Associate Professor Mason White will serve as the Jury Chair for this year’s Steedman Fellowship — one of the oldest and most prestigious awards in the United States. The 2016 Call for Proposals marks a shift for the biannual Fellowship from a design competition to an invitation to develop research proposals that respond to a particular theme. To go along with this change, White created the 2016 theme of Adaptation.

From the Steedman Fellowship website:

“Our age is increasingly defined by unpredictability and a need for contingency in design. However, the life of a building or design cannot always keep pace with changes in culture, context, or climate. How is the rigidity of architecture slackened? Where does the ability to adjust, modify, or respond to factors exist? Can (and does) Architecture adapt?  

This year, the theme of adaptation is offered as an area of enquiry. In biology, adaptation enhances the survival and fitness of organisms. Within design, demands for adaptive responses to climatic, cultural, or societal change have tested architecture’s transformative properties. More than ever, exciting new considerations of accessibility, sustainability, and flexibility are being incorporated earlier and earlier into design processes. It could be argued that an inability of architecture to adapt will be its demise.”

 

The Steedman Fellowship is open to practicing architects anywhere in the world who have received an accredited degree in architecture within the last eight years. Proposals are due November 1. The winning proposal will receive $50,000 to support up to a year of international travel and research. Other members of the jury include Deborah Berke, Elena Cánovas, Joyce Hwang, and Jeff Ryan.

White, along with Lola Sheppard, is a founding Partner at Lateral Office. Earlier this year, their firm won a Royal Architectural Institute of Canada Urban Design Award for Impulse — a playful installation created for the Place des Festival in Montreal. The artwork transformed Montreal’s arts district “into a space of urban play through a series of thirty interactive acoustic illuminated see-saws that respond and transform when in motion.”

During a trip to Adelaide, Australia in 2015, Jordan Duke witnessed her first wildfire.

“We were driving over a hill and I could see a large plume of smoke in the horizon,” she said. “Thousands of hectares were on fire.” From the plane, the next day when she flew out, Duke was struck by the vast expanse of charred earth. She thought about it the entire flight home.

As a student in the Master of Landscape Architecture program at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, Duke wondered: what could landscape architects do to help mitigate wildfire disasters? In the wake of the fire that struck Fort McMurray in Alberta in May, it’s a question that carries increased relevance — particularly since wildfires are predicted to increase in the future.

For her thesis project the following year, Duke researched how wildfires could be mitigated through tools that exist within the realm of landscape architecture. Her research culminated in the development of a strategy for Cleland Conservation Park. The park is based in South Australia where in February 2009, wildfires claimed over 170 lives. Her plan — which combined remote sensors embedded in the landscape with site-specific landscape design strategies that would produce both short- and long-term results — projected new possibilities, not only for the field of landscape architecture but also for how we could diminish such disasters in the future.

“There’s a lot of planning when it comes to wildfires in terms of where to build neighbourhoods, and there are many techniques to track and evaluate an area’s likelihood of burning, but I found that there were few systems in place to reduce the risk of a large wildfire occurring in the first place, “ says Duke.

Inspired by her work the previous summer at the Daniels Faculty’s Green Roof Innovation Testing Laboratory (gritlab), the first part of her strategy included embedding remote sensors within the landscape that would allow for real-time monitoring of data such as humidity, wind, temperature, vegetation density, and water availability — factors that contribute to the likelihood of a fire.

“At gritlab, we learned that sensor technology is cheap and easy to deploy. I had no computer engineering background, but by the end of the summer, we were installing sensors throughout the green roof, downloading data and doing analysis,” says Duke. “This triggered an idea: what if we could take these sensors and deploy them across a huge site to monitor variables that would let us know in advance when fires are likely to happen?”

Under Duke’s plan, data from the sensors would activate a variety of responses across the landscape. For example, on dry, hot days, weather modifiers installed along the ridges and valleys of the park would disperse mist across the site to increase humidity levels. Using the regular ocean breeze moving across the site, the modifiers would also scatter the seeds of fire-resistent cypress trees along the ridges of the landscape. Over time, the wall of trees that would eventually grow would become windbreaks that could help slow the pace of a fire.

Excess rainwater, which normally flows down the hills to the ocean during heavy rain, would be collected in reservoirs, which could become recreational pools for people visiting the park or sources of water for animals in search of refuge. When sensors indicate the risk of a fire in a particular location, however, the water would be released down the valley to soak the landscape below. The large amount of rapidly released water would also increase erosion runoff, thus creating firebreaks throughout the valley.

Duke also considered vegetation, which provides fuel for burning fires. Artificial watering holes strategically placed throughout the park would attract animals in times of drought. Native wallabies, kangaroos and other animals coming to the pools of water would then feed on nearby vegetation, reducing fuel for a potential fire.

“None of these devices eliminate risk,” says Duke. “Instead, they work to shift risk from large scale, catastrophic events to smaller, everyday risk levels.”

In addition to these and other tactics designed to mitigate risk, Duke explored ways to influence human behavior. The weather monitors along the ridge of the hill above the city, for example, could be programmed to light more brightly at night during periods of high-energy use.  

“The idea is to change the collective consciousness of the local population by highlighting invisible phenomena and patterns that are contributing to climate change and wildfire occurrences,” says Duke. Energy consumption in the city of Adelaide is among the highest in Australia.

While the scope of her thesis was to research and propose a new approach to mitigating wildfires, Duke does hope to one day build and test her project.

Her hope is that the strategy she devised will plant the seeds for ways that landscape architects can contribute to wildfire mitigation in the future.

“Developing science fiction scenarios are necessary,” says Duke. “Imagining what could be done is usually the first step towards something actually happening.”

Assistant Professor Liat Margolis was Duke’s thesis advisor. Duke received the American Society of Landscape Architects Certificate of Honor and the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects Student Award of Merit at this year’s graduation awards ceremony.

On June 11, Assistant Professor Liat Margolis will join a group of preeminent scholars and professionals in the field of landscape architecture to "critically reflect on what landscape architecture has achieved over the last 50 years and present bold ideas for what it should achieve in the future." This discussion will take place as part of the Landscape Architecture Foundation Summit, a one-time historic gathering dedicated to the 50^th anniversary of Ian McHarg’s seminal Declaration of Concern, which heralded landscape architects as key leaders in the environmental movement.

Writes Barbara Deutsch for the Land8 blog:

“Fifty years ago on June 1 and 2, 1966, Ian McHarg, Grady Clay, Campbell Miller, Charles R. Hammond, George E. Patton, and John O. Simonds were convened by the newly formed Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF) at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Motivated by a sense of crisis about the environment and its future, they proclaimed the role of the landscape architect as critical to help solve it and drafted and signed a Declaration of Concern outlining a four-pronged strategy to multiply the effectiveness of the limited number of landscape architects and produce more trained people to cope with the future environment they foresaw.”

The Director of the Daniels Faculty's award-winning Green Roof Innovation Testing Laboratory (gritlab) and Co-Director of the Centre for Landscape Research, Margolis was selected as one of 70 “established and emerging leaders” in the field of landscape architecture. As a panelist, her role will include engaging in a debate about landscape architecture’s potential to effect real world change.

For more information, visit lafoundation.org

Associate Professor David Lieberman will be presenting a paper and chairing a panel at the Continuum2016 conference happening June 12^th to 14^th in Nicosia, Cyprus. The event, hosted by the University of Cyprus Department of Architecture and the European University of Cyprus Music Department, intends to further research of the last decade in architecture, music, and acoustics.

At the conference, Lieberman will present the film titled within the Sounds of these Waves, which was edited and composed by Parastoo Najafi (MArch 2016) and produced by the Studio of David Lieberman Architect.

“The three hour film is a series of visual texts as an investigation in time, in thoughts and in dreams as we move through the spaces of discovery and imagining,” says Lieberman. “The texts interweave original musings and the words of Virginia Woolf in her meditations ‘The Waves.’ ”

Later this month, Lieberman will be returning to the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna on June 27^th and 28^th to participate in their final reviews as an external reviewer for two of the graduate programs in architecture. His time at the Academy will include participating in post-graduate seminars, advising doctoral students, and continuing research concerned with the birch forests as painted by Gustav Klimt and the properties of the Austrian Spruce tree (a favoured species for string instruments and piano soundboards).

Related:

• David Lieberman delivers keynote lecture on sound, light, and architecture and contributes to an exhibition on hippie modernism
• David Lieberman publishes a chapter in the book Xenakis Matters

• North House to become a permanent installation and research laboratory

Lecturer Hans Ibelings, Lecturer Alex Josephson (PARTISANS), and friend of the Daniels Faculty Eve Lewis (MSc., Urban and Regional Planning 1981) will participate in a discussion exploring the condominiumization of Toronto on June 22 as part of the Luminato Festival. The panel discussion will reflect on the book Rise & Sprawl: The Condominiumization of Toronto. Co-authored by Hans Ibelings and PARTISANS, the new book investigates the emergence of a new pressure-cooked architectural vernacular and posits alternative ways of tackling design and development processes to ensure better architectural outcomes.

Rise and Sprawl: The Condominiumization of Toronto
by Hans Ibelings and PARTISANS

June 22, 2016, 5–6:30 PM, Side Room
The Hearn (440 Unwin Avenue, Toronto)

“While rapid densification is contributing to Toronto’s increased liveliness, the unbridled development of monotonous condo towers is resulting in a significant facelift we may later come to regret,” write Ibelings and PARTISANS. “We are failing to create a cityscape that serves our citizens, let alone a skyline we can be proud of as a legacy for future generations.”

The discussion is part of a series of events hosted by After School + PARTISANS for Luminato 2016 that focus on the future of Toronto in terms of arts institutions, civic infrastructure, architecture and design, and overall cultural and economic prosperity.

For more information, visit Luminato's website.

In March, Associate Professor Brian Boigon lectured at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) as part of the exhibition The Other Architect. The exhibition explored architecture in terms of different collaborative strategies, strange concepts, and new kinds of tools.

From the CCA:

“Brian Boigon ran Culture Lab at the back of a rock club in Toronto from 1991 to 1994. The object of Culture Lab was to intellectually entangle and compress the distance between theory and product—and to ultimately create a new space of interoperability whereby speakers, hosted on stage by Boigon, would be thrown into an unknown social architecture, yielding new speculations about what constitutes cultural production in the transitional years between the analogue and the digital. Boigon’s talk addresses the temporal and social ramifications that led up and into the Culture Lab project and beyond.”

After the talk, Boigon was joined by Joan Ockman and Phyllis Lambert to discuss the internet and social media in today’s context.

“We are barely able to function in the digital and yet there’s a new layer, this social media layer,” said Boigon. “I think this social media layer, despite the tropes of it being superficial and…curiously problematic, there’s something in their networks and meshes that are producing a new kind of social space and temporality and we have to pay attention to this as architects.”

The transcription of the discussion was included in the online CCA publication What the future looked like. To view the publication, visit: cca.qc.ca/what-the-future-looked-like

Thanks to generous donations made by alumni and donors, Daniels Faculty students can apply for grants, fellowships, or scholarships to fund travel and research at sites of interest both within Canada and abroad.

We’ve asked students who received travel awards last year to share their experiences with us. Last week, we heard from Saarinen Balagengatharadilak and Vanessa Abram. Today, we hear from Master of Architecture student Hamza Vora , who spent six weeks conducting research in Casablanca, Marrakesh, and Fez in Morroco, and Tunis in Tunisia with support from the Paul Oberman Graduate Student Endowment Fund.

Why did you decide to go to Casablanca, Marrakesh, Fez, and Tunis, and what did you hope to learn while you were there?
I wanted to study street vendors in North African cities to see the urban condition and context they currently operate in.  I intended to observe the street vendors and public life of the souks (markets) that are still vital part of the old city centres. Morocco and Tunisia both have well preserved and vibrant old city centres where street vendors in the souks are an integral part of daily life.

Tell us about something interesting that you discovered.
I had this idea of authenticity and that the markets would only sell local goods and support the local community. It was a bit shocking to see that majority of the street vendors sold counterfeit goods made in China. This was particularly in the case Tunis. It is a real problem as it has been devastating to the local industries.

How has this travel research opportunity enhanced your academic career?
I got a better understanding of the meaning of public space. It informed some of my decisions for my thesis project. Urban life in these North African cities is very chaotic. It is an organized mess. To comprehend that, you have to experience it first hand.

How will this research inform your future work?
I am still very interested in street vendors and how they contribute to an informal economy. During my research trip I was looking at how they function and negotiate public pace. I still want to continue learning about this and how they contribute to different public spaces.

For more information on Hamza’s research download his report [PDF].

Visit the Current Students section of the Daniels Faculy's website for more information on the travel awards.

From 1991 to 1994, Associate Professor Brian Boigon ran Culture Lab at the back of a rock club, where he would host guest participants with disciplinary backgrounds in architecture, art, film, video, music, comedy, science and fashion. The panel, with Boigon at the helm, would be thrown into an unknown social architecture, yielding new speculations about what constitutes cultural production in the transitional years between the analogue and the digital. Culture Lab themes ranged from Insider Criticism and Weaklings to Dip Sticks.

On March 31, 2016, at 6:00pm Boigon will be giving a talk at the CCA titled "Fucking with Interoperability." He will be addressing the temporal and social ramifications that led up and into the Culture Lab project and beyond.

Culture Lab: Brian Boigon — "Fucking with Interoperability"
March 31, 2016 | 6:00 pm
Centre Canadien d'Architecture / Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA)
1920 Baile, Montreal, Quebec H3H 2S6

RSVP to the event on Facebook.

Most Torontonians may not consider the history of Fort York in its modern context, but the site is rich with stories of disrupted bird habitation, receding water edges, and unsettling warfare. In the Fall semester of 2014, Nicolas Koff and Marisa Bernstein led the third year landscape architecture course, LAN3016: Fort York’s Fluid Landscapes, to investigate the history of Fort York, and to examine how the site could accommodate changing uses.

“Through its key location at the historical intersection of the Garrison creek and the lake shore, the site has over the years been used for sustenance, protection, transportation, recreation and education,” writes Nicolas Koff in the course description. “With each incarnation, the site gained in complexity, culminating in its present multi-layered state.”

The outcomes of this course have continued on into different mediums. The projects were featured on Projexity — a website created by Koff and Bernstein that engages communities in neighbourhood improvement projects. Last May, the duo led a Jane’s Walk focused on research from the course along with and Ya’el Santopinto. More recently, the Fort York narratives developed from the course were transformed into a podcast for Cities Alive. The podcast recounts stories as told by students Kaari Kitawi, Grace Yang, Carla Lipkin, Meaghan Burke, and Rui Felix.

“[The development of] the stories for the students was supposed to get their foot in the door in the design process,” says Marisa Bernstein in the podcast. “It was a way for them to come up with a narrative for the site that would then help guide them through their projects for the entire semester.”

The student projects have been documented by on Projexity, and can be viewed at fluidfortyork.projexity.com

Renderings pictured above (in order of appearance) by Kaari Kitawi, Andrea Linney, Meaghan Burke, and Rui Felix.

Pin-ups have been un-pinned, exams have been written and students are undoubtedly catching up on some much needed sleep. Before shifting into summer mode, we thought this would be a good time to reflect on the past academic year. Here are the six most read news stories of the last 8 months.

6. Architectural Studies graduate Omar Gandhi "one of Canada's most exciting emerging designers," says the Globe and Mail

January 18, 2016

5. View the competition entries and have your say in the redesign of U of T's St. George Campus

October 5, 2015

View the winning design by KPMB Architects, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA) and Urban Strategies.

4. #ReadingList: 3 books to read over the holidays

December 15, 2015

3. Photographs by Peter MacCallum document the transformation of One Spadina

June 4, 2014 (updated regularly)

View all One Spadina photos on the Daniels Faculty's Flickr page

2. Multigenerational housing: Daniels faculty and alumni rethink the family home

February 25, 2016

1. 12 things every grad student presenting their thesis should know

March 25, 2015