Architects and urban planners have been working with residents of high rise towers built in the 1960s and 1970s in Toronto to determine how to bring life and much needed neighbourhood amenities to the empty parking lots and unused green spaces at their base.

One of the results — after a decade of research and community outreach (h/t Graeme Stewart, MArch 2007) — is a new approach to zoning dubbed Residential Apartment Commercial (RAC) — which would allow for farmers markets, restaurants, small businesses, and artist spaces, among other uses that were previously not permitted. The goal is to increase the livability of the neighbourhoods — creating places where neighbours can easily walk, meet, interact, find employment, and build community.

According to Globe and Mail architecture critic, Alex Bozikovic, “The idea is that the spaces between the towers, which belong to no one in particular, will no longer be vacant and arid.”

What would these new spaces look like? To find out, Bozikovic took a stroll around some 1970s apartment blocks in Mississauga with Associate Professor Michael Piper. An architect and urban designer, Piper has been studying the design of tower neighbourhoods with his students from the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design.

Writes Bozikovic:

We parked my car in the lot of one 28-storey white-brick tower to check out the commercial offerings – a hair salon, a convenience store – which seemed to be doing fine; in Mississauga, unlike in Toronto, they're allowed by city bylaws. Nearby, a flying-saucer-shaped medical building perched between driveways and bent pines. It was nobody's idea of a shopping paradise, but it seemed to work. "This is the sort of precedent we need to be looking towards," Piper said.

But when we tried to visit the building next door, there was no walkway – and the driveways, just a stone's throw apart, didn't connect either. This sort of dysfunctional site planning is typical. "While these buildings, in their design … aspire to have a big public space that's open to everyone, these sites are chopped up into small pieces," Piper explained. Combining driveways and parking lots makes a lot of sense, but good luck bringing together different landlords or condo boards to make it happen.

Piper warned that simply applying urban design ideas typical to downtown Toronto would not likely be successful.

"These sites are very resistant to the current formulas," he told Bozikovic. "Rather than resort to the city-centre type of urban form, we should seek to create liveable spaces that suit the people who live there rather than enforce an outside vision on them."

Visit the Globe and Mail’s website to read the full article.

Photo, top: by Jesse Colin Jackson (MArch, 2009). Jackson's Radiant City series focused on Toronto’s tower apartment neighborhoods.

Designed by Nader Tehrani and Katie Faulkner, the Daniels Faculty’s nearly finished new home at One Spadina Crescent has been receiving accolades from both members of the public (search #OneSpadina on instagram and twitter) and the media (see Architecture Critic Alex Bozikovic’s review in the Globe and Mail).

Tehrani and Faulkner are principals at firm NADAAA. And with the completion of The Daniels Building at One Spadina, the Boston-based firm will have a total of three architecture school buildings under its belt — “a feat that no one else is known to have achieved,” reports Architectural Digest. Tehrani has also designed the buildings for the architecture school at Georgia Tech and the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne.

From Architectural Digest:

Now he is preparing for the opening of the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto on a prominent site with an existing neo-Gothic building, which he incorporated into the new structure. Given that the school offers training in architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design, Tehrani made sure the building “engaged all three disciplines.” Indeed, like the other two buildings, it invites collaboration; Tehrani says that “with the withering away of architecture as a siloed practice, we need buildings that encourage interdisciplinary thinking.”

As the Dean of the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at Cooper Union in New York, Tehrani is familiar with the needs of architecture schools and can easily put himself in the place of a dean working with a designer. Close collaboration is key, he tells Architectural Digest.

At One Spadina, NADAAA collaborated with Adamson & Associates (the project’s Architect-of-record), heritage architects ERA, and landscape architects Public Work.

Visit Architectural Digest’s website to read the full article: “Nader Tehrani Is Literally Shaping the Future of Architecture.”

Photos by Nic Lehoux

Associate Professor An Te Liu is working with Daniels Alumus Graeme Stewart (MArch 2007) to brighten up Kensington Market.

Writes Dave LeBlanc for the Globe and Mail:

What do you get when you mix the following? An architect with a particular interest in “tower renewal” – the science of reskinning 1950s-1970s buildings to be more energy efficient – who also works at one of the city’s top heritage firms; a world-class sculptor who has had solo exhibitions in Berlin, Shanghai, Los Angeles and New York; a condominium board filled with artists, educators, architects, engineers, writers and other creative types; and a wall that didn’t exactly look good after some much-needed structural repairs.

You get a new gateway to Kensington Market on the east wall of the Kensington Market Lofts at 160 Baldwin St.

“This will be his biggest public piece,” said Stewart of Liu’s design. A professor in the Master of Architecture program at the Daniels Faculty, Liu has been engaged in sculpture and installation work that explores issues of funtion, occupation, and cultural coding in the domestic and urban realms since 1999. A principal at ERA Architects, Stewart was a key initiator of the Tower Renewal Project, which examines the future of Toronto’s modern tower neighbourhoods, and a founding director of the Centre for Urban Growth and Renewal.

Writes ERA on their website:

While not a tower renewal project, there are several aspects that have been informative for tower renewal endeavours. This has included:

• Detailed thinking about construction sequencing without displacing residents.
• Instituting a best practice approach to recladding of existing assemblies that takes into account long term durability, fire protection, improved insulation, and continuity of vapour barriers.
• Showing how an initially functional imperative can be leveraged to provide a design approach with additional meaning for the residents and the community.

Visit the Globe and Mail’s website to read the full article by Dave LeBlanc.

Image, top: Artist An Te Liu once painted a postwar bungalow ‘Monopoly green’ as part of the ‘Leona Drive Project’ in Willowdale, Ont.

Associate Professor Zeynep Çelik Alexander was recently featured in GSAPP Conversations – a podcast produced in partnership between ArchDaily and Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP). Alexander discusses her ongoing research on the history of modern architecture since the Enlightenment and the meaning of "Gestaltung,” the need for developing new language suitable for contemporary practice, and the role of architecture schools within the context of research universities.

“We haven’t yet developed the language with which to understand the world that we live in,” says Alexander to Columbia GSAPP student Jarrett Ley.

GSAPP Conversations is a podcast series designed to offer a window onto the expanding field of contemporary architectural practice. Each episode pivots around discussions on current projects, research, and obsessions of a diverse group of invited guests at Columbia, from both emerging and well-established practices.

Alexander recently published the book Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2017), which “offers the first major intellectual history of kinaesthetic knowing and its influence on the formation of modern art and architecture and especially modern design education.”

From the University of Chicago Press website:

Focusing in particular on Germany, and tracing the story up to the start of World War II, Alexander reveals the tension between intellectual meditation and immediate experience to be at the heart of the modern discourse of aesthetics, playing a major part in the artistic and teaching practices of numerous key figures of the period, including Heinrich Wölfflin, Hermann Obrist, August Endell, László Moholy-Nagy, and many others. Ultimately, she shows, kinaesthetic knowing did not become the foundation of the human sciences, as some of its advocates had hoped, but it did lay the groundwork—at such institutions as the Bauhaus—for modern art and architecture in the twentieth century.

It’s been a decade since Toronto’s building boom — which saw cultural institutions such as the ROM, the National Ballet School, the Toronto Film Festival, and OCAD, among others — transform the city with new works of architecture. Chief among these new buildings was the Art Gallery of Ontario, whose Frank Gehry-designed expansion was completed in 2008.

So how is the addition holding up? The Toronto Star spoke to AGO employees and local architects — including Daniels Faculty Dean Richard Sommer — about the transformation and how it came to be.
 

Writes Nick Patch:

Compared to the audacious scratch-made classics Gehry had recently turned out to worldwide acclaim — 1997’s astonishing Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, of course, or 2003’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles — he was going to be, in some ways, restrained simply based on the realities of the site.

Yet several critics now believe those limiting circumstances ultimately benefited the project.

“Gehry was doing extremely high-budget, big-gesture projects at that point in his career, and this one didn’t allow for that,” said Richard Sommer, dean of the University of Toronto’s Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design. “He’s sometimes at his best when he has to do something scrappier.”
 

Visit the Toronto Star’s website to read the full article “Frank Gehry’s gift to Toronto gets better with age.”

Professor Joanne Tod was recently profiled by U of T’s  The Bulletin Brief on her experience as an artist, her role as a teacher of new artists, and her portraits of distinguished people including Bruce Kidd, Jane Gaskell, Hal Jackman, Michael Wilson, Margaret MacMillan and Robert Prichard. Tod has exhibited her work nationally and internationally for the past thirty years; a career which began when she was 12 years old.

“In grade 7, my art teacher was the late David Cowan,” said Tod to The Bulletin, writer and editor Veronica Zaretski. “He bought several early drawings and paintings from me as well. This was undoubtedly the first affirmation, to myself and maybe even to my parents, that it might actually be feasible to pursue a career in art.”

Evolving from an early interest in Pop Art and documentary photography, Tod is widely known for her subject of social critique in the guise of high realism paintings. Between 2007 - 2011, Tod painted every Canadian soldier that fell in Afghanistan. The project, entitled Oh, Canada – A Lament, consisted of 6" x 5" portraits that were interspersed with other painted panels arranged to resemble a fragmented Canadian flag. The installation travelled to prominent galleries and museums across Canada including the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum, Toronto's Harbourfront Centre, and the Winnipeg Art Gallery.

Tod is sometimes commissioned to paint portraits of distinguished figures. Says Tod of her process:
 

Usually I will meet with the person informally first, to get to know them a little. In this way I am prepared to converse with them during the modeling session, and to glean interesting information about them as academics and as people. Hopefully, some of what I learn imbues the portrait with a greater depth of understanding. It’s important to ascertain the preferred setting for the portrait – formal or informal? Institutional or domestic? Often people will want to insert something personal, such as a memento, book, or a pet, etc. which is included in the final work. I would like to think that viewers of the portraits do actually get a sense of the personality of the subject. My goal always is to get a good likeness, and to depict the subject at his or her best.
 

Since teaching at U of T, it has been an important goal for her to support former and current students. Recently, she commissioned recent graduate Chantal Hassard (BVS 2016) to create an installation of artwork in Tod’s bathroom (pictured above).

“It’s a bit like playing the stock market, although I am not as concerned with resale value as I am in observing how certain students evolve in their careers,” says Tod. “And I do get to witness this development because I remain friends with many of them.”

Read the full article on The Bulletin Brief’s website.

A number of Daniels faculty and alumni were recently named part of “30 Canadian Architecture Firms Breaking New Ground” by Azure Magazine. The list was created to celebrate Canada Day and was the third in a series of “best and brightest” lists.

“Some of our choices are studios that are fresh out of school and have yet to complete an entire building; others have won international competitions that will see their work realized on the other side of the world,” writes Azure. “At every scale they share a drive (some might call it an obsession) for pushing architecture to the limits in terms of technology, innovation and beauty.”

Omar Gandhi Architecture founded by Omar Gandhi, a graduate of the University of Toronto’s Honours, Bachelor of Arts in Architectural Studies program (project pictured above)

“With a second office now in Toronto, the studio is bringing and adapting rural sensibilities within an urban context. Says Gandhi: “I want my aesthetic to change constantly.” Last week, the firm took home a People’s Choice AZ Award for Rabbit Snare Gore.”

Studio AC, founded by Sessional Lecturer Jennifer Kudlats and Andrew Hill

“Principals Jennifer Kudlats and Andrew Hill are alums of KPMB Architects, where they first met. Running their own studio since 2015, they are now finishing up three residential renovations that express their taste for clean lines, wide open rooms, natural wood finishes and large doses of natural light.”

Office OU, founded by Sessional Lecturer Nicolas Koff and Uros Novakovic

“Earlier this year Office OU won a major masterplan competition for Sejong City (shown). The 190,000-square-metre site has been mapped out to house administrative buildings and five national museums that sit among manicured and natural landscapes, including terraced rice fields. When completed in 2023, the project’s impact is expected to shift South Korea’s cultural focus from Seoul to Sejong.”

Hapa Collaborative, where Sarah Siegel (MArch 2006) is an Associate

“Along with Nick Milkovich Architects and Matthew Soules Architecture, Hapa is responsible for the new Vancouver Art Gallery Plaza (shown), a $9.6-million renovation of the popular 4,197-square-metre square. The project, which had a soft opening on June 22, is already adored by locals. Its most defining feature is a tricolour mosaic of asymmetric tiles. In Canadian cities public squares can be few and far between. This plaza’s dramatic upgrade gives a new face to the entire downtown core.”

Public Work, the Landscape Architects for One Spadina

“Public Work is one of the key players envisioning plans for a 400-hectare waterfront site in Toronto. Called the Port Lands, the massive project has just received a financial injection of $1.25-billion from three levels of government. It is the largest redevelopment project of its kind in the history of Toronto, and it is expected to transform the postindustrial area into new neighbourhoods and parks, while providing a necessary flood barrier.”

Polymétis, founded by Sessional Lecturer Michaela MacLeod and Nichola Croft

“When Polymétis won the Prix de Rome for Emerging Practitioners, a year-long scholarship, they used the funds to visit 20 international sites that take a design approach to reclaiming waste sites within cities. We’re excited to see how Polymétis finds ways to apply this knowledge for cultivating public spaces out of wastescapes.”

Office of Adrian Phiffer, founded by Lecturer Adrian Phiffer

“The firm makes little distinction between art and architecture. Their competition entries have ranged from imagining Guggenheim Helsinki as a giant purple barge to a winter warming hut that lends out orange blanks to keep ice skaters warm.”

JA Architecture Studio, founded by Sessional Lecturer Nima Javidi, Behnaz Assadi (MLA 2008), and Hanieh Rezaei (MUD 2004)

“Now under construction is Duple Dip, a minimalist house in Toronto’s westend that from the exterior looks like a chapel. Inside, the sparse interior connects four outdoor spaces.”

Partisans, founded by Sessional Lecturer Pooya Baktash and Lecturer Alex Josephson

“The early success of Partisans hasn’t meant they have rested on past laurels. Among other large-scale projects the studio is working on is the rebirth of Union Station, Toronto’s central rail hub. The station is now undergoing a massive expansion that will see it double in size, mostly by digging underground. The project is expected to be completed in 2018.”

Woodford Sheppard Architecture, founded by Taryn Sheppard (MArch 2010) and Christ Woodford

“A number of WS projects signal a change for the region [St. John’s in Newfoundland]. In particular is the firm’s ambitious concept for The Bridge, a building that responds to the recent expansion of Newfoundland’s offshore oil industry and the need for both housing and office space. If built, the project would provide a campus that acts as a buffer zone between industrial and residential areas.”

Public City Architecture, a merger between Peter Sampson (BArch 1999) Architecture Studio and Plain Projects Landscape Architecture

“Making winter fun is one of the PCA’s main preoccupations. Their latest social engagement effort appeared on a public ice rink in Winnipeg last winter: a giant “crokicurl” game that mixes the rules of the tabletop board game crokinole with the physical scale of a curling rink.”

For the full article, visit Azure's website.

The concrete jungle of Downtown Toronto can sometimes be an unwelcoming place for our four-legged companions, but the newly redeveloped Berczy Park offers a respite for the city’s dogs and their human allies. Designed by alumnus Claude Cormier (BLA 1986), Berczy Park will now feature hand-painted dog sculptures spitting water into a large cast-iron fountain. Surrounding the centrepiece is a diamond-grid of pink and grey granite, with new elm trees and tulips along the perimeter.

“We’re trying very hard to make this not like a mall,” Cormier told The Globe and Mail. “We are combining it with the public realm to create a very urban feeling.”

Berczy Park officially opened on June 28, and is located behind the Flatiron Gooderham Building on Church and Front Streets.

Cormier has designed other well-received public spaces in Toronto, such as the HTO Park, Sugar Beach, and his firm is currently designing “Central Park” at the Vaughan Metropolitan Centre.

“The Montreal-based designer has put his stamp on the city with parks and public spaces, such as Sugar Beach," writes Alex Bozikovic for The Globe and Mail. “They’re whimsical but rigorously planned: incorporating time-honoured principles of public space, and the history of landscape design, but also a sense of fun.”

Two years ago, Cormier participated in a short lecture and panel discussion to celebrate the 125-year-history of the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design. Titled "The Future of Creativity,” the event was one of four dialogues on the work of our faculty and alumni, and the new modes of practice that they, together with our students, hope to model and instigate. Watch the full lecture on our YouTube channel.

Photos, top: 1) Credit: Industrios Photography 2) Credit: Tom Ridout 3) View of the plaza and fountain looking west, CC+A

Between rising lake levels, routinely flooded basements, and recent memories of cars and trains stranded in flooded streets, water is on the mind of many Torontonians. With extreme weather events on the rise due to climate change, what can be done to protect our homes, roads, and parkland in the future?

“With GRIT Lab on the job, the Toronto Islands, as well as the rest of the city, may avoid a future as a swimming pool,” says the Globe and Mail’s Architourist Dave LeBlanc.

LeBlanc recently visited the Daniels Faculty’s award winning Green Roof Innovation Testing Laboratory and met with its director Liat Margolis, who told him about the lab's research, which aims to improve how we design green roofs to reap the most environmental rewards in urban environments like Toronto. In addition to aiding in water management by absorbing rainfall before it washes into our sewers and homes, green roofs provide thermal cooling, increased biodiversity, pollinator habitats, and more.

But, as Margolis says, “not all roofs are created equal.” The interdisciplinary team of researchers at the GRIT Lab are working to discover which combination of materials will have the largest impact, given the site, factors such as the height of the building, and the community's environmental goals.  Because, as LeBlanc writes, “different plants thrive under different conditions,” and because the environmental issues in one area may be different from another, there’s "no one size fits all" solution.

Writes LeBlanc:

Prof. Margolis explains that, properly designed, a green roof can retain 85 per cent to 90 per cent of rainfall during the peak of a storm. In a future Toronto with, say 50-per-cent coverage, this would deliver “a significant contribution in flood reduction.” If a green roof is closer to protected Greenbelt areas (these do dip into Scarborough), it’s better to allow more of that water to find its way back into the soil, so, in that case, give the bees wildflowers instead.
 

To help get out the message and inform best practices, the GRIT Lab works with a number of industry partners, including Tremco, bioroof systems, and Sky Solar, among others. The City of Toronto — which in 2009 became the first city in North America to adopt a green roof bylaw requiring new buildings with a gross floor area over 2,000 square metres to have a green roof — has also worked closely with the lab, providing funding and reviewing research results.

Although the Daniels Faculty has moved to its new home at One Spadina, the GRIT Lab will continue its research on the roof of Faculty’s former building at 230 College. A second site will open on the roof of One Spadina Crescent in the near future.

Visit the Globe and Mail’s website to read the full article “In search of the greenest roof.”

A grand total of 8,213 people visited One Spadina May 27 & 28 during Doors Open Toronto. The event offered the public an early look at the Daniels Faculty’s new home as it nears completion.

The site “was one of this year's popular destinations,” reported Urban Toronto. “Photographers and urban enthusiasts were drawn to the NADAAA- and Adamson Associates-designed facility for views of its juxtaposition of restored heritage and modern design.” Heritage architects ERA were responsible for the renewal of the original building, while the firm Public Work are the project’s landscape architects.

Globe and Mail architecture critic Alex Bozikovic reviewed the nearly complete Daniels Building earlier in the month, calling it "one of the best Canadian buildings of the past decade." It is "spectacular," he says, "rich with arguments about how contemporary architecture, landscape, and urbanism can work with history and build the city of the future."

The CBC was among the visitors on May 28th, interviewing Dean Richard Sommer in the third floor Graduate Design Studio for the evening news. 

Many people who participated in the weekend event were interested in the history of the building. The original cloister, designed by the firm of Smith & Gemmel for Knox College, was constructed in 1875. During World War One, it was a military hospital where Amelia Earhart volunteered at the time.

In the 1940s, One Spadina was home to Connaught Laboratories, where insulin was produced. Sandy MacPherson (pictured above, with Linda Tu) found the office where his father worked in those days. He remembered visiting him there as a child. The space is now part of the Office of the Registrar and Student Services.

Many Daniels Faculty alumni also came by for a first look of the new building, and were welcomed in an alumni lounge set up for the event. Nazila Atarodi (MUD 2008) generously volunteered her time to meet and greet graduates of the Faculty over the weekend. 

An exhibition of graduate student work was also on display throughout the building. Produced by an exhibition team that included students Brandon Bergem, Katerina Gloushenkova, and Serafima Korovina, with Faculty Advisor Assistant Professor Jeannie Kim, the exhibition showed the breadth of creative questions and research topics our students tackle to address the many design challenges we face in our shared quest to make a better world. 

Classes at One Spadina are set to start in September. The building will officially open in the fall.