Associate Professor Liat Margolis, director of the Daniels Faculty's Master of Landscape Architecture program and assistant dean of research, published an article in the most recent issue of Canadian Architect magazine on the Faculty's award-winning Green Roof Innovation Testing Laboratory.

Green roofs "are a favourite among designers, policymakers and citizens not only because of this ecological multi-tasking, but also because they transform a vast and underused layer of the city—the roof scape—into a thing of beauty," writes Margolis, but they also perform important functions, such as aid in stormwater management and thermal cooling, and provide a habitat for bees.

Toronto was the first city in North America to create a bylaw that requires the construction of green roofs on new developments. At present, buildings with a Gross Floor Area greater than 2,000 square metres must include a green roof. But as Margolis explains "there are so many different types of green roof products, materials, configurations and dimensions," and a plant's performance may vary based on the climate and conditions in which is it grown. So how do you determine which types of green roofs will reap the most benefits?

Research is ongoing, with a second site of the GRIT Lab now being constructed on the room of the Daniels Building at One Spadina Crescent, but the GRIT Lab's multidisciplinary team of researchers are already collecting results. Visit Canadian Architect's website to read about some of the conclusions and learn more about the GRIT Lab's work.

Launched last summer, StudentDwellTO is an 18-month-long joint-research project being conducted by the University of Toronto, Ryerson, OCAD, and York University to find solutions to one of the biggest issues facing post secondary students in the Greater Toronto Area: affordable housing.

As Romi Levine writes in U of T News, researchers — including Assistant Professors Mauricio Quirós Pacheco from the Daniels Faculty and Marcelo Vieta from OISE, U of T's faculty leads on the project — have developed a strong understanding of the challenges that students face and best practices from around the world.

"One of their early findings," writes Levine, "is that design greatly affects student experiences."

From the article:

The StudentDwellTO team is currently collecting census data with the help of faculty including David Hulchanski, professor at the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, and will be conducting focus groups with students and stakeholders to get a clearer picture of the current landscape and future possibilities.

In addition, faculty members are incorporating the study of student housing into their curricula, says Vieta.
 

This fall, Daniels Faculty undergraduate students will use the data and case studies collected to explore ideas for the design of student housing.

Visit U of T News to read the full story.

Image, top by Scott Carncross (March 2017). Part of his Master of Architecture thesis A new Housing through Symbiotic Performance.

Masters of Landscape Architecture student Catherine Howell, along with Assistant Professor Jennifer Drake and Associate Professor Liat Margolis, recently published an article in The Conversation describing that — with the appropriate variables — green roofs can help maintain bee populations in cities. Unfortunately, current green roof practices favour the native bee's non-native relatives. As cities sprawl “into their surroundings, fragmenting animal habitats and replacing vegetation with hard surfaces such as concrete and asphalt,” declining bee populations are  an increasing concern.

As the article explains, it is becoming more understood that a green roof needs to be designed to maximize the benefits specific to its context, and the Daniels Faculty’s GRIT Lab is pioneering this research. Factors such as plant species, building height, and proximity to other habitat patches are important to consider when a green roof is designed with bee populations in mind. For example, bees will rarely visit green roofs over 8 storeys high. Additionally, while the plant species called “sedum” is currently the go-to green roof material, it only favours a small percentage of Toronto’s bee population.

“It’s important to note that roughly 92 per cent of Toronto’s bee species are native,” writes the article's authors. “So, favouring non-native plants [like sedum] can provide habitat for non-native bees over native bees, and could consequently lead to increased competition for those native bees.”

Under the supervision of Drake and Margolis, the article was a result of Howell’s summer work term as Student Lab Manager and Research Assistant at the GRIT Lab. 

Said Howell on the experience:

“I was surprised by how varied green roofs can be, and how the variables (planting type, depth, soil, irrigation type) can have different outcomes. I thought it would be pretty simple, like you can spread out a mat of Sedum and call it a day. But not all green roofs are created equal and you need to figure out the location, the size, and what you want your main objective to be to design one properly. Consciously designing green roofs is incredibly important for maximum effectiveness.”

Photo, top: A wild, non-native bee forages for pollen on the green roof of the University of Toronto’s GRIT Lab.

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.

Bordering Canada and the United States, North America's Great Lakes are well known as the world's largest body of freshwater, which has made the region an attractive area for urban growth. But what other characteristics — ecological, geological, cultural, and political — are common to the region, which spans two provinces and eight states? And how have they influenced urbanization? How might understanding the Great Lakes basin as one of the continent’s coastal zones help inform future development and design?

Third Coast Atlas: A Prelude to a Plan, by Daniels Faculty Associate Professor Mason White, together with Clare Lyster, Charles Waldheim, and Daniel Ibañez, provides a multi-layered description of the process of urbanization along North America’s “Third Coast.” The large, hardcover book, filled with maps, plans, diagrams, timelines, photographs, and essays, offers an in-depth description of the region, laying the foundation for future engagement and regional endeavors.

“In a continent that often looks to the powers on its east and west coasts, this book envisions a new international, mid-continent epicenter,” writes Keller Easterling in the Atlas’ Forward. “Third Coast Atlas allows us to imagine a time when serious politicians, planners, and developers would never dream of advocating for urban or regional enterprises without first considering the profound correlative intelligence of territorial design.”

Essays include “Cutting the Corporate Lawn,” an analysis the industry’s environmental imact in the region, by Daniels Faculty Associate Professor Alissa North; and “Good’s Gone, Fine’s just Perfect,” an overview of Toronto’s urban development by Dean Richard Sommer. Daniels Faculty Alumni Geoffrey Thün (MUD 2007), and Heather Braiden (MLA 2005) also contributed to the book.

The Atlas is already receiving critical acclaim: Metropolis Magazine listed it among its top 25 books for Fall.

The Toronto book launch will take place at the Daniels Building at One Spadina on October 24. Save the Date! Information will be posted on our Events page shortly.

Below is a discussion with Clare Lyster and Mason White recorded at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

In recent years, Broward County located in Southeast Florida hasn’t been able to rely on historical data when preparing their prevention measures against flooding; the weather patterns and sea levels have consistently deviated from expected standards. According to Associate Processor Fadi Masoud,"Nowhere in North America are the patterns of precarious coastal development more visible than in South Florida...Thirty-five miles of levees and 2,000 hydraulic pumping stations drain a metropolitan area of 6,137 square miles (15,890 km²), resulting in the ‘world’s largest wet subdivision’ with $152 billion worth of property projected to be below sea level by 2050." As sea levels rise, millions of Americans could be forced to leave their homes.

So how does a city or region plan in the face of such precariousness? Masoud explored an alternative approach to land-use planning in the article "Coding Flux: Redesigning the Migranting Coast," recently published in Scenario Journal. "The pressures of accelerating coastal change demand a new responsive and flexible zoning paradigm that introduces time, process, and potential into land use regulation," writes Masoud.

Working under a collaborative project between MIT's Urban Risk Lab and the University of Toronto's Daniels Faculty, Masoud — with a team that includes Lecturer Ultan Byrne, Mayank Ojha, Aditiya Barve, and Kelly Leilani Main — has been researching and developing a new method of planning for future weather events for Broward County. They call it “flux code zoning” because of its ability to represent a range of projected future conditions.

Four ecological paradigms have had a direct impact on public policy in North America. Image by Fadi Masoud.

“Normative or traditional zoning has historically relied on two conditions: on the regulation of land and the regulation of use,” writes Masoud. “We posit a third condition, a layer of the zoning envelope that introduces time, process, and scenario-driven flexibility into land use regulation.”

Visit Scenario Journal to read the full article.

Photo, top: South Florida’s urban fabric surrounded by water on three sides. Image by Fadi Masoud.

On Wednesday, May 3, 2017, five speakers from the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design presented their research at the University of Toronto's event Future Environments: Art and Architecture in Action. The audience learned how architecture defines our environment, be it external environments, such as the green roofs dotting our cities skylines, or internal environments of our buildings.

Dean Richard Sommer and U of T President Meric Gertler provided opening remarks and Nora Young, from CBC’s hit radio show, Spark, moderated the evening.

The event featured presentations by:

• Emerging Canadian designer and researcher Brady Peters presenting Architecture, Atmosphere, Computation;
• Toronto-based scholar, composer and artist, Mitchell Akiyama presenting Matter and Metaphor;
• Director of the Green Roof Innovation Testing Laboratory, Liat Margolis presenting Green Roofs: Interdisciplinary by Nature;
• Founding partner at the design practice Lateral Office, Mason White presenting Micro-environments;
• Director of Visual Studies, Charles Stankievech presenting The Rare Earth Age of the Canadian Arctic.

“Architecture and art are as much a way of finding the world, as of forming it, and have surprising and often misunderstood historical and contemporary relationships with scientific inquiry,” said Richard Sommer, Dean and Professor of Urbanism at the Daniels Faculty. “This event will present members of the Daniels Faculty whose research moves beyond traditional text and mathematical modes of ideation to explore intersections between design, the environment, and visual culture.”

Barbara Fischer, Executive Director of U of T's Art Museum and Associate Professor in the Daniels Faculty's Visual Studies program, closed out the evening. The audience was invited to view the exhibition It's All Happening So Fast at the Art Museum which focused on the history of the Canadian landscape and the future impact of extraction industries on our perceived national identity.

Watch the talks on the Daniels Faculty Youtube Channel.

This event was brought to you by: Science & Engineering Engagement at the University of Toronto & the Daniels Faculty at the University of Toronto

Photo, top: Courtesty of Brady Peters - Project Distortion, Distortion Music Festival, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2010 | Photo by Anders Ingvartsen

The Daniels Faculty’s former building at 230 College Street is now being renovated to become the home of U of T’s student union — but the its Green Roof Innovation Testing Laboratory on the rooftop, remains in full swing. We spoke to Master of Landscape Architecture students Catherine Howell and Hadi El-Shayeb about their experience working at the GRIT Lab this summer and the plans to launch a second site on the roof of the Faculty's new home at One Spadina Crescent.

How did you become involved with the GRIT Lab?
Catherine: The GRIT Lab was one of the main drivers for me to come to Daniels. I did my undergraduate degree in health studies at Queen’s and when figuring out what to do next, I saw the GRIT Lab website and thought, “this is so cool!” It was an interesting facet of landscape architecture and architecture that I had never heard of before. I had it in the back of my head that I wanted to help out in some way. I had Liat Margolis as a professor in first year, and she was very inspiring. The opportunity to work alongside Liat, while playing an active role in the green infrastructure movement, has made for an extremely engaging summer thus far.  

Hadi: I’ll be starting the Master of Landscape Architecture program in September. I did my undergraduate degree in Planning at the University of Waterloo, and a lot of my research was on climate change adaptation. I also worked for the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change as a Policy Intern on renewable energies, and attended the COP22 Marrakech the UN Climate Change Summit that happened in Morocco last November. The GRIT Lab was very interesting to me because green roofs are an opportunity to adapt to climate change. I messaged a few professors, including Liat, and thankfully she responded to me and added me onto the project. I have always been interested in landscape architecture and its role in ecological design. I’m really interested in environmental and climate change adaptation. GRIT Lab is a subset of that.

What are your responsibilities at the Lab?
C: We’re the “nine to fivers,” the Lab Managers and Research Assistants, so we have to be surface-level experts in everything, from electrical wiring to coding to sensors. The GRIT Lab is a system: it includes physical inputs, such as sunlight and water; the sensors that monitor factors such as rainfall, soil moisture, and water retention; a computer; and then the production of infographics that demonstrate these processes. We have to understand all levels of that process. We also have to help coordinate a number of people who are doing research here, including undergraduate, masters, and PHD engineering students. We need to make sure they’re happy with the data being collected, troubleshoot broken sensors, and so on. We’re also working on articles for publication that summarize GRIT Lab research so that it is understandable to the general public.

Sedum planting | Photo by Josie Harrison

And what has some of that research found?
C: I’m writing about green roof hydrology and how green roofs hold onto water. Right now, it’s understood that they can absorb up to 50% of stormwater, but actually with the right combination of plants and soil they can hold onto 70-80%, which is huge. Especially in cities like Toronto where we now have the Green Roof Bylaw, you can really maximize the benefits of your green roof if you know the right combinations. It can function as a low impact development option: if you have enough green roof coverage on your building then you might not have to install any ground water storm management infrastructure like swales or cisterns to meet the wet weather flow standards.

H: One of the articles I’m writing is on growing media, its effect on different performances, and how selecting different media can have different benefits. For example, both mineral-based and compost-based growing media are popular in Canada and Southern Ontario. It is believed that compost-based media compacts and loses organic content over time, but our studies show that it doesn’t actually do that, and, additionally, it can absorb about three times more water than mineral-based meda.

meadow planting | Photo by Josie Harrison

C: I’m also writing about bees and Sedum versus meadow planting. Right now there is a big push to promote native pollinators in Ontario. It has been shown that native plants attract more native bees, but Sedum, which is not native to this region, is the preferred green roof planting type. It goes to show that we have to carefully consider plant selection on green roofs if we want to promote biodiversity. With more and more greenroofs being built, the plants we choose could have a regional impact on ecological diversity.

What have you learned from your experience working at the GRIT Lab so far?
H: Seeing the technical components put into this green infrastructure has been a big thing for me. The importance of data collection and the nitty gritty details has been eye-opening. I’ve learned that there is a strong need to collect all the data to improve our systems.

C: I was surprised by how varied green roofs can be, and how the variables (planting type, depth, soil, irrigation type) can have different outcomes. I thought it would be pretty simple, like you can spread out a mat of Sedum and call it a day. But not all green roofs are created equal and you need to figure out the location, the size, and what you want your main objective to be to design one properly. Consciously designing green roofs is incredibly important for maximum effectiveness.

Catherine Howell looking south down Spadina Avenue from the roof of One Spadina. PhD student Omar Bawab is helping develop plans for a second site of the GRIT Lab over the summer | Photo by Josie Harrison

How will the GRIT Lab expand its research at One Spadina?
C: There is a giant cistern underneath One Spadina that holds all the rainwater that falls on the property. They want to use the grey water from the cistern to irrigate the green roof. We need to test the quality of that water and how it will affect the various plants on the roof. There will be quite a lot of urban contaminants, including salt from de-icing the walkways. I’m curious to see the results from that, whether the water will need to be treated or not.

H: Omar Bawab is an international PhD student here on a global exchange program, to help develop the plans for the green roof testing beds at One Spadina. He has a lot of experience with green roofs and particularly connected cisterns for water collection, which is the main purpose for building this roof. Catherine and I will be helping him draft the visual representation for the project.

GRIT Lab student researchers, from left to right: Redwan Baba & Diego Domingo, undergraduate students, Civil Engineering; Catherine Howell, MLA; Eric Wang, undergraduate student, Civil Engineering; Hadi El-Shayeb, MLA; Marisa Fryer, graduate student, Civil Engineering | Photo by Josie Harrison

How do you think your experience this summer will influence your future research or ambitions?
H: One thing I’m finding really interesting is linking the local scale action at the GRIT Lab to global scale policies. We have these huge ambitions to bring down emissions and stop the global average temperature from increasing, but how do we do that at a local scale? I’m interested in the role that landscape architecture can play in this.

C: Learning so much about green roofs as a summer job has really piqued my interest in them. As a landscape architect, I would love green roofs to be a big part of my practice when I start working in the field.

When he graduated in 2015, Jonah Ross-Marrs received the Jackman-Kuwabara Prize, awarded to the student judged to have the most outstanding Master of Architecture thesis of the year. That summer, he won a Pier 9 Artist-in-Residence fellowship at AutoDesk in San Francisco. How’s life a year after graduation? Honours Bachelor of Arts in Architectural Studies student Josie Northern Harrison (HBA 2017) caught up with Ross-Marrs over email to find out how his time at U of T has helped prepare him for future work in computation and architecture — and how he plans to expand on his thesis this Fall as a new student in the Master of Science in Architecture Studies (SMArchS) in Computation at MIT.

What inspired you to study architecture at the Daniels Faculty?
After completing an undergraduate degree in History, I wanted to study something tangible that would give me a foothold in the professional world. I was inspired by the models and diagrams on the walls of the architecture department at McGill University and felt I would be more at home in such an environment. I thought architecture might be an opportunity to build on my hobby of making electro-mechanical things and bring my creative work into a more formal academic environment.

I decided to study at Daniels because of the accomplished faculty. I liked the diversity of professors and felt the reputation of the school would help me in my career. I also felt that living in a large urban center would be a good supplement to my studies.

When did you first start experimenting with open source software?
I have been interested in electronics since the mid-1990s, when I began building simple solar-powered robots from e-waste. My interest was sparked by the magic of tiny, intricate mechanisms coming to life when charged with electricity. When Arduino (an accessible type of open-source hardware and software) was released, it allowed a whole group of people like myself access to microchips (mini reprogrammable electronic brains) that was previously unavailable. Once I was familiar with Arduino, it was a natural progression to make Do-It-Yourself (DIY) Computer Numerically Controlled (CNC) machines.

How did studying at the University of Toronto influence your work?
Every design studio was, for me, life-changing and extremely challenging. I wasn’t sure I would continue on the traditional path of a practicing architect, so I used the courses I took as opportunities to develop my own creative method. I began to develop a creative process and learned that my strengths were in visual communication. I also learned to work within a highly critical environment and to accept criticism of my work. Studying design changed my view of making and made me aspire to higher ideals and have a greater appreciation for the context of my work.

Living in Toronto, I had access to valuable resources needed for experiments with custom CNC tooling. Active Surplus, Jacob’s Hardware, Above All Electronic Surplus, Hacklab.To, and other communities were crucial assets to my projects.

The Mini CNC Foam Cutter tutorial that you posted on Instructableshas been very successful (with ~42,000 views and ~500 favorites). Will you continue to contribute to the open source/hardware hacking community?
I have published a few more Instructables since the Mini CNC Foam Cutter and hope to get feedback from the community about the value of these projects. I hope to meaningfully contribute to the open-source community because I build on projects created by my peers as prime resources for my investigations. For the open-source hardware community in particular, I would like to continue to develop a series of mini CNC machines that work with different materials and use e-waste components in different ways.

What was it like being an Artist-in-Residence at the Autodesk Pier 9?
The Autodesk Artist-in-Residence Program was an excellent opportunity to interact with the programmers who develop software used by designers, and to gain access to cutting edge fabrication technologies. It was also an opportunity to meet incredibly talented designers and artists from around the world and learn from their practices. The San Francisco tech scene in general is extremely stimulating and full of intelligent and entrepreneurial individuals.

What did you create for the residency?
My project captured a moment that is normally lost in the process of printing a 3D model. When a computer prepares a 3D model for printing, it rebuilds the model out of triangles (i.e. translates the model into triangles) before virtually slicing the model into layers for the 3D printer to interpret. This first triangulation step is called the meshing process. I printed each component of this translation process separately in the order they have been rebuilt by the meshing algorithm. This was done with various input models: a house, a car, a washing machine, or a pencil sharpener. The results visualize the work of the meshing algorithms, providing a behind-the-scenes look into an almost instantaneous computer process that designers interact with every day but would never experience spatially. The potential of the project is in the way it can analyze and compare the behavior of different algorithms designed to do the same task in a kind of visual short-hand.

Do you hope to expand on the work you did for your MArch thesis in the SMArchS program in Computation at MIT?
At MIT, I hope to continue exploring my MArch thesis project and follow it wherever it leads me while challenging myself to increase my skill level in programming languages. Most of all, I hope to meet others in my field and learn from them, hopefully allowing myself to evolve and develop new insights.

Do you have any advice for students starting their Masters of Architecture degree next year?
I would suggest attending the guest lectures as they are a valuable opportunity to get insight into the design process and various strategies of presenting work. I think maintaining an interest in extra-architecture subjects is important because of the nature of inspiration. Connected with this, I think it is important to find ways to maintain a balanced lifestyle throughout the degree.