Professor emeritus and former dean Larry Wayne Richards has penned a lengthy treatise on design’s digital futures in the April edition of Canadian Architect.

Entitled “What Now? Acceleration and Imagination in Digital Space,” the article in the magazine’s Insites section lays out Professor Richards’s views on “the convergence of artificial intelligence, virtual reality and robotics” in architecture, which he characterizes as “both a real danger and great opportunity” for the field.

“The digital realm and the extended realities of architecture are changing at breakneck speed,” he writes. “There is a sense of something radically different now—an accelerating cyber-avalanche, generating previously unimagined spatial complexity.”

In the piece, Professor Richards (pictured below) buttresses his analysis by weaving in interviews with three leading architects and educators: Meaghan Lloyd of Gehry Partners in Los Angeles, Douglas MacLeod of Athabasca University and Sandra Manninger of the School of Architecture and Design at the New York Institute of Technology.

In one instance, MacLeod tells Richards: “We need legislation to ensure equal access to emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence. A.I. is particularly important because, if unregulated, it will result in job losses across all disciplines, including architecture.”

“In the future,” he continues, “it will be possible for A.I. to produce a fully detailed and code-compliant building design without the need for an architect. We need to think carefully about how A.I. is deployed.”

To read Professor Richards’s article in full, click here.

Professor Richards was dean of the Daniels Faculty from 1997 to 2004. He continues to serve the Faculty as professor emeritus.

Evoking the disorientation of rapid technological change, Some Acronyms, a graphic by Richards and Julie Fish, accompanies Professor Larry Wayne Richards’s article on design's digital futures in the April 2025 issue of Canadian Architect.

Volume 1 of Scaffold* Journal, created and published by the student-run SHIFT* Collective, has been released. 

It’s the first print edition of the rebooted publication, which evolved out Shift Magazine, a previous Daniels publication.

Shift Magazine, an undergraduate risograph journal, was released nine times between 2014 and 2019. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic shut down all Shift operations until 2022, when they were revived by the members of the SHIFT* Collective. 

Since 2022, the collective has published four additional risograph zines while planning the reimagined Scaffold* Journal. Its members consist of students from across all years and programs within the Daniels undergraduate cohort.

“Our current team created Scaffold* in response to a gap that we had perceived in access to research within our academic context,” says the collective. “All of the research we had seen was perfect, it was pedestaled, and we wanted to provide a clearer path through which students could pitch themselves into the pits of scholarship.” 

Their goal with the new publication, team members add, was “a process-oriented research journal platforming the work of emerging scholars in disciplines of the built environment.” To that end, the editing team met “prolifically” with student contributors and faculty advisers “to understand their practices and our responsibility in representing them.”

Volume 1 of the journal, whose contributions include students and faculty members across programs, contains “a multitude of disparate perspectives that all fall under the constructed-environment umbrella.” According to its creators, the edition explores methodologies ranging from collage and board gaming to junk appropriation and speculative fabulation.

“Scaffold* only attempts to represent the diversity of work that goes on within disciplines of architecture, art and the built environment. Ultimately, it is a testimony to what we, as a community within the Daniels Faculty and beyond, have learned and continue to learn from each other.”

With the first print edition of Scaffold* now complete, the SHIFT* Collective is already at work on Volume 2, submissions for which “will open soon.”

Print copies of Volume 1 are currently available for purchase at Cafe 059 in the Daniels Building at 1 Spadina Crescent. A digital version can also be accessed at theshiftcollective.net.

Above: Contributors and faculty recently joined members of the SHIFT* Collective to mark the launch of Scaffold* Journal’s first print edition. Scaffold* is a new iteration of Shift Magazine, a previous Daniels publication.

The Inuusirvik Community Wellness Hub—an award-winning building designed by the practice Lateral Office, which Professor Mason White co-leads with Lola Sheppard—is featured on the cover of the June issue of Canadian Architect. 

“The building opened late last year in Iqaluit’s downtown core and was instantly beloved,” journalist Adele Weder writes in the feature article devoted to the project. “In a community that struggles with social and geographic isolation, the Wellness Hub could turn out to be the town’s most important new building in years.” 

The Wellness Hub is a compact multi-purpose community centre that brings together many services in Nunavut’s capital, such as counselling and daycare facilities, a wellness research centre, a research library, food preparation and gathering spaces.

Inspired by Indigenous vernacular structures, the building’s design was recognized with a 2023 Canadian Architect Award for the Lateral Office team, which includes sessional lecturer Kearon Roy Taylor, as well as Verne Reimer Architecture Inc. 

Professor White has long focused his architectural research on the North—among his projects have been the Canadian exhibition “Arctic Adaptations: Nunavut at 15” at the 2014 Venice Biennale, the 2017 publication Many Norths: Spatial Practice in a Polar Territory, and the ACSA Award-winning installation “Contested Circumpolar: Domestic Territories.” 

“For all their years of research, the Wellness Hub is the first completed building for Lateral Office, whose principals hold academic positions at the architecture schools at the universities of Toronto and Waterloo,” Weder writes. “Their practice has long been more focused on raising questions than chasing commissions.”  

Iqaluit is one of the fastest-growing cities in Canada and, as Weder notes, the burgeoning demand for new buildings is both an architectural opportunity and an imperative to design responsibly. 

“There is a wider conversation about circumpolar architectural typology: What is an arctic vernacular today?” says Professor White, Director of the Faculty’s Master of Urban Design and Post-Professional programs. “This building is a response to that question, but it is not the response. We’re just happy that this building can contribute to the wider conversation.” 

Read the full article online or pick up a copy of the June issue of Canadian Architect. 

All photography ©2024 Andrew Latreille. All rights reserved.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ᐊᖏᕐᕋᒧᑦ / Ruovttu Guvlui / Towards Home, the exhibition on view in the Architecture and Design Gallery until March 22, 2024, has been reviewed by The Globe and Mail. 

The newspaper’s architecture critic, Alex Bozikovic, calls the show, which was organized by and first presented at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, an “exceptionally rare thing: an Indigenous-led exhibition on architecture.”

Co-curated by Joar Nango (a Norway-based Sámi architect and artist), Taqralik Partridge (Associate Curator, Indigenous Art - Inuit Art Focus, Art Gallery of Ontario), Jocelyn Piirainen (Associate Curator, National Gallery of Canada) and Rafico Ruiz (Associate Director of Research at the CCA), the exhibition showcases installations by Indigenous designers and artists, reflecting on how Arctic Indigenous communities relate to land and create empowered, self-determined spaces of home and belonging. 

“The exhibition’s approach to architecture is loose—inevitably so. It explores the expansive ways in which Northern Indigenous people define, and strive for, a sense of home,” Bozikovic notes. He adds that “expansive ideas about place spill through the exhibition, in which the artists pose some broad questions about domesticity. That idea is inevitably complex for individuals and peoples whose homes and lives have been profoundly disrupted by the rippling effects of colonization.”

Read the full review in The Globe and Mail or view the print version here.

Banner image: Harry Choi Photography 

Two practices spearheaded by members of the Daniels Faculty—Lateral Office and Ja Architecture Studio—have been awarded 2023 Canadian Architect Awards of Merit.

A Toronto-based platform for new spatial environments, Lateral Office is co-led (with Lola Sheppard) by Professor Mason White, Director of the Faculty’s Master of Urban Design and Post-Professional programs. The practice was recognized, with Verne Reimer Architecture Inc., for the Inuusirvik Community Wellness Hub, a multipurpose community centre in Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut.

Also based in Toronto, Ja Architecture Studio was co-founded (with architect and alumnus Nima Javidi) by Assistant Professor Behnaz Assadi. Ja was recognized by Canadian Architect for The Parti Wall, a multigenerational residential project proposed for a narrow lot in downtown Toronto.

Opened officially on November 30, the ICWH (pictured above and below) unites counselling services, a daycare, a wellness research centre, a research library and food-preparation and gathering spaces in a single, 883-square-metre facility.

Characterized by lightweight materials and panelized components, “the building utilizes the practical modular building techniques necessary for the North, but introduces colour and setbacks to the massing to make a building that will stand out and welcome the community,” as architect and urban strategist Michael Heeney, one of the awards jurors, put it.

“The building section, with its clerestory central atrium, pushes the boundaries of what can be achieved in Northern public buildings.”

Architect and urbanist Claire Weisz, another juror, was equally impressed. “This building does so much with a very constrained set of design moves. It uses straightforward means to prevent environmental damage and mitigate strong winds for the users, and [it] improves local conditions for passersby. Its bright yellow ramps and entrance walls can be seen in lower light conditions, and set the stage for it to connect to other community assets in this High Arctic city.”

Ja’s winning design (pictured in slideshow below) envisions the spine shared by two adjoining residences and their respective laneway suites as an armature that works with the context of its block to draw natural light deep into the homes, incorporate a range of outdoor spaces within each property...and create interior, multi-storey “nested gardens” for the two street-facing houses.

“This exploration of space and materials,” Heeney enthused, “is just the kind of thing that is good to see in small-scale residential work.”

Fellow juror Omar Gandhi, an architect celebrated for his own housing projects, added: “It is evident that the end result is the product of a highly intensive formal investigation based on spatial relationships, access to natural light, responses to climate, and relationships to the landscape.”

In total, Canadian Architect bestowed 18 Awards of Excellence and Merit for projects around the country this year. For a full list of recipients, click here.

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. 

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

The colonial fishing villages and maritime infrastructure along the shoreline of early modern Newfoundland are the foci of an article by Assistant Professor Jason Nguyen in the international quarterly Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes.

Nguyen’s essay, titled “Encountering the Shoreline: Ecology and Infrastructure on the Early Modern Newfoundland Coast,” is part of a special issue, “Port Cities and Landscapes of the Sea,” edited by Kathleen John-Adler and Stephen H. Whiteman.

The issue also includes articles by Christy Anderson from the University of Toronto, Edward Eigen of Harvard University and Jeremy Foster of Cornell University. 

An historian of architecture, landscape and urban planning in the early modern world, Nguyen (pictured below) contends in his essay that, during the 17th and 18th centuries, the establishment of settlements and construction of seagoing vessels, preservation stations and other logistical sites at and across the littoral line supported the commercialization of the global cod market while fundamentally altering the coastal ecologies of North Atlantic waters. 

The Grand Banks of Newfoundland—the underwater plateaus that provided shallow feeding conditions for underwater life—made the sea shelf one of the richest fishing regions in the world. 

On a global scale, the commercial extraction and preservation of cod supported the expanding diet and political economy of the early modern imperial state. 

On a local scale, the construction of buildings along the shoreline intruded on the littoral ecosystem and impelled the relocation of the native Beothuk inhabitants to the island’s interior, thereby highlighting the genocidal ramifications of European coastal development. 

How, Nguyen’s article asks, might one conceptualize the logistical architecture of the Newfoundland fisheries as both a spatial node within a global network of trade as well as a material intrusion into the ecology of the North Atlantic coastline?

To read the article, click here. Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes is an open-access journal.

Banner image: Matthäus Merian’s “Richard Whitbourne and the Mermaid of St. John’s Harbour,” in Theodor de Bry’s Dreyzehender Theil Americae, 1628. The etching and engraving is in the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.