For the multidisciplinary artist Cassils, who joined the Daniels Faculty’s Visual Studies department as an associate professor last summer, practicing art is a long game requiring passion, imagination and vision.  “You also have to have strategy, tenacity and a thick skin,” they say.

Among those qualities, skin is an especially apt reference point for the transgender artist, who makes their own body “the material and protagonist” of their work. Incorporating live performance, film, sound, sculpture and photography, it has been performed and exhibited in galleries and performance venues from Philadelphia to Perth, garnering prestigious grants and awards along the way.

On March 5, Cassils (pictured above) will present an overview of their multifaceted oeuvre, which they characterize as “a form of social sculpture,” as part of the Winter 2024 MVS Proseminar series. The talk, which is free of charge and open to all, will take place in the Main Hall of the Daniels Building at 6:30 p.m.

In anticipation of the event, Cassils took the time to ruminate on their experience at U of T so far, their desire to enhance somatic learning at Daniels and more.

You joined the Daniels Faculty as an associate professor in July. What has your experience been like so far?

The students at Daniels are so big hearted, open minded and gracious. I have felt lucky to work with them.

What will your talk on March 5 cover?

It will be an overview of my art practice as it intersects with performance, protest, community building and the fostering and importance of compassion and love in dark times.

For the uninitiated, how would you characterize your practice? What themes or issues are addressed by it?

I am a transgender artist who makes my own body the material and protagonist of my performances. My art contemplates the history(s) of LGBTQI+ violence, representation, struggle, survival, empowerment and systems of care. I see performance as a form of social sculpture: Drawing from the idea that bodies are formed in relation to forces of power and social expectations, my work excavates historical contexts to examine the present moment. 

What will some your priorities be as an instructor at Daniels?

I am interested in utilizing my many years as an embodied practitioner to support somatic and experimental ways of learning that heighten the creative process. I hope to be a force of solidarity and for marginalized students and to bring with me a pedagogy informed by real living artist practices that operate outside traditional cis, white, colonized, heterosexual norms. 

The Visual Studies department at Daniels is unique within the Faculty and among university programs generally. How do you see your role within it? And what would you say to any budding artists or curators who are thinking of studying with us?

My role it to model what it takes to be a real living artist operating in the world as well as to foster the unique vision and talents of each student. Art is a long game and you have to have passion, imagination and vision. You also have to have strategy, tenacity and a thick skin.

Being a Visual Studies student allows you access to a cohort of peers. The best way to get things done as an artist is to shuck the ego-based emphasis of certain aspects of the art world and build your own community, your own networks of mutual aid. Working together in and outside class gives us a unique opportunity to foster these connections. We are stronger together.

Portrait by Robin Black

Taught by Professor Richard Sommer, Exploring Design Practices (ARC302) introduces students to the practice of architecture and its allied disciplines through a series of presentations by an array of leading practitioners and scholars. 

The conversations go beyond the case studies and examples of architecture and design typically presented in lecture-based courses to probe the ideas and influences that design and planning professionals have drawn on, whom they collaborate with, and the background frameworks to the work they do. 

The following lectures are open to all members of the Daniels community as well as the public. All lectures take place in Main Hall in the Daniels Building at 1 Spadina Crescent. Registration is not required.

Winter 2024

February 28, 12:30 p.m.
Dana Cuff
UCLA Architecture and Urban Design; cityLAB

March 6, 12:30 p.m.
Brandon Donnelly
Slate; Globizen Group

March 13, 12:30 p.m.
Peter Clewes
architectsAlliance 

March 20, 12:30 p.m.
Marshall Brown
Marshall Brown Projects

March 27, 12:30 p.m.
John Bass
UBC School of Architecture + Landscape Architecture

Earlier in the semester, students heard from Amy Whitesides, Võ Trọng Nghĩa, Germane Barnes and Georgeen Theodore.

Professor Mason White, Sessional Lecturer Kearon Roy Taylor and Assistant Professor Karen Kubey have been recognized by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) with 2024 Architectural Education Awards. The trio won for two separate projects in the category of Faculty Design. The Faculty Design Awards acknowledge work that advances the reflective nature of practice and teaching through creative design and design investigation and by promoting work that expands the boundaries of design. 

Colleagues at the Toronto-based practice Lateral Office, co-founder White (pictured above at right) and associate Taylor won for “Contested Circumpolar: Domestic Territories,” an installation that examines domestic life in eight Arctic nations by situating it within broader sociocultural, economic and geopolitical contexts. Their partners on the winning team include Lateral Office co-founder Lola Sheppard of the University of Waterloo and Matthew Jull and Leena Cho of the University of Virginia. 

Exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2021, “Contested Circumpolar: Domestic Territories” presents eight narratives of inhabitation from each of the countries that lay claim to the Arctic—Canada, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the U.S.—to reveal deep and complex connections between domestic space and the larger territory.  

A series of rooms within eight houses juxtaposes the distinct artifacts and architectures of everyday life in the Arctic with territorial narratives that expose the interlinked far-flung contexts shaping the domestic scenes. 

In the process it addresses issues of transnational politics, Indigenous self-determination and radical socio-environmental adaptation in one of the 21st century’s most complex and contested regions.  

The installation “Contested Circumpolar: Domestic Territories” was exhibited as part of the Across Borders series at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale. Models were arranged as a roundtable assembly representing different regional challenges. Photos by Giorgio Lazzaro

An urbanist specializing in housing design and social justice, Kubey (pictured at left in the banner) won her ACSA Award, along with Neeraj Bhatia of the California College of the Arts and Ignacio González Galán of Barnard College, for “Aging Against the Machine,” a research project that looks at aging not as a problem to be solved but as a life stage facing a range of barriers—physical, social, financial and cultural—that make it difficult to grow older with dignity and in community. 

Part of a 2022 Center for Architecture exhibition entitled Reset: Towards a New Commons, the project builds on past and ongoing work in the California community of West Oakland, a culturally diverse and historically activist neighbourhood where older residents nonetheless face precarious living conditions, insufficient public amenities and limited caregiving options.  

It was developed by examining, connecting and expanding on existing initiatives there and by consulting with and amplifying the voices of its residents, who contributed through a series of roundtables and conversations. 

“Aging Against the Machine,” a commissioned research project overseen by the Daniels Faculty’s Karen Kubey and others, was part of a 2022 Center for Architecture exhibition entitled Reset: Towards a New Commons. Photos by Asya Gorovitz and Miguel de Guzman

Among the project results were proposals in a range of scales, from interior home renovations to collective land-ownership models and intergenerational housing projects. In particular, diverse spaces for commoning and networks of care at the scale of the building and the neighbourhood are integrated with public social programs and mutual aid initiatives, ultimately contributing to an intersectional, community-based approach to aging. 

According to ACSA, award winners are selected for their ability to inspire and challenge students, to expand the architectural profession’s knowledge base and to extend their work beyond academia into practice and the public sector. 

Winners of the Faculty Design Award are chosen in particular for how their work expands the boundaries of design through formal investigations, innovative design processes, addressing justice, working with communities, advancing sustainable practices, fostering resilience and/or centering the human experience. 

For a full list of 2024 ACSA Award winners, click here. 

Lukas Pauer, an Assistant Professor and inaugural Emerging Architect Fellow at the Daniels Faculty, has been awarded the 2024 AIAS/ACSA New Faculty Teaching Award.  

The annual award, sponsored jointly by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) and the American Institute of Architecture Students (AIAS), recognizes excellence and innovation in teaching during the formative years of an architectural teaching career. 

Pauer, who originally joined the Faculty as an Adjunct Professor in 2021, is also the founding director of the Vertical Geopolitics Lab (VGL), an investigative practice and think-tank at the intersections of architecture, geography, politology and media dedicated to exposing intangible systems and hidden agendas within the built environment. 

“All of my courses relate to aspects of space and power in the built environment but range in scale from the built object to the city or the polity,” says Pauer. “A key component of my academic practice is to serve the empowerment of marginalized, underrepresented, and vulnerable individuals and communities.” 

A scene from the Counterhegemonic Architecture thesis research studio course during a visit to the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal.

When it comes to his pedagogical approach, Pauer emphasizes removing hierarchical barriers between instructors and students. “I focus on the fact that they [students] will soon become my colleagues, often in just a few years’ time. Rather than a rigid hierarchy with instructors and critics being the sole possessors of knowledge, I want to open it up and make more horizontal dialogues possible.” 

This dialogue proves particularly useful in the context of studio-based learning. “Especially in design, there are often multiple approaches to solving problems, which is why I tend to actively encourage my students to challenge me,” he says, adding: “I often ask students to comment on each other’s projects individually. By inviting students to have just as much of a voice, the studio not only becomes an inclusive but also an authentic environment in which future practitioners can meet to inspire and learn from each other.” 

At Daniels, Pauer teaches at both the graduate and undergraduate level, including a year-long Master of Architecture (MARC) design research studio that investigates space and power in an effort to expose, challenge and reconstitute the pervasive and ongoing reality of imperial-colonial expansion.  

MARC students in the Counterhegemonic Architecture (ARC3020) studio have produced diverse theses (snapshots of which can be seen above) that range from a proposal for a pavilion at an international horticultural exposition that comments on the Turkish state’s colonial displays of progress to protest on behalf of the Kurds of Hasankeyf (“An Archive of Memories Washed Away” by Liane Werdina) to a temporary gallery exhibition on the cyclical push-pull nature of countries seeking to actively control the physical manifestation and collective memory of their national identity and history (“Forward Not Back, Reconsidering the Past in a Future Ukraine” by Bryson Wood) and a design for a mixed-use high-rise building and accompanying professional practice manual intended to empower residents of Toronto’s Chinatown (“Seeing through Transit-led Displacement in Toronto’s Chinatown” by Christopher “Chris” Hardy).  

In the Bachelor of Arts in Architectural Studies (BAAS) program, Pauer teaches Close Readings in Urban Design (ARC253), which has the overarching hypothesis that public space isn’t actually “public” for everyone—a theme that Pauer considers a throughline between research and teaching.  

“In many ways this award feels full circle,” says Pauer. “Given the integration of my practice, research, and teaching.” He adds: “A few years back I had planned my doctoral dissertation as a stepping stone toward achieving particular mid and long-term objectives; (a) to develop an original didactic-pedagogical approach to an emerging academic field at the intersections of architecture, geography, politology, and media as well as (b) to develop a business plan-like framework for a non-profit investigative practice and think-tank. So my think-tank’s upcoming research-based debut exhibition is another outcome informed by this integrated approach to academic practice.” 

On March 6, Pauer will open the exhibition “How to Steal a Country,” which will transform the Larry Wayne Richards Gallery into scenes from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Scale- and life-size dioramas, vignettes and tableaus will create an immersive experience, revealing the key role architecture plays in the ongoing sovereignty dispute. A corresponding public lecture, “Recognizing Facts on the Ground,” will take place on March 14. 

Two Daniels Faculty landscape architecture professors are among the recipients of 2024 CELA Awards, given out by the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture for excellence in teaching, research, creativity and design innovation.

Associate Professor Alissa North (pictured above at left) has won this year’s senior-level Award of Excellence in Research or Creative Work, while Associate Professor Liat Margolis (pictured above at right) has been recognized with the award for Outstanding Administrator.

The CELA Awards are an annual program administered by the Council’s Awards Committee and overseen by its Board of Directors. This year’s 13 winners were chosen from among nearly five dozen competitors for 2024 faculty and student prizes, according to the Council.

The editor or co-editor of numerous publications, including last year’s Innate Terrain: Canadian Landscape Architecture, North teaches graduate design studio, visual communication and history and theory courses at the Faculty.

She is the co-founder with Peter North of North Design Office, which won a 2023 Toronto Urban Design Award in the category of Small Open Spaces for its Stackt Market project.

Margolis, who was the Faculty’s Associate Dean of Research and directed the Master of Landscape Architecture program from 2017 to 2022, has been leading the Green Roof Innovation Testing Laboratory (or GRIT Lab) for the past 14 years.

Based at the Daniels Faculty, GRIT Lab is an internationally renowned research facility dedicated to research and training in living green infrastructure. 

According to CELA, the awards “serve to not only recognize these individuals, but also to inspire us, elevate our standards, and build this growing community of educators.”

This year’s recipients will be honoured on March 22 at an awards dinner and reception in St. Louis, Missouri. The ceremony will be held during CELA’s 2024 annual conference, entitled Taking Action: Making Change. The conference will take place March 20 to 23.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark your calendar for public lectures

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

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

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

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

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

Visit an installation of student artwork 

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

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

Check out a curated display in the Library

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

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

Learn more about Building Black Success in Design 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The book is available for purchase online.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the essay online or download a PDF.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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