In recognition of National Indigenous History Month, join the Community for Belonging Reading Group on Thursday, June 5, for an afternoon honouring Indigenous histories and futures, with an opportunity to reflect on our contributions toward reconciliation. 

The event will feature a Storywalk exploring the history of Indigenous presence and contemporary activities across the University of Toronto’s St. George campus, combined with a discussion of the corresponding texts The Aesthetics of Repair: Indigenous Art and the Form of Reconciliation by Eugenia Kisin and Retreating to Re-Treat by The Collective Encounter. It offers a space to consider the campus’s history and how it reflects “Indigenous protocols for enacting justice between persons, things and territories.” 

Date: Thursday, June 5
Time: 2:00-4:00 p.m. 
Location: Eberhard Zeidler Library 
Register in advance.

Trina Moyan, Nehiyawak Nation, advisor and educator on the Daniels Faculty's First Peoples Leadership Advisory Group, will lead the Storywalk from the Daniels Building at 1 Spadina Crescent (the former Knox College), weaving participants through sites and time with stops including First Nations House, the Ziibing pavilion, Philosopher's Walk and more.

All Daniels Faculty community members are invited to participate and consider their own contributions toward reconciliation, encouraging thoughtful engagement with Indigenous histories and futures.

Limited copies of the books will be available for free on a first-come, first-served basis in the Eberhard Zeidler Library.

The Community for Belonging Reading Group is sponsored by U of T Affinity Partners, Manulife and TD Insurance. 

The second iteration of the Solar Biennale, a roving biannual that focuses on design’s engagement with the sun, kicked off last month in Switzerland. Among the projects on view in its central exhibition, called Soleil-s, are two by members of the Daniels Faculty.

Have a Nice Day, a synthetic solar canopy that’s animated by motion sensors (pictured above), was designed by Common Accounts, the Toronto- and Madrid-based studio co-led by Assistant Professor Miles Gertler with Igor Bragado. 

“The installation considers the sun as a cosmic battery whose rays can increasingly be replicated and directed toward myriad purposes,” explains Gertler, citing cellular rehabilitation, anti-aging and enhanced fertility among them.

Adds Bragado: “The project troubles the psycho-social associations with the sun in the age of climate change and channels them into sensible, energetic encounters in the space of the gallery.” 

The museum staging Soleil-s, Lausanne’s Musée de Design et d’Arts Appliqués (mudac), has acquired Have a Nice Day (the assembly of which is pictured below) for its permanent collection. The piece was fabricated in Portugal by ArtWorks.

The creation of the installation was supported by research assistants Marie-Ellen Houde-Hostland, Emilie Tamtik and Elizaveta Grishina. Houde-Hostland is currently a student in the Faculty’s Master of Architecture (MARC) program, while Tamtik graduated from the program in 2024.

According to Gertler, “the piece is part of a larger body of research from my studio that focuses on self-design’s capacity to manage the body’s relation to the planetary.” In addition, it “furthers research presented in the film program of Shaping Atmospheres,” an exhibition staged last fall in the Faculty’s Architecture + Design Gallery. 

Shaping Atmospheres was curated by Ala Roushan and Associate Professor Charles Stankievech, who also have work on view at mudac.

A Shroud Woven of Solar Threads, their film invoking ancient Persian history for an alternative way of engaging with the sun (a still is pictured below), asks probing questions about mankind’s apparent desire to control the environment, reflecting “our hubris or, worse, our inab­il­ity to conceive of a harmo­ni­ous coex­ist­ence with other living beings.”

“In seek­ing to master the sun,” the artists posit, “are we jeop­ard­izing subtle ecolo­gical balances that we barely under­stand?”

Through the ancient figure of Mithra, they suggest, the Persians “viewed celes­tial phenom­ena as forces to engage in dialogue, rather than manip­u­late. Thus, the film poses an essen­tial ques­tion: In the face of current climate crises, could human­ity not recon­nect with former, more sens­it­ive ways of under­stand­ing?”

Soleil-s, the show in which both Have a Nice Day and A Shroud Woven of Solar Threads appear, was curated by Scott Longfellow and Rafael Santianez. It runs at mudac until September 21. 

The Solar Bien­nale, which was launched in the Netherlands in 2022, will also take place on the EPFL campus in Lausanne, “with events, parties and activ­it­ies to explore the many facets of the sun, a univer­sal symbol and source of life.”

Project installation image: ©Bruno Lança—ArtWorks

Professor emeritus and former dean Larry Wayne Richards has penned a lengthy treatise on design’s digital futures in the April edition of Canadian Architect.

Entitled “What Now? Acceleration and Imagination in Digital Space,” the article in the magazine’s Insites section lays out Professor Richards’s views on “the convergence of artificial intelligence, virtual reality and robotics” in architecture, which he characterizes as “both a real danger and great opportunity” for the field.

“The digital realm and the extended realities of architecture are changing at breakneck speed,” he writes. “There is a sense of something radically different now—an accelerating cyber-avalanche, generating previously unimagined spatial complexity.”

In the piece, Professor Richards (pictured below) buttresses his analysis by weaving in interviews with three leading architects and educators: Meaghan Lloyd of Gehry Partners in Los Angeles, Douglas MacLeod of Athabasca University and Sandra Manninger of the School of Architecture and Design at the New York Institute of Technology.

In one instance, MacLeod tells Richards: “We need legislation to ensure equal access to emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence. A.I. is particularly important because, if unregulated, it will result in job losses across all disciplines, including architecture.”

“In the future,” he continues, “it will be possible for A.I. to produce a fully detailed and code-compliant building design without the need for an architect. We need to think carefully about how A.I. is deployed.”

To read Professor Richards’s article in full, click here.

Professor Richards was dean of the Daniels Faculty from 1997 to 2004. He continues to serve the Faculty as professor emeritus.

Evoking the disorientation of rapid technological change, Some Acronyms, a graphic by Richards and Julie Fish, accompanies Professor Larry Wayne Richards’s article on design's digital futures in the April 2025 issue of Canadian Architect.

The Daniels Faculty will be well represented at this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, running in the Italian city from May 10 to November 23.

In addition to lecturer and Applied Technologies Director Nicholas Hoban, who is on the creative team representing Canada at the 19th iteration of the event, a number of Faculty students and alumni are among the nearly two dozen recipients of Biennale Fellowships supported by Canada’s Council for the Arts.

The fellows, says the Council, which bestows the fellowships on architecture students and emerging arts practitioners from across the country, “will conduct independent research in Venice and serve as exhibition ambassadors at the Canada Pavilion, engaging with a global audience including architects, artists, designers, scholars and cultural leaders.”

“The Canada Council is delighted to support this year’s fellows as part of Canada’s long-standing engagement with the Venice Architecture Biennale,” Michelle Chawla, Director and CEO of the Canada Council for the Arts, said in a statement announcing 2025’s recipients.

“This is a diverse group of passionate, creative thinkers who will expand their independent research in an international context and enrich the Canada Pavilion. The fellows’ participation will deepen the conversation on how art and architecture meaningfully impact and strengthen society, in Canada and all over the world.”

Among the recipients associated with Daniels and U of T are:

Renée Powell-Hines
Master of Architecture student Powell-Hines is an artist and aspiring practitioner who views the field of architecture and design through the lens of equity, ethnography and sustainability. Her passion for technology focuses her master’s degree coursework on digital fabrication and robotics, with the goal of making contemporary fabrication methods more sustainable and accessible in the hopes of integrating this optimized making method into affordable housing.

Tanis Worme
Worme is a non-binary/gender fluid Plains Cree (nēhiyaw) student pursuing their MVS in Curatorial Studies degree at Daniels. While their education in architecture is rooted in Ontario, their design sensibilities are grounded in their lived experiences as an urban Indigenous person from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Their growing body of studio work considers notions of memory through blood and storytelling. Their design ethos builds on these themes, drawing from intellectual traditions to deconstruct inaccessible architecture and offer alternative narratives of compassionate spatial interventions.

Lane Johnson
MARC graduate Johnson is an architectural designer who works at the intersection of design, research and practice. His thesis at Daniels focused on bio-climatic architecture in the Caribbean. Johnson has worked on projects in the Caribbean, Canada and the United States.

Darian Razdar
Razdar is a writer, artist and independent scholar who acquired his Master of Science in Urban Planning at U of T. Razdar’s practice is embodied, ecological, collaborative and research-intensive, often working with the mediums of poetry, image, textile and print. His publications include Edge Theory (Silverfish, 2025), Morning Poems (San Press, 2023) and COUNTER-MAP: A Poetics of Place (Reflex Urbanism, 2022). His practice is currently based in Toronto and Mexico City.

Adrian Yu
Yu received his Bachelor of Arts in Architectural Studies degree at Daniels. He is currently an architectural designer and photographer at Toronto-based Office In Search Of. Yu is also a visual artist interested in designing composite images as a way to generate critical narratives on architecture and the built environment. Memory, culture and emotion have become areas of interest in his work and motivate the use of interdisciplinary techniques spanning photography, illustration, photogrammetry and digital rendering to study their implications on our experience of space.

This year, a total of 21 fellows will be travelling to Venice from Canada. For the full list of fellowship recipients, click here.

Powell-Hines portrait by Kodi Ume-Onyido. Worme portrait by Carmelle Martinez. Johnson portrait by Yugo Takahashi. Razdar portrait by Chellise Michael. Yu portrait by María Chen Liang.

A retrospective exhibition showcasing work that came out of the ROB|ARCH conference held simultaneously at the Daniels Faculty and at TMU last year is currently on view at InterAccess Gallery in Toronto.

In May 2024, some of the world’s top robotics researchers gathered at both schools to examine key currents in robotic art and architecture. Led by Maria Yablonina, Paul Howard Harrison, Nicholas Hoban, Zachary Mollica and Brady Peters of the Faculty and by Jonathon Anderson of Toronto Metropolitan University, the ROB|ARCH 2024 conference included, among its programming, eight hands-on robotics workshops run over three days. 

Work from each of those workshops is on view in the InterAccess show, which runs until April 5. Entitled Beyond Optimization: ROB|ARCH Retrospective, the exhibition has been led by Anderson, Hoban and Mollica.

On Wednesday, April 2, a closing reception will take place between 7:00 and 9:00 p.m. at InterAccess, which is located at 32 Lisgar Street. All are welcome to attend.

A free public event showing participants how to draw paper illustrations from digital designs using the Universal Collaborative (UR) robot arm is also being held on the last day of the exhibition. 

Collaborative Robot Drawing will take place between 2:00 and 3:30 p.m. on Saturday, April 5.

Participants may register here.

Students, donors, faculty and staff came together at the Faculty Club recently for the yearly breakfast gathering celebrating student award recipients and those who support them.

This year’s Student Awards Breakfast took place in the main room of the Club on the morning of February 26. 

A total of 216 students from across the Faculty’s disciplines were supported through 41 awards in 2024/25. Many were in attendance at the breakfast last month.

“In hosting this event today, we are very pleased to be bringing together our faculty, our many generous donors and our talented award recipients, the latter having distinguished themselves academically and as student leaders,” said Acting Dean Robert Levit, who introduced the proceedings.

“At the University of Toronto,” he continued, “awards have been a part of academic life for nearly 200 years, contributing immeasurably to U of T’s achievements and to its global reach. Today, as the funding of post-secondary institutions by government continues to decline, the support by donors of endowed scholarships, awards, prizes and bursaries at universities is crucial.”

Among the new awards singled out by Dean Levit (pictured below) was the Nelda Rodger Indigenous Student Award in Architecture and Design, a renewable award that provides financial support to full-time Canadian students of First Nations, Inuit and Métis heritage in the Faculty’s Architectural Studies program.

This award, he noted, is the first of its kind devoted to the study of architecture at U of T. 

Matthew Arnott, a third-year Master of Landscape Architecture student, was one of two award winners to address the breakfast gathering. The recipient of this year’s Claude Cormier Award in Landscape Architecture, he expressed how much the award, which was established by the acclaimed landscape architect and alumnus before he passed away in 2023, meant to him personally.

“Claude, being queer, Canadian and unapologetic in his design approach, has long served as a source of personal inspiration, blazing a trail for so many young designers like myself that previously did not exist,” Arnott said.

“To Claude and the folks at CCxA [Cormier’s Montreal-based practice], I’d like to express great thanks for establishing an award that makes graduate education so much more accessible and, more broadly, for their celebration of creativity, whimsy and humour in their approach to design.”

Olivia Carson, a student in the Bachelor of Arts in Architectural Studies program, also addressed the breakfast. She is a recipient of a John and Myrna Daniels Foundation Opportunity Award.

“I have been fortunate to have my family, peers and professors as my greatest supporters and inspirations,” Carson said. “But even with that support, there are moments when external recognition is needed—a reminder that what we are doing [as students] matters.”

“These awards,” she continued, “do just that; they nurture curiosity, fuel ambition and enable students to embrace learning as more than just an academic pursuit, but as a lifelong endeavour. Their support reminds us that education is not just about meeting requirements but [also] about exploration, creativity and growth. I would like to express my gratitude to the John and Myrna Daniels Foundation for the award I have been granted and for their generous contributions to the Daniels Faculty.”

In concluding the event, Dean Levit thanked both Carson and Arnott for sharing their experiences.

“You have painted a touching picture of the importance of recognition by others,” he said, “and of the impact of the kind of financial support shared by all of the award recipients who have joined us this morning.”

As of this year, the Daniels Faculty administers more than 125 donor-supported funds, a large proportion of which are devoted to student aid and recognition.

All photos by Richard Ashman

Associate Professor Aziza Chaouni was the subject of a recent BBC Outlook podcast episode that focused on her upbringing in Fez, Morocco and on her return years later as a recently trained architect on an epic journey across the Sahara Desert.

Chaouni was the first Moroccan to study architecture at Harvard University, where her thesis advisor and mentor, Hashim Sarkis, encouraged her to pursue a project close to home—one inspired by social responsibility to a community versus a starchitect’s vision for a monumental building. 

In the end, Chaouni set out to restore the heavily polluted river that runs through Fez's ancient medina—and found her true calling in the process.

Listen to the episode.

The graduate seminar Land Practices/Prácticas de la tierra (ARC3313) taught by Rafico Ruiz (Canadian Centre for Architecture) seeks to situate a range of ‘land practices’ to document how the land holds memories, marks and modes of orientation across subject positions that include humans, but also exceed our capacity to articulate relationships to land. 

Designers, artists and researchers from Indigenous, Afro-Colombian and other communities in Colombia will contribute to the seminar discussions.

Daniels students, faculty and staff are invited to tune in virtually on Mondays from 6-7:30 p.m.

February 10
Josefina Klinger Zúñiga with Pedro Aparicio-Llorente

Colombian environmentalist and community activist Josefina Klinger Zúñiga and Pedro Aparicio-Llorente, architect and founding principal of APLO, will discuss:

• Afro-Colombian land rights and knowledges
• Environmental activism and education in Nuqui, Chocó
• Pacific coast as Afro-Colombian homelands
• Building youth-based environmental knowledges  

Join online.

March 10
Gilma Mosquera with Pedro Aparicio-Llorente

Gilma Mosquera is an architect, teacher and researcher with a wide trajectory on the habitat of the Colombian Pacific and Afro-Colombian ways of creating domestic and urban spaces.   

Topics covered 

• Afro-Colombian-defined architecture on the Pacific Coast
• Community-based methods
• Afro-Colombian spatial knowledges
• Cultural memory and design 

Join online.

March 17
José de la Cruz with Pedro Aparicio-Llorente 

José de la Cruz is a community leader in Bojayá, Colombia. 

Topics covered 

• Bojayá as a site of violence and memory work
• Afro-Colombian commemoration and activism
• Land as a place of healing and repair
• Afro-Colombian land reparations  

Join online.

Images: 1) Mangrove, Jurubira. Courtesy of Pedro Aparicio 2) Payao, engraved drawing. Courtesy of Pedro Aparicio.

The Mass Timber Institute based at the Daniels Faculty is pleased to announce the publication of Historical Tall-Wood Toronto, an open-source digital document authored by Daniels alumnus Ross Beardsley Wood. 

Funded by the Institute, the Canadian Wood Council and Ontario WoodWorks, the publication features contributions by fellow alumnus Daniel Wong and a foreword by Professor Ted Kesik.

Historical Tall-Wood Toronto (the cover of which is pictured below) is an evidentiary database of late 19th and early 20th century vernacular brick and beam buildings that were built using the fire restrictive specifications and construction technology of Heavy Timber Mill-Construction (mill-construction) in Toronto. 

The research in the publication illustrates the urban trajectories of 42 select examples of mill-construction and analyzes patterns in their development to create a morphological index of this set of buildings.

The publication’s index provides a record of architectural, urban development and sociocultural information that defines this distinct urban-vernacular building typology.

To download the document, click here. For more information on the Mass Timber Institute, including other current projects, click here.

Collage in banner and on homepage by Ross Beardsley Wood

The next gathering of the Community for Belonging Reading Group will examine Scarcity: Exploring an Abundance of Creative Possibilities for Social Challenges inspired by the books—Field Notes on Scarcity, edited by Tosin Oshinowo and Julie Cirelli, and Scarcity: A History from the Origins of Capitalism to the Climate Crisis, by Frederick Albritton Jonsson and Carl Wennerlind. 

All Daniels Faculty community members are invited to participate in an abundance of conversation about innovative, inspiring and ingenious strategies to address climate change and economics.  

Date: Friday, February 7 
Time: 12:30-2:00 p.m. 
Location: Eberhard Zeidler Library 
Register in advance. 

Oshinowo, a Lagos-based Nigerian architect and the co-editor of Field Notes on Scarcity, will participate in the conversation following her public lecture at the Daniels Faculty titled “An Alternative Urbanism: The Culture of Self-organising Systems.” 

Published in conjunction with the 2023 Sharjah Architecture Triennial, Field Notes on Scarcity examines what scarcity looks like on the ground, and the challenges and opportunities it presents across architecture and design. Sixty scholars and practitioners from across the Global South—including Lesley Lokko, Yinka Shonibare, Formafantasma, Rahul Mehrotra, Olalekan Jeyifous, Abeer Seikaly, Ilze and Heinrich Wolff, Chitra Vishwanath, and Deema Assaf—contribute reflections, poems, visual essays, and dialogues exploring what scarcity represents, what it inspires, and what it reveals.  

The second text, Scarcity: A History from the Origins of Capitalism to the Climate Crisis, presents “a sweeping intellectual history of the concept of economic scarcity—its development across five hundred years of European thought and its decisive role in fostering the climate crisis.” 

Limited copies of the books will be available for free on a first-come, first-served basis in the Eberhard Zeidler Library beginning Thursday, January 16.  

The Community for Belonging Reading Group is sponsored by U of T Affinity Partners, Manulife and TD Insurance.