The Architecture and Design Gallery at One Spadina Crescent got some coast-to-coast exposure last night, when CBC's The National aired an interview with Daniels Faculty dean Richard Sommer about New Circadia, the art installation he co-curated with artists Natalie Fizer and Emily Stevenson.

The story, by journalist Kas Roussy, uses New Circadia's soft, cavelike environment and nap-friendly ethos as a jumping-off point for a report on the health benefits of napping during the day. Sommer is shown lounging in New Circadia while explaining how the installation has benefitted Daniels students by helping them take time away from their busy work schedules for rest and meditation.

The clip can be viewed on the CBC's website.

New Circadia is the inaugural exhibition in the Daniels Building's Architecture and Design Gallery, which had its grand opening on November 7. The gallery is open to the public from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. every day except Tuesday. (Although it will be closed from 4 p.m. on December 20 to 9 a.m. on January 7 for the winter break.) Admission to New Circadia is free of charge.

The National appearance is only the latest of a number of a prominent press mentions for New Circadia. Catch up with the rest of the coverage below:

• The Globe and Mail - "At the University of Toronto's New Circadia exhibition, architects imagine a world with room to rest"
• CBC Spark - "Walden, revisited"
• Toronto Life - "Inside New Circadia, a nap-friendly felt cave at U of T"
• Archinect - "A 'soft utopia' takes shape in University of Toronto's experimental gallery"
• The Spaces - "The University of Toronto’s new gallery lets you do a ‘digital detox’ on your lunch break"

Photograph of New Circadia on opening night by Harry Choi

Above: Daniels students in Fadi Masoud's 2017 option studio explore a Mangrove park in South Florida

When Hurricane Dorian collided with the Bahamas, the resulting devastation was a reminder that the world's weather patterns are growing less and less hospitable to coastal communities. Fadi Masoud, an assistant professor at Daniels whose research deals with the impacts of climate change on urban development, spent last week doing multiple interviews with the CBC about some of the ways in which better urban design may help mitigate future natural disasters.

“Obviously we cannot rebuild what was there before,” Masoud told the CBC’s Radio Canada International. “There’s an opportunity for us to restore, enhance, and protect natural defence systems that were there before, such as mangroves, wetlands, marshes and dunes. All of these act as a kind of sponge. They’re the first line of defence.”

“Many have unfortunately been replaced by marinas and seawalls—hard surfaces, which end up increasing the vulnerabilities of the communities behind them.”

One alternative, Masoud said, would be for communities around the world to cultivate greenspace as a defence against flooding, much like Toronto has done with Corktown Common, a flood protection landform that doubles as a public park.

Listen to Masoud’s full Radio Canada International interview here.

Daniels Faculty Lecturer Alex Josephson and his partners in PARTISANS, an architecture and design firm based in Toronto, have partnered with firms RWDI and Maffeis Engineering, as well as Sidewalk Labs, to help create a new “smart awning” design, an experimental new exterior application of EFTE which they hope will create more useable outdoor space in cities with varied climates. Designed through extensive modelling and examination of local weather data, this is the first project in Ontario to utilize EFTE, a material chosen for it’s portability and utility in creating unique forms. PARTISANS says that their deployable “building raincoat” could potentially help to reduce then impact of extreme climate and help create more useable outdoor space in less than ideal weather conditions.

These systems can be attached to existing building exteriors, helping to address the perennial weather problems that impact Toronto. These units are designed to be installed on the exteriors of building entrances, and aim to help create a more comfortable transition from indoor to outdoor space. EFTE as a material is completely recyclable and can be customized to incorporate different patterns that affect light and overall opacity, meaning that this system can be used in a range of different applications and environments.

Josephson, speaking with Sidewalk Talk, said that the team was able to utilize computer modeling throughout the process to  find the best approach. “This is real experimentation where the scientific method meets design,” Josephson said (via Sidewalk Talk).

PARTISANS further describes their prototype tensile structure project in their press release:

Even when the conditions are right to promote vibrant street life, the weather plays a big role in determining how much time people spend outdoors. And while the seasons drive the character of public life in Toronto—from summer days spent on patios, to fall farmer’s markets across the city—it is no secret that outdoor activity is concentrated to the six-month period from late April through October, when the weather is pleasant. For centuries, cities have used architecture to moderate the weather and keep public life active on the street. In the late 1800s, Toronto was filled with a maze of awnings that extended from storefronts and glass arcades to cover alleyways; and many streets throughout the city are still lined with the porched homes that were once a hallmark of Toronto’s residential design.

In Spring 2018, PARTISANS was tasked with helping Sidewalk Labs answer the following question: how does one design an outdoor public space that is comfortable for Torontonians year-round? Toronto is famous for our snowy winters and incredibly humid summers, with temperatures ranging across a 70°F differential throughout the year. While we traditionally think of extreme weather as native to desert, arctic, and ocean climates, Toronto—is located on the edge of Lake Ontario—is an environment where it is only comfortable to be outside for approximately 30% of the year. PARTISANS and RWDI closely studied the wind and solar conditions of Sidewalk Lab’s lakeside headquarters 307 to develop the optimal shape and material design to increase outdoor comfort. The result is a Raincoat that reinterprets Toronto’s formal tradition of awnings and porches through the contemporary lens of responsive weather mitigation.

The project is currently viewable at Sidewalk Lab’s lakeside headquarters 307. Read more about the building raincoat in Archpaper and Archdaily.

A new temporary public art installation by Assistant Professor Victor Perez-Amado and third year Master of Architecture students John Nguyen, Anton Skorishchenko, Abubaker Bajaman, and Stephen Baik is drawing large crowds to Toronto’s Woodbine Beach.

Part of the Winter Stations exhibition, now in its 5^th year, the project is one of six installations enticing visitors to explore the city’s waterfront in the winter.

Four of the installations were selected via an international design competition and two were created by invited post-secondary institutions. The group from the Daniels Faculty was among the international competition winners, which included teams from the United States, Mexico, and Poland.

The theme of this year’s exhibition was migration. Cavalcade — the Daniels Faculty team's winning design — depicts brightly coloured silhouettes of migrants on a journey to a better life. Visitors may walk around them, their footprints converging in the sand and snow. At the centre of the installation is a mirror where one may view their reflection and see themselves as part of the collective.

Video and photos above courtesy of the Cavalcade team

"Cavalcade is an installation that reflects the collective spirit of human movement and transversal," wrote the Daniels Faculty team about their installation. "Not just in the contemporary political sense of global migration, but in the consensus that the human quest for a better life is one that is timeless and universal.”

Mayor John Tory visited the installations on the opening day, February 18, and was on hand to view presentations by each team February 13 at Rorschach Brewery.

Woggle Jungle photo by Yasmin Al-Samarrai; Obscura photo courtesy of Ontario Place

In their presentation, Perez-Amado and Skorishchenko, representing the Daniels Faculty team, shared other public art installations they created in Toronto that helped inform their approach, including Woggle Jungle, Obscura (pictured, respectively, above), and most recently a modular 3D printed design now on display at Autodesk’s Toronto headquarters.

Open to the public, the Winter Stations exhibition runs until April 1.

Read media coverage of the Winter Stations exhibition, via CBC News, and Now magazine.

The Daniels Building at One Spadina was recently honoured as a finalist for Building of the Year as part of the 2018 AN Best Design Awards.  These awards, now in their sixth year, are a unique project-based awards program that showcases great buildings, building elements, interiors, and installations. Additionally, The Architects Newspaper (AN) panel awarded the Daniels Faculty the top honours in the education category, alongside notable buildings from UCSB and Carnegie Mellon University.

In their announcement of the winners, AN’s William Menking and Matt Shawn said that the final decision was a close one:
 

For our Building of the Year award, our esteemed jury was fiercely divided between two exemplary but very different projects. The final debate came down to SCHAUM/SHIEH’s Transart Foundation—a private gallery across from the Menil campus in Houston—and NADAAA’s Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto. SCHAUM/SHIEH’s relatively small but mighty building employs punched-through balconies and a blurred program to utilize the space to maximum effect. Meanwhile, NADAAA’s extension and renovation of a 19th-century neo-Gothic building includes dramatic, complex lunettes that let in Aalto-esque light. In the end, the jury chose the scrappy Houston project, but the decision really could have gone either way.
 

The John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design celebrated the official opening of One Spadina on November 17, 2017. Designed by Nader Tehrani and Katherine Faulkner, principals of the internationally acclaimed firm NADAAA — in collaboration with Architect-of-record Adamson & Associates, landscape architects Public Work, and heritage architects ERA — the revitalized One Spadina is an urban design exemplar and catalyst for the transformation of U of T’s western edge on the Spadina corridor. The Daniels Building at One Spadina is a showcase for the city and the University, and a world-leading venue for studying, conducting research, and advocating for architecture, landscape, and sustainable urbanization.

Learn more about the One Spadina project

A pair of Daniels Faculty alumni recently received an honorable mention from Eleven Magazine’s “Shaking Up Havana’s Malecon” design competition.

The competition posed a unique challenge: to re-imagine Cuba’s iconic Malecon esplanade road, which runs alongside Havana for five miles, serving as both a key piece of traffic infrastructure and vital defense against flooding.

Participants were required to consider the following priorities in their proposals: “protection in the form of a renewed sea defence, engagement in the form of new cultural social spaces along the Malecon, and identity in the form of resurrecting an old icon back to life and defining a new beginning for Havana in the 21st century.”

Master of Landscape Architecture graduates Xiru Chen (MLA 2012) and Stella Yuan Lin (MLA 2014) received an honourable mention for their submission “Malecon Rhapsody”.

The team explains their innovative and naturalistic approach to the challenge in the project summary: The MALECÓN RHAPSODY addresses Havana’s vulnerability to coastal flooding with a protective ribbon along Malecón. The 8 km-long landscape infrastructure incorporates public space with the storm and wave surge defense systems. This also creates architectural elements, amenities, energy generation stations, and food production hubs that provide the locally needed cultural, recreational, and socio-economic benefits.

Xiru Chen says that their interest in the project resulted from a meaningful trip to visit Cuba. “We were both fascinated by the colorful landscape, passionate culture and complex history of Cuba,” she explains. “The scope of the competition, to create a renewed sea defence, and act as new cultural social spaces, is also very attractive to us.”

She further explains that the process of working on the project helped them to recall the broader thinking learned during their time at Daniels. “This process reminded us of the days when we spent late nights in school working on studio projects,” says Chen. “We both graduated years ago, and the fast pace of real practices rarely allows for deep design thinking. Working on the competition has reminded us of the essentiality of critical thinking in the design process. This award encourages us to remain curious and keep learning.”