StudentDwellTO — a cross disciplinary research project on affordable student housing being conducted by the University of Toronto, Ryerson, OCAD, and York University — wants to know more about students' experiences finding affordable homes in Toronto.

The project's researchers, which include Daniels Faculty Assistant Professor Mauricio Quirós Pacheco and recent graduate Kearon Roy Taylor (MArch 2018), are now recruiting students for a paid, two-hour focus group to help them gain more insight into barriers and strategies that students face in accessing housing and how housing could be better designed to address students' needs.

From the StudentDwellTO website:

Toronto’s housing crunch has made headlines over the last several years. The city is currently experiencing a severe lack of affordable rental units, and the vacancy rate in 2017 dropped to 1%, the lowest number in over 16 years (Myles 2017). This housing crisis, while impacting everyone living in Toronto, has specific impacts on students that need to be understood through further research.
 

To be eligible for the focus group, participants must be undergraduate, or graduate students registered full-time at OCAD, York, Ryerson or U of T.

For more information or to sign up to participate in a focus group, visit the StudentDwellTO website.

Image, top from Matthew McKenna's thesis, "Typologies for Neighbourhood Densification"

Associate Professor Jane Wolff, Assistant Professor Justine Holzman and alumna Sandra Cook (MLA 2017) were among the featured speakers who presented at the symposium "Fresh Water: Design Thinking for Inland Water Territories," September 13-15 at the University of Illinois.

As written on the University of Illinois' website:

Fresh Water: Design Thinking for Inland Water Territories is an interdisciplinary design symposium addressing regional, territorial, and continental water issues across inland North America. The geographic contexts and intellectual sites for the symposium—the major inland (non-coastal) watersheds of the Mississippi, the Great Lakes Basin, St. Lawrence, and the Nelson riversheds—remain under-explored in design research.
 

Wolff, Holzman, Cook participated in the Plenary, WATERBODIES. The symposium also displayed work from On The Pond, an exhibit on the ecological impacts of catfish farming that Holzman created with Forbes Lipschitz.

Holzman is part of the Dredge Research Collaborative (DRC) with Sean Burkholder, Brian Davis, Rob Holds, Tim Many, Brett Milligan, and Gena Wirth. An independent non-profit organization, DRC "aims to improve sediment management through design research, building public knowledge, and facilitating transdisciplinary conversation." Holzman's research focuses on landscape infrastructure for regional design, responsive technologies in landscape architecture, and the epistemic history of scientific landscape modelling.

Wolff's design research investigates the complicated landscapes that emerge from interactions between natural processes and cultural interventions; its goal is to articulate terms that make these difficult (and often contested) places legible to the wide range of audiences with a stake in the future.

Sandra Cook is a landscape designer at Forrec Limited in Toronto and is an independent landscape researcher. Click here to read our Q&A with Cook on the transition from school to work.

For the second year in a row, a graduate studio from the Daniels Faculty has received ARCHITECT magazine's Studio Prize.

The Studio Prize "recognizes thoughtful, innovative, and ethical studio courses at accredited architecture schools" across Canada and the United States. The Daniels Faculty's Option Studio "Coding Flux: In Pursuit of Resilient Urbanism in South Florida" (LAN 3016) taught by Assistant Professors Fadi Masoud, who coordinated the course, and Elise Shelley is among this year's six winners.

Rayna Syed (standing at right) and Alexandra Lazervski (third from left) present their plans for a southern Florida county that faces flooding challenges, increasing water levels and salt water damage (photo by Harry Choi)

The award-winning studio challenged students to develop design solutions to address increased flooding from rising sea levels and intense storms, such as hurricanes, in South Florida — events that are becoming increasingly common to due climate change.

Writes ARCHITECT:

The responses, which the students presented to Broward County representatives who visited Toronto, ranged from a “freshwater credit” system that incentivizes residents to capture excess rainwater in cisterns on their property to a “flux” zoning code that changes as rising sea levels impact land-use patterns around the county. Yet another proposal considers the county’s western border, which abuts the Everglades wetlands, more as an inland “coast,” with recreational and tourism possibilities, and less as a site solely for real estate development, which might leave the area more vulnerable to sea level rise. Juror Jennifer Yoos, FAIA, lauded the students’ approach to “rethinking how these design processes should be done.”

This was the fourth time Masoud has led a hands-on, pragmatic studio focused on South Florida, and Broward County officials say it was the first time their office had worked with such a studio on planning ideas. They say they welcomed the outside insight, and have begun to incorporate some of the students’ ideas, like flux zoning, into their long-range planning.
 

U of T News covered the student's work in the studio last year, from the start of the term in September to final reviews.

Students who participated in the award-winning studio include: Chaoyi Cui, Marianne Lafontaine-Chicha, Meikang Li, Niloufar Makaremi, Leslie Norris, Natalie Schiabel, Qiwei Song, Zainab Al Rawi, Meng Bao, Chukun Chen, Mengqi Dai, Jessica Guinto, Tania Hlavenka, Joshua Kirk, Alexandra Lazaervski, Ning Lin, Aidan Loweth, Carlos Portillo, and Rayna Syed.

For more information, visit ARCHITECT's website.th Florida" recently received the Sloan Award, a Studio Prize from Architect magazine.

Image, top, by: Qiwei Song, Meikang Li, and Chaoyi Cui

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."

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.

Daniels Faculty experts are part of U of T's new multi-disciplinary initiative to address urban challenges

The John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design is thrilled to be part of the University of Toronto's newly established School of Cities, which brings together more than 230 urban experts across three campuses to work together to help cities around the world thrive, now and in the future.

More than half of the world's population now lives in urban areas. Working with community partners both locally and globally, the School of Cities is providing a platform for  U of T researchers and scholars to connect and collaborated in bold new ways.

“There is really no other institution in the world that has attempted to create something like this,” U of T President Meric Gertler told U of T News. “It is ambitious in terms of its disciplinary scope, its focus on research and teaching as well as outreach, bringing the best insights from research and scholarship to applications in the city.”

Members of the Daniels Faculty of the School of Cities working group include Associate Professor Liat Margolis, Assistant Professor Fadi Masoud, and Assistant Professor Mauricio Quirós Pacheco. Margolis, who is also on the School of Cities Steering Committee, is the Faculty's Assistant Dean of Research, the director of the Faculty's Master of Landscape Architecture program, and director of our award-winning Green Roof Innovation Testing Laboratory (GRIT Lab), which works with industry partners and the City of Toronto to study how to improve the performance of green roofs in urban environments.

• For more on U of T's School of Cities, read the full story by Romi Levine in U of T News
• Visit the School of Cities website

The Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design is pleased to host Smartgeometry (sg), a widely-acclaimed biennial workshop and conference that investigates how digital tools and computation can serve architecture and design.  sg2018 will attract a global community of innovators in the fields of architecture, design, science, engineering and science to participate in four-day workshops followed by a two-day conference to explore new forms of architectural and structural expression.
 
The Workshop on May 7-10 enables professional architects, engineers, academics, and students to engage in high-level training and research in a collaborative environment with world-leading experts in architectural computation, digital fabrication, and artificial intelligence.
 
The Conference on May 11&12 will feature presentations by renowned designers and theorists on computational design and artificial intelligence.

(Please visit the Smartgeometry website to view registration fees, which include special rates for students.)
 
A new kind of intelligence is emerging and becoming a part of our everyday lives. The new mind will be able to learn at fantastic rates, have unbounded creativity, alter and adapt its own behaviour or experience, and perhaps even live forever — raising questions about how we live and experience the world. Whether humans are directly or indirectly collaborating with these computationally intelligent machines, they have the power to be an active partner or tool in design creativity, blurring the traditional relationship between a designer and their tools.
 
At sg2018, human and computational intelligences will interact with each other and the physical world through robotics, vision, sensing, language, materials, and design. The conference will explore the impact of computational intelligence on the future of architectural design, and how machine minds will improve the world we live in.
 
www.smartgeometry.org

A new app designed by Associate Professor Aziza Chaouni together with a group of architecture students from the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, could be the first step in protecting communities in Morocco’s Guelmim Province from being forced to flee their land, where the ravages of climate change have led to widespread drought and desertification.

Soon available through itunes, the app provides would-be tourists with information on routes, sites, and resources in the region. But it also doubles as a master plan for the Moroccan Ministry of Tourism, which partnered with Chaouni and her research platform Designing Ecological Tourism (DET) to determine how sustainable tourism could help local residents, including low-income farmers and craftspeople, stay in the area and support the conservation of the region’s sensitive ecology.

“When people in this region abandon their land for the cities, they are also leaving behind cultural practices,” says Chaouni, an architect and engineer who grew up in Morocco and whose research is focused on design issues in the developing world, particularly arid climates. “It feels like I am witnessing culture being erased.”

Chaouni’s research, combining architecture and ecotourism, grew out of her Master of Architecture thesis at Harvard, which proposed uncovering the Fez River in her hometown — a project she further developed after graduating and came to realize.

“I was really interested in the scarcity of water, and, later, through my research as the Aga Khan Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, I found that many innovations in Saharan regions were happening in the field ecotourism, because owners had the means and the motivation to mix traditional construction techniques with innovative technology and design,” Chaouni says. “Working in areas where you cannot take your natural resources for granted, you realize how wasteful  the design approaches you are accustomed to are. It completely redefined how I think about architecture and landscape architecture.”

Rendering by Yi Zhang, Agri-tourism centre

The Moroccan Ministry of Tourism reached out to Chaouni’s research platform to develop an ecotourism master plan for the southern Morocco province of Guelmim, where the Anti-Atlas mountain range, Sahara Desert and Atlantic Ocean meet. Although the unique landscape offers extraordinary hiking and trekking opportunities, beautiful beaches, and “is one of the best spots in the world for kite surfing,” Chaouni says it doesn’t receive as many tourist as other Moroccan destinations, in part because it lacks the infrastructure to support them.

Working with local politicians, villagers, ecologists, and landscape architects (including Associate Professor Alissa North), Chaouni and graduate students in her Winter 2017 research studio selected key sites identified by the Ministry and developed a program (which could include new built infrastructure such as a hotel, an interpretive centre, wayfinding, lookout points, or a combination of these elements) for each. Their research included a trip to the Guelmim Province where they visited the sites and met with locals.

“The student projects helped the Ministry and the local community better envision what could be built there and how it might support the fragile region,” explains Chaouni.

The following summer, Chaouni engaged the help of graduate students Mengie Cheng and Yiming Chen and undergraduate students Yi Zhang (now a Masters student) and Treasure Zhang, to map and rate the attractions, develop routes, and propose additional infrastructure that would need to be built to support them. The maps included existing hotels, homestay opportunities, and local cooperatives, where women have crafts for sale. Graduate student Eleanor Laffling and Undergraduate student Yasmine El Sanouyra provided editing and design assistance for the app this past fall.

With the help of developers at U of T, this information, along with some of the top student projects that illustrate a vision for the future, were incorporated into an app, which will be free to download. Design guidelines developed by Chaouni will inform the Ministry of Tourism’s request for proposals that will ultimate see infrastructure built across a total of 52 sites.

“I chose to do an app instead of a traditional publication because its impact on the livelihood of the local population will be more immediate,” says Chaouni. “The Ministry of Tourism is now interested in undertaking the same approach for other regions in Morocco.”

For more information on Designing Ecological Tourism, visit DET’s website.

Rederings, top:: 1) rehabilitation of Agadir Id Aissa, bu Treasure Zhang; 2) Birdwatching research station and lodge, by Kellie Chin; 3) rendering by Yiming Chen

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.