Linn Runeson and Eric Reid of the landscape architecture and urbanism studio edit will deliver a guest talk at the Daniels Faculty on Thursday, October 5. 

The pair co-founded edit, which is based in Oslo, Norway, in 2018. At the heart of the practice is a profound desire to make landscape an essential part of creating meaningful and sustainable habitats for all living beings.

The title of their Thursday lecture, which will take place from 1:00 to 2:00 p.m. in Room 330 of the Daniels Building, is “In the making.”

Runeson and Reid often collaborate with architects, engineers, artists and researchers, among other specialists, on complex urban landscapes. They are currently engaged in a diverse range of projects, from the planning and design of gardens and public spaces to larger-scale territorial strategies.

Part of this semester’s Integrated Urbanism Studio, the lecture is open to all.

Exploring design’s agency in dealing with such complex subjects as the climate crisis, decarbonization, housing and spatial justice, the Integrated Urbanism Studio fosters interdisciplinary collaboration by requiring the Faculty’s architecture, landscape architecture and urban design students to work together on shared projects.

This lecture is the second of several guest talks slated this term for the Studio.

The John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto is pleased to present its Fall 2023 Public Program.

Our Program this semester addresses a range of pertinent issues concerning the natural and built environments, continuing the Faculty’s tradition of fostering dialogue and exchanging knowledge through a curated series of exhibitions, lectures, book talks, panel discussions and symposia. 

Through these events, we aim to engage our local and international communities on the important social, political and environmental challenges confronting our disciplines and the world today.  Topics addressed include design and social justice, urbanization and housing, art and media, and ecology and landscape resilience.  

All of the events in our Program are free and open to the public. Register in advance and consult the calendar for up-to-date details at daniels.utoronto.ca/events.  All events will be livestreamed and available to view on the Daniels Faculty's YouTube channel. 

September 21, 6:30 p.m. ET  
Architecture Rooted in Place
Featuring Nzinga B. Mboup (WOROFILA)

Register

September 28, 6:30 p.m. ET 
The Architecture of Disability
Featuring David Gissen (Parsons School of Design, The New School)

Register

October 4, 5:30 p.m. ET
Exhibition Opening—Le Corbusier: Models
A travelling exhibition of models of Le Corbusier works from the private collection of Singapore-based RT+Q Architects

Register

October 12, 6:30 p.m. ET  
Detroit-Moscow-Detroit: An Event in Honour of Jean-Louis Cohen
Featuring Claire Zimmerman (Daniels Faculty, University of Toronto) and Christina E. Crawford (Art History Department, Emory University)

Register

October 19, 6:30 p.m. ET 
George Baird Lecture: Evolving Influence
Featuring Bruce Kuwabara  (KPMB Architects)

Register

October 25, 5:30 p.m. ET
Exhibition Opening—ᐊᖏᕐᕋᒧᑦ / Ruovttu Guvlui / Towards Home
An Indigenous-led exhibition and publication project organized by the Canadian Centre for Architecture with the Daniels Faculty

Register

November 2, 6:30 p.m. ET
Technical Lands: A Critical Primer
Featuring Charles Waldheim (Graduate School of Design, Harvard University)

Register

November 21, 6:30 p.m. ET
Media Art’s Future, Present, and Past: Notes from the Field
Featuring Tina Rivers Ryan (Buffalo AKG Art Museum)

Register

November 23, 6:30 p.m. ET
On Relationality in Housing and Design
Featuring David Fortin (School of Architecture, University of Waterloo)

Register

November 30, 6:30 p.m. ET
Landscape Strategies for a Fire-Prone Planet
Featuring Jonah Susskind (SWA Group)

Register

As National Indigenous History Month 2023 comes to a close, the Daniels Faculty is proud to announce an initiative that also looks to the future: the establishment of the Nelda Rodger Indigenous Student Award in Architecture and Design, an endowed award intended to support the recruitment of First Nations, Métis and Inuit students interested in those fields.  

Historically, Indigenous groups have been underrepresented in architectural education and consequently in the profession and practice of architecture. Of the more than 7,000 registered architects in Canada last year, only about 20 were First Nations or Métis, according to a 2022 report in The Globe and Mail.  

“The Faculty is thrilled to introduce this award as part of its ongoing efforts to enhance Indigenous representation both at the Daniels Faculty and in the design professions,” says Dean Juan Du. “As co-founder of Azure Media and editor-in-chief of Azure magazine, Nelda Rodger was a long-time advocate for contemporary architecture and design and for inclusivity and community in the design professions. We are grateful to her husband and partner, Azure Media CEO Sergio Sgaramella, for endowing this award in her honour.” 

Based in Toronto, Rodger (pictured below) served as editor-in-chief of Azure, the internationally respected architecture and design publication, for nearly three decades, from 1985 (the year that she and Sgaramella co-founded it) to 2013. In addition to spearheading the magazine, she was instrumental in launching the annual AZ Awards, which recognize worldwide excellence in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, product design and other related disciplines. Rodger passed away after a long illness in January of this year. 

“Nelda and I both wanted to establish a way of helping young Indigenous students access higher education, something to which we understood many face barriers,” Sgaramella says. “In collaboration with the Daniels Faculty, we have established this bursary to recognize and assist qualifying Indigenous students pursuing degrees in architecture—the first initiative of this kind at U of T.” 

Preference for the new award will be given to full-time undergraduate students in the Faculty’s Architectural Studies program, although graduate students in the Master of Architecture program will also be considered. 

The award is a renewable one, meaning that recipients continue to receive it in subsequent years of enrolment, providing that they continue to demonstrate financial need. 

Amos Key Jr., one of the three members of the Daniels Faculty’s First Peoples Leadership Advisory Group, welcomed the award, noting the importance of now spreading the word about it among Indigenous high schoolers in Ontario and the rest of Canada. 

“I don’t think [a career in architecture] is necessarily on their radar,” elaborates Key, a member of the Mohawk Nation and a leading figure in the ongoing language revitalization movement among First Nations people in Canada. “This is a good start.” 

Contributions to the Nelda Rodger Indigenous Student Award in Architecture and Design, to be granted for the first time in 2024, may be made by clicking here. For more details, contact Stacey Charles at 416-978-4340 or stacey.charles@daniels.utoronto.ca.  

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 Daniels Building at 1 Spadina Crescent will be open for self-guided tours as part of the 2023 Doors Open Toronto program this weekend.

More than 140 buildings and sites are on the roster of this year’s instalment of the popular annual event, which sees normally inaccessible local landmarks throw their doors open to the public.

The Daniels Building will be open to visitors from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. on both Saturday, May 27 and Sunday, May 28. Last admittance on each day is at 4:30 p.m.

In addition to taking in the architectural splendours of the revitalized 1 Spadina hub, participants have three on-site exhibitions to check out—Recent Work by Marina Tabassum Architects in the Larry Wayne Richards Gallery, Resolutions for the Antarctic: International Stations & the Antarctic Data Space in the lower-level Architecture & Design Gallery and the annual End of Year Show highlighting student work from across the Faculty’s disciplines—as well as the art installation on the north facade of the Building by Indigenous artist Que Rock. 

Admission to the Building and to all Doors Open venues is free. A dedicated brochure with map of the Daniels Building has been produced to hand out to visitors.

To view the Daniels Building’s Doors Open page, click here. To see the full list of Doors Open Buildings and Sites, click here. 

The following lectures, part of the Exploring Design Practices undergraduate course taught by Richard Sommer, are open to outside attendees. Registration is not required.

January 18, 12:30 p.m. ET
ENGAGEMENTS
Marshall Brown, Marshall Brown Projects
Main Hall, Daniels Building, 1 Spadina Crescent

January 25, 12:30 p.m. ET
Freedom Schools for Accountable Architecture
Jae Shin and Damon Rich, HECTOR urban design
Main Hall, Daniels Building, 1 Spadina Crescent

February 1, 12:30 p.m. ET
Breathing is Spatial
Michael Murphy, Michael Murphy Studio, Ventulett Chair at Georgia Tech
Main Hall, Daniels Building, 1 Spadina Crescent

February 8, 2:30 p.m. ET
How I Got Here
Bruce Kuwabara, KPMB Architects
Main Hall, Daniels Building, 1 Spadina Crescent

March 1, 12:30 p.m. ET
Building Resilience
Amy Whitesides, Design Critic in Landscape Architecture at Harvard University Graduate School of Design
Main Hall, Daniels Building, 1 Spadina Crescent

March 8, 12:30 p.m. ET
Public Scholarship and Design Advocacy
Nancy Levinson, Editor and Executive Director of Places
Main Hall, Daniels Building, 1 Spadina Crescent

March 17, 12:30 p.m. ET
ARCHITECTURES OF CARE: On Keeping and Shaping Our Places
Justin Garrett Moore, Inaugural Program Officer, Humanities in Place, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Main Hall, Daniels Building, 1 Spadina Crescent

March 24, 12:30 p.m. ET
FORMALIST ENDGAMES & THE DISCURSIVE SPACE OF PRACTICE
Michael Maltzan, Michael Maltzan Architecture
Main Hall, Daniels Building, 1 Spadina Crescent

The Daniels Faculty is honouring Black History and Black Futures Month with a series of initiatives and events aimed at uplifting the ongoing movement for racial justice and celebrating the achievements and contributions of Black individuals. This year’s theme in Canada is “Ours to Tell,” emphasizing the importance of sharing stories of success, sacrifice and triumph in the Black community to inspire a more equitable society. 

As noted in the University Commitment in the Scarborough Charter, the work of Black flourishing and thriving should “be informed, shaped and co-created by communities” to be effective. The Daniels Faculty is committed to this principle, starting with the Designing Black Spaces with Community Accountability event on February 1, featuring Tura Cousins Wilson of SOCA, Jessica Kirk of the Wildseed Centre for Art and Activism, and Jessica Hines of Black Urbanism Toronto. The event will focus on accountability in design and Black community engagement. 

Other events in the series include the student-led Black Flourishing through Design gathering — part of the Daniels Faculty mentorship program Building Black Success through Design — on February 15. This event will provide young and upcoming designers with feedback on their projects and opportunities for dialogue on themes such as community, Black spaces and Black excellence. The design work is rooted in the shaping of the built environment, and the reviewers will include the Faculty’s Otto Ojo, Joshua Kirk, Bomani Khemet and Camille Michelle. It is bring coordinated by Jewel Amoah and Clara James. Stay tuned for further details. 

Toward the end of the month, the Community for Belonging Reading Group: Black Futures will take place on February 28, bringing together faculty, staff and students from Daniels and across the University of Toronto to discuss works by authors Sekou Cooke and Tina M. Campt. 

The month-long celebration concludes with the Blackness in Architectural Pedagogy and Practice workshop on March 1, aimed at designers and educators. 

For more information on Black History and Black Futures Month events at the Daniels Faculty, visit the events page here. Updates will be provided regularly. 

Community for Belonging, a new reading initiative “intended to raise awareness of the broad spectrum of identities within the Daniels Faculty community and provide a platform for engagement, interaction and discussion,” officially launches this week.

Over the coming calendar year, at least four individual Community for Belonging Reading Groups will meet to discuss titles that represent non-traditional and underrepresented perspectives in written work about architecture, design and the built and natural worlds.  

The first two meetings will take place during the Winter semester (on February 28 and March 28), with two more planned for the Fall term. There may also be a fifth meeting in June, depending on community interest. 

During each of the meetings, which are open only to faculty, staff, students and alumni from the Daniels Faculty and U of T communities, two titles will be discussed. 

While each of the texts on the reading list will be by, about or for communities that have been historically underrepresented in architecture, design, visual studies and forestry, they are not intended to reflect definitive resources on including or expanding voice. Rather, the titles chosen are meant to serve as springboards for intentional conversations about inclusion and belonging.  

Those who have signed up for the meetings will be asked to come prepared to discuss at least one of the two texts proposed for that meeting. Participants will be given a hard copy of the designated book(s) in advance, with digital versions provided if the hard copies run out.  

The four meetings scheduled will be held in person in the Reading Room of the Eberhard Zeidler Library, which will be transformed into a conversation space for the events. 

The two titles selected for the February 28 meeting — the theme of which is Black Futures Month — are Sekou Cooke’s 2021 anti-elitism manifesto Hip-Hop Architecture and Tina M. Campt’s survey from the same year of Black contemporary artists, A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See.

The theme of the March 28 discussion, meanwhile, is International Women’s Month and Transgender Identities; the titles selected for that meeting are Lucas Crawford’s Transgender Architectonics: The Shape of Change in Modernist Space (2020) and Jan Cigliano Hartman’s The Women Who Changed Architecture (2022).

Each of these two meetings will take place between 7:00 and 8:30 p.m. Members of the Daniels Faculty community who have neither ordered nor read the selected books may also attend the discussions.

The Community for Belonging reading-group project, which is being supported by Manulife and TD Insurance, will culminate on International Human Rights Day in December, reflecting its goals of building community, raising awareness of human rights, and celebrating identity. The University of Toronto has long-standing affinity relationships with Manulife and TD Insurance. These partnerships allow the University to provide beneficial, value-added financial and insurance products to alumni and students. See all affinity products.

To sign up for the first group discussion on February 28, click here.

Please refer any questions to:

Jewel Amoah
Assistant Dean, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion
jewel.amoah@daniels.utoronto.ca

Cathryn Copper
Head Librarian
cathryn.copper@daniels.utoronto.ca.

Marshall Brown, the Princeton-based architect, urbanist, artist and scholar, is scheduled to speak at the Daniels Faculty on Wednesday, January 18. 

Brown’s presentation, called ENGAGEMENTS, will take place in the Main Hall of the Daniels Building at 12:30 p.m., part of the Exploring Design Practices undergraduate course being taught by Richard Sommer. 

As in previous years, the lunchtime lecture and dialogue is open to other students and faculty and to the public at large. Registration is not required.

An associate professor with tenure at the Princeton University School of Architecture, where he directs the Princeton Urban Imagination Center, Brown represented the United States at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale and has work (examples of which are shown at top) in the collections of several major museums, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Reflecting his belief that the architect’s role is to test and expand the boundaries of reality, he constructs “visions of urban worlds yet to come” through such media as collage, architectural drawings on drafting vellum, sketches on tracing paper, video, models, objects and built projects.

Wednesday’s talk by Brown is the first of several slated for the Exploring Design Practices series this term. Anticipated future speakers include Michael Murphy, Peter Clewes, Amy Whitesides and Justin Garrett Moore. More details will be forthcoming.

Banner images from left: Vanderbilt Tower (collage on inkjet print, 51 x 40 inches), 2009; Prisons of Invention 4: The Well (collage on archival paper, 44 3/4 x 35 3/4 inches), 2021.

The following lectures, constituting the Master of Visual Studies Proseminar Winter 2023 series, are also open to outside attendees.

January 24, 6:30 p.m. ET 
Lydia Ourahmane
Co-presented by Mercer Union
Main Hall, Daniels Building, 1 Spadina Crescent

February 14, 6:30 p.m. ET 
Brett Story
Co-presented by Images Festival
Main Hall, Daniels Building, 1 Spadina Crescent

March 14, 6:30 p.m. ET 
Nasrin Himada
Co-presented by Images Festival
Main Hall, Daniels Building, 1 Spadina Crescent

March 21, 6:30 p.m. ET 
Alexis Kyle Mitchell
Main Hall, Daniels Building, 1 Spadina Crescent