For decades, Phragmites australis (pictured above) has ranked among the worst weeds in Canada, damaging the biodiversity, wetlands and beaches of Ontario, Quebec and elsewhere. 

A new guide, co-developed by researchers at the Daniels Faculty and at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC), aims to combat this destructive invader—a tall, dense grass that was introduced into North America from Europe in the 1800s and is also known as common reed—by offering “a suite of simple, easy-to-use identification tools” designed to distinguish it from vulnerable native species without relying on expensive, specialized lab analyses.

“Given the importance of Phragmites management in Ontario as a conservation concern,” says postdoctoral research fellow Michael McTavish of Forestry, “we think this tool would be of great use to land managers and other researchers.”

Dr. McTavish is the lead author of the guide, which was recently published in Invasive Plant Science and Management, the online peer-reviewed journal focusing on fundamental and applied research on invasive plants and the management and restoration of invaded non-crop areas.

His co-authors and collaborators include Professor Sandy M. Smith of Forestry and three researchers from AAFC: research scientists Tyler Smith and Robert Bourchier and research technician Subbaiah Mechanda.

“To effectively manage the invasive introduced subspecies of common reed and avoid misallocating resources,” they write, “land managers require practical, reliable tools to differentiate it from the desirable native subspecies. While genetic tools are extremely useful for identification, morphological identification is a valuable complementary tool that is easier [to use], cheaper, available in the field and thus more accessible for many land managers and researchers.”

In the course of the team’s research, a suite of 22 morphological traits were measured in 21 introduced and 27 native P. australis populations identified by genetic barcoding across southern Ontario. Traits were compared between the subspecies to identify measurements that offered reliable, diagnostic separation. Overall, 21 of the 22 traits differed between the subspecies, with four offering complete separation: the retention of leaf sheaths on dead stems; a categorical assessment of stem colour; the base height of the ligule, excluding the hairy fringe; and a combined measurement of leaf length and lower glume length. 

Additionally, round fungal spots on the stem occurred only on the native subspecies and never on the sampled introduced populations. 

“The high degree of variation observed in traits within and between the subspecies,” the researchers conclude, “cautions against a ‘common wisdom’ approach to identification or automatic interpretation of intermediate traits as indicative of aberrant populations or hybridization.”

As an alternative, their “five best traits” checklist offers simple and reliable measurements for identifying native and introduced P. australis. It is most applicable, they note, “for samples collected in the late summer and fall in the Great Lakes region, but can also inform best practices for morphological identification in other regions as well.” 

The full guide as well as the research that led to it is detailed in the IPSM report. To read it, click here.

The checklist, however, isn’t the only weapon in Dr. McTavish’s arsenal against common reed. This past spring, he publicized details about another initiative involving the release of “two old/new adversaries” of P. australis: a pair of European moth species expected to provide effective biological control of the native-choking plant.

“The two European moths, known by their scientific names Lenisa geminipuncta [pictured below] and Archanara neurica, were selected only after extensive safety testing confirmed they were highly specific to invasive Phragmites, meaning that they can only complete their lifecycle on this plant,” Dr. McTavish said. “The caterpillars of the two moths feed inside the invasive Phragmites stems, causing the weed to wilt or die. In 2019, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) approved the release of both biocontrol agents in Canada. To date, over 17,000 insects have been released at 13 locations across southern Ontario.”

According to Dr. McTavish, “early monitoring at the release sites is very promising for establishment and use of this new tool for Phragmites management. The released insect populations have survived over a year at the release points. They have completed their full lifecycle and are causing visible damage to Phragmites plants at several release locations. The research team is now focused on an intensive laboratory rearing program for the caterpillars and on testing release methods using insect eggs, caterpillars, pupae and adult moths.”

The program’s ultimate goal, he adds, “is to use these early ‘nurse’ locations for collection and redistribution of insects to land managers and the public with serious patches of Phragmites. Populations of the insects are still establishing, and initial results are very encouraging. Over time, as the insect populations continue to grow and spread, biological control is expected to become a valuable new component of the integrated management strategy for invasive Phragmites.”

This second, insect-based control initiative is based on a research program that began in 1998 as well as critical support from stakeholders including Ducks Unlimited Canada, MITACS, the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry, the Nature Conservancy of Canada, NSERC, the rare Charitable Research Reserve and AAFC.

The research team is an international one led by AAFC and U of T. Other members include collaborators from the University of Waterloo, Ducks Unlimited Canada and the Nature Conservancy of Canada in Canada, Cornell University and the University of Rhode Island in the United States and CABI (the Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International) in Switzerland. 

Image of Lenisa geminipuncta moth on a stem of invasive Phragmites by Patrick Häfliger. 

Associate professor Daniel Chung is this year’s beneficiary of the Mayflower Research Fund, an endowment established by a generous donor to encourage and stimulate research in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture and urban design, and allows for collaboration with other areas of the University.

Chung’s current research examines a building’s envelope—the roof, walls and surfaces that are in contact with the outdoors—to better predict the effects of climate change on buildings.  

With support from the Mayflower Research Fund, he will advance his research on building-envelope performance as it relates to moisture flows and moisture-related damage. 

“If we can more easily monitor moisture throughout the building, not just at the surface, and know what is happening across all facades, like a fit-bit that monitors day-to-day activity, we can attune buildings to have adaptive properties that respond to varying climatic conditions and prevent building deterioration before it becomes an expensive and time-consuming process to address and repair,” he says.

Both a registered architect and a professional engineer, Chung will direct his grant funding, totalling $10,000, to test and develop a new assessment method for real-time moisture-transport behaviour by validating the use of what is known as dielectric permittivity sensors (a type of water-sensitive probe ordinarily used to test the moisture content of soil) to measure and track the amount of water present in the facades of buildings. 

The data collected in this research will be used to demonstrate the potential of the method’s use for in-situ moisture content assessments, and will be leveraged when applying for additional external funding in the coming academic year that will focus on sensing transient three-dimensional moisture flows through multi-layered building envelope assemblies. 

A guarded hot box measures heat flow through building envelope materials. It is currently under construction in Chung's lab, and will be used in the project supported by the Mayflower Research Fund. 

Since its establishment in 2018, the Mayflower Research Fund has supported research across a range of topics, from improving fresh-air circulation in multi-unit buildings (Bomani Khemet, 2022) and the effects of interior light on human psychology and physiology in Canada’s subarctic and polar regions (Alstan Jakubiec, 2021) to advancing research in computational design with a focus on robotics (Maria Yablonina, 2020) and an in-depth study of the design of suburban parks (Fadi Masoud, 2019).

Faculty members with full-time appointments at the Daniels Faculty are eligible to apply.    

Building Place!—the Engage-Design-Build show designed to highlight the cultural identities and stories of the many ethnic groups that call Toronto’s Little Jamaica home—will end this Sunday (July 30) with an exhibition wrap party.

Located in a storefront gallery at 1476 Eglinton Avenue West, Building Place! opened on July 16. The exhibition features community-based artwork and urban furniture by students from York Memorial Collegiate Institute and the Daniels Faculty.

It was coordinated by faculty and students in the Master of Urban Design (MUD) program through Engage-Design-Build, a partnership between the Daniels Faculty and the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) aimed at connecting city high schoolers with the community around them through hands-on design and building projects.

One of the main goals of the experiential-learning initiative, which is funded by U of T’s Access Program University Fund (APUF), is to open pathways for youth who are underrepresented in the design professions because of economic or racial barriers to careers in architecture, design and planning.

Engage-Design-Build, say its organizers, a group led by Assistant Professor Michael Piper and Sessional Lecturer Otto Ojo, “connects with multiple course streams, with the aim of creating collaborative cross-curricular projects at multiple scales.”

They do this, they add, by engaging with “multiple stakeholders to broker a dialogue between the school and the community, fostered through multiple field trips and youth participation in community events. This interchange informs and shapes the student projects.”

On Sunday, the wrap party will be held between 3:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m., but the exhibition itself can be seen from noon to 6:00 p.m. Visitors can also take in Building Place! on Thursday (July 27) from 2:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.

For more information on Engage-Design-Build and its projects to date, click here.

The Daniels Faculty is pleased to announce that Assistant Professor Adrian Phiffer has been appointed Director of the Master of Architecture (MARC) program for a one-year term, effective July 1, 2023.  

He takes over from Assistant Professor Wei-Han Vivian Lee, who is beginning a one-year Research and Study Leave this summer and will resume her directorship of the MARC program in 2024.   

“I have been teaching at Daniels since 2009 and in many ways it has been like a second home for me,” says Phiffer, who is originally from Romania. “I am excited to continue the tremendous work Vivian Lee has grounded in the program and the open collaboration with our students, faculty, staff and school supporters.” 

Phiffer is director of the Office of Adrian Phiffer, whose work includes international building and master planning projects in Nurnberg, London, Delhi, Beijing, Prague, Riga and Montreal. He is also the author of the book Strange Primitivism and director of the short film Hero of Generic Architecture.

Phiffer looks forward to growing the interdisciplinary approach to the MARC program. “We live in a very creative time when new ways of thinking but also new relationships between different disciplines and agents are possible and necessary,” he says.

“Because of its proximities and overlaps with the landscape architecture, urban design, visual studies and forestry programs, as well as its direct partnerships with the First Nations of Southern Ontario, city communities and national and international groups, the architecture program at Daniels is strongly positioned to offer one of the most relevant professional education nowadays.”  

Photo by: Codrut Tolea

A film created as part of Daniels Faculty architecture grad Batoul Faour’s thesis project two years ago is currently on view in a group show at Ottawa’s SAW art centre.

Faour, who has also been working as a sessional instructor at the Faculty since January 2022, graduated from the post-professional Master of Architecture program in 2021. That same year, she was awarded the Avery Review Essay Prize for her treatise on how architectural glass exacerbated the damage from the August 2020 port explosion in Beirut, Lebanon.

Faour’s thesis project comprised both the prize-winning essay and a film that she screened during the final review. The film, titled Shafāfiyyāh, which means transparency in Arabic, is one of the works being presented at SAW in the group show Beirut: Eternal Recurrence.

Co-curated by Daniels Faculty sessional lecturer Amin Alsaden, the exhibition features the work of about a dozen international contemporary artists, its title taken from a text by theorist-artist Jalal Toufic on the philosophical notion of “eternal recurrence.” The show proposes that time and events repeat themselves in an infinite loop—a concept especially resonant in the long-suffering Lebanese capital.

“The participating artists do not necessarily pass judgment about Beirut, its repetitions or how coming to terms with the cyclicality of certain phenomena could perhaps create a new consciousness that might begin to change the course of history,” the exhibition’s curators note. “But to observe their replications is to recognize parallels between a past and a future entangled in a difficult present.”

In her thesis project, Faour examines how both the narrative and material lifecycles of glass are entangled in Beirut’s history and politics.

In her essay and her film, she notes how, after the 2020 explosion, “Beirut’s windows and streets have become palimpsests of broken glass, telling of generational cycles of sectarian violence in a country still ruled by the same warlords who tore the city apart decades ago, erased their traces, and disguised this history in a dysfunctional present normality.”

In addition to disseminating her research among a wider audience, the exhibition, Faour says, is a great example for current students of alumni pursuing “alternative trajectories beyond commercial practice.”

Beirut: Eternal Recurrence, which opened on July 15, runs until September 23. SAW is located at 67 Nicholas Street just north of the University of Ottawa.

Top image of hand organizing pieces of glass: still from film by Batoul Faour. (Below) Exhibition images by Ava Margueritte.

The Daniels Faculty is pleased to announce that Professor Mason White has been appointed Director of the Master of Urban Design (MUD) program for a one-year term, effective July 1, 2023. He takes over from Assistant Professor Michael Piper, who had led the program since 2020.  

Professor White joined the Daniels Faculty in 2005 and has served as interim Director of the Master of Architecture program twice, in 2007 and in 2011. For the past five years, he has directed the Faculty’s Post-Professional Master of Architecture and Post-Professional Master of Landscape Architecture program, a position he will continue to fill.  

“Assuming the directorship of Master of Urban Design program provides an opportunity to identify allegiances between all of our Post-Professional programs,” says White. “I am honoured to serve the Faculty in this new role, and I am all ears to hear from colleagues, students, alumni and professionals about how we can better serve the discipline and practice today.” 

White says he is excited to build on the program’s existing strengths. “In particular, the MUD program has expanded to include urban design across scales, recognizing the importance of community-driven co-design,” he says. “Equally, the program broadened its consideration of sites and contexts that have been underrepresented and overlooked. Given how uniquely international the MUD cohort is, this year we will be further expanding the subjectivities and cultural scope of the program globally.”

With the Daniels Faculty located in North America’s fourth largest city, and one of the most diverse cities in the world, White sees ample possibilities to address the complexity of contemporary urban issues. “This opportunity,” he says, “creates a truly unique program with both strong ties to parallel fields and direct links to professional practice in a truly urban setting.” 

Looking ahead to the 2023-24 academic year, White expects a number of new initiatives and curricular innovations in the MUD program, including welcoming new faculty into studio courses, as well as providing more opportunities for students to engage with professionals. In terms of research, “The program will also be exploring regions traditionally overlooked by the urban design discipline that will include rural and remote regions in Canada, but also internationally,” he says. “Like their urban counterparts, these ‘hinterlands’ are also undergoing rapid transformation.”  

The MUD program will also continue to explore collaboration with the Faculty's forestry and visual studies programs to uncover curricular and research potentials in urban forestry and urban art practices. “There are so many wonderful new opportunities here at the Daniels Faculty MUD program to address truly contemporary urban issues that are unfolding in real-time,” White says.

White founded the design practice Lateral Office in partnership with Lola Sheppard in 2003 and is also a founding editor of the journal Bracket. His work, research and teaching invite readings of architecture as a by-product of complex networks within ecology and culture. His recent research pursues questions of the role of infrastructure and networks within contemporary spatial practice. 

The Daniels Faculty’s Jason Nguyen has co-edited a special Journal of Architecture issue centred on the theme of “un-making architecture.”

The special issue, which he co-edited with Elizabeth J. Petcu of the Edinburgh College of Art at the University of Edinburgh, “surveys the concept of ‘un-making’ as an overarching facet of architectural thinking and production that has yet to be considered at a synoptic scale.”

The co-editors define un-making in this context as “the actions that result in the dismantling of architectural forms, modes of thought and means of production.” 

A historical study of these operations, they hope, “might generate necessary theoretical frameworks to conceptualize transformations in architecture amid today’s unprecedented socio-political and environmental challenges.”

The aim of the special issue, which was released in June, is twofold, Nguyen and Petcu write in their introduction. “First, it brings into dialogue topics from across different periods and geographies that explore varied yet related notions of un-making.” Second, “it introduces a range of theoretical approaches to analyze architectural disassembly that might further conversations and actions to reimagine the discourses, institutions and practices in the field today.”

Among the scholars who have contributed articles to the issue are Victoria Adonna of McGill University, Matthew Mullane of Radboud University, Eliyahu Keller of the Negev School of Architecture, Ana María León of Harvard University and Delia Duong Ba Wendel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

To access the issue—Volume 28, Number 2 of The Journal of Architecture—click here.

Homepage and banner image, courtesy of AFP/Getty Images, offers a view of Dresden Frauenkirche (1726-1743, rebuilt 1994-2005) in 1952. The church was destroyed during World War II. 

Resolutions for the Antarctic: International Stations & the Antarctic Data Space, the multi-media exhibition on view in the Faculty’s Architecture and Design Gallery since March, has been reviewed by The Globe and Mail.

The newspaper’s architecture critic, Alex Bozikovic, calls the show, which includes a film, an open-access digital database and a timeline chronicling exploration and design on the remote southern continent, an “intriguing” one that “asks probing questions about climate change, science and global diplomacy.”

Curated by Italian architect Giulia Foscari and her non-profit research agency UNLESS, Resolutions for the Antarctic “opens up several major issues in architecture and spatial design,” Bozikovic notes, citing, among others, the creation of architecture “under the most extreme pressure” and the disassembly of buildings without leaving “ruins or waste.”

The exhibition, which runs until July 21, assembles the interdisciplinary research and design work of some 200 architects, landscape architects, artists and scientists, including Dean Juan Du, who ran the Polar Lab at the University of Hong Kong.

Located on the lower level of the Daniels Building at 1 Spadina Crescent, the Faculty’s Architecture and Design Gallery is free and open to the public from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Monday to Friday, closed on weekends.

To read the Globe and Mail review, click here.

Banner and homepage photo by Harry Choi

Between analog and digital, home workshops and design-build studios, Zachary Mollica has been using trees in all aspects of his teaching and research since joining the Daniels Faculty last year as an Emerging Architect Fellow. 

An architect, maker and educator, Mollica had previously been Warden of the Architectural Association’s woodland campus in England and founding director of the AA Wood Lab before returning home to Canada in 2022.

The two-year Emerging Architect Fellowship Award, a non-tenure appointment at the rank of Assistant Professor, was established by the Daniels Faculty to offer early-career architects an opportunity to teach in a supportive environment as well as the resources to develop focused research. 

Now entering the second year of his Fellowship, Mollica reflected recently on his first 12 months at U of T and shared what’s coming up. 

What area of research did you explore during the first year of your Emerging Architect Fellowship? 

My work this past year has been primarily concerned with trees (of all sorts), wood and building. These three have admittedly been my key focus areas for years now, but in returning home to Toronto for the inaugural Emerging Architect Fellowship at Daniels, I have taken the opportunity to study and begin to work with wood and tree pieces specifically found around the city. This has included both receiving big bits of trees from arborists and finding lots of interesting wooden furniture in need of repair or deconstruction near our school.  

I’ve also been working on a few large-scale maps and diagrams of the relations between Toronto’s trees, streets and history of landscape change. Throughout these kinds of works, I apply 3D scanning and other tools of close observation to work in reaction to specific rather than generic materials with minimal energy. 

The fellowships also involve teaching both undergraduate and graduate students. What courses did you teach and what has the experience been like? 

I had two courses in the first year. Last July, I had the opportunity to lead a two-week design-build studio in Wellington, Ontario. Joined by a crew of 12 motivated undergraduate students and a teaching assistant, Zakir Hamza, we had two weeks to sketch out, detail and construct a new gatehouse for a community-run beach. The result was a fantastic bright little yellow hut (pictured below) that unfolds to provide protection from sun and wind.  

Through the fall and winter, I then headed up the Using Trees in the City Master of Architecture research studio (@usingtrees), a third-year course that supports the development of students’ individual thesis projects over two terms.

In term one, students were led through a fast-paced series of hands-on projects during which their thesis topics emerged. Through term two, the students and I worked collaboratively on their main project, seeking out expert guidance from individuals within our diverse faculty and beyond. I was blown away by the results students achieved in our first year (shown in the slideshow below) and am looking forward to round two with a new group next year. 

Here’s what we did in short: 

• [Student] Chunying deconstructed and remade IKEA furniture to understand/expose its processes. 
• Jiashu engaged the characteristics of birch bark and traditions to propose a new cladding. 
• Jin exposed the qualities of old wood through a series of artifacts made from salvage. 
• Lulu exploited wood’s elastic properties to make temporary shelters with minimal material. 
• Pablo prototyped a tree-climbing machine to take photogrammetry scans in tree crowns. 
• Sam designed uses for the parts of conifer trees neglected by the industry. 
• Tingxu crafted staircases designed to take advantage of non-linear wood grain. 
• Xiaoyu imagined new programs for deteriorating wood barns across Ontario. 
• Xuansong studied the circular materials to be found in common Toronto house types. 
• Yi observed and engaged broadly with processes of soil erosion in the Don Valley. 
• Yinuo worked to develop long-life applications for the lowest-quality paper and wood fibre. 

Your fellowship project will ultimately be exhibited and disseminated within and beyond Daniels. Any hints on what it might look like or involve? 

My way of working is both very analog and very digital. In drawing (illustrated below), I use up a tonne of graph paper as well as straining my eyes interrogating high-resolution 3D scans of forests on a screen. In making, I use hand tools from my grandfather as well as digital fabrication equipment.

My intention for the exhibition and publication that will come out of this fellowship is to demonstrate all these methods together—and the value I see in their combination—through a series of Toronto-centric studies of landscape, trees and wood building. During the fellowship, I have set up a rather lovely home workshop tailored exactly to my range of methods (and pictured in the banner image at the top of this page) that I also have schemes to try to share an experience of with visitors to the exhibition.  

What have been some of the highlights of your time at the Faculty to date? 

There has been plenty of good this year, but a few come to mind. 

• Wrapping up last summer's design-build project at 9:00 p.m. on a Friday night on the beach with headlights pointed at the build was the right kind of way to jump into this new role. 
• In joining Daniels, I now work with colleagues who are old friends made in Halifax, Vancouver, Germany and London. And that’s a treat. 
• Our first project for the Using Trees studio, Stoop, was a special one. It saw each student tasked to find disused wood furniture on the streets, to bring these back to school and then have some fun interrogating them. 
• Participating in conversations and evening events organized by our students in groups like the FLL and AVSSU. I have been beyond impressed to find our students leading the push for critical discussions on the future of building. 

What’s on the horizon for your second year? 

Year two is exciting. For teaching, I have a design-build this summer where we are going to bring some big bits of tree to examine and create with together in the Daniels workshops. Then in the fall, I have the fun of teaching both first-year undergraduates and a second run through the research studio sequence with a new group of third-year MARC students taking on their theses. 

For research, I want to make a particular push on finishing up and making available a set of teaching resources for unusual wood design projects I have been working on. A sort of reflection on the last 10 years’ worth of unusual wood projects I have participated in, and an attempt to make these valuable to others. 

A research project exploring “the practice of perspective” in the works of 16th-century French architect Jacques Androuet du Cerceau held at the British Museum has garnered the Daniels Faculty’s Georges Farhat a Visiting Fellowship from the British Academy.

The British Academy’s Visiting Fellowships provide outstanding academics based in any country overseas (and active at any career stage and in any discipline within the humanities and the social sciences) with the opportunity to be based at a U.K. higher education or other research institution of their choice for up to six months.

Dr. Farhat, a landscape historian specializing in the history of knowledge and technology as applied to garden and landscape design, will use his Fellowship to further develop his long-standing research on built-in optical devices and topographical perspective that has previously been supported by, among others, the Académie d’Architecture de Paris, the Centre de recherche du château de Versailles, the Descartes Centre at Utrecht University, the Society of Architectural Historians, and Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C.

“This collection,” Dr. Farhat says of du Cerceau’s works in the British Museum, “is key to understanding the intertwined histories of perspective and landscape design in the West. Yet, despite growing scholarship on du Cerceau, the practice of perspective in his British Museum works remains a puzzle.”

Although du Cerceau’s oeuvre encompassed buildings, ornament, furniture and metalwork, he is largely remembered today for his detailed and often fanciful engravings of French chateaux, gardens and architectural elements. These works were influential among contemporary and later designers and even aided in garden preservation efforts in the 20th century.

For more information on Dr. Farhat’s project, entitled The Practice of Perspective in the Works of du Cerceau at the British Museum, click here. For more information on the British Academy’s Visiting Fellowships, click here.