Associate Professor Aziza Chaouni is this year’s recipient of the World Monuments Fund (WMF) Watch Award, which the international preservation organization is bestowing on her for “her innovative work in heritage preservation through the implementation of sustainable technologies” in arid climates and elsewhere.

“Chaouni’s leadership and inventive solutions,” says the body, “have benefited multiple communities and sites across the globe, including her recent collaboration with Lafarge-Holcim Morocco on post-earthquake reconstruction efforts in [the Moroccan province of] Haouz.” 

It adds: “Her collaborations with WMF at Ontario Place in Canada, Old Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone and Maison du Peuple in Burkina Faso exemplify her ability to integrate cultural preservation with sustainable design.”

In addition to teaching at the Daniels Faculty, Chaouni (pictured below) is the founding principal of Aziza Chaouni Projects, a multidisciplinary design practice based in Toronto and Fez, Morocco. Among its primary mandates are “researching and making resilient and environmentally sensitive designs, buildings, neighbourhoods and cities.” 

Chaouni’s work has been recognized with numerous international awards, including top honours from the Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction, which extolled projects in both its Global and Regional Africa and Middle East categories.

“Aziza Chaouni has been instrumental in merging architectural preservation with environmental sustainability, particularly in regions that receive low rainfall [and] where such efforts are crucial,” says Bénédicte de Montlaur, President and CEO of the WMF. “Her partnerships with World Monuments Fund in North America and Africa demonstrate her dedication and her resourceful approach.”

Since 1965, the WMF has raised $300 million to support more than 700 cultural-heritage sites in 112 countries. Through the World Monuments Watch—a biennial, nomination-based program—the organization uses cultural-heritage conservation to empower communities and improve human well-being. 

Chaouni will receive the 2024 Watch Award at the WMF’s annual Summer Soirée, which will take place in New York City, the organization’s home base, on Wednesday, June 5.

For further information on the body’s work, visit wmf.org. For more details on the 2024 Watch Award, click here.

Banner images: 1. Maison du Peuple, Burkina Faso. 2. Ontario Place, Toronto. 3. Old Fourah Bay College, Sierra Leone.

In March, the exhibition “How to Steal a Country” opened in the Daniels Faculty’s Larry Wayne Richards Gallery, transforming the display space at 1 Spadina Crescent into scenes from the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Using scale- and life-size dioramas, vignettes and tableaus, the immersive exhibition reflects some of the research conducted by 2022-2024 Emerging Architect Fellow Lukas Pauer into the role that architecture can play in asserting or suppressing national identity and sovereignty. 

As both the exhibition and his fellowship wind down, Pauer took the time to answer a few questions about the show and the work behind it. “How to Steal a Country” closes on May 14.

“How to Steal a Country,” your research-based exhibition on the role of architecture in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, is part of the research and teaching you have undertaken as an Emerging Architect Fellow. Can you elaborate on how the exhibition reflects this work?

My work has been concerned with the histories of space and power in the built environment and their entanglements with the present. On arrival here at Daniels and building upon the findings of my doctoral dissertation, I started developing a series of teaching aids for my students in various formats to allow them to better understand imperial-colonial violence as a pervasive and ongoing reality around the world that is not a historic event but that continues to be manifested through seemingly minor or banal practices and built objects of the everyday.

For example, in a series of input lectures, I shared my theoretical framework and research on many case studies from different sites around the world in which countries presently instrumentalize buildings and infrastructure to project power, to claim authority over people and land. These cases were envisioned as exemplary vehicles for students to acquire and test unconventional skills that most students might not have acquired yet during their studies. In a series of skills workshops, I taught a range of techniques I have employed in my practice and research for students. Consequently, having spent a large part of my fellowship translating my practice and research into original teaching aids in the context of the courses I taught, it felt only natural to also conceive my fellowship exhibition as a teaching aid.

In terms of its medium/format, the aim behind the work remains a didactic-pedagogical one—how do we develop a vocabulary that allows us to visually, materially and spatially describe how authority over people and land is manifested through seemingly minor or banal practices of the everyday?

The title of your exhibition is a provocative one. Is the Russian invasion of Ukraine a prototypical case of using built objects to project power and subvert sovereignty or an atypical one?

Many visitors of the exhibition would speak to me about the parallels they saw in the exhibition with what is part of the imperial-colonial history and ongoing present of what is presently known as Canada. For example, one section of the exhibition discusses the forced deportation and naturalization of Ukrainian children. By supposedly “evacuating” Ukrainian children into the supposed “care” of “foster parents” in Russia under the guise of supposed “reeducation” and “welfare services,” the Russian government has sought to make it difficult to preserve their independent post-Soviet Ukrainian identity. Not unlike what happened to many Indigenous local children in what is presently known as Canada, this has led to the assimilation of children, by invalidating their originally identity.

So in terms of its topic, the exhibition applies the aforementioned theoretical framework and analytical techniques for the role of architecture in sovereignty disputes to discuss a very specific context. However, part of the didactic-pedogagical intent of the exhibition is for the visitor to be able to make parallels to other contexts. This is not by chance. Over the past 10 years, I have critically studied how imperial-colonial expansion has been performed architecturally throughout history in ancient, medieval, modern and recent times, as well as still today.

This has led to a comparative theoretical framework and repository of case studies from different sites around the world in which countries presently instrumentalize buildings and infrastructure to project power. This includes but is not limited to the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which is not necessarily an atypical case. So there will be subsequent exhibitions and associated publications applying the framework and techniques to other sovereignty disputes. Stay tuned.

What lessons might be learned from your research by either governments or their people about recognizing subversion and protecting sovereignty?

Although recent scholarship alludes to a relationship between space and power as well as the various ways in which power has configured space, many people seeking to participate in the political life of their community still lack the vocabulary to describe how authority over people and land is manifested through seemingly minor or banal practices of the everyday.

We have come up with diplomatic doctrines to respond to soft power. We have military doctrines to deal with hard power. However, policy-makers lack appropriate tools and models that aid the recognition of more hybrid kinds of non-verbal visual, material and spatial interventions. These come above the line of what is commonly understood as diplomacy but below the line of warfare. Within this grey zone, recent practices have instrumentalized many different types of built objects. For example, in the case of the current exhibition on display, Russia has instrumentalized humanitarian aid operations, bank branches and Internet and telephone facilities, as well as child boarding and care facilities to project power.

Such objects capitalize on their ambiguity. They seem to be neither diplomatic nor military in function, which renders their instrumentalization plausibly deniable. A lack of understanding how any object may be instrumentalized for political purposes limits people’s ability and responsibility to contribute to political decisions about the built environment.

One of your conclusions is that “sovereignty is a performative concept dependent on an audience.” Can you elaborate on this idea?

Sovereignty has been a key term for my work. If we untangle the very definition of this concept, which refers to “authority over people and land” and then untangle the concept of authority itself, which refers to “recognized power,” or a power that is being seen, that is being recognized by individuals or a community as being legitimate.

So if power over people and land depends on being seen, on being recognized in order to become legitimate, by definition sovereignty depends on an audience. As such, the very definition of sovereignty is a theatrical, a performative concept. It depends on being seen by a domestic or foreign audience. The hinge that can anchor a claim to authority over people and land to the ground are sovereignty markers, the “facts on the ground.” You can plant a flag or construct a building as a marker of sovereignty, to make a claim in a very specific place, but if you do not document this flag or building in various media such as taking a photo or making a drawing of it, it may as well have never happened.

In the case of the current exhibition on display, these would be the buildings and infrastructure that Russia has instrumentalized to legitimize its claims to sovereignty—the humanitarian aid operations, bank branches and Internet and telephone facilities, as well as child boarding and care facilities. These four case types are each displayed in a niche of the gallery. Not by chance have they been displayed as theatrical prop-like objects to create an immersive experience. These techniques from theatrical set model-making in the design of the exhibition are a nod to the theatricality of claims to sovereignty.

All images, including Lukas Pauer at the opening of “How to Steal a Country” in March 2024, by Harry Choi

The Canada Council for the Arts has announced that the Living Room Collective will represent Canada at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, from May 10 to November 23, 2025. 

Selected by a Council-designated selection committee, from among the group of five shortlisted candidates, the Living Room Collective will curate the next architecture exhibition at the Canada Pavilion. 

The creative team is led by bio-designer Andrea Shin Ling, alongside core team members Nicholas Hoban, a lecturer and the Director of Applied Technologies at the Daniels Faculty, Vincent Hui, a professor at Toronto Metropolitan University’s Department of Architectural Science, and Clayton Lee, a curator, producer and performance artist.  

Together this group of architects, scientists, artists, and educators will work at the intersection of architecture, biology, and digital fabrication to situate architecture as an integral and supportive component of our ecosystem.  

“It is an incredible honor to have been selected to represent Canada at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale,” the Living Room Collective said in a statement. “In demonstrating the possibilities of a collaborative relationship with nature, we look forward to leveraging this global platform alongside national and international partners to engage in a critical dialogue around alternative design practices that can sit alongside contemporary carbon neutral building strategies.”  

Read the full announcement from the Canada Council for the Arts. 

About Living Room Collective   

Andrea Shin Ling is an architect and bio-designer who works at the intersection of design, digital fabrication and biology. Her work focuses on how the critical application of biologically and computationally mediated design processes can move society away from exploitative systems of production to regenerative ones. She is the 2020 S+T+ARTS Grand Prize winner for her work as Ginkgo Bioworks’ creative resident designing the decay of artifacts in order to access material circularity. Shin Ling is a founder of designGUILD, a Toronto-based art collective, and was a researcher in the Mediated Matter Group at the MIT Media Lab, where she worked on Aguahoja I, a 3D-printed bio-material pavilion. She is currently a doctoral fellow at the Chair of Digital Building Technologies at the Institute of Technology and Architecture, ETH Zurich.

Nicholas Hoban is a computational designer, fabricator and educator. He works at the intersection of computational design, robotics, construction and simulation in pedagogy, research and practice. Hoban is the Director, Applied Technologies, at the Daniels Faculty and a lecturer within the Daniels technology specialist program, leading various research and teaching labs while developing curriculum for studios and seminars on advanced fabrication and robotics within architecture. His research focuses on the application of robotics within fabrication and construction, and how we can solve critical problems in geometry through integrated processes. Hoban was a lead fabricator and computational designer for two previous Venice Biennales: for the 2014 Canadian Pavilion for Lateral Office’s Arctic Adaptations and for the 2016 Swiss Pavilion for Christian Kerez’s Incidental Space.  

Vincent Hui is a distinguished professor at Toronto Metropolitan University’s Department of Architectural Science, imparting knowledge across diverse domains from design studios to digital tools. His pedagogical excellence has earned him multiple teaching accolades, as he delves into the intersections of architecture, fabrication and allied disciplines. With over 25 years of experience, his extensive publication portfolio focuses on design pedagogy, simulation, prototyping and technological convergence, complemented by a rich body of creative work showcased globally. Collaborating with esteemed organizations such as the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (RAIC), the Ontario Association of Architects (OAA) and the Canadian Architecture Students’ Association (CASA), Hui endeavors to empower the next generation of designers, navigating emergent shifts in praxis. Committed to bridging academia and industry, he advocates for experiential learning initiatives and outreach endeavors for aspiring designers. His remarkable contributions have culminated in his induction into the esteemed RAIC College of Fellows.  

Clayton Lee is a curator, producer and performance artist. He is currently the Director (Artistic) of the Fierce Festival in Birmingham, England. He was previously the Director of the Rhubarb Festival, Canada’s longest-running festival of new and experimental performance, at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. Lee has also worked as Creative Producer on Jess Dobkin’s projects, including For What It’s Worth, her commission at the Wellcome Collection in London, England; as Curatorial Associate at the Luminato Festival; and as Managing Producer of CanadaHub at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Lee’s performance projects have been presented in venues across Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and New Zealand. He was one of the Art Gallery of Ontario’s 2023 Artists-in-Residence.  

Banner image from left to right: Andrea Shin Ling. Photo: Andrei Jipa; Nicholas Hoban. Photo: Nazanin Kazemi; Clayton Lee. Photo: Sam Frank Wood; Vincent Hui. Photo: Florencio Tameta.

The Canadian Society of Landscape Architects (CSLA) has named Elise Shelley (Associate Professor, Teaching Stream) one of the 2024 inductees into its prestigious College of Fellows.

Fellows are recognized for their outstanding contributions to the profession of landscape architecture.

The College of Fellows will welcome the newest members—10 in total—during a ceremony at the CSLA’s next Congress, taking place in Winnipeg May 30 to June 1.

Investiture to the College is the highest honour that the CSLA, founded in 1934 to advance the art, science and practice of landscape architecture, bestows on its members. A jury of six Fellows, representing regions across Canada, selected the new ones based on extensive submissions documenting each candidate’s contributions to the profession.

“It is humbling and empowering to be nominated to the College of Fellows by my peers, as it validates that the work I do as an educator and practitioner has significance in the field of landscape architecture,” says Shelley, who is Director of the Faculty’s Master of Landscape Architecture program.

“As a CSLA Fellow, I will represent the Daniels Faculty and our students as I continue to pursue excellence for our program and for the discipline. I appreciate this honour and will do all I can to live up to the great work of those that have come before me.”

Since the inception of the CSLA’s College of Fellows in 1964, 270 members have seen induction, which comes with the designation “FCSLA.”

Shelley is being inducted in the categories of Professional University Instruction and Executed Works of Landscape Architecture. Other categories include Administrative Professional Work in Public Agencies or Government Service and Direct Service to the CSLA.

In addition to her roles at the Faculty, Shelley is the Director of Landscape at the Toronto-based interdisciplinary firm gh3*. Among her current projects are Warehouse Park in Edmonton and Olympic Plaza in Calgary, both collaborations between gh3* and CCxA. 

When the CSLA meets in Winnipeg at the end of May, it will be celebrating its 90th anniversary. For the full list of 2024’s inductees, click here

Jean-Paul Kelly (Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream) is among the 25 intergenerational artists, duos and collectives showing work at Greater Toronto Art 2024, the second edition of the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto’s recurring triennial show.

Other members of the Daniels Faculty community featured in the exhibition include sessional lecturers Sukaina Kubba and Oliver Husain. Alumnus Mani Mazinani, who graduated with an Honours B.A. in Visual Studies in 2008, rounds out the Daniels contingent.

MOCA Toronto’s triennial exhibition was conceived in 2021 “to look more closely and consistently at artistic practices with a connection to the Greater Toronto Area (GTA).” 

This year’s edition, which “looks back as much as it looks forward,” presents work made between the 1960s and the present, “allowing the co-mingling of art created in different decades to provide new ways of understanding the current moment and imagining the future.”

The director of the Visual Studies department until this year, Kelly is a prizewinning artist who makes videos and exhibitions that pose questions about the limits of representation by examining complex associations between found photographs, videos, sounds and online media streams. 

For GTA24, he created a new installation, How cruelty disgusts the view, while pity charms the site (pictured above and below), which is composed of six line drawings in graphite. The drawings are inspired by 18th-century English artist and social critic William Hogarth’s modern moral prints The Four Stages of Cruelty.

The exhibition will also include B.A.A.D.C. (Bonjour aux amis de calamité), a 2016 wall-based sculpture that references writer and political activist Jean Genet’s sensual short film from 1950, Un chant d’amour (A Song of Love).

A multidisciplinary artist who joined the Faculty as a sessional lecturer in 2021, Kubba is represented in the triennial with a series of new wall-based sculptural drawings made from PLA filament. Her series is traced from a Persian rug that has been in Kubba’s family for generations. The fractured vignettes highlight narratives of travel and trade, of migration, and of relationship to land.

Sessional lecturer Husain, an artist and filmmaker, often collaborates with other artists and friends on his projects, which frequently have “a fragment of history, a rumour, a personal encounter or a distant memory” as jumping-off points.

At GTA24, Husain and collaborator Kerstin Schroedinger, an artist working in performance, film/video and sound, are showing DNCB, a 2021 three-channel video installation that ruminates on the complex history of Dinitrochlorobenzene, a chemical substance that is used in the processing of colour film and was also explored as an experimental alternative AIDS treatment in the 1980s and 1990s.

Husain and Schroedinger will also present Hypericin Yellow Movie, a new lecture performance based on this body of research. The free showing (one of their 2021 films is pictured below) will take place at MOCA on Friday, May 31 at 7:00 p.m.

Alumnus Mazinani, lastly, is an interdisciplinary artist who makes work that connects scale and sensation, improvisation and ancient thought. His practice encompasses installation, lens-based media, sculpture, sound and music. 

For GTA24, Mazinani was commissioned to develop a major new work, Solar Scale, an immersive five-channel sound and light installation structured around pentatonic music and harmonic pulsation.

At 7:00 p.m. on July 19, Mazinani and a group of collaborators will present a musical performance that extends the Solar Scale soundscape to a live experience. The concert will feature the Solar Organ, an electronic pentatonic instrument created by Mazinani, playing improvised and composed music on MOCA’s ground floor. A variety of invented and traditional pentatonic scales will be used by the musicians, covering a spectrum of approaches to pentatonic sound generation.

This year’s triennial runs at MOCA through July 28. For more information on the exhibition and other works on display, click here.

Image credits from top to bottom:

“How cruelty disgusts the view, while pity charms the sight,” No. 1-6, 2024. Six graphite drawings on laid paper, painted wood frames and fabric wrap mats, painted and oxidized steel posts. Installation view, Greater Toronto Art 2024 at MOCA Toronto. © and courtesy of Jean-Paul Kelly. Photo by LF Documentation.

“How cruelty disgusts the view, while pity charms the sight,” No. 4, 2024. Graphite drawing on laid paper, painted wood frame and fabric wrap mat, painted and oxidized steel post. Installation view, Greater Toronto Art 2024 at MOCA Toronto. © and courtesy of Jean-Paul Kelly. Photo by LF Documentation.

Oliver Husain and Kerstin Schroedinger, "THE GARDEN – Cinematics of the Soil." Installation view, 2021. Courtesy of the artists and Silent Green Kulturquartier. Photo by Husain/Schroedinger.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Based at the Daniels Faculty’s Centre for Landscape Research, Parks in Action is a multidisciplinary, multi-year design-research initiative investigating the untapped potential of public and private open spaces in Toronto’s inner suburbs.

It has included a partnership with Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Urban and Regional Planning and is funded by the University of Toronto’s School of Cities, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Partnership Grant, TransformTO’s Neighbourhood Climate Action Champions Program and Environment Canada.

Recently, Parks in Action launched a comprehensive website, parks-in-action.webflow.io, where is outlines and archives its research to date and documents the workshops and exhibition connected to it.

Entitled “Parks in Action: Co-designing Inclusive Open Spaces,” that exhibition (pictured in slideshow below) opened in June of last year and is still on view at the World Urban Pavilion in Toronto’s Regent Park.

The Parks in Action project, writes Associate Professor Fadi Masoud, Director of the Centre for Landscape Research, “underscores the vital role of suburban parks, open spaces and the public realm in Toronto’s climate adaptation and mitigation,” particularly with relation to air pollution, urban heat-island effect and urban flooding.

“One of its primary objectives,” he continues, “is to assess and quantify the social and environmental value of public and private open spaces in the city’s inner suburbs, specifically its ‘Tower in the Park’ neighbourhoods.”

It also “investigates the untapped potential of these parks in suburban communities,” and asks what kind of design and management strategies are needed to reflect the diversity and heterogeneity of the population they serve, as well as how they might be retrofitted to increase their environmental and social performance.

In June of 2019, the City of Toronto launched its first Resilience Strategy at the Daniels Faculty. This strategy identified the overlap of climate risks and social vulnerability in Toronto’s aging high-rise rental apartment towers as “the single most pressing, urgent priority for the city’s resilience.”

Toronto is home to North America’s largest concentration of postwar apartment towers, with vast green spaces, ravines, parks and schools typically surrounding over 1,500 buildings throughout the city.

Over the years, the Parks in Action team has engaged in “Knowledge Exchange” sessions with grassroots leaders, city officials and community members, with members co-creating and distributing risk and opportunity maps (such as maps that illustrate the links between surface heat temperature, air pollution, land cover and tree canopy) to local leaders. Local leaders and climate champions then connected this data with lived experience and existing policy to advocate for neighbourhood change, building a shared language for considering green open spaces’ critical role in residents’ daily lives and long-term health and well-being.

Based on the “Knowledge Exchange” sessions, the Parks in Action team devised a set of Climate Design Action Cards that identify a slate of design solutions to climate change ranging from small and easy interventions to more significant ones that can be enacted or advocated by leaders and residents. The Climate Design Action Cards informed spatial scenarios on prototypical transect cross-sections of Toronto’s inner suburbs, offering innovative tools to engage with local leaders and residents, facilitate engagement, and empower community members to better advocate for local climate action.

Congruently, a series of Community Climate Action Hubs were designed for parks in equity-deserving neighbourhoods. The installations exemplified the project’s commitment to reinventing outdoor spaces, providing environmental education, increasing accessibility and offering spaces for socialization. The first set of installations is currently under construction in various parks in the city. 

Overall, Parks in Action has showcased how building resilience requires a holistic approach that considers public open space as part of the shared infrastructure of climate adaptation. To that end, the design research is shaped by the lived experiences of individuals and communities, highlighting the interconnectedness of social climate action and design thinking.

For more information on the Parks in Action project and to peruse its research to date, visit its site here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For more information on Lumière, click here.

Photography by 6ix Films

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For more details about ReHousing, click here.

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