone who picks up the December issue of Canadian Architect will see, on the front, a scale model of "Wardell," a home addition designed by Ja Architecture Studio. The reason for the prominent placement? The design was a winner of a Canadian Architect Award of Excellence.

The Canadian Architect Award of Excellence is given annually to Canadian projects that exemplify architectural design excellence. Ja Architecture was one of four 2020 winners.

Wardell is a front-facing addition to a semi-detached home in Toronto's Riverdale neighbourhood. In creating the design, Assadi, Javidi and their staff of current and former Daniels Faculty students — MArch student Kaveh Taherizadeh and recent graduates Kyle O’ Brien (MArch 2017) and Rosa Newman (MArch 2020) all made direct contributions — transformed one of the most prosaic types of housing in Toronto into something exceptional.

The design adds a curved brick face to the front of a home on a wedge-shaped lot. The new facade rises to a gable-like peak that resembles, but does not emulate, the rooflines of adjacent houses. The front wall is cantilevered over the home's entrance, which gives the whole assembly an appearance of lightness. Inside are 51 square metres of new living space. The interior includes a sunken first floor with a courtyard, a second-level living area, and a luxurious open-plan master suite with its own winter garden, balcony, and skylight.

The Wardell design is currently still in development. The structure is scheduled for completion in 2022.

“This is a little jewel in the middle of the city," Stephan Cavalier, one of the award's jurors, wrote in Canadian Architect. "The designers could have just added to the existing house, but they created a separate object with a versatile space between. I like the tension from the street façade, which respects the smaller scale of the added component. The sculptural shape is complemented by a very interesting tectonic approach that does something different with brick."

To find out more about Wardell and the other winners of this year's Canadian Architect Awards of Excellence, visit the Canadian Architect website.

Felipe Coral has had a year full of ups and downs. He graduated from the Daniels Faculty's undergraduate architecture program in spring 2020 and made a life-changing move to Melbourne, Australia — right before the city entered one of the world's longest and most stringent COVID-19 lockdowns. And then, at the end of that lockdown, he notched a major professional achievement: he won an international design competition.

Felipe's friend, recent University of Melbourne graduate Simeon Chua, noticed a call for submissions for "Reviving Mines: Shandong Park," a competition that asked entrants to design ways of rehabilitating a former mining site in China's Shandong province. The two young designers decided to work together on an entry. In November, their design, titled "Gallery of the Anthropocene," won first prize.

The competition was organized by Non Architecture. The jury included Jules Gallissian, an architect at Snøhetta, as well as several representatives from China's tourism and cultural development establishment. Felipe and Simeon will jointly receive an award of 7,000 euros.

Felipe Coral.

"This was an uncertain year for me, graduating and trying to prove I have talent," Felipe says. "So it was very rewarding to be given this prize."

Simeon is currently in Singapore, where he's working for WOHA Architects. With Felipe locked down in Melbourne, the pair had to coordinate their efforts online. They met twice a week on Zoom to strategize and compare notes and drawings. The entire design process took about three months.

Felipe and Simeon's design transforms a mine in Shandong into a place for relaxation and thought. The centrepiece of their of their proposal is an artificial river that flows down the staircase-like terraces left behind by years of extraction activity. Around the river, the two designers placed filtration dams, ponds, and water-filtering native plants. They also included a few "gallery" spaces — areas where visitors could pause to learn more about the history and consequences of landscape-altering industrial activity.

"For us, it came back to making industrial pasts of landscapes visible, instead of swiping it under the rug," Felipe says. "That's how I think landscape architecture can be used to create new futures that also educate."

A rendering of Felipe and Simon's design.

The artificial river would flow into a reservoir at the bottom of the mine, which would serve as a place for people to relax and reflect. In keeping with the Chinese setting, Felipe and Simeon styled their drawings after Chinese ink paintings.

To learn more about their design, and to find out about the competition's other finalists, visit the Non Architecture website.

On November 19, the Daniels Faculty is hosting Architecture in Dialogue, an online symposium to celebrate the 14th cycle of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture. But even once the symposium ends, it will still be possible to learn about the award's latest crop of honourees in an engaging way. That's because the Daniels Faculty has created a new Architecture in Dialogue website, to educate the public about the award and its impact on the design fields.

The Aga Khan Award for Architecture is given every three years by the Aga Khan Development Network. The recipients are projects in the fields of architecture, landscape, planning, and historic preservation that address the needs of societies with significant Muslim populations.

The Aga Khan Award was first given in 1980, but it has struggled to gain prominence in the western hemisphere. "Although this award has existed for decades, the winning projects are not well known to North Americans, particularly students of architecture, landscape, and urbanism, who could learn from their examples," says Daniels Faculty professor Brigitte Shim, who is a member of the award's steering committee. "Taken individually and seen together, these works provide remarkable precedents for tackling global challenges."

The Daniels Faculty's symposium, and the accompanying website, are intended to help bring the award's latest winners to the attention of Canadian and American architects, academics, and students.

The new website, designed by sessional lecturer Andrew Bako and Nikolas McGlashan (MArch 21), includes information about the award competition in general. It also contains a wealth of details on the winners of the award's 14th cycle, which concluded in 2019.

The 2019 winners include the Alioune Diop University Teaching and Research Unit, a Senegalese educational facility designed by the Spanish architecture firm IDOM. The building expertly references local architecture while incorporating modern sustainability features like passive cooling and wastewater filtration.

Another highlight among 2019's winners is the Palestinian Museum, designed by Heneghan Peng Architects, of Ireland. The structure, located in the West Bank town of Birzeit, takes inspiration from the rough-hewn agricultural terraces that surround it.

For more information on those and other winners of the 14th cycle of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, visit the Architecture in Dialogue website.

Take me to the Architecture in Dialogue website

Web design by Andrew Bako and Nikolas McGlashan, with thanks to Jeanie Lim (Shim-Sutcliffe Architects) and the Daniels Faculty exhibition committee.

Anyone searching for King William Street, a major dining and entertainment strip in Hamilton, Ontario, will soon have a new landmark to navigate by. Make Studio — a design-build practice led by sessional lecturer Dina Sarhane, Daniels alumnus Mani Mani (MArch 2010), and Tom Svilans, a designer and researcher at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen — has won a competition to build a tall, functional piece of public art at the street's eastern terminus.

Make Studio was announced as the winner of Hamilton's King William Street Beacon and Gate Public Art Project competition on October 16. The studio's winning design, titled "Wood Gate," consists of a series of custom wood glulam arms, arranged to resemble a tall tree that has been splintered, as if by lightning. ("Glulam" is short for glued laminated timber, a durable engineered wood product.) The design is intended to complement the surrounding urban streetscape while symbolizing Hamilton's transition from a manufacturing town to an arts and hospitality hub.

The eight-metre-tall structure satisfies the "beacon" part of the city's design brief, and it also acts as concealment for a utilitarian element: an internal pulley system allows one of the glulam arms to be lowered to street level, so it can serve as a barricade to vehicle traffic during pedestrian-focused public events. (That's the "gate.")

Make Studio's proposal was one of six to make the city's shortlist. The competition jury, in its public report, praised Wood Gate for the way its design "creates a welcome connection to nature, speaks to evolution and growth and brings a unique warmth to the street."

Wood Gate is scheduled to be installed during summer 2021. "We are thrilled that municipalities are welcoming the use of wood in our public spaces," Sarhane says. "We are advocates for the use of wood in the public realm because we see the material choice as sustainable, local and inviting. It is a humble and tactile material that is readily available in our country. With advances in digital fabrication, it can be transformed into infinite possibilities."

The Wood Gate design includes a number of innovative touches, starting with the wood itself. Make Studio will be using yellow cedar to create a custom, free-form glulam material designed to resist weather and wear. Recessed within the glulam arms will be strips of high-intensity LED lights. The lights will serve a dual purpose: they'll illuminate the beacon with white light and also serve as a warning system, by flashing red when the barricade is being lowered.

The design also includes a public bench, which will be installed on the other side of King William Street, opposite the beacon. The bench will double as a locking mechanism for the barricade, and will also conceal a storage area for the barricade's pulley handle and "road closure" sign.

Designing and building public works projects out of engineered wood is a specialty of Make Studio, which was founded by Sarhane and Mani in 2016. (Sarhane is also the founder of DS Studio, a separate architecture and urban design practice.) The studio's other recent projects include "Turtle Tower," a beacon-like wooden public sculpture that resembles an elongated turtle shell, now under construction in Kelowna, British Columbia. And Make is currently at work on developing a system of wooden playground equipment for public use.

Louisa Kennett, a third-year student in the Daniels Faculty's Master of Landscape Architecture program, has been named the 2020 recipient of the Landscape Architecture Canada Foundation University of Toronto Scholarship, a $1,000 award that recognizes students who exemplify landscape architecture scholarship.

The award was endowed in 2017, in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Ontario Association of Landscape Architects. Candidates are selected by Daniels Faculty instructors and approved the LACF.

In a letter announcing the award, the LACF praised Louisa for her "excellence in communication and demonstrated strength in leadership, character, and participation."

For Louisa, receiving the LACF scholarship was a pleasant surprise. "I'm very grateful for the support of the MLA faculty," she says. "This award really encourages me to continue developing my skills and knowledge in this exciting field."

Before coming to the Daniels Faculty, Louisa graduated from Queen's University with a Bachelor of Science in biology. She had no previous background in design. "Landscape architecture excited me because it's able to address both social and environmental issues," she says. "One of the great things about this field is that it draws people from so many different backgrounds."

After overcoming some early difficulties with acclimating to design software and design culture, Louisa began to distinguish herself in the MLA program. For the past year, she has worked as a research assistant to assistant professor Fadi Masoud, director of the Centre for Landscape Research. Her work at the CLR has focused on developing revitalization strategies for Toronto's suburban green spaces.

"Louisa is a stellar student who demonstrates extraordinary capacity for design as well as history and theory," says Liat Margolis, director of the Daniels Faculty's Master of Landscape Architecture program. "I congratulate her on this well-deserved national recognition."

A rendering from moveTO.

Her recent coursework includes "moveTO," an imaginative design for an extension of the West Toronto Railpath. The project, which Kennett co-created with fellow student Allison Smith, employs a long, continuous tube of steel called "the spine," which twists into various useful shapes — like benches and basketball hoops — as it traverses the Railpath corridor.

For more information on the LACF University of Toronto scholarship, visit the LACF website.

David Martell, a professor emeritus in the forestry program at the Daniels Faculty, has been named the recipient of the 2020 Ember Award for Excellence in Wildland Fire Science, a prize given by the International Association of Wildland Fire to scientists who have demonstrated sustained excellence in wildland fire research.

In its public notice about the award, the IAWF noted Martell's 45-year career as a wildland fire researcher — especially his efforts to conduct operational research on forest fire suppression and apply that research to the creation of simulation models. The Ontario government used the results of Martell's research to determine how to manage its air tanker fleet, and his work enabled the creation of new techniques for weighing the costs and benefits of different fire suppression systems.

"Dr. Martell has had a strong influence on the development of fire leaders and managers across Canada because he dedicated time to understanding their operational point of view, integrating academic and operational perspectives, and absorbing the real application of fire management," the IAWF writes.

Martell is the co-director (with Mike Wotton) of the Daniels Faculty's Fire Management Systems Laboratory, where he conducts research on fire in boreal forest ecosystems.

"I'm very honoured to be the 2020 recipient of the Ember award," Martell says. "Although I am the recipient, this award recognizes research that I carried out in collaboration with my graduate students, research assistants, other researchers, and forest fire management personnel of the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry (OMNRF). I'm very grateful for their contributions, and for the financial support I've received from the OMNRF, as well as the University of Toronto and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada."

The annual Arbor Awards are the University of Toronto's highest honours, given to alumni or friends who have performed extraordinary volunteer service at the university. The awards were established in 1989, and have since been received by about 2,400 people, out of more than 600,000 U of T alumni worldwide. This year's recipients include four people who were nominated specifically for their service to the Daniels Faculty.

The Daniels Faculty's honourees are:

Barry Sampson

Barry Sampson (BArch 1972) is a longtime professor (now professor emeritus) at the Daniels Faculty, and a principal at Baird Sampson Neuert Architects. As a career educator, he has inspired and mentored successive generations of students in the technically demanding field of whole-building design. He was chosen for an Arbor Award as a result of his many extracurricular contributions to life at the Faculty — particularly his service as an advisor to the dean during construction of the Daniels Building. "This is a very much appreciated and unanticipated honour," Sampson wrote in an email. "It has been particularly satisfying for me to have had many opportunities over the years to support the work of the Faculty and, ultimately, assist in creating a fitting new home for it at a prominent location within the University of Toronto and city."

Jane Welsh

Jane Welsh (MScPl 2000) is a project manager at Toronto City Planning and also president of the Ontario Association of Landscape Architects governing council. Her Arbor Award recognizes her efforts to engage the OALA's membership in support of the Michael Hough/OALA Visiting Critic in Landscape Architecture, an endowed position that continually enriches the Daniels Faculty's landscape architecture program. Welsh has also personally mentored several Master of Landscape Architecture students and has been a frequent participant in the Faculty's student-professional networking events. "I think it's so important to foster emerging practitioners in landscape architecture," she says. "It's a very important profession — especially in the world we're in now."

Carl Blanchaer

Blanchaer has played a pivotal role in city-building, both as a principal at WZMH Architects (a role from which he is now retired) and as a member of Toronto's Design Review Panel, which helps shape the municipal government's response to high-stakes development proposals. Carl also serves on the University of Toronto's Design Review Committee, where he has volunteered his expert judgment on countless campus design projects, including the St. George Campus Secondary Plan. On top of that, he has, on many occasions from 2016 to the present, generously volunteered his time as a guest critic during the Daniels Faculty's design reviews, making him a crucial bridge to the design professions and development community. "I feel like I've been very fortunate with the opportunities that I've had in my professional career, and volunteering at the university was an opportunity to give back to the community in a way where I could offer some experience and expertise," Blanchaer says. "I was really taken aback by the award, but obviously I was incredibly pleased. I never expected any recognition."

Heather Dubbeldam

Heather Dubbeldam is the principal of Dubbeldam Architecture + Design and a past chair of the Toronto Association of Architects. Heather is known within the profession as an advocate for racial and gender equity — a cause she advances in her role as advisory vice chair of Building Equality in Architecture Toronto (BEAT). Her Arbor Award recognizes her role in helping establish the Daniels Faculty's student-professional networking event series, as well as her time spent as a guest critic during the Faculty's design reviews. "Engagement between students and professionals really helps to strengthen our profession," she says. "There's so much new thinking that's happening at the school, and that can really enrich the practice of architecture."

A pair of Daniels Faculty students have won an international award for a pavilion they designed, which uses coloured panes of glass to raise awareness of global air pollution.

Rick Schutte and Mina Onay, both architecture undergraduates, were named regional winners in the "daylight investigations" category of the 2020 International Velux Awards — a biannual competition run by Velux, a manufacturer of windows, skylights, and blinds. In addition to a cash prize, Rick and Mina have won the right to present their design at this year's World Architecture Festival, where they will compete with four other regional winners for the grand prize in their category.

"It's so amazing, and so we're so grateful," Rick says. "We've been on cloud nine for weeks."

Rick Schutte and Mina Onay.

Participants in the daylight investigations category of the 2020 International Velux Award competition were required to submit designs that investigated the physical properties of light, using new materials and technologies.

Rick and Mina realized that they would need to take an unconventional approach in order to make their project stand out from hundreds of other entries. Both of them are minoring in visual studies, and it occurred to them that a visual arts perspective could be precisely the thing to give them an edge. The competition's rules required them to pick a faculty advisor, so they chose J.P. King, a sessional lecturer in the Daniels Faculty's visual studies program. J.P. is a working artist who specializes in printmaking.

"When Rick and Mina came to me, they didn't necessarily want architectural thinking to guide their project," J.P. says. "They were looking for someone who was more process oriented, who could guide them through the stages of thinking through a piece of public artwork."

The design process was complicated by the fact that the project team's members were located on different continents. Rick and J.P. were both in Toronto, but Mina had left the city for her home in Turkey in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and was unable to return. She and Rick ended up doing most of their collaborative design work on Miro, an online whiteboarding platform that has become popular with designers over the past few months.

Despite the distance, the pair were able to develop a sophisticated design that they titled "AQIP," or "Air Quality Index Pavilion." They developed the concept using parametric design methods.

The pavilion, which they envisioned being installed on a site on the Toronto Islands (this project, like most student competition entries, will not actually be built), is made almost entirely of four-inch-thick panes of glass that are precisely curved to create a maze-like environment that looks, from above, like the bloom of a flower. The striking structure straddles the line between architecture and public art, in the vein of large-scale sculptors like Richard Serra.

A chart, created by Rick and Mina, that shows the air quality indices of various cities around the world.

Under J.P.'s guidance, Rick and Mina researched the air quality index, a standard measurement of air pollution used in population centres around the world. They surveyed the air quality of several of the world's largest countries and took note of the cities within those countries that had recorded the worst pollution.

Once they had compiled a table of air quality index scores from around the world, they set about finding a way to represent the data within the built form of their pavilion. They researched the visual effect of particulate matter in the atmosphere and realized that excessive pollution typically causes the sky to take on an orange tint — a fact now familiar to anyone who has been following news of the California wildfires.

Rick and Mina decided that each glass panel in their pavilion would represent a different global city. Each of the panels would be tinted orange in proportion with the air quality of its corresponding city: the worse the air quality, the deeper the orange hue.

Top: A rendering of the view from inside the pavilion. Bottom: A view of the skylight at the pavilion's centre.

A visitor to the Air Quality Index Pavilion enters from the outer edge of the "flower," where the lightest-orange glass (representing the least polluted cities) is located. As the visitor progresses towards the centre of the pavilion, he or she encounters glass panes that are deeper orange, representing cities with poorer air quality. At the centre of the pavilion, in the middle of the whorl of glass, the orange is so intense that it's almost opaque. Bathed in orange light, the visitor has a visceral experience of the effect of air pollution on the earth's atmosphere.

At the very centre of the pavilion, the glass petals part, leaving a round, open portal through which a visitor can look up and see blue sky. "This element of the design was inspired by James Turrell's skylights," Rick says. "Visitors have the ability to look up and see the bright blue sky when they're covered with this orange light filtering through the glass. It's a hopeful moment at the centre of our installation."

The World Architecture Festival, where Rick and Mina will present their design and vie for the grand prize in their category, will take place in June 2021.

Sing Zixin Chen, who graduated from the Daniels Faculty's Master of Landscape Architecture program last semester and quickly landed a job at SvN Architects and Planners, now has something else to celebrate: not only has she been named a winner of an Honor Award in the Urban Design category of this year's American Society of Landscape Architects Student Awards, but an image of her work is on the cover of the September 2020 issue of the society's official publication, Landscape Architecture Magazine.

"I feel very honoured to have been selected, and I really appreciate that my work has been recognized by such a highly professional group of people," Chen says.

Her ASLA-award-winning project was her Daniels Faculty thesis, which she presented in winter 2020. The project proposes a number of carefully considered, low-tech design interventions for the eastern waterfront of Mumbai, the largest city in India.

Sing Zixin Chen.

Chen chose Mumbai because she had visited the city in 2017, prior to starting her MLA studies. "It was a design exchange program," she says. "I spent two weeks there. We studied the waterfront, spoke to residents to gather information about how the area was used, and collaborated with students from Mumbai."

When she began researching Mumbai for her thesis project, Chen noticed that the city's eastern waterfront had a variety of different groups of users, including the residents of a local fishing village, visitors to a nearby 17th-century British fort, birdwatchers attracted by the local flamingo population, and workers at a nearby salvage yard for boats. Her design, she realized, would need to take all these uses into consideration. Her aim was to preserve the site's cultural context and its people’s way of life by building on the waterfront's existing infrastructure in a sustainable, natural way.

Her final design proposal called for a three-phase rehabilitation of the shoreline, starting with the construction of a dike to control erosion. A treatment pond and waste collection area would remove pollutants from the water, setting the stage for phase two: the introduction of aquaculture systems, which would allow locals to grow their own algae, seaweed, kelp, and shellfish. Mangroves would flourish in the purified water, which would attract fish for locals to catch, restoring some of the area's traditional fishing economy.

Top: A section showing Chen's proposal for aquaculture along Mumbai's eastern waterfront. Bottom: Chen's site plan.

In the final phase of Chen's proposed redesign, locals would use salvaged plastics to create an archipelago of artificial floating islands, which could be used as platforms for agriculture, commerce, or community events.

Gathering waste materials for use in the creation of floating islands.

Chen's project was the only Daniels Faculty student project to be recognized by ASLA this year. "This is a very competitive award," says Chen's thesis advisor, associate professor Liat Margolis. "The fact that her drawing was used for the cover of a national professional magazine is an enormous accomplishment and a testament to Sing's brilliant work."

Top image: A drawing of the Mumbai waterfront, showing Chen's proposed design interventions.

Drew Adams (MArch 2011), at the age of 35, has already had a distinguished career in the nine years since he graduated from the Daniels Faculty. Now he has something else: the 2020 Emerging Architect Award, from the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada.

The award, formerly known as the "Young Architect Award," is given each year to a young architect who has demonstrated excellence in design, leadership, or service to the profession. Adams sees the win as a heartening vote of confidence in his career path, which has focused mostly on design for nonprofit clients. "What stands out to me is that it affirms a type of community-focused work that is too often under-recognized," Adams says. "More than ever, I'm optimistic about community-impact work and what we can still achieve together through collective action."

Adams is currently an associate at LGA Architectural Partners, where he has worked for the past seven years. He was the project architect for LGA's Evergreen Brick Works' Future Cities Centre, a former kiln building that now serves as a multifunctional event space. The project is known as one of Toronto's best and most prominent examples of adaptive reuse.

The Evergreen Brick Works' Future Cities Centre. Photograph by James Morely/A-Frame.

Adams also had a leading role in creating LGA's design for Eva's Phoenix, a transitional housing centre for homeless youth, located in downtown Toronto. The building's 10 townhouse-style units provide a supportive environment for young people who need a safe, temporary place to live, learn, and recover from trauma.

The RAIC jury noted Adams's frequent conference appearances and university guest lectures, as well the quality of his design work.

The jury writes: "Drew’s work displayed an impressive commitment to the benefits of material research, technical explorations of building systems, energy modelling, and daylight studies all in the service of designing and building a more inclusive living environment for those most in need in our communities."

Adams received the 2011 Irving Grossman Prize for his final thesis on innovative and sustainable housing design. Before entering the Daniels Faculty's Master of Architecture program, he graduated from the University of Waterloo, with a bachelor's degree in urban planning.