This summer, the Research Opportunity Program (ARC399H1) was conducted as a two-week intensive workshop offering undergraduate students the unique opportunity to design and build a structure on Hart House Farm.
 
Students spent the first week in a studio setting on the St. George campus, designing and prototyping a collaborative project using both digital and analog tools and materials. During the second week, they stayed at Hart House Farm to collectively assemble the structure they designed. Taught by Instructors William Haskas, and Matei Denes of PlusFARM, the studio (entitled “Nocturne Elemental”) was established as an environment for discourse, digital design, craftwork, fabrication, and construction with a particular emphasis upon the areas where analog and digital design overlap, trade places, and inform each other.
 
Following an initial analysis of a pivotal cinematic moment, students worked with Rhinoceros and Grasshopper to explore generative workflows and fluidity in form-making. This was followed by a series of physical prototypes developed around the simple program of a space for projection and different forms of bodily occupation. In the absence of a specific site or material constraints, the exuberant forms were then evaluated in terms of their potential performative success.
 
The project was then developed through a poly-authored digital design process, allowing every student to embed, share, and infuse their ideas upon the final outcome. In keeping with this model of collaborative authorship, the students decided collectively which scheme to invest in and take to Hart House Farm the following week.
 
For the second half of the course, students continued to develop and refine the scheme while camping on site, ultimately fabricating a collaboratively-built structure that functions as a screening pavilion, a beacon, and a viewing device that is intended to transform our understanding of the natural setting of Hart House Farm.
 
PlusFARM is an internationally recognized design and fabrication studio with built projects in London, Lima, Toronto, and New York City. Working with both digital and material design, the studio inverts traditional, authoritarian, top-down design to explore horizontal platforms of participation and production through the practice of “poly-authorship,” which responds to how digital technologies have changed the way artchitecture is being taught, practiced, and managed.

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Photos above by Harry Choi

On February 28, Master of Landscape Architecture students participated in the Daniels Faculty’s Student-Professionals Networking Event, hosted in collaboration with the Ontario Association of Landscape Architects (OALA) and organized with the help of GALDSU, the Daniels Faculty's graduate student union.

This annual event provides students with the opportunity to meet with landscape architecture professionals, ask questions about their practice, and gain knowledge of their prospective career paths.

OALA President Doris Chee welcomed the students and professionals with opening remarks before they started “speed networking” sessions in room 066. The evening concluded with an informal reception for all involved.

“I was excited to talk to Janet Rosenberg,” said student Nancy Zhang. “We spoke about landscape design for condo development, and she had some suggestions for being competitive in the job market.” Rosenberg — Principal of the Toronto-based firm Janet Rosenberg & Studio — has hired a number of graduates from the Daniels Faculty in the past, including recent 2016 MLA graduates Nicholas Gosselin, Jordan Duke, Dayne Roy-Caldwell, and Emma Mendel.

Catherine Howell asked Lei Chang, Senior Landscape Architect at FORREC Ltd., about the types of questions firms ask in job interviews and what they look for in portfolios. “She told me that although your skills are obviously important to get your foot in the door, people are also interested in your personality,” said Howell. “She also mentioned that they are very interested in process drawings — they’re interested in the ideas.”

When asked if there was anything she learned that she found surprising, Howell mentioned advice she received from Bryce Miranda, a partner at DTAH: “He said that his firm is interested in people who could combine urban planning, landscape architecture, and architecture in their projects — and students who had interests in how all the fields work together.”

Howell noted the value of the Daniels Faculty’s “superstudio” — which brings together graduate students from architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design. A key goal of this studio is to create opportunities for students across programs to discover shared concerns, approaches and design solutions to the complex demands associated with a large-scale urban project, such as the proposed Rail Deck Park in Toronto.

Zhang was grateful for the opportunity to meet with senior professionals in the field. “It’s good to be able to talk face-to-face,” she said. “It helps to establish a connection and to learn more about the profession. Landscape architecture is a broad field. It’s hard to know whether you want to do playground design or master planning, so it really helps to talk to people working in the industry.”

The Daniels Faculty would like to thank all the professionals who generously donated their time to meet and share advice with our students:

Tyler Bradt
Project Manager, Landscape + Ecology
The Planning Partnership

Lei Chang 
Senior Landscape Architect
FORREC Ltd. | Scott Torrance Landscape Architect

Doris Chee
President, Ontario Association of Landscape Architects
Landscape Architect, Hydro One Networks Inc.

Caroline Cosco
Senior Program Advisor
Ontario Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change 

Greg Costa
Senior Landscape Architect, Associate
MHBC

Nadia D'Agnone
Landscape Architectural Designer
Stantec

Aina Elias
Principal, Elias +

Gunta Mackars
Principal, Landscape Architecture
Stantec

Bryce Miranda
Partner, DTAH

Elyse Parker
Director, Public Realm Section
Transportation Services, City of Toronto

Janet Rosenberg
Principal, Janet Rosenberg & Studio Inc

Alex Shevchuk
Project Manager, Landscape Architecture Unit
Parks, Forestry & Recreation, City of Toronto

Gail Shillingford
Associate, Planning and Urban Design
DIALOG

Stephanie Snow
Principal, Snow Larc Landscape Architecture Ltd.

On November 8, myself and 27 other Daniels Faculty students from this semester’s ARC201 class embarked on a day trip, led by Assistant Professor Jeannie Kim, to see architecture in Buffalo, New York. The majority of the trip was spent at Silo City where, upon arrival, everyone was astounded by the massive scale of the buildings on site. The gargantuan grain elevators were once instrumental in the economic growth of Buffalo, but gradually came to be abandoned by the 1990’s.

In recent years, the site has been re-invented as an art space where installation and performance art are juxtaposed within the derelict state of the silos.

The tour provided an opportunity to see the spatial and experiential conditions of an architectural typology that inspired Le Corbusier and his ideas about modern architecture. The silos provided a good case study in understanding relationships in massing, and addressing architectural space whether it is a conscious production or a by-product of one’s chosen form(s).
 
We were also treated to a brief tour of the Darwin D. Martin House by Frank Lloyd Wright, which helped us realize the great potential for architects to be deliberate and uncompromising about our designs in realizing a vision for space and living.

Just before heading home, we visited downtown Buffalo to see Louis Sullivan’s Guaranty Building and ponder the architect’s most famous line “form (ever) follows function.” Everyone was excited to see the richly ornate exterior of one of North America's earliest skyscrapers.

To see more photos from the trip, head over to the Daniels Faculty's Facebook page.