In the winter 2020 session of Visual Communication 2 (LAN1022), first-year Master of Landscape Architecture students were tasked with developing their visualization skills by studying either an Indigenous burial mound (known as a tumulus) or a colonial earthwork fortification. Each student first drew the topography of their assigned fort or tumulus, then created drawings that developed a historical or fictional narrative about the site.

Now, anyone interested in perusing the course's impressive visual output can do so easily, because all of it has been collected in a book. Forts & Tumuli, a lavishly illustrated volume assembled by assistant professor Fadi Masoud, can be read in its entirety online or purchased for $48.99 from Blurb.ca.

(Last year's edition is also available.)

Here are a few projects from the book.

Stefan Herda

Stefan's study area was the Pirámide del Sol, an archaeological site located on the outskirts of Mexico City. The pyramid is the largest structure in Teotihuacan, an ancient city that was already a ruin by the time of the Aztecs. Stefan obtained spatial data from researchers at Arizona State University, which he used as the basis of a series of illustrations that attempt to reconstruct what the Aztecs would have seen and experienced as they stumbled upon the empty city for the first time. "I articulated a walk from the mountaintops down into the site," Stefan says. "Each drawing is a step along this journey of discovery."

Elva Hu

Elva studied Fort Warren, in Boston, Massachusetts. She chose to focus her illustrations on a Civil War legend about "the lady in black" — a woman who supposedly attempted to free her confederate solider husband from the fort, was caught and executed, and now haunts the premises as a ghost. Elva's dark colour palette is intended to highlight the fort's gloomy aspects.

Agata Mrozowski

Agata took on the Cahokia Mounds, the remains of a Native American city believed to have been abandoned around the year 1300. After studying the layout of the mounds, Agata became intrigued by the way the city's layout mirrored certain stellar constellations. Through her drawings, she attempted to convey the way the mounds relate to the sky. "All of my drawings have circles and curvatures," she says. "They're really trying to emphasize that temporal circular relationship between the cycles of life and this land."

Nadia Chan

Nadia studied Fort Jay, a post-Revolutionary War stronghold located on Governor's Island, in New York City. She chose to focus her drawings on the time of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, when, according to her research, the fort was used as a field hospital. (She settled on her topic a few weeks pre-COVID. She had no idea how relevant her choice of focus was about to become.) She juxtaposed images of hospital tents with images of a spring lawn party, once an annual occurrence at the fort. "These drawings evolved into a fictional retelling of history, but also a kind of commentary on our current pandemic situation," Nadia says.

Read Forts & Tumuli now

George Baird is many things to the Daniels Faculty: a graduate (BArch 1962), a long-time professor, and a former dean. But Baird's influence extends well beyond the university. A new book, The Architect and the Public: On George Baird's Contribution to Architecture, attempts to explain how Baird's conception of "the public" in architecture and urbanism impacted the development of those fields.

The book, edited by Daniels Faculty lecturer Roberto Damiani and published by Italy-based Quodlibet, is an outgrowth of "George Baird: A Question of Influence," a 2012 symposium hosted by the Daniels Faculty. The finished volume consists of 19 essays and interviews about Baird's work and his contributions to architectural theory.

Among the book's group of essayists and interview subjects are international architecture luminaries like Kenneth Frampton and Peter Eisenman. But much of the writing and talking is done by voices from closer to home, like KPMB's Bruce Kuwabara, who studied under Baird in the 1960s; Michael Piper, director of the Daniels Faculty's Master of Urban Design program; and Richard Sommer, who just completed his appointment as the Daniels Faculty's dean.

"In choosing and arranging the book's elements, I wanted to highlight Baird's intellectual commitment to envisioning architecture as a social and political construction," Damiani says. "It became clear to me that Baird's conceptualization of public space is much broader than the design of the physical environment of public streets and squares. His thinking assesses architecture as a medium of cultural representation that embodies the potential of engaging and empowering spontaneous forms of social life."

Baird has had a storied career in private practice. He's the founding principal of Baird Sampson Neuert Architects, which is known for its many public space and institutional commissions, both in Canada and abroad. Baird's early work included an influential report on design guidelines for Toronto's downtown. His firm's more recent highlights include the Old Post Office Plaza, in St. Louis, and York University's new McEwen Graduate Study and Research Building.

The book places Baird's accomplishments in context with the evolution of architectural thought during the latter half of the 20th century. "The reader will find critical references to the formation of what we now define as architectural theory," Damiani says, "as well as the transatlantic intellectual exchange between North America and Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, the development of architectural pedagogy in North America, and finally the design guidelines that shaped downtown Toronto."

The Architect and the Public is available from the publisher's website, and will soon be for sale on Amazon.

Adrian Phiffer, an assistant professor at the Daniels Faculty, didn't come up with the name for his newly released book, Strange Primitivism, entirely on his own.

"'Strange primitivism' is a characterization that I've heard friends using when they speak about my design work. It's not my own invention," he says. "The reason I'm embracing this characterization is that I do think my designs aim towards a sense of primitivism — meaning, a sense of legibility and honesty in the way that form, materials, and program are being manipulated."

The book, a collection of 35 essays about Phiffer's architectural design practice and his experiences teaching design students at the Daniels Faculty, went on sale yesterday. It includes autobiographical notes, brief treatises on architectural theory, and thoughts on life and design in Toronto.

The volume was published by The Architectural Observer, a small publishing house run by Daniels Faculty lecturer Hans Ibelings.

In his writing, Phiffer has attempted to replicate some of the forthrightness that he strives for in his architectural practice. "Overall," he says, "the book is characterized by a sense of honesty that maybe is typical for someone who has grown up in Eastern Europe." (Phiffer is from Romania.)

"My ambition was to unearth parts of the process of working in the architectural realm that sometimes are not fully revealed, because designers would feel uncomfortable revealing them."

The book's intentionally fragmented layout and its four different covers (which Phiffer says are a way to "engage with readers in a visual dialogue about having, or not having, an image") were created by Haller Brun, a Dutch designer. The pages are filled with images of Phiffer's projects, as well as his students' projects.

Strange Primitivism's cover price is $37.50, and it's now available on Amazon.

Historically, Toronto has had a complicated relationship with our local ravines and waterways. While most Torontonians pass the Humber River or the Don Valley at some point during our daily commute, as urbanites we don’t often consider our relationship with these green spaces and how we might best leverage them to improve the livability or infrastructure of our city. 

A new book, birthed in the creative ferment of the Daniels Faculty’s studio environment, seeks to address this lack of consideration by reimagining our two main local ravines as more useable public space, as enhancements to our infrastructure, and as environmental assets to the predominantly urban local landscape.

Ravine Re-create highlights work from Daniels Faculty students in the 2016 Option Studio, established by Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture Alissa North, as well as designs from the similarly-structured 2018 MLA Design Studio 4, coordinated by North and co-taught with Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture Justine Holzman, and Sessional Lecturer Emilia Hurd.

Working in collaboration with several divisions of the City of Toronto and the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority, Waterfront Toronto, and Evergreen, students developed designs and ideas for reimagined landscapes that sought to address specific action items and priorities identified by the Toronto Ravine Strategy,  the City’s recently developed policy guide for future development and use of our urban waterways. In addition to this close collaboration and consultation with local agencies, students also undertook a guided tour of the Humber River, led by Alan Colley, founder of Toronto Aboriginal Eco Tours.

The studio framework consisted of two main stages. Students first worked on mapping these areas in order to better understand the larger ravine systems, and then proceeded to proposing specific design ideas for particular sites along the ravine or river. This work has now been compiled into a book recently published by North entitled Ravine Re-create: Design Ideas for Toronto’s Ravines, featuring designs and drawings from students.

“The hope is that this book will allow Torontonians to gain new perspectives and see new potentials for the ravines,” explains North. “And that the interesting maps and design proposals in the book will spur their own ideas. The ravine system is a very big network, and it will need many heads to guide it toward balanced integrity.”

North says that this kind of thinking is timely, given the rapid urban growth experienced by the GTA in recent decades. “Our ravines are such a great asset for our exponentially increasing city, but we have modified them to such a great extent, and mostly detrimentally,” she elaborates. “Due to their urban context, they cannot be returned to any type of pre-settlement state, so their health is in our hands. How and what we decide to do has potential beneficial impact environmentally, socially, equitably, economically, and ecologically, but only if we commit to the ravines. I think Toronto now values its ravines, but doesn’t really know what that means, or what to do with that notion. This book provides, ideals, ideas, and visions.”

Ravine Re-create: Design Ideas for Toronto’s Ravines retails for $47.50 (including tax) and can be purchased by emailing Associate Professor Alissa North.

Images by:
1. Stephen Brophy
2. Adelin Yingqian Hu
4. Andrew Hooke
5. Waiyee Chou, Irene Wong, Angela Moreno
6. Yuxin Liu, Kathleen Alexander, Cynthia Chiu Chen, Andrea Lam

The Potato Plan Collection, a new book edited by Mirjam Züger and Kees Christiaanse, both celebrates Patrick Abercrombie's 1943 colourful diagram of London's many districts and explores its "potential as an analytical tool for contemporary metropolitan territories."  Mark Sterling, director of the Daniels Faculty's Master of Urban Design program, contributed an essay to the book as well as drawings, including a "Potato Plan" of Toronto, which he prepared collaboratively with Sabrina Yuen (HBA, Architectural Studies, 2016).

From the Potato Plan Collection's press release:

Originally drawn in 1943 as part of the County of London Plan, Abercrombie’s ‘Social and Functional Analysis’ poetically illustrates the city as an agglomeration of distinct communities, clusters, and centralities. The Potato Plan Collection comprises 40 Potato Plans from all around the globe, each being a reinterpretation of the original by local architects, urban designers and scholars. As a whole, the collection offers a new perspective on the structure of regional configurations in the urban age.

The recent publication is one of a number of projects that has kept Sterling busy lately. In May, he hosted a delegation of 19 planning and urban design officials from Helsinki, Finland for a talk on the history and current state of urban design and planning policy in the City of Toronto. The group included the Deputy Mayor of Helsinki, 12 members of the Finnish Parliament, and a number of members of the Helsinki City Executive Office. He also participated in a conference held in Milan in which he spoke via Skype about the Greater Toronto Area.

A Principal of Acronym Urban Design and Planning, Sterling is an award-winning architect, urban designer and professional planner. He is a leading thinker on new approaches to compact urban form and an innovator in exploring intelligent development scenarios through a variety of approaches to digital visualization. Visit the Daniels Faculty's 'people' page to learn more about Mark's professional activities and research.

Matthew Jull, an assistant professor from the University of Virginia, has published a review of Many Norths, by Associate Professor Mason White and Lola Sheppard, in the most recent issue of the Journal of Architectural Education (JAE).

Given the dearth of books on architecture in the arctic, the 471 page volume, which "charts the unique spatial realities of Canada's Arctic region" is "a timely and critical contribution to design research on the Arctic," writes Jull. "As we seek to develop new ways of designing and adapting buildings and cities globally as a result of the impacts of climate change, the Arctic — and the research presented in Many Norths — will provide an important framework and reference."

White and Sheppard are co-founders of Lateral Office, which has been recognized for its extensive research in the north. In 2012 it won the Arctic Inspiration Prize. In 2014, Lateral Office represented Canada at the International Architecture Exhibition of Venice Biennale, and was honoured with a "Special "Mention" for "Its in-depth study of how modernity adapts to a unique climatic condition and a local minority culture."

Jull's review is available online via JAE's website: http://www.jaeonline.org/articles/reviews-books/many-norths-spatial-pra…

Photo, top: Iqaluit looking east, 2010. Photo by Ed Maruyama, courtesy of the City of Iqaluit.

Associate Professor Zeynep Çelik Alexander's book Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design "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."
 

Is all knowledge the product of thought? Or can the physical interactions of the body with the world produce reliable knowledge? In late-nineteenth-century Europe, scientists, artists, and other intellectuals theorized the latter as a new way of knowing, which Zeynep Çelik Alexander here dubs “kinaesthetic knowing.”     

In this book, Alexander 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. 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.
 

Published by University of Chicago Press, Kinaesthetic Knowing has received rave reviews.

"Zeynep Celik Alexander's stunningly original study of the intersection of emergent laboratory psychology, new pedagogical credos, and artistic practices in late nineteenth-century Germany, is a landmark analysis," said Barry Bergdoll of Columbia University.

Daniel M. Abramson of Boston University called the book extraordinary: "A critical history of design education, this book is exceedingly learned, smart, knowing, original, and, for all that, accessible and well-written. Its impact will be as broad and deep as the work itself."

The book can be purchased online, and is also available at the Daniels Faculty's Eberhard Zeidler Library.

Zeynep Çelik Alexander is an architectural historian whose work focuses on the history of architectural modernism since the Enlightenment. Her current research project explores architectures of bureaucracy from the Kew Herbarium to the Larkin Administration Building. Alexander is a member of Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative and an editor of the journal Grey Room.

"Landscape architecture is often left out of the conversation when talking about technology, but sensors, advanced modeling techniques, and robotic manufacturing will eventually cause a seismic shift in landscape architecture," writes The Architects Newspaper.

With this in mind, the publication recently listed the book Responsive Landscapes, by Daniels Faculty Assistant Professor Justine Holzman and Bradley Cantrell, chair of Landscape Architecture at the University of Virginal School of Architecture, among it favourite tech books of 2018.

Holzman researches landscape infrastructure for regional design, responsive technologies in landscape architecture, and the epistemic history of scientific landscape modelling. Responsive Landscapes is "the first book to rationalize interactive architecture and responsive technologies through the lens of contemporary landscape architectural theory."  As described on its website, the book explores various approaches taken to utilize responsive technologies in current professional practice.

+ Read AN's list of its favourite tech books of 2018.
+ Visit the Responsive Landscapes website.

Assistant Professor Erica Allen-Kim contributed the chapter "Condos in the Mall: Suburban Transnational Typological Transformations in Markham, Ontario" to the book Making Cities Global: The Transnational Turn in Urban History, now available from University of Pennsylvania Press. 

Edited by A. K. Sandoval-Strausz and Nancy H. Kwak, Making Cities Global argues that "combining urban history with a transnational approach leads to a better understanding of our increasingly interconnected world. In order to achieve prosperity, peace, and sustainability in metropolitan areas in the present and into the future, we must understand their historical origins and development."

The publication was recently featured in The Metropole.

"One of the features of the Chinese-dominated ethnoburb in North America has been the densely configured shopping center, in many cases an enclosed plaza or minimall that serves as a social gathering space for a decentralized population," says Allen-Kim. "Condo malls, which were developed and marketed primarily to Asian and Hispanic immigrants in North America, have occupied an unusual position in that qualities of informality and looseness were cultivated rather than repressed by local and transnational developers, investors, and entrepreneurs."

Erica Allen-Kim is an historian of modern architecture and urban design. Her work on global cities and cultural landscapes focuses on issues of memory and citizenship. She is currently completing her first manuscript, Mini-malls and Memorials: Building Little Saigon in American Suburbs, and has published on Vietnamese-American war memorials and the transnational politics of Chinatown gates. Her current book project, Chinatown Modernism, situates the architectural and urban projects of American Chinatowns within the broader context of modern architecture and planning.

Images, top by Luke Duross (MArch 2016) as part of his thesis Retail Revisions: Ownership, Authorship and the Ethnic Mall: 1) Current Ground Floor Expansion, Pacific Mall 2) Original Ground Floor Expansion, Pacific Mall

On September 29, the University of Toronto published its inaugural report  by the newly formed President’s Advisory Committee on the Environment, Climate Change, and Sustainability, which includes contributions from committee member Associate Professor Liat Margolis.

The Committee — struck earlier this year, after it was proposed in the President’s report Beyond Divestment: Taking Decisive Action on Climate Change — was formed to identify ways U of T can meet the “challenges of climate change and sustainability, with a particular focus on research and innovation, teaching, and University operations.”

The Committee builds off and supports the implementation of several commitments made in the Beyond Divestment report that came before it, including

1. Launching a tri-campus clean-tech challenge to encourage environment and energy related entrepreneurship
2. Providing $750,000 to be distributed over three years for climate change related academic initiatives
3. Prioritizing climate change-related themes in selected programs and curricula 
4. Increasing the Utilities Reduction Revolving Fund by 50 per cent (from $5 million to $7.5 million) to encourage more extensive implementation of energy-saving retrofits in our buildings
5. Formally adopting substantially more rigorous energy efficiency standards for capital projects
6. Pursuing opportunities to use our campuses as ‘test beds’ for environmental and sustainability research and best practices
7. Investigating the potential for development of other renewable energy projects
 

By investing time and resources into sustainability targets, the Committee hopes to make sustainability part of the core identity of U of T. To read the full report, visit the Office of the President’s website.

Margolis’s research focuses on the knowledge transfer of multi-performance materials and technologies across disciplines, particularly understanding and articulating the emerging relevance of performative landscapes as urban infrastructure. She was central to the creation of the Green Roof Innovation Testing Lab (GRIT Lab) and serves as its Director. She is also Co-Director of the Centre for Landscape Research (CLR). Last month, Margolis was appointed as the Daniels Faculty’s Director of the Master of Landscape Architecture program and Associate Dean, Research.