On December 5, as Toronto City Council voted in favour of moving forward with planning for Rail Deck Park, Master of Architecture, Master of Landscape Architecture, and Master of Urban Design students presented design ideas for this new public space, which would be built over the rail corridor that cuts through the southern edge of the downtown core.

"Toronto city council voted 36-4 in favour of pushing ahead with planning work for the park, which is now estimated to cost some $1.665 billion although only five per cent of the design is complete," reported CBC News. "If built, the park would span the rail corridor from Blue Jays Way to Bathurst Street, creating more than eight hectares (21 acres) of green space in the middle of the city."

Above are photos of some of the projects that were presented on December 5.

Congratulations to all Superstudio students on completing your final review!

On November 17, the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design celebrated the official opening of its new home — the Daniels Building — at historic One Spadina Crescent.

Located on the western edge of the University of Toronto’s St. George campus just north of College Street, the iconic neo-gothic building and stunning contemporary addition, currently nearing completion, is now poised to become an international focal point for education, research, and outreach on architecture, art, and the future of cities.

University of Toronto President, Professor Meric Gertler; Dean of the Daniels Faculty, Professor Richard Sommer; and Chair of the Governing Council at the University of Toronto, Claire Kennedy welcomed donors, alumni, faculty, students, and other esteemed guests to commemorate the Daniels Faculty’s new home — which the Globe and Mail’s architecture critic has called “one of the best buildings in Canada of the past decade” — with an official ribbon cutting ceremony and reception.

Above is a slideshow of images from the opening ceremony.

Click here to read the full press release.

Janet Rosenberg & Studio — in partnership with Patkau Architects, Blackwell Structural Engineers, and ERA Architects Inc. — has been announced the winner of the Nepean Point Design Competition.

Launched by the National Capital Commission (NCC) in the spring of 2017, this international competition called for participants to reimagine and redesign Nepean Point, a hill in Ottawa that overlooks the river, the parliament buildings, the Canadian Museum of History and other features of Canada’s capital.

A number of Daniels Alumni and students were part of the winning team led by Janet Rosenberg & Studio, including: Todd Douglas (MLA 2013), Jordan Duke (MLA 2016), Nicholas Gosselin (MLA 2016), Kerrie Harvey (MLA 2008), Glenn Herman (BLA 1990), Andrew Hooke (MLA 2017), Rob McIntosh (MLA 2015), Dayne Roy-Caldwell (MLA 2016), Jessie Seed (MLA 2003), and Wayne Swanton (BLA 1989).

Daniels Faculty Lecturer Adrian Phiffer also supported the winning team; his office, The Flat Side of Design, including Dimitrios Karopulos (MArch 16) and second year student Diana Franco Camacho, produced the majority of the images and renderings for the proposal.

The competition design brief called for “a 21^st century green space that is an inspiring source of pride for all Canadians.” It was hoped that the design would transform Nepean Point into a cultural focal point that can host artistic events, improve access to the site, and encourage discovery.

The winning proposal, entitled Big River Landscape, would offer visitors to the point a range of experiences via quiet meandering meadow paths, promenades with spectacular views high above the river, nooks where one can sit and observe the landscape, a stage and amphitheatre, and re-envisioned entrance points that welcome and invite visitors to the site.

Congratulations to all involved!

Earlier this month, graduate students in Peter Sealy’s course, ARC 3309 “The Photographic Mediation of Architecture,” travelled to Montréal to view photographs from the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s collection. The students were asked to research a photograph from the collection in advance of the trip. While there, they gave a presentation to the class in the presence of the actual researched piece. Louise Désy, curator of photographs at the CCA, took the students on a tour of the Centre’s underground photography vault. The class also visited Phyllis Lambert’s Greystone exhibition of photographs, taken with Richard Pare in the early 1970s.

While in Montreal, the class also visited  a number of buildings with local architects as guides, including: U, by Atelier Big City with architect Howard Davies; the Stade de Soccer de Montréal by Saucier + Perrotte, with Lia Ruccolo and Olivier Blouin; and The Schulich School of Music by Saucier + Perrotte, with Vedanta Balbahadur.

An elective course at the Daniels Faculty, “The Photographic Mediation of Architecture” provides a broad survey of architecture’s contemporary and historical relationship with photography.

From the course description:

From  Julius  Shulman’s  idealizations  of  California  modernism  up  to  Helène  Binet’s present-day interpretations of Zaha Hadid’s and Peter Zumthor’s buildings, architectural photographs tell us much about architecture in its cultural and intellectual  contexts. Sometimes  images  correspond to the intentions of architects, their clients and the imagined publics for whom buildings have been designed; in  other  cases, photographs reveal previously hidden  aspects of built space and invite new interpretations. While the relationship between buildings  and their representations is necessarily complex, themes including space, subjectivity, materiality, ornament, mimesis, interiority and otherness all find their expression in architectural photographs.

Peter Sealy is an architectural historian who studies the ways in which architects constructively engage with reality through indexical media such as photography. He holds architecture degrees from the McGill University School of Architecture and the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. He is currently completing his PhD at Harvard on the emergence of a photographic visual regime in nineteenth-century architectural representation.

The Site Magazine featured Dayne Roy-Caldwell’s Master of Landscape Architecture thesis After Gold in its recent issue. A recent graduate, Roy-Caldwell (MLA 2016) examined the remains of the mining industry in the northern Ontario town of Kirkland Lake. His project explored the role that the gold-mining industry has played in shaping the region’s landscape vernacular and history, and how the remnants of this industry could form the basis of a new network that addresses social, ecological, and economic challenges faced by post-mining communities.

The theme of this issue of The Site Magazine is "Future Legacies." Leading up to the issue, the magazine also hosted a design competition, of which several alumni were recognized. Winners include Evan Wakelin, MArch 2017 (winner); Shelley Long, MLA 2015 (winner); Emma Mendal, MLA 2016 (Honorable Mention); Rob McIntosh, MLA 2015 (Runner Up); and Fionn Byrne, MLA 2010 (Runner Up).

For more information, and to purchase a copy of the issue, visit http://www.thesitemagazine.com/buy/

Images: “AFTER GOLD: Designing for Post-Mining Realities” by Dayne Roy-Caldwell (MLA 2016)

In one of their first "Superstudio" assignments this year, graduate students were asked to overlay ideas onto a supergraphic of the city of Toronto initially created for the Design Exchange’s inaugural EDIT Festival. The students looked at the city through a specific lens in an exercise to imagine alternative futures.

Questions addressed in the exercise include:

• How can the process of looking at and drawing the city at a very large scale inform the way we design the city at other, smaller scales?
• What infrastructural, landscape, and building features should be highlighted in drawings of the kind?
• How might designers participate in imaging processes of city-wide and regional urbanization in a serious yet inventive way that can offer compelling, future-oriented alternatives?
• What kind of big pictures might inspire the public imagination in ways that might compel citizens to participate in making meaningful change?

The Daniels Faculty's  Superstudio course is an opportunity for architecture, landscape, and urban design students to discover shared concerns, approaches, and design solutions, and to model the kinds of collaborative, creative, and technical processes required to successfully address the complex demands (political, social, cultural, environmental, formal, infrastructural, etc.) of urban projects today and into the future. Graduate students in architecture, landscape, and  urban design work on the same set of assignments throughout the semester, allowing each discipline to bring its range of approaches to urban-scale exercises so they can be identified and speculated upon across the whole “super” studio.

For the full album, visit the Daniels Faculty Flickr page.

Last month, Master of Architecture students participated in the Daniels Faculty’s Student-Professionals Networking Event, organized with the help of the Ontario Association of Architects (OAA) and GALDSU — the Daniels Faculty's graduate student union.

The event provides students an opportunity to meet with top architecture professionals, ask questions about their practice, and gain knowledge of their prospective career paths. Modeled after “speed networking,” students alternated — moving from table to table — to meet and pose questions to professionals about their practice, as well as to gain knowledge into their prospective career paths.

Professor Shane Williamson — Director, Master of Architecture — and Kathleen Kurtin — Senior Vice President and Treasurer of the OAA — welcomed the students and professionals with opening remarks before they started the “speed networking” sessions in rooms 230 and 330 at One Spadina. Students spoke with professionals who shared their advice on transitioning from school into professional practice.

“It’s good to be able to talk face-to-face,” said student Nancy Zhang about a similar event hosted earlier this year. “It helps to establish a connection and to learn more about the profession."

Masters of Landscape Architecture students can look forward to another Student-Professionals Networking Event to happen January 2018.

The Graduate Architecture, Landscape, and Design Student Union (GALDSU) will launch this year’s issue on Friday, October 6. This issue will explore “the multiplicity of ways in which the graduate students of Daniels confront the realities of our world – and their worlds – as a way to imagine and create space for multiple futures.” How, Co-Editors and Alumni Jasper Flores, Elise Hunchuck, and Dayne Roy-Caldwell ask, do the “practices of architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, and visual studies suggest ways for us to design with and for each other?”

The launch party will take place at OFFSITE Concept Space at 867 Dundas Street West. There will be music, food, and a cash bar. Copies of the new publication will be available to purchase. For more information, visit the Eventbrite page.

A note from the editors on the cover image (pictured above): “The moon was installed at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto in April 2016, alongside Gillian Dykeman (MVS 2016)'s video 'Dispatches from the Feminist Utopian Future,' watercolour schematic drawings of the earthworks, and a keystone covered in tachyon particles. For more, please see 'Dispatches from the Feminist Utopian Future (page 13-18) and Psychic Strata: Land, Art, Subjectivity (page 19-26). Both works are by Gillian Dykeman. The cover photograph was taken by Jesse Boles (MVS 2015), courtesy of Gillian Dykeman (2015).

Other photos (in order of appearance): 2-On Spheres by Ekaterina Dovjenko, 3-Wasting Futures by Elaine Chau, 4-To Melt Into Air, Slowly by Vanessa Abram, 5-∆ Museum by Melissa Gerskup and Ray Wu

Bachelor of Arts in Architectural Studies student Marienka Bishop-Kovac and Masters of Architecture student Phat Le recently published the 2nd issue of their zine titled I’M SO MAD that documents stories about living and growing up in Toronto. The first edition featured stories written by Bishop-Kovac and Le. This recent edition expanded to the larger architectural community to showcase stories from citizens concerned with gentrification in Toronto.

“Toronto, my friends have written about you and the fond memories they have shared with you,” writes Bishop-Kovac in I’M SO MAD. “We want a Toronto that is accessible, we want Toronto to live up to another one of its nicknames, Toronto the Good!”

I’M SO MAD 2 is an archive of stories from Daniels Faculty students and alumni Ahlam Mo, Alexandra Spalding, Elif Özçelik, Ji Song Sun, Josie Northern Harrison, Waiyee Chou, Marienka Bishop-Kovac, and Phat Le, and members of Toronto's architectural community Philip Ocampo, Khadijah Salawutang, Mubashir Baweja, and Victoria Willis. Landmarks mentioned include 1840-50 Victoria Park Ave, Rexdale Mall, Coffee Time, the bus stop at Pharmacy Ave/St. Clair, and many more.

'We are putting our memories into words to start a dialogue about gentrification,' Bishop-Kovac told U of T News earlier this year.

I’M SO MAD 2 can be viewed online through Issuu.

“It is commendable when a design student tackles a tough building typology, and exceptional when the author discovers real invention within that typology. The developer-driven world of mid-rise residential housing requires just such invention and new thinking.”