The second design studio in the Master of Landscape Architecture sequence, Land(scape) and Memory (LAN1012), introduces concepts, terminology and design research tools for academic and professional work concerning cultural and political history, community engagement and multicultural collaborations, as well as the creation of spaces for ongoing public participation, dialogue, stewardship, shared governance and civic expression. 

For their first project, titled Memory, Healing and Cultural Resurgence: Reconstructing the Counter Monument, LAN1012 students engaged in an analytical reconstruction of case study precedents through models and written interpretations. The aim was to generate a collective vocabulary on the range of dilemmas, aesthetics, places and unfolding of counter monuments, counter ceremonies and cultural regeneration projects relative to memory, loss, healing, narratives, engagement, accountability, prospect, identity and land. 

Projects included analyses of memorials to enslaved workers and to murdered and missing Indigenous women, as well as studies of colonial impositions on land and water, of a decentralized “counter monument” in Berlin, and of the dichotomy between one monument’s intent and its reception. Completed work looked at examples of monuments and memorials from Canada and the U.S. to Germany and South Africa. 

LAN1012 is taught by Associate Professor Liat Margolis and Sessional Lecturer Terence Radford. The projects depicted in the slideshow above are detailed below.

Images 1, 2: The University of Virginia Memorial to Enslaved Laborers, by Howler Yoon, Dr. Mabel O. Wilson, Dr. Frank Dukes, Gregg Bleam Landscape Architect and Eto Otitigbe, was the focus of student Kiana Rezvani Baghae, who explored the carving and stacking of 4,000 sheets of paper, each symbolizing the records, newspaper adverts and receipts of purchase of the enslaved laborers that belonged to and built the University of Virginia.

Images 3, 4: Patrick Minardi studied Every One, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, Queer and Trans Relatives Bead Project, a traveling exhibition by Cannupa Hanska Luger. The Native Women’s Association of Canada reports that more than 4,000 individuals have been lost—a number that is staggering, anonymous and unfathomable to most.

Image 5: Claire Leverton studied the 2017 performance King Edward VII Equestrian Statue Floating Down the Don by Life of Craphead. Through a series of mappings from the 1700s to the present day, she traces a history of relentless colonial Impositions on the river and landscape.

Images 6, 7: Georgia Posno studied The Witness Blanket, a traveling art piece commemorating the survivors of the Residential School system, by Indigenous artist Carey Newman/Hayalthkin’gemeto. Over 10,000 Residential School survivors contributed to the making of The Witness Blanket, sharing their stories, gifting objects and walking through sites that held deep memory.

Images 8,9: Benjamin Dunn studied Freedom Park, a post-apartheid heritage monument in Pretoria, South Africa, by NBGM and the Office of Collaborative Architects. Dunn’s model critically analyzes the memorial’s intent to signify a reconciled and unified national consciousness relative to its actual reception.

Images 10, 11: Garry Buchan studied Places of Remembrance by Renata Stih & Frieder Schnock, a decentralized counter monument in Berlin. In this double-sided, life-size model enclosure, 80 of the 400 Nazi laws and public policies between 1933 and 1945 are listed alongside archival photos.

Images 12, 13: Suet Wing (Sylvia) Lo studied the Indigenous Cultural Markers at Humber College by Brook McIlory, led by Ryan Gorrie. Lo’s model investigates the relations of the Anishinaabemowin place names along the Carrying Place’s terrain and waterways.

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

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.

Integrated Urbanism Studio (ARC2013Y, LAN2013Y, URD1011Y) brings together architecture, landscape architecture and urban design students to work on the same assignments throughout the semester. 

The focus area for the Fall 2023 studio, coordinated by Mauricio Quirós Pacheco, Rob Wright and Roberto Damiani, was the decommissioned airfield lands at Downsview in Toronto—currently one of the most significant urban transformation opportunities in North America.     

From proposals that address ecological connectivity and food scarcity to residential typologies and aforestation techniques, following are a selection of group projects from the MARC, MLA and MUD programs. 

The Spot 

Students: Mo Bayati, Valerie Hope Haddad, Julia Dronsejko 
Program: Master of Architecture 
Instructor: Mauricio Quirós Pacheco 

“Our Downsview proposal represents a comprehensive approach to urbanism grounded in an understanding of the site’s historical evolution, current conditions and the needs of both the local community and Toronto at large. The project synthesizes four critical issues facing the city. Firstly, it addresses the imperative of retaining and expanding industrial space, acknowledging the escalating demand in Toronto.

The introduction of a central node for entertainment and events aims to create a vibrant and engaging atmosphere, enriching the cultural fabric of the area. To confront Toronto’s healthcare challenges, our proposal strategically proposes a new hospital at Downsview. Additionally, the initiative tackles food scarcity by implementing urban agriculture, utilizing advanced techniques such as hydroponics. The design encompasses industrial zones, event space, health and wellness districts, and agricultural areas.” 

Process Based Landscapes 

Students: Rebecca Martin, Zhuanghyi Peng, María Alonso Novo 
Program: Master of Landscape Architecture 
Instructors: Rob Wright, Megan Esopenko 

“Process Based Landscapes questions what public open spaces could look like if they were positioned as key nodes of social, economic and civic life. These close-up plans translate large-scale concepts into site-specific strategies through an agricultural field, an ecological corridor and a residential neighbourhood. Within each context, design strategies were aimed to create engaging landscapes that invite residents into the processes taking place on the site.” 

Social Urbanism 

Students: Shivangi Chauhan, Rajvi Modi
Program: Master of Urban Design 
Instructor: Roberto Damiani 

“Social Urbanism: A paradigm of public space justice is an urban design project situated within the environs of Downsview neighbourhood in the city of Toronto. The conceptual framework embodies a holistic ethos in urban development, prioritizing the welfare of communities through nuanced responsiveness and enhancement of the site, local context and public realm. The term ‘Social’ within this context manifests a dual significance in the realm of urban development. On one facet, it connotes notions of communal cohesion and active engagement, while on the other it conveys an engagement with fundamental societal requisites like, housing, immigration and awareness centres, etc.” 

Change of Plan: STADIA City 

Students: Nezar Alkujok, Negar Mashoof, Yegor Konechnyy
Program: Master of Architecture 
Instructor: Aziza Chaouni

“In the evolving landscape of Downsview, Change of Plan: STADIA City, inspired by the Smithsons’ 1957 Hauptstadt entry, involves a habitable bridge complex. Drawing from 1960s megastructures, the proposal unites major sectors—YorkU Village, Sheppard Avenue West, Northwood Park, Yorkdale Mall and Sobeys Stadium—via interconnected elements, including a main stadium and multi-use stadia, strategically positioned as nodes within the sky bridge. This approach reimagines the site, transforming local and national events into an ever-growing, evolutive series of spaces, both at and above ground.”

Events, Ecology, Ephemera 

Students: Matt Arnott, Anh Luu, Seth Ramesra 
Program: Master of Landscape Architecture 
Instructors: Rob Wright, Megan Esopenko 

“Through the process of exploring the site’s history, what stood out to us was the longstanding pattern of strange events and massive crowds. The site’s history of sporadic occupation has been absorbed into its identity, creating a program defined by flux. Simultaneously, ecological presence and diversity have dwindled over time as people have come to occupy the site, rendering natural cycles invisible in favour of roads and runways. This project seeks to bring inhabitants of the site closer to the natural happenings that often go overlooked, foregrounding an urbanism rooted in ecological events.” 

The Urban Rooms 

Students: Anurag Panda, Pallavi Patil, Sakshi Thorat, Wenqian Han 
Program: Master of Urban Design 
Instructor: Roberto Damiani 

“The proposed development plan aims to turn Downsview into a growth centre with public corridors and mixed-use development. The current land-use segregation only focuses on residential or employment, lacking an equitable distribution of mixed-use development. The plan includes the concept of ‘urban rooms,’ grouping houses around open spaces to create a square. The green spaces will be better connected via a green spine and a series of intimate ‘outdoor’ rooms. Mixed-use corridors of higher densities are allocated along the exterior edge, and more intimate institutional areas are kept near Downsview Park. A central amenity transforms into a sport-focused room in the proposed layout.” 

Patchwork City: Reimagining Downsview as Urban Tapestry 

Students: Lily Lu, Owen Miu, Yunjung Park, Ghazal Elmizadeh
Program: Master of Architecture  
Instructor: David Verbeek

“Patchwork City is an urban strategy that challenges conventional urban planning in Toronto. It presents an alternate approach by introducing a dynamic interplay of urban composition on the Downsview Airport site, through extracting and overlapping different urban fabrics. From bungalows to skyscrapers, these fabrics span across countries, cities and centuries, both generic and specific, built and unbuilt. Rather than playing a numbers game, Patchwork City focuses on the creation of distinct morphologies and new urban experiences that celebrate the vibrancy of Downsview and Toronto.” 

Leading with Landscape  

Students: Evlyn Sun, Georgia Sa, Tracy Ngan  
Program: Master of Landscape Architecture 
Instructors: Rob Wright, Megan Esopenko

“As the benefits of greenspaces are now increasingly evident, this project investigates what it means to design a new Downsview community by putting landscape first. The proposed plan prioritizes ecological connectivity by concentrating density around transit stations and providing pedestrian-oriented circulation throughout an extensive network of greenspaces. Rather than continuing a history of urban development fragmenting the landscape, this plan recognizes that resilient landscapes are integral to support community and urban infrastructure.” 

Aboretropolis: Re-Centering the Forest 

Students: Khadija Waheed, Richard Schutte, Lhanzi Gyaltsan 
Program: Master of Architecture 
Instructor: Christos Marcopolus 

“Before Downsview Airport—and before Toronto’s urban monoculture was constructed—there was a native maple-beech forest that thrived for thousands of years. This project proposes a hybrid Miyawake-poplar afforestation technique to partially return Downsview to its pre-settlement forest state. Responding to Toronto’s desperate needs of both housing and natural forest area, a new urban form is envisioned merging a diverse ecosystem of building typologies with non-invasive branching road networks that allow the forest to grow into urban spaces. Transit-rich building clusters maximize walkability and provide access to the amenities of the 15-minute city, compressed into a five-minute urban forest.” 

Dirty Downsview 

Students: Nicole Hekl, Linjuan Dai, Bracha Stettin 
Program: Master of Landscape Architecture 
Instructors: Rob Wright, Megan Esopenko 

“This project aims to create an urban development where the toxic legacy of Downsview’s industrial past serves as a starting point for imagining a sustainable and regenerative site for urban living and industry. The contamination of a post-industrial airfield became the impetus for creating a site-wide plan for soil remediation, green industry development and thriving urban conditions. Through careful phasing, thoughtful layering and connecting to existing ecological conditions, our plan creates waste treatment centres, housing and jobs for 60,000 people. Remediate the past, anticipate the future.” 

Reimaging the Green Spine 

Students: Yanyu Feng, Nan Liang; Diane (Doehyun) Kim, KIM, Sylph (Peizi) Yu
Program: Master of Urban Design 
Instructor: Roberto Damiani 

“The green spine is proposed to one side of the site and a secondary, pedestrian-only network within the built-form area. This allows for green connectivity through and outside of the site and [for] superblocks that are pedestrian-oriented and create flexible building opportunities for developers. The organic block pattern has allowed us to explore high-density buildings, while maintaining the green and picturesque appeal of suburban neighbourhoods.” 

Reconnecting Downsview: an argument for patchwork urbanism  

Students: Avondale Nixon, Declan Roberts, Nikki Basford 
Program: Master of Architecture 
Instructor: Jon Cummings 
 

“Reconnecting Downsview aims to integrate the neighbourhood into Toronto’s urban fabric by weaving together the once severed gridded street network. A matrix of street types was devised, placing users and circulation type on one axis, and street sizes and characteristics on the other. The resultant eight street types were distributed across the site, creating a highly connective and fine-grained urbanism. At the block scale, this interest in the human-scale spaces manifests in atypically small parcel size that encourages micro-development and a rich patchwork urbanism.” 

Auntie Urbanism 

Students: Daniel Lam, Michelle Choi, Jared Leslie 
Program: Master of Architecture 
Instructor: Karen Kubey 

“Auntie Urbanism proposes a vibrant, just future for Downsview Park in Toronto. Inspired by Vietnamese Aunties, and supporting local immigrant families, the framework centers the often-overlooked roles that women and diverse cultures play in Toronto communities. The proposal promotes economic, social, and relational exchanges that build on an existing informal network of Aunties who cook and sell international cuisines. The design explores how the site can be activated during the day and night, featuring lanterns and a night market, to stimulate the Auntie side hustle economy. By implementing variations on the Vietnamese “tube home” – a tall, narrow, intergenerational rowhouse typology with a retail ground floor – the design bridges the gap between work and personal life. We seek to cultivate not only placemaking, but place keeping.” 

Geographies of Production

Students: Gladys Lee, Aastha Saihgal, Cameron Hendey, Rubin de Jonge
Program: Master of Architecture
Instructor: Mariana Leguía Alegría

“Our proposal looks at reestablishing connections of people, agriculture, and nature within a new model of self-sustained and community living, in conjunction with revisiting accessibility and affordability on site through a lens of equity. By introducing “hub” neighborhoods that address different modes of living, our proposal presents various geographies of production at different scales, encouraging spaces to co-live, co-work, and co-exist with the site and the broader context of Toronto.” 

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.  

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.  

Visitors to the Bentway Skate Trail in downtown Toronto have had added incentive to strap on their ice skates besides the thrill of gliding across frozen water this winter: A colourful procession of “woven” light arches, known as The Gateway, has illuminated the popular winter amenity since mid-December, bringing a facsimile of the northern lights to the underbelly of the Gardiner Expressway.

Chosen after a nationwide call for project submissions, the vibrant addition to the 220-metre-long, figure-eight-shaped Trail is the brainchild of two Daniels Faculty alumni: the multidisciplinary designers Yi Zhou (MLA 2013) and Carlos Portillo (MLA 2018).

Now based in San Francisco, Zhou (pictured below at left) is an associate landscape architect at Surfacedesign, Inc. and was previously a landscape architect at CCxA in Montreal. Portillo (pictured below at right) joined CCxA in 2018 and has worked on such projects as The Ring in Montreal and Love Park in Toronto.

The design partners were on hand when The Gateway’s lights—an interweaving of green, blue, violet and magenta—were first switched on on December 16. The nightly illumination will continue until February 19, when the Skate Trail closes for the season.

“…The Expressway’s large columns come alive as visitors move beneath them, the ethereal colours mixing, mingling and dancing overhead,” says the duo’s artistic statement.

“The Gateway evokes the movement and magic of the northern lights across the sky, which are most vibrant during the dark winter months. The many strands of [interlacing] jewel-toned cords…pay tribute to the diversity of vibrant cultures and peoples that make up Toronto.”

Like several of their previous artistic projects—Zhou’s immersive Language of Plants installation has toured several locations throughout Toronto and Portillo’s award-winning work Entwine was on display at the prestigious Jardins de Métis International Garden Festival from 2019 to 2021—The Gateway fuses “art, natural phenomena, the built environment and community encounters.”

Inspired by the installation, The Bentway Studio also hosted a pair of free public workshops in January—one on weaving and the other on astronomy and the northern lights.

In addition to the designers, members of the project team included the structural engineering firm Blackwell and the fabrication studio Steel & Oak Designs.

For more information on the Bentway Skate Trail, including hours of operation and equipment-rental prices, click here.

Banner image by Brandon Ferguson

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.”

From serving as guest critics during reviews to providing mentorship to students and fundraising for scholarships, four esteemed Daniels Faculty community members have received Arbor Awards, the University of Toronto’s highest honour for volunteers, for their significant contributions to the University and the Faculty. 

“Our success is due in no small measure to the excellence of our alumni and friends, whose dedication is exemplified by our Arbor Award winners, past and present,” said President Meric Gertler at a January 16 ceremony honouring award recipients, the first in-person celebration since 2019.  

Congratulations to all awardees, including 2023 recipient Jocelyn Squires (pictured above with President Gertler), 2022 recipient Eha Mai Naylor and 2020 recipients Heather Dubbledam and Jane Welsh.

Jocelyn Squires
Master of Architecture, Daniels Faculty, 2016

Squires has consistently supported students and instructors at the Daniels Faculty for more than five years. Her contributions include volunteering as a guest critic, mentoring students, leading a faculty tour with visiting architects and participating in the Faculty’s accreditation review.

Arbor Award recipients (from left to right) Jane Welsh, Eha Mai Naylor and Heather Dubbeldam with President Gertler. 

Jane Welsh
Master of Science in Planning, Faculty of Arts & Science, 2000

Jane is a dedicated champion of the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design’s Student-Professionals Networking Event. As president of the Ontario Association of Landscape Architects, she acts as a bridge between the Faculty and the profession. 

Eha Mai Naylor
Bachelor of Landscape Architecture, 1980

For over 20 years, Naylor has generously supported the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design. Her many contributions include serving as a Faculty Council member and as a guest critic; mentoring and hiring Master of Landscape Architecture graduates; advising on governance and oversight issues; fundraising for student financial aid; and founding a scholarship. Recently, she was also named a U of T alumni governor. 

Heather Dubbeldam

Acclaimed architect Dubbeldam was pivotal in establishing the Daniels Faculty’s Student-Professionals Networking Event, which brings together graduate students and industry leaders. She also serves as a guest critic at Design Studio reviews.