Why study architecture?

Architecture is about more than designing buildings, "it is also a systematic way of thinking," says Dean Richard Sommer.

Dean Sommer spoke to Greg Hemmings and Dave Veale, hosts of the business podcast The Boiling Point, about the "broad lateral thinking that comes with training or schooling in architecture," and how it prepares students not just to be architects and designers, but effective business leaders, problem solvers, and entrepreneurs.

He cites graduates from the Daniels Faculty who have developed successful careers in healthcare, transit planning, branding and fashion, real estate, and the food business, just to name a few. (Hailed Coffee, pictured above, was started by alumnus Salim Bamakhrama, MArch 2010).

"Architecture requires a joined up way of thinking," explained Dean Sommer, who argued that many of the challenges we now face require the expertise of not just one discipline, but many.  An architect brings different perspectives together and is able to consider diverse and competing forces, he says —  few fields force you to think that laterally.

Click hear for a link to the full interview.

A group of undergraduate students and recent graduates from the Daniels Faculty working under the name MaW Studio (@StudioMaW) have designed their first built project: The Coffee Lab.

Situated inside a two-square-meter former window display forming part of 141 Spadina Avenue in Toronto, the tiny café serves customers through a window that opens up to the sidewalk. Vestiges of a former Mama's Pizza sign provide a lit arrow pointing to the Lab.

The coffee shop could be the smallest in the world — its owner, Joshua Campos, is currently seeking certification from Guinness. According to Christopher Hume in the Toronto Star, the new café is "an excellent example of how even the tiniest spaces can be used creatively in a city like Toronto." The project has also been profiled in NOW.

The Coffee Lab project is MaW Studio's first commission. "The project exploits and augments the dissociation between container (window display), sign (Mamma's Pizza sign), and program (coffee shop), by producing a design that breaks the café itself down into smaller and more complex dislocations," writes the collective.

On the north wall, a classicized ornamentation begins at counter height and folds onto the ceiling. At times it resembles a standardized molding, while at others it morphs into a forced perspective. On the exterior wall, the logo of the coffee shop — a golden baroque frame — transcends its print format to become a three-dimensional object.
 

Originated in response to The Coffee Lab project, its first commission, MaW Studio's collaborative practice is interested in methods of dislocation. Differing from the stylistic trend of architectural Postmodernism that emerged in the last century — while still inescapably rooted in a Postmodern condition — the Studio's aim is to activate the often dormant political capabilities of surfaces and spaces through a constructed out-of-placeness. MaW Studio's conceptual  toolbox borrows from gestalt psychology, phenomenology, film theory, and Mannerism.

PROJECT: The Coffee Lab
LOCATION: 141 Spadina Avenue, Toronto, Canada
YEAR: 2018
CONCEPT/DESIGN: Sebastian Lopez Cardozo
VISUALIZATION: Neil Xavier Vas
PROJECT MANAGER: Daniel Lewycky
DESIGN/FABRICATION/INSTALLATION:
Adriana Sadun
Kian Hosseinnia
Neil Xavier Vas
Sebastian Lopez Cardozo
CLIENT: Joshua Campos, o/a "The Coffee Lab"

About MaW Studio:

Adriana Sadun completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Toronto with a double major in architecture design and visual studies. Currently, she is a Master of Landscape Architecture candidate at the Daniels Faculty. Adriana worked as a Digital Manager for SHIFT Magazine, the undergraduate publication at U of T architecture and online blog for the Daniels Faculty. She has also participated in different design projects and competitions, including Deconstruct, the winning proposal for the TEDxUofT Installation Design Competition for the 2018 conference that took place at the St. Lawrence Centre for the Performing Arts in Toronto. Adriana's interest focuses on reconfiguring our understanding of art and architecture through the exchange of a broad spectrum of disciplines, from visual arts and photography to digital fabrication and urban studies.

Daniel Lewycky is a Toronto-based designer whose interests lie in the intersections between architectural processes and at points of dimensional translation. When not designing, building or running clientside relations for MaW, he can be found playing venues as the frontman for the local baqnd Dorval, editing ARTIFIZI, producing ARTIFIZI Video, and making a mean stovetop Latté.

Kian Hosseinnia is a fourth year undergraduate student studying architecture and philosophy at the University of Toronto. Along with his studies, Kian has collaborated with a number of students and professionals on a number of built and research projects. The built projects include Float, an outdoor interactive project built in the summer of 2015 with Situate | Design | Build at 401 Richmond, Toronto; and Aperture, the winning proposal for the building of a temporary parklet for Café Mosaic in Edmonton, Alberta in the summer of 2017. Kian has also participated in the research for Professor Stephen Verderber's book Innovations in Behavioral Health Architecture. Kian's own research intersts lie at the intersection fo philosophical argumentation and architecture theory, where he is currently researching and writing about contemporary philosophy and architecture with Professor Matthew Allen.

Neil Xavier Vas is a young designer and visualization artists from Toronto, earning a Bachelor's degree in Architecture from the University of Toronto in 2017. Neil has taken the helm of architectural knowledge and pursued it throughout various educational and professional outlets. One of his many achievements was to co-author a competition entry, "House for Bowie," which received an honourable metion from and was displayed at the Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urbanism in Bucharest, Romania. Neil now practices as an architectural designer through various outlets, honing a passional specialty in architectural visualization. He is set to continue his education in architecture at the University of Toronto in the fall of 2018 and seeks to be an architect, in time.

Sebastián López Cardozo is the founder and editor-in-chief of ARTIFIZI (@artifizi),  editor at Dialogos Journal for Social Justice, and a research assistant for Mary Louise Lobsinger. His editorial work has taken him to the offices of Greg Lynn, Andrew Kovacs, and Bureau Spectacular, in Los Angeles, where he conducted his first interviews for the publication. He is currently working on the re-launch of his digital publication, and is collaboratind with Johannesburg scholar Sumayya Vally for the release of ARTIFIZI's very first print issue, to be release on January 5th. Most recently, he worked for Partisans Architecture, where he became involved in an exhibition in collaboration with Storefront for Art and Architecture and EDIT.

The Daniels Faculty's Green Roof Innovation Testing Laboratory (GRIT Lab) was featured in a Toronto Star article on the role that green roofs can play in mitigating urban heat island effect, a phenomenon that makes cities hotter as concrete and asphalt absorb and radiate the sun's heat.

Writer Joseph Hall toured the new green roof laboratory on the roof of 1 Spadina Crescent with Associate Professor Robert Wright, director of the Centre for Landscape Research and current Dean of U of T's Faculty of Forestry. The nearly completed facility at 1 Spadina Crescent is the GRIT Lab's second site, and an expansion of its original experimental laboratory on the roof of 230 College Street, which was constructed in 2010.

Writes Hall:

While [the GRIT Lab at 1 Spadina Crescent] will look specifically at the use of cistern-stored rainwater as a viable irrigation source for the rooftop arrays, it will also continue its predecessor’s search for ideal plant and soil combinations and investigations into the gardens’ potential to alter outdoor temperatures, moderate storm runoffs, save energy and attract pollinators.

“Every (flat) rooftop in Toronto faces south so they get maximum radiation up there,” says Wright, also dean of forestry at the school. “So whatever we can do to make more reflective surfaces or put vegetation up there will cool the environment around them.”

Work at the College St. lab showed that temperatures at the green roof’s surface were about two degrees lower than the ambient air in summertime — a dip largely caused by the plants’ release of water vapour into the air through a process known as evapotranspiration.
 

Associate Professor Liat Margolis — director of the GRIT Lab and director of the Daniel's Faculty's Master of Landscape Architecture program — was also featured in the story, comparing the temperature difference between the surfaces of a typical dark roof and those that have been outfitted with plantings:

On bright, hot days those sun-absorbing and often vast rooftops would be about 10 C hotter than their green counterparts, says Liat Margolis, a U of T landscape architect who heads the GRIT Lab projects.

Those black-top roofs, Margolis says, are major contributors to the heat-island, micro-climate effects that broil many parts of the city in summertime.

But since introducing a bylaw in 2009 mandating green roofs be installed on all new developments with floor areas greater than 2,000 square metres, Toronto now leads the continent in their deployment.
 

The GRIT Lab is a state-of-the-art facility — and the only one of its kind testing the environmental performance associated with green roofs, green walls and solar photovoltaic technologies in Canada.

For more information on the GRIT Lab, visit the Daniels Faculty's website.

Click here to read the Toronto Star's story: "The height of cool: Battling the heat from U of T’s experimental green roof."

On May 30, Toronto Life, together with Bosley Real Estate and Mizrahi Developments, hosted the "Toronto Tomorrow real estate summit." Dean Richard Sommer was one of five featured speakers to address the question of how Toronto's built environment may evolve to accommodate a growing population in the coming years.

Sommer was joined by four panelists: Sam Mizrahi, president and founder of Mizrahi Developments; Realtor David Fleming; Alexandra Dagg, Airbnb’s public policy manager for Canada; and Architect Guela Solow-Ruda, principal of the firm ARK.

Following the event, Toronto Life published "Five things we learned at the Toronto Tomorrow real estate summit:"

Richard M. Sommer, dean of the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design at U of T, closed out the evening with an appeal to city planners: develop a bigger, bolder vision for Toronto’s growth than the case-by-case development deals that currently determine what gets built. “Incrementalism in the absence of vision replicates the status quo and breeds mediocrity,” Sommer said. “A great and growing metropolis like Toronto … must see itself as more than just an amalgamation of districts, neighbourhoods and developments.”
 

Visit Toronto Life's website to read the full article and view photos from the event.

Unceded: Voices of the Land — Canada's exhibition at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale — is the country's first Indigenous-led entry in architecture's most prestigious international festival. Presented by acclaimed architect Douglas Cardinal, with co-curators Gerald McMaster and David Fortin, the exhibition presents the work of 18 Indigenous architects from across Turtle Island (Canada and the United States).

In addition to highlighting and celebrating the contributions of Indigenous designers in the field, the exhibition underlines the important role of Indigenous architects in shaping the country's future.

“I firmly believe that the Indigenous worldview, which has always sought this balance between nature, culture and technology, is the path that humanity must rediscover and adopt for our future," said Cardinal in the Canada Council for the Arts' media release. "The teachings of the Elders are not the teachings of the past. They are the teachings of the future.”

As Murray Whyte reports in the Toronto Star, "the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada lists only 12 members who identify as Indigenous," but that could change, writes fellow Star columnist Shawn Micallef, “if educators and funding entities worked to attract youth to the profession using all the resources available and let them know they won’t be alone.”

Perhaps with the future in mind, Unceded curators enlisted James Bird, who will be starting his Master of Architecture degree at the Daniels Faculty this fall, to help coordinate a group of Indigenous architecture students from across Canada, including Daniels Student Katari Lucier-Laboucan. The university students will act as cultural ambassadors, offering tours, providing translations, and answering visitor questions at the exhibition over the course of its run.

A knowledge keeper from the Nehiyawak nation and Dene Nation, Bird, who recently completed his Bachelor of Arts in Indigenous Studies and Renaissance Studies at U of T, decided to pursue his undergraduate degree followed by a master’s in architecture after nearly 30 years as a carpenter, journeyman, and cabinet maker. He is also a member of the RAIC’s Indigenous task force, launched in June 2016 to seek “ways to foster and promote Indigenous design in Canada.”

For more information on the Canadian exhibition at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, visit www.unceded.ca, and read Elizabeth Dowdeswell’s article “Celebrating Indigenous people through their architectural vision,” in the Toronto Star.

This week (May 7-12), the Daniels Faculty is hosting Smartgeometry — a biennial workshop and conference that investigates how digital tools and computation can serve architecture and design. Attracting a global community of innovators in the fields of architecture, design, science, engineering, and science, this year's events will explore the relationship between architecture and AI.

Globe and Mail architecture critic Alex Bozikovic wrote about some of the novels ways that computation and new fabrication technologies are altering the how architects design spaces in a recent article (now available to subscribers online). His piece features The Living, a New York studio among the pioneers in the field of generative design.

Bozikovic also spoke to Assistant Professor Brady Peters, a director at Smartgeometry who helped organize this year's workshops and conference at the Daniels Faculty:
 

"Smart geometry is not just about computation,” Daniels assistant professor Brady Peters says, “but increasingly about fabrication – the relationship of the design process to the fabrication and construction process.”

Peters, a long-time participant in the biennial event, speaks from experience. While working at Foster & Partners in London, he participated in the design of complex structures – including the glass-and-metal roof of a courtyard at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, which appears to ripple like a sail.

Making such forms has been the most visible application of software in architecture, and 20 years ago, it meant serious technical challenges. Frank Gehry’s office was able to design his famous Guggenheim Bilbao by customizing software intended for aircraft production.

At this point, “the software problem has gotten solved,” Peters says. “The tools” – software including Grasshopper and Rhino – are widely available, and they allow users to “design a series of relationships between geometric forms that then combine into architecture.”

The question, then: Where can tech take us? At this year’s Smartgeometry – which begins with a five-day workshop, “a chance for people in practice to get together, geek out and develop new technology” – the territory is artificial intelligence. One possible application: tracking and interpreting data from building sensors that reveal how a build performs. “Now, it’s about energy being measured on an hourly basis or minute-by-minute basis – and that can serve as part of the design of new buildings,” Peters says. “This is research that hasn’t yet been done in architecture – a real living lab, and seeing how building can evolve.”
 

Tickets for the Smartgeometry conference are available online via eventbrite. A list of speakers and the schedule can be viewed on the Smartgeometry website.

Associate Professor Liat Margolis, director of the Daniels Faculty's Master of Landscape Architecture program and assistant dean of research, published an article in the most recent issue of Canadian Architect magazine on the Faculty's award-winning Green Roof Innovation Testing Laboratory.

Green roofs "are a favourite among designers, policymakers and citizens not only because of this ecological multi-tasking, but also because they transform a vast and underused layer of the city—the roof scape—into a thing of beauty," writes Margolis, but they also perform important functions, such as aid in stormwater management and thermal cooling, and provide a habitat for bees.

Toronto was the first city in North America to create a bylaw that requires the construction of green roofs on new developments. At present, buildings with a Gross Floor Area greater than 2,000 square metres must include a green roof. But as Margolis explains "there are so many different types of green roof products, materials, configurations and dimensions," and a plant's performance may vary based on the climate and conditions in which is it grown. So how do you determine which types of green roofs will reap the most benefits?

Research is ongoing, with a second site of the GRIT Lab now being constructed on the room of the Daniels Building at One Spadina Crescent, but the GRIT Lab's multidisciplinary team of researchers are already collecting results. Visit Canadian Architect's website to read about some of the conclusions and learn more about the GRIT Lab's work.

Daniels Faculty lecturer Katy Chey will be speaking about her new book Multi-Unit Housing in Urban Cities: From 1800 to Present Day at the California College of the Arts on February 19th. Her talk is part of the lecture and panel discussion "Housing the Multitude." Sarina Kennerly of Kennedy Architecture & Planning, and Matthew G. Lasner, of Hunter College, CUNY will be joining her on stage to discuss the relationship bewteen urban development and the production of new housing typologies.

Chey's new book was also recently announced on ArchDaily. Click here to read the full article.

Multi-Unit Housing in Urban Cities is available in-stores at the U of T Bookstore, Swipe Books + Design, Type Books on Queen Street, and Indigo in the Eaton Centre, and other major online retailers.

"Every family is different. Why are so many family homes the same?" asks Alex Bozikovic, architecture critic for The Globe and Mail.

He explores the answer to this question in a recent article that spotlights a multigenerational home in Ancaster near Hamilton, designed by Associate Professor Shane Williamson and Besty Williamson, principals of Williamson Williamson Architects. This isn't the first multigenerational home that the firm has built. Their Grange Triple Double house, designed for a three-generational family, has won multiple awards.

Williamson Williamson Architects' House on Ancaster Creek "provides the suburban virtues of privacy and comfort, while making room for the elders of a family to live and age in place," writes Bozikovic. "This model of domesticity scrambles the very ideas on which the suburbs were built, to beautiful results."
 

"Property values are so high that it's becoming an easy decision to consolidate multigenerational family resources under one roof," Shane Williamson says.
...

"Multigenerational living is not so intrinsic to our North American culture as it is elsewhere," he adds. "But given the diversity of our society," he argues, "it's coming." Part of that involves the arrival of new Canadians who bring a cultural norm of multigenerational living; Binh, the homeowner in Ancaster, is of Vietnamese descent. South Asian families have likewise brought this practice with them to the Toronto suburbs.
 

Visit The Globe and Mail to read the full article.