On November 15, the Daniels Faculty will mark Trans Awareness Week by holding space to honour and stand in solidarity with transgender people within the University of Toronto community and beyond. Trans Awareness Week is this year being observed between November 14 and 18. The Faculty’s gathering, at 5:30 p.m. in Room 131 of the Daniels Building (the Staff and Faculty Lounge), will acknowledge the hostility and barriers that trans people face globally, within Canada, at U of T and within the Daniels Faculty community.

Five days later — Sunday, November 20 — is Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR), which honours the memory of transgender people whose lives have been lost to acts of anti-trans violence. Trans Day of Remembrance was started in 1999 by transgender advocate Gwendolyn Ann Smith to honour the memory of Rita Hester, an African American trans woman who was killed in her Boston-area home in 1998. 

U of T recognizes both Trans Day of Remembrance and Resilience and Trans Awareness Week every November. A calendar of events taking place across the University from the 14th to the 18th is available here.

Recent data from Statistics Canada and Trans Pulse Canada reveal that the discrimination faced by transgender Canadians is widespread and multifaceted. The repercussions, as outlined in the statistics below, can be difficult to process and may be upsetting to some. They are shared here to foster awareness, solidarity and action.

As a result of anti-trans discrimination:

• 43% of transgender Canadians have attempted suicide
• 58% face suicidal ideation
• 45% have unmet or uncovered healthcare needs
• 58% were unable to receive academic transcripts with their correct name and sex
• 18% have been turned down for jobs because they are trans
• 32% suspect being transgender resulted in job loss
• 97% reported avoiding one or more public spaces because they are trans

On November 15, Leon Tsai (pictured above) will be at the Faculty gathering to lead attendees in reflection on trans awareness and remembrance. Tsai (she/they) is a Taiwanese trans-femme and settler-immigrant storyteller (un/re) learning in Tkaronto (Toronto).

The gathering will be an opportunity to raise transgender awareness, to hold space, to honour the lives lost and impacted by anti-trans violence, and to reflect on the challenges that trans people encounter in society on a daily basis. All are welcome to attend the event. Registration is not required.

It is with much sadness that the Daniels Faculty has learned of the death of Blanche Lemco van Ginkel, architect, urbanist and the first woman to hold the title of dean at the Faculty.

Born in England in 1923, van Ginkel grew up in Montreal and was educated at McGill University (where she received a professional Bachelor of Architecture degree in 1945) and at Harvard University (where she acquired her Master of City Planning degree in 1950).

After moving to Toronto in the late 1970s, she was appointed Dean of U of T’s School of Architecture in 1977. Three years later, the School reassumed administration of the Department of Landscape Architecture to become the Faculty of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. Van Ginkel served as dean of the reconstituted Faculty for two more years. After completing her five-year term as dean, she continued to teach at the Faculty until 1993, leading a number of graduate and undergraduate design studios. 

“Professor van Ginkel was among the first women leaders of architecture institutions in Canada and the U.S. in an era and a discipline largely dominated by men,” says Dean Juan Du, who assumed her position in 2021, becoming the Faculty’s second woman dean and the only full-time female faculty member at the rank of full Professor in Architecture.

“While we still have a far way to go as a discipline and profession, Blanche paved the way for many of us to follow. She contributed to the design cultures of Montreal and Toronto, and established pioneering initiatives here at the Faculty, such as the Study Abroad programs in Paris and Rome, the first of their kind in Canada. It was this kind of expansive, outward-looking perspective that helped shape the world-class school that we are.” 

Reflective of her cosmopolitan, well-travelled nature, van Ginkel’s route to Toronto and to the Faculty, where an endowed scholarship — the Professor Blanche Lemco van Ginkel Admission Scholarship — currently exists, was a circuitous one. 

Between and after acquiring her degrees, van Ginkel gained professional experience in Regina (1946), with William Crabtree in London (1947), under Le Corbusier in Paris (1948) and for Mayerovitch and Bernstein in Montreal (1950-51). After living in Philadelphia from 1951 to 1957, she returned to Montreal, where she formed a partnership, van Ginkel Associates, with her husband, H.P.D. (Sandy) van Ginkel, whom she married in 1956. She had been registered as an architect in Quebec since 1952.

It was in Montreal and with Sandy van Ginkel that she achieved what are perhaps her greatest professional accomplishments outside of academia: saving two of the city’s urban jewels — Old Montreal and Mount Royal Park — from potentially ruinous development. In the case of the former, a proposed elevated expressway threatened to desecrate the now-beloved historic district, so van Ginkel reportedly went up in a helicopter with her camera to document it from above, bringing home to many through the resulting pictures just how extensive and precious Old Montreal is.

“If  Blanche Lemco van Ginkel had never lived in Montreal,” McGill News wrote last year, when she was awarded the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada’s Gold Medal, “the city would look very different than it does today — and not in a good way.”

Over the years, van Ginkel was widely recognized for both her academic achievements and her professional firsts, which included, in addition to serving as the Faculty’s first female dean, being one of the first women to teach at the University of Pennsylvania, the first woman to become a Fellow of the RAIC, and the first woman (and first Canadian) to sit as president of the 110-year-old Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture.

In 2000, she was made a member of the Order of Canada, and in 2018 van Ginkel was one of the four subjects of filmmaker Joseph Hillel’s  City Dreamers, a documentary about the trailblazing female architects who had outsized roles in shaping North America’s urbanscapes over the past 70 years (the film’s three other subjects are Phyllis Lambert, Cornelia Hahn Oberlander and Denise Scott Brown). 

“Blanche was a first in so many ways, as a practitioner and in education,” says Laura Miller, Associate Professor of Architecture at the Daniels Faculty and one of the organizers of a 2020 event celebrating van Ginkel’s RAIC Gold Medal.

“In working on the event, I learned that, for women architecture students during the time she was Dean, she was the first female teacher and architect they had ever encountered. Blanche was therefore a visible and relatable role model that they could emulate, a source of real inspiration. That she did this with grace and elegance only added to her aura among not only her women students, but many others who were part of that time period at the Faculty.”

The event that Professor Miller helped organize in 2020 was called For Her Record, a reference to the 1986 exhibition For the Record, which “Blanche was instrumental” in creating.

“The exhibition identified women graduates of the Faculty from the very first one in 1920 through the 1960s, showing the trajectory of their careers, and documenting their contributions to the built environment through their practices,” Professor Miller recalls. “Such an accounting had not happened before, and it painted a picture of the experiences of women architects in Canada — as much a kind of social history as a design documentation.”

Van Ginkel, who died in Toronto on October 20, is survived by her two children with Sandy van Ginkel, Brenda and Marc. (Sandy van Ginkel died in 2009.) At her request, no funeral or public service will be held, but donations to the Professor Blanche Lemco van Ginkel Admission Scholarship are welcomed. (To make a donation, click here. For more information, contact Stacey Charles at 416-978-4340 or stacey.charles@daniels.utoronto.ca.)

A celebration of Blanche van Ginkel’s life will be held at the Daniels Faculty at a future date. 

Banner image: Former dean Blanche van Ginkel in a still from City Dreamers, Joseph Hillel’s 2018 film about pioneering female architects who had outsized impact on North American urban centres throughout much of the 20th Century. In 1960, van Ginkel took to the sky over Montreal in a helicopter (second image) to document why Old Montreal should be kept intact.

The fiery red leaves of the giant sugar maple on the southeast edge of Spadina Circle have prompted many a passerby to stop and gawk over the last several weeks. Even amid other colourful specimens, the blazing scarlet display stands out, although it’s hardly an outlier in the autumn splendour department either on campus or across Toronto right now.

Are this year’s fall hues unusually spectacular? Yes, says Sean Thomas, professor of forestry at the Daniels Faculty and a longtime associate editor at the journal Tree Physiology. This season, he notes, a perfect storm of climatic conditions have coalesced to produce especially vibrant leaf tones. He broke down the whys and hows.

Why do leaves change colour? What’s the science behind it?

There is a common misconception that autumnal leaf-colour change is due entirely to degradation of chlorophyll that “unmasks” other pigments that are already there. This is true basically with yellow colouration, which is mainly due to carotenoid pigments. However, red colours in fall foliage are due to newly produced anthocyanin pigments, which raises an intriguing functional biology question: What is the adaptive value in leaves producing new pigments just before the leaves are to be shed?

There are a couple of hypotheses, but the explanation that I think has received the most support is that anthocyanin pigments are playing a role as a “sunscreen” that better enables trees to recover nutrients from senescing leaves. It turns out that the breakdown products of chlorophyll are highly reactive, particularly under high UV exposure and low temperatures. Without the protection offered by anthocyanins, free radicals are generated from the breakdown products of chlorophyll that disrupt the process of nutrient recovery. Some anthocyanins also are antioxidants and scavenge the free radicals, so there are likely two aspects to their protective function during leaf senescence.

This “nutrient recovery hypothesis” predicts that anthocyanin production should be greatest when temperatures are low (but still above freezing, since frost events kill leaves) and light levels are high. This pattern is widely supported. Demonstrating that anthocyanin production actually increases nutrient recovery itself is more difficult to demonstrate, but there is some evidence for this as well.

So the colours are more vivid this year? 

Compared to last year, yes. Consistent with the theory, last fall was a relatively warm one in the GTA, without near-frost events until well into November — and also relatively cloudy conditions. This year had the right combination [for brighter colour] of cold weather events, lack of drought or a hard frost, and relatively sunny conditions.

Why do people react so strongly to red tones, as we’ve seen with the single sugar maple on Spadina Circle?

I think the accepted psychological theory is that red provokes strong emotional reactions because it is a danger cue. But what happens when the entire landscape is red, or the colour is rendered on such a large scale? To speculate wildly outside of my area of expertise, a red forest landscape may initially provoke a kind of alarm reaction, to which viewers then acclimate, and this acclimation is pleasantly stimulating. Perhaps this is a bit like spicy food: “Hot” flavours are due to pain receptors, and the relaxation of the pain response releases endorphins.

Banner image by Zheren Zheng

After a months-long process of consultation and collaboration, the Daniels Faculty is excited to announce the members of its First Peoples Leadership Advisory Group, created in partnership with Indigenous stakeholders both within and outside the University to diversify the range of Indigenous knowledge at the Faculty and to increase the availability of the Advisors to students, faculty and staff. 
 
The new Advisors — Elder and Traditional Teacher Dorothy Peters, educator and advocate Amos Key Jr., and artist and community planner Trina Moyan — were brought together after an open call for members this past summer and a series of consultations with Indigenous members of the Faculty and University. 

The Advisors will provide regular and ongoing guidance to members of the Faculty, including its academic and administrative leadership teams, to facilitate a range of important goals, including greater incorporation of Indigenous knowledge into coursework and research activities, connecting students and faculty with Indigenous peoples and communities in productive and meaningful ways, and supporting the next generation of students through focused outreach and planning.   

Elder Peters, Key and Moyan will maintain regular office hours in Room 220 of the Daniels Building at 1 Spadina Crescent, providing both in-person and online advisory time for Indigenous students at U of T as well as all members of the Daniels Faculty.   

In addition to the on-site Advisory Group, acclaimed architect Douglas Cardinal, who served as the Faculty’s Frank O. Gehry Chair in 2020-2021, will join the Faculty as Decanal Advisor on Indigenous Knowledge. In this role, Dr. Cardinal will work closely with Dean Juan Du and the Faculty’s leadership team on the strategic development of Indigenous knowledge and research, its integration with the school’s curriculum, its dissemination through courses and public programs, and the ongoing recruitment of Indigenous faculty, students and staff. 

Dr. Cardinal’s appointment, along with those of the Advisory Group members, significantly enhances Indigenous presence and capacity at the Faculty, as well as increases its ability to answer the Calls to Action articulated by the University’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) Steering Committee.  

“I am very pleased by this appointment,” said Dr. Cardinal upon accepting the role of Decanal Advisor on Indigenous Knowledge. “Although I do not speak on behalf of all Indigenous people, I do look forward to contributing my perspective and to working with the Dean and the Faculty on enhancing the dissemination of Indigenous teachings.”  

Adds Dean Du: “We have made great strides in terms of promoting and integrating Indigenous knowledge over the past few years, but there is much more work to be done. Elder Peters, Amos, Trina and Douglas each brings a wealth of educational, professional and lived experience to our school, and I look forward to continued learnings from them. Under their guidance, our commitment as a Faculty to pursuing Truth and Reconciliation and to addressing the Calls to Action will only be strengthened in the years and decades to come.” 

Elder Dorothy Peters 

A Traditional Teacher and Community Nookmis, Elder Peters is a member of Jiima’aaganing (Seine River) First Nation. Throughout her career, she has worked in various consultative capacities with multiple Indigenous organizations in Toronto, including Aboriginal Legal Services and Anduhyaun Inc., and she has previously supported Indigenous students at the University of Toronto through First Nations House, where she served until recently as an Elder-in-Residence. A residential school survivor, Elder Peters is regularly called upon to share her stories, teachings and cultural expertise at events throughout the city.

Amos Key Jr. 

A member of the Mohawk Nation, Key is an educator, advocate and Traditional Faith Keeper of the Longhouse at Six Nations of the Grand River Territory. The long-time Director of First Nations Language at Woodland Cultural Centre, where he co-founded the Gaweni:yo Cayuga/Mohawk Immersion School System, Key is a leading figure in the ongoing language revitalization movement among First Nations people in Canada. He has also taught as an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Indigenous Studies, and was the inaugural Vice-Provost, Indigenous at Brock University in St. Catharines.

Trina Moyan 

Artist and activist Moyan is nehiyaw iskwew (Plains Cree) from the Frog Lake First Nation in Alberta. She began her career as a writer and producer for the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN) and co-produced and directed the National Aboriginal Achievement Awards (now Indspire) for CBC Television. Moyan is a co-founder of Toronto-based Bell & Bernard, a First Nations consulting firm dedicated to including the histories and current realities of Indigenous peoples within urban planning projects, and has spoken widely on Indigenous inclusion and empowerment. Moyan is also a muralist, a traditional dancer and a University of Toronto alumna.

Douglas Cardinal 

One of the world’s most prominent Indigenous architects, Dr. Cardinal is known for his lifelong commitment to sustainable design and for such landmark buildings as the Canadian Museum of History. Born in Calgary to a father of Blackfoot heritage and a German/Métis mother, he served as the Daniels Faculty’s Frank O. Gehry Chair in 2020-2021 and was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Laws degree by the University of Toronto in June 2022. In 2018, Dr. Cardinal led a team of Indigenous architects and designers who represented Canada at the Venice Architecture Biennale, and he continues to design residential, institutional and industrial buildings. His role as Decanal Advisor on Indigenous Knowledge at the Daniels Faculty continues his longtime advocacy for the dignity and advancement of Indigenous Peoples.

The Daniels Faculty’s Centre for Landscape Research, led by Assistant Professor Fadi Masoud, will host the first post-pandemic gathering of the Great Lakes Higher Education Consortium this week during a three-day invite-only conference dedicated to the health and resilience of the vast Great Lakes Basin.

From Thursday to Saturday (September 29 to October 1), more than 30 designers, policy experts, planners, engineers and ecologists from around the Great Lakes region will meet in Toronto for a workshop on the critical role that blue-green infrastructure will play in the future adaptation of the basin to climate change. The majority of discussions and panels will take place in the Daniels Building on Friday and Saturday. This workshop will be preceded by a tour on Thursday of important aquatic sites in the Greater Toronto Area, including the Lower Don Lands on downtown Toronto’s waterfront and the Jim Tovey Lakeview Conservation Area and Bayview Village Site in Mississauga.

“This workshop,” say conference co-organizers Masoud and James Wasley of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, “aims to chart a clear path for the practice of integrative blue-green infrastructure design in service of a more climate-ready and resilient Great Lakes Basin.”

Launched in 2020, the Great Lakes Higher Education Consortium was co-founded by the Council of the Great Lakes Region (CGLR), the University of Toronto and the University of Illinois System to address the most pressing socio-economic and environmental challenges facing the region by promoting regular and impactful collaborations among academics, industry and governments. In 2021, four other major universities joined the Consortium. It is currently being administered by the CGLR.

This week’s conference, entitled Reimagining Water and sponsored by the CGLR, will look at blue-green infrastructure design through the lenses of just about every relevant field, including architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, civil and environmental engineering and the related sciences and public policy arenas.

Among the specific topics to be covered during the workshop, which Dean Juan Du will kick off with welcoming remarks on Friday morning, include conservation governance, emerging obstacles to design and governance innovation, keeping up with the changing science, and projective future models and partners.

“Synthesizing these diverse fields of knowledge,” say Masoud and Wasley, “is the daily work of design professionals in this field. Our goal is to better connect academic research to the cutting edge of the profession.”

For more information on the workshop and its mandate, contact Assistant Professor Masoud.

The Daniels Faculty community will gather at the south end of 1 Spadina Crescent on Friday to mark the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation (NDTR) and Orange Shirt Day.

The commemoration will take place from 12:15 to 1:00 p.m. on the Paul Oberman Belvedere, with events moving inside the Daniels Building in the event of inclement weather. 

It will include an opening prayer and address by Elder Dorothy Peters, an Ojibwe Traditional Teacher and Community Nookmis who works with multiple Indigenous organizations in Toronto.

She will be followed by Amos Key Jr., a member of the Mohawk Nation, a Traditional Faith Keeper of the Seneca Longhouse, and a leading figure in the ongoing language revitalization movement among First Nations people in Ontario and Canada.

Key will provide a traditional song and words, and there will be additional sharing and remarks from other Daniels Faculty members. Commemorative activities have also been organized by students, faculty and staff throughout the day at the Faculty. 

In the spirit of reconciliation and healing, all community members are encouraged to wear orange shirts, now-iconic symbols inspired by the story of residential school survivor Phyllis Webstad of Stswecem’c Xgat’tem First Nation.  

Those who are unable to attend the Faculty’s commemoration at the Daniels Building may also mark the day in other ways. From 10:00 to 11:00 a.m. on Friday, the University of Toronto’s Orange Shirt Day and National Day for Truth and Reconciliation Commemoration will take place in the Great Hall at Hart House; this event will also be livestreamed on YouTube.   

This week, moreover, all U of T community members can show their solidarity virtually by using the Orange Shirt Day icon as their profile photo and the virtual backdrop during Teams or Zoom calls. The Orange Shirt Day avatar can be downloaded here and the background here. 

And on October 3, Indigenous students, staff and faculty are invited to take part in the University of Toronto’s Indigenous Community Gathering at Hart House Farm. This will be an opportunity to share space with one another and to prioritize community care following Orange Shirt Day. Interested parties can pre-register here. 

The Daniels Faculty’s buildings have been full of much activity of late. For many of you returning to our classrooms, labs and offices this month, it’ll be the first time in a long while that we are all fully back in person for the start of a new school year. For others, this month will mark your first-ever time at the Faculty or even at the University of Toronto. Whichever the case, I want to welcome everyone to the 2022-2023 academic year. I am thrilled that we are all together again. The coming year promises to be an exceptional one in many ways.
 
Over the past two years, we have all had to rethink how we learn and come together as a community. As a result, the Faculty has garnered many valuable lessons that we hope will serve us all better as we embark on this new term. For our students, our aim is to restore as great a degree of normalcy and access as possible, so that you can enjoy the full benefits of your experience here in safe and vibrant learning spaces.  
 
These benefits include not only a world-class education at one of the most interdisciplinary design schools on the continent, but also a full roster of inspiring extracurricular offerings. This fall’s public programming series includes lectures, panel discussions and performances by some of the leading designers, artists and thinkers in their fields; it’ll be kicked off on September 15 with the annual Gehry Chair Lecture, to be delivered by Dhaka-based architect Marina Tabassum, the 2022-2023 Frank Gehry International Visiting Chair in Architectural Design. Look out, too, for two major exhibitions in the Architecture and Design Gallery at 1 Spadina Crescent this year, as well as a multitude of activities planned around the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, Black Heritage Month, and other noteworthy dates.
 
One of the most exciting and important developments at the Faculty this semester is the presence of our newly assembled First Peoples Leadership Advisory Group, created after an open public call this summer. Part of our ongoing commitment to enhancing Indigenous knowledge and capacity at our school, the multi-person Group will be working closely with the Faculty leadership team and with all members of our community. More information on the Advisory Group, as well as collaborative Faculty learning and awareness facilitated by the Office of Indigenous Initiatives, will be shared very soon.

As these initiatives suggest, equity, diversity and inclusion are among our greatest priorities at the Faculty, which is why I’m also happy to welcome, among the impressive new additions to our academic and administrative team, our inaugural Assistant Dean, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion. Dr. Jewel Amoah, who joined us in July, has been tasked with working with all of us to facilitate the kind of institutional changes required to foster equal access and representation across the Faculty. She brings a wealth of international advocacy and academic experience to the role, and I look forward to working closely with her as we strive toward this important goal.
 
As our Advisory Group and our Assistant Dean EDI conduct their work, they will seek to build as many relationships with faculty, students and other stakeholders as they can, meaning that their doors will always be open. Mine, too. Part of the joy of working at the Daniels Faculty is how uniquely connected we all are in our distinct yet intertwined pursuits. I very much look forward to strengthening those connections even more this term, and to a great year ahead!
 
Juan Du (she/her)
Dean and Professor
John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design

Photos by Emma Hwang

The Daniels Faculty’s Jane Wolff, Professor in Landscape Architecture, has been awarded this year’s Margolese National Design for Living Prize.

Awarded annually by the University of British Columbia’s School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, the honour recognizes a Canadian designer whose work and advocacy in the built environment addresses the pressing human and environmental challenges of our time, improving lives and communities in the process.

In its citation, the 2022 jury noted how Wolff’s “work on landscape literacy has had a significant impact on our collective understanding of critical environmental issues. Her human-centric tools of writing, hand drawing and public engagement reach a wide audience without compromising the complexity of the subject matter.”

“I am thrilled and honoured to be recognized by an organization focused on design as a means of addressing urgent, complicated questions about the places we live and the way we live in them,” says Wolff.

“The prize makes it possible to begin working right now in even more public, more collaborative ways — and that’s a chance to bring more people into the conversation.”

For Wolff, the past 12 months have been a banner year professionally. In addition to the Margolese Prize win, her recent book BAY LEXICON was awarded a 2022 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize, established by the Foundation for Landscape Studies and now administered by the University of Virginia’s Center for Cultural Landscapes.

This past spring, moreover, her Toronto Landscape Observatory, an interactive installation co-curated with Susan Schwartzenberg, was a highlight of this year’s Toronto Biennial of Art.

On October 3, Wolff will officially accept her Margolese Prize at a presentation and panel discussion in Vancouver. The ceremony will be held at the Robert H. Lee Alumni Centre on the UBC campus.

The John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto is excited to present its Fall 2022 public program. Through a series of book talks, panel discussions, lectures and symposia, our aim is to foster meaningful dialogue on the important social, political and environmental challenges confronting our world today. Among the questions raised: How might we create new knowledge and leverage it as a tool for critical reflection and, ultimately, collective change?

Our programs — and the difficult questions that motivate them — address a range of topics that are central to what we do, including design and social justice, art and new media, urban development and housing, and ecology and landscape resilience.

All events are free and open to the public. Register in advance and check the calendar for up-to-date details at daniels.utoronto.ca/events. 

September 15, 6:30 p.m. ET
Gehry Chair Lecture: Marina Tabassum on Architecture of Transition
Featuring Marina Tabassum (2022-2023 Frank Gehry International Visiting Chair in Architectural Design, Daniels Faculty, University of Toronto)
Moderated by Juan Du (Daniels Faculty, University of Toronto)

September 27, 6:30 p.m. ET
Artist Talk
Featuring Montreal-based new-media artist and composer Erin Gee
Moderated by Mitchell Akiyama (Daniels Faculty, University of Toronto)

October 3, 12:30 p.m. ET
Afterall Vol. 53 Launch
Featuring Stan Douglas in conversation with Charles Stankievech (Daniels Faculty, University of Toronto)

October 5, 12:30 p.m. ET
Site Constructed: Alvar Aalto, Luis Barragan
Featuring Marc Treib (College of Environmental Design, University of California at Berkeley)
Moderated by Georges Farhat (Daniels Faculty, University of Toronto)

October 6, 6:30 p.m. ET
Serious Fun: The Landscapes of Claude Cormier
Featuring Claude Cormier (Claude Cormier + Associés, Montreal) with Susan Herrington (School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, University of British Columbia) and Marc Treib (College of Environmental Design, University of California at Berkeley)
Moderated by Elise Shelley (Daniels Faculty, University of Toronto)

October 20, 6:30 p.m. ET
Housing Multitudes: Reimagining the Landscapes of Suburbia
Exhibition Opening
Conceived and curated by Richard Sommer (Daniels Faculty, University of Toronto) and Michael Piper (Daniels Faculty, University of Toronto) in collaboration with Daniels Faculty colleagues, students and others

October 27, 6:30 p.m. ET
Hough Lecture: Dilip da Cunha on Ocean of Wetness: Where Design Begins
Featuring Dilip da Cunha (Michael Hough/OALA Visiting Critic in Landscape Architecture)
Moderated by Elise Shelley (Daniels Faculty, University of Toronto)
 
November 3, 6:30 p.m. ET
A Retrofitting Suburbia Agenda for Equity, Health and Resilience to Climate Change
Featuring June Williamson (Spitzer School of Architecture, The City College of New York) in association with the exhibition Housing Multitudes: Reimagining the Landscapes of Suburbia
 
November 8, 1:00 p.m. ET
Magnificent Modular  
Featuring Lina Lahiri (Sauerbruch Hutton, Berlin)
Moderated by Roberto Damiani (Daniels Faculty, University of Toronto)
 
November 10, 6:30 p.m. ET
Contemporary Indigenous Performance and Artist Discussion  
Featuring Sandra Laronde (Misko Kizhigoo Migizii Kwe) and Red Sky Performance
 
November 17, 6:30 p.m. ET
Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration
Featuring Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi (Architecture Department, Barnard College) and Rachel Lee (Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, TU Delft) with Juan Du (Daniels Faculty, University of Toronto), Alexandra Pereira-Edwards (Canadian Centre for Architecture), Armaghan Ziaee (California State University San Marcos), Meredith TenHoor (School of Architecture, Pratt Institute) and Pamela Karimi (Art Education, Art History and Media Studies, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth)

November 22, 12:30 p.m. ET
Resilient Urban Forests Require All Hands on Deck: Lessons from Ecology, Community Science and Working Across Disciplines
Featuring Carly Ziter (Biology Department, Concordia University)
Moderated by Sean Thomas (Daniels Faculty, University of Toronto)
 
November 29, 6:30 p.m. ET
The Art of Being of Service to Art
Featuring Cheryl Sim (Director and Curator, Phi Centre)
Moderated by Mitchell Akiyama (Daniels Faculty, University of Toronto) 
 

The Daniels Faculty is pleased to announce that Dhaka-based architect Marina Tabassum is the 2022-2023 Frank Gehry International Visiting Chair in Architectural Design. 

Since establishing her practice, MTA, in 2005, Tabassum has built a growing body of work acclaimed for its sustainability, ultra-locality and thoughtful material choices.  

In 2016, she was awarded the Aga Khan Award for Architecture for what is perhaps her best-known project to date: the Bait ur Rouf Jame Mosque in the Bangladeshi capital. Last year, she received the prestigious Soane Medal, which recognizes the work of architects, educators or critics who have furthered the public’s understanding of architecture. Tabassum has taught at architecture schools in Bangladesh, Europe and the United States, and has lectured around the world. 

“We are thrilled that Marina will be serving as the Daniels Faculty’s Gehry Chair this year,” says Dean Juan Du. “Her work uniquely addresses the social and ecological challenges of today through architectural design. With all of her projects, Marina consistently engages local culture and environmental context sensitively and innovatively to create meaningful, enduring architecture for and with communities.” 

MTA's Bait ur Rouf Jame Mosque in Dhaka won the 2016 Aga Khan Award for Architecture.

During her appointment as Gehry Chair, Tabassum will lead a year-long research studio for third-year Master of Architecture students at the Faculty. She will kick off her time here with a public lecture in the Main Hall of the Daniels Building on September 15 at 6:30 p.m.  

“I am looking forward to my time at the University of Toronto,” says Tabassum. “The Gehry Chair is a research-based studio. In the era of the Anthropocene, we need to reassess the agendas of architecture and explore the new roles architects can adopt as agents for change. The studio will explore current exemplary models being tried out by architects around the world in order to formulate their own ideas.” 

In particular, Tabassum adds, “my studio will focus on Architecture of Transition. We will study various forms of mass displacement of people due to war, conflict and climate-related crises, among others, and seek out various responses by architects and other professionals. We will also address the issues of permanence and temporality in architecture and the roles materials and construction play in it.”   

“Marina’s practice,” says Wei-Han Vivian Lee, director of the Faculty’s Master of Architecture program, “is unique in its devotion to the planning of sustainable communities. Her projects address humanitarian issues through thoughtful design, a celebration of vernacular craft, and experimentation with material use. So many of our faculty and students are interested in these issues, and we are honoured that she will be here to share her expertise with the Daniels Faculty community.” 

Named in honour of Frank O. Gehry, the Toronto-born designer of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the Gehry Chair brings an international architect to the Faculty every year to deliver a public lecture and enrich the student learning experience. The endowed role was established in November 2000 by Indigo Books and Music founder Heather Reisman and 45 other donors; they contributed $1 million, which was matched by U of T.  

Over the years, past Gehry Chairs have included Daniel Libeskind (2002-2003), Preston Scott Cohen (2003-2004), Merrill Elam (2004-2005), Diane Lewis (2005-2006), Will Bruder (2006-2007), Jürgen Mayer H (2007-2008), Wes Jones (2008-2009), Mitchell Joachim (2009-2010), Nader Tehrani (2010-2011), Hrvoje Njiric (2011-2012), Josemaría de Churtichaga (2013-2014), Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee (2016-2017), Amale Andraos and Dan Wood (2017-2018), Aljoša Dekleva and Tina Gregorič (2019-2020), Douglas Cardinal (2020-2021) and Lina Ghotmeh (2021-2022). 

For more information on Tabassum and MTA, click here.