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.

Alumni Zhengyan Jin (MUD 2015), Weiming Shi (MUD 2015), and current undergraduate Architectural Studies students Yujie Wang and Yang Yue recently won the Director’s Choice Award for the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) Underground Bath House Competition hosted by Arch Out Loud.

The competition asked participants to explore the possibility of creating an underground bathhouse within the Korean DMZ that responded to the surrounding geopolitical conditions. Titled “Unresolved Line,” the team created a proposal that could perpetually respond to the political tension between two nations.

“By having a series of chronological assigned vertical pipelines that connect to the underground mechanical system dotting along the demarcation line of DMZ zone, the project becomes an effort to both reconnect people to the geopolitical history and unify them in the realm of light, water, and fog,” writes the team in their project statement. “More importantly, the architecture has to grow along with such political tension, and therefore, remains as an unfinished project.”

All the winning entries to the competition can be viewed on the Arch Out Loud website.

Jin and Shi previously won honorable mention in the 2015 Urban Ideas Competition for their Brampton City Centre Revitalization proposal, which also included team member Zhiyu Liu (MLA 2016). Liu, Jin, and Shi envisioned transforming the commuter suburb by ennhancing accessibility, improving the main streets and traffic circulation, and encompassing stategies to expand restaurant and retail businesses in the area.

Alumna Ridhima Khurana (MArch 2015) recently published a calendar featuring photos taken on a field trip for ARC1012Y, a first year Masters of Architecture course. Taught by Associate Professor Rodolphe el-Khoury and coordinated by Associate Professor Shane Williamson, the students visited architectural sites within the Great Lakes area to better understand the environment, building, culture, and symbolic aspects of the sites.

“I started capturing the details of all the buildings we visited around the Great Lakes,” says Khurana.“[I refrained] from revealing too much information about where each building stands, [and instead focused] on the smaller pieces that make up the complete design.”

The course asked students to analyze and interpret one of several buildings in terms of natural light, circulation, structure, geometry, symmetry and balance, and unit to whole relationship. Khurana was assigned the Milwaukee Art Museum designed by Santiago Calatrava.

‘The field trip provided an opportunity to photograph the details of this building that would otherwise not have been available to me,’ says Khurana. ‘Seeing Calatrava’s architecture up close and in-person completely left me in awe.’

Khurana incorporated the photos taken from this field trip into a calendar published through RK Studios — her recently established photography and architectural design firm. The calendar, which can be purchase online, also includes photography of Toronto, which she plans to make into an exhibition later this year.

Photos above of the Milwaukee Art Museum, by Ridhima Khurana

Developing ways to make our contemporary suburbs more livable, humanly scaled, and civically oriented is challenging without a better understanding how they work: why they grew the way they did and the economic pressures that continue to influence the way they’re designed.

Enter Mallopoly, a new website developed by Assistant Professor Michael Piper with students from the Daniels Faculty, including collaborators: Emma Dunn (2015) and Zoe Renaud (2015); the development team: Mina Hanna (2015), Rachel Heighway (2015), and Salome Nikuradze (2016); and course participants: Jordan Bischoff (2015), Janice Lo (2015), Ayda Rasoulzadeh (2015), Beatrice Demers Viau (2015), and Anna Wan (2015). Based on Monopoly, the popular board game about land speculation in the late 19th century mercantile city, Mallopoly provides a graphic manual to help urbanists understand an economic logic for the built form of polycentric urban regions, such as the Greater Toronto Area (GTA).

“The goal is to provide designers with a fresh understanding of these places,” explains the Mallopoly team on their website. This fresh understanding can then be used as a basis for “imagining new civic futures for suburban agglomerations.”

The team describes how this game of city building is organized around malls — the new anchors for the many centres and edge cities that make up the contemporary megalopolis. Over the last thirty years, other large buildings have grouped up around malls producing a quasi civic aggregation of stand-alone buildings whose latent formal logic has yet to be fully understood in architectural or morphological terms.

From Mallopoly’s website:

Like many cities in North America, the GTA has been decentralizing since the post-war boom; the prevailing economic cause being cheap land at the periphery. Sustained governmental and market measures that ensure affordability, access to property; and the rise of the middle class after the war all contributed to Toronto's expansion. During the early phases of urban dispersal, buildings seemed to repel each other with maximum entropy producing a scattered urban form. Car use obviated the need for physical coherence between buildings, helping to produce a built form that seemed to spread like confetti.

In the proposed game, players would start from the downtown core of Toronto and move along the highway to come across “interchange spots” where they could purchase a property. Like the board game Monopoly, players could either purchase a low value property to build cheap and fast or save to densify more inherently valuable sites. After determining where to build, players of this game would then draw a “technique card” to determine how to build, or the type of spatial relationship they are to use between the new buildings and existing mall agglomeration.

The property values and spatial relationships are all based on a study of the polycentric urban form in the GTA. In a sense, the rules to this game are a mirror to reality, and the game itself an opportunity to learn about it. From this understanding, the Mallopoly team argues, new rules can be written that may bring about well informed, yet optimistically motivated alternatives to the current state of the suburbs.

Images above from mallopoly.ca

Mallopoly began as a research studio on Toronto malls at the University of Toronto coordinated by Michael Piper. It has since developed into this online publication.

MALLOPOLLY COLLABORATORS
Michael Piper, Emma Dunn, Zoe Renaud
Development: Mina Hanna, Rachel Heighway, Salome Nikuradze
Research studio: Jordan Bischoff, Janice Lo, Ayda Rasoulzadeh, Beatrice Demers Viau, Anna Wan

SISTER SUBURB
www.projectsuburb.com

On January 24th, first year Master of Architecture students in ARC 1012 participated in reviews for their first assignment of the studio. For this project, titled "Split/Twins," students were asked to develop a “double-house” on a shared site for two different residents. The class was instructed to think of the residents as twins, separated at birth; or as reluctant mutualistic collaborators. While some of the activities would be shared between the two residents, most of their activities would be apart. As architects, the students had to negotiate the desires of the twins spatially and ensure that the two houses were equal.

Click here to learn more about the Daniels Faculty's Master of Achitecture program.

By Romi Levine
Cross-posted from U of T News

Toronto’s ravines snake through the city, providing a quick escape from the concrete jungle while serving as a haven for the city’s wildlife. But the ravines are under threat as climate change, rapid growth and even invasive species threaten their future.

University of Toronto landscape architecture master’s students at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design are hoping to inspire City of Toronto planners with innovative design solutions to the biggest issues facing the ravines.

They’ve spent the past semester drafting and perfecting their ideas, biking along the Don and Humber rivers and touring Boston's Emerald Necklace, the city's 1,100 acre chain of parks, to get a first-hand look at how other cities interact with their ravines. Their final projects, which were part of a public exhibit at Daniels on Monday, took into account actions proposed as part of the Toronto Ravine Strategy – a city-led initiative to create a vision for the city’s ravines.

“The city is really growing and population and density is increasing a lot. It puts a lot of pressure on the ravines, and so we're seeing a lot of the issues like flooding and ecological deterioration of the ravines,” says Alissa North, an associate professor at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture and director of the master of landscape architecture program.

North grew up right next to the Humber River so she is keenly aware of the importance of preserving the ravines.

“It's a big issue and a big opportunity to see how we can find more productive relationships between the city and the ravines,” she said.

Students picked a particular issue to focus on – like promoting cultural heritage or preserving ecological features – mapping out a big-picture strategy while also focusing on site-specific solutions.

Andrew Hooke looked at how to save at-risk plant species while mitigating invasive plants and flooding.

“I learned a ton about different plant species, and how they're able to spread throughout the ravines,” he says.

Stephen Brophy chose to re-imagine Black Creek, a watershed that connects with the Humber River, to incorporate cultural programming while also preventing flooding. He says Toronto’s ravines should play a more important role in the city’s identity.

“Central Park in Manhattan is its main defining feature. Toronto has a Central Park. It's in the ravines, and it's way bigger but completely overlooked,” he says.

North says students’ involvement in the Ravine Strategy is a great way to provide them with real-world opportunity. In turn, city workers can find inspiration from the students.

“Their creativity and unbounded enthusiasm can have a lot of impact on the people who are in the roles that are shaping our city right now,” she says.

The City of Toronto provided students with base map material and city representatives have been present at many of the students’ presentations, including their final exhibition.

“It’s quite lovely to see little gems of ideas that could be very useful,” says Jane Welsh, a project manager for Toronto’s city planning department as she admired some of the final projects.

Maintaining waterways is crucial to creating sustainable cities, says Carolyn Woodland, a senior director at Toronto and Region Conservation Authority.

“It's great students are thinking long-term because they'll be the professionals of the future,” she says.

Last semester, first year Master of Landscape Architecture student Devin Tepleski was asked to address his classmates, first at the Daniels Faculty’s student awards luncheon on October 27 and, later, at a Faculty event to recognize those who donated to the new Daniels building at One Spadina Crescent. Below is a transcript of his speech, in which he describes what inspired him to study landscape architecture and how he and his fellow classmates can, through their work, inspire positive change and help build solutions to challenges facing communities throughout the world.

::::::::::::::::::::::

What excites me most about my studies in Landscape Architecture is the opportunity to work on solutions -- answers to the questions I’ve been asking for the last five years since finishing an undergraduate degree in anthropology. What makes places matter to the people that live there? What is worth protecting?

I have been extremely lucky to travel as much as I did with my work, at first to Ghana where I worked as an ethnohistorian and documentarian with communities displaced by a hydroelectric dam. From there I went on to spend 4 years working with Cree and Dene communities in Northern Alberta and on a massive marine use study with Salish nations of Southern Vancouver Island.

These experiences were life-changing. I got to sit around day after day interviewing everyone from the wisest elder to the youngest school child about what matters to them about the places they live, but that is only one way to look at what I did. In the contexts in which I worked, I mainly documented what concerned them -- their anxieties and their fears -- and in communities like Fort McKay, surrounded by open pit oil sands mines in all directions, these anxieties run deep. My deliverable at the end of most of these jobs was a report, a document. Often it was a map of the places that mattered most that would soon be destroyed. Other times it was 300 pages listing concerns, systematically, by category. The recommendations and appeals within were rarely heeded.

While I believe the process of coming together in the development of these documents was a great way to build a sense of cohesion -- coming together to share stories about that time Uncle James killed his first moose or to retell ancient stories about battles fought many generations ago -- I never felt that the document was enough. Especially when you work in a community long enough, it gets harder to ask the same questions over and over again -- questions you know the answer to already. But rarely was I able to answer the questions the people had for me. Often the questions that I would get the most were related to design solutions they identified, simple things like traffic lights and speed bumps. Where are they? When will they be built? I don’t know. My job ended when I handed in the document.

Do I think landscape architecture will provide all the answers? Certainly not. In fact there is a danger in providing only downstream solutions. And I think this is important, especially when we are so immersed in an aesthetic discipline. We must realize that outside of the design work we will do, that politics matter. I hope each and everyone of us can be active in our communities and push for policies that allow designers like us to build a better world.

With Landscape Architecture, I’ve found a home that is equally holistic as anthropology -- a discipline that seeks to understand the cultural complexities that transform spaces into places. I know it is too early to say where the next three years will take me, but I am grateful to be in a place that believes in their students enough to offer their support.

I look around at my fellow students here today and I see so much potential. You are investing in the opportunities for each and every one of us to find answers within ourselves. In return -- I am going to go out a limb and make a promise on behalf of all the students here today -- we will work hard to build solutions beyond the walls of self. We will work every day to make our communities better places.

Bachelor of Arts in Architectural Studies students Phat Le and Marienka Bishop-Kovac recently published a zine titled I’M SO MAD that documents stories about growing up in the Trinity Bellwoods area in Toronto.

"We love Toronto so much; it's hard seeing the neighbourhood that we grew up in dramatically change," write Le and Bishop-Kovac. "We hope that this zine archives our childhood memories before they fade and encourages others to externalize their feelings of displacement.”

The zine documents existing and bygone landmarks of the Trinity Bellwoods area: Classic Variety, Saint John’s Lutheran Church, Superior Sausage Company, 210 Ossington, and Trinity Bellwoods Park. With each landmark is an accompanying memory about the place: buying sausages for a Slovak dinner, eating injera in the basement of a church, or admiring the moustache of a convenience store clerk.

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

Come February 20, Toronto’s Balmy, Kew, and Ashbridges Bay beaches will be dotted with temporary public art installations — stations designed to engage passers-by and celebrate winter along the waterfront.

This year, a number of Daniels Faculty graduates and students are among the winners of Winter Stations, the international design competition held to select the installations.

Master of Landscape Architecture students Asuka Kono and Rachel Salmela reinterpreted a Japanese hot spring for their winning submission I See You Ashiyu. “Providing Torontonians the opportunity to engage physically with water in the winter creates an immersive experience that frames this harsh landscape in a new way,” wrote the duo in their submission.

In BuoyBuoyBuoy, another winning entry by Dionisios Vriniotis, Rob Shostak (MArch 2010), Dakota Wares-Tani (MArch 2016), and Julie Forand, each component of the “infinitely reconfigurable” installation is shaped in the silhouette of a buoy. When the installation is eventually dismantled, the pieces can be kept as a keepsake or donated to schools and community centres for reuse.

A team of students from the Daniels Faculty is also among the institutional winners, which include the University of Waterloo, and the Humber College School of Media Studies & IT, School of Applied Technology. The Daniels Faculty’s submission, Midwinter Fire, “reframes the narrative of our local forests to show the potential power of our urban ecology to city dwellers.” The team of Daniels students included John Beeton, Herman Borrego, Anna Chen, Vikrant Dasoar, Michael DeGirolamo, Leonard Flot, Monika Gorgopa, James Kokotilo, Asuka Kono, Karima Peermohammad, Rachel Salmela, Christina Wilkinson, Julie Wong, and Rotem Yaniv. Assistant Professor Pete North served as their advisor.

Honorable mentions were awarded to 18 teams, four of which involved Daniels Faculty alumni and students. These proposed installations included:

Catalyzed Winter
Seven (Xiru) Chen (MLA 2012), Naiji Jiao (MArch 2014), and Louis (Yi) Liu (MArch 2014)

Every Last Drop Of Sunlight
Yvan MacKinnon (MArch 2013)

Qbic Hangars
Stephen Baik (MArch student) and Abubaker Bajaman (MArch student)

Sift
Deagan McDonald (MArch 2015) and Kelsey Nilsen (MArch 2015)

Congratulations to everyone who participated in the competition. For more about the Winter Stations project, visit: http://www.winterstations.com/

Media:
Toronto beaches winter station design winners announced [CBC]
Eight art installations to make a splash at Toronto waterfront [Metro]

Pictured, above: 1. BuoyBuoyBuoy, by Dionisios Vriniotis, Rob Shostak (MArch 2010), Dakota Wares-Tani (MArch 2016)  2. I See You Ashiyu, by Asuka Kono and Rachel Salmela  3. Midwinter Fire, by Daniels Faculty students  4. Catalyzed Winter, by Seven (Xiru) Chen (MLA 2012), Naiji Jiao (MArch 2014), and Louis (Yi) Liu (MArch 2014)  5. Every Last Drop Of Sunlight, by Yvan MacKinnon (MArch 2013)  6. Qbic Hangars, by Stephen Baik (MArch student) and Abubaker Bajaman (MArch student)  7. Sift, by Deagan McDonald (MArch 2015) and Kelsey Nilsen (MArch 2015)

By Josie Northern Harrison, Co-Editor-in-Chief, Shift Magazine

Shift Magazine — the Daniels Faculty’s Architecture and Visual Studies undergraduate publication — is excited to announce the launch of its fourth issue: SHIFT 04. This edition of Shift Magazine focuses on activism in art, architecture, and urban design — how the three fields can impose political ideologies, and how they can act as a representation of voices that are often undermined by powerful organizations. SHIFT 04 is a departure from the previous editions of the magazine, which acted as more of a scrapbook of undergraduate student work. Instead, this edition was heavily curated to emphasize that there are Daniels undergraduate students who think deeply about very real political issues.

The printing method used for SHIFT 04 is also very different from the last edition, which used a heavy 80lb paper with a perfect bind. As Co-Editors in Chief, Phat Le and I wanted to use the magazine object itself as an opportunity to express a statement about the institution of architectural student work. We chose cheap printing methods to destroy the preciousness of the architectural object. To achieve this, we utilized the risograph printing process on a lightweight 40lb newsprint paper with a saddle-stitched bind. Risograph reduces the cost of printing by only printing with one colour at a time instead of the CMYK and similar processes which combine colours to achieve a specific hue. For Shift, almost all of the images and text are either red or blue; for one image, we combined the two colours to create purple. By creating this lo-fi aesthetic, the magazine takes architectural work out of its typical white walled, pristine environment into an imperfect context that feels more accessible because it doesn’t try to look lavish.

SHIFT 04 is comprised of mostly essays with some photos and illustrations. Phat Le interviewed Syrus Marcus Ware about his work with Black Lives Matter, and the importance of the arts for activism and acceptance. Najia Fatima interviewed Elle Flanders and Tamira Sawatzky of Public Studio about attempts to separate politics from art, and their artwork that addresses the settler and colonial relationship in Palestine. Other essays in SHIFT 04 discuss the use of architecture as oppression in Palestine, the 2013 protests at Taksim Gezi Park in Turkey, and the TD Centre in Toronto as a proposed site of protest.

The launch for SHIFT 04 will take place from 6PM to 9PM on Friday, January 13 at 665 Spadina Avenue. Free copies of Shift will be available, and the editorial team will be present to discuss the work of the magazine. Visit the event page for the SHIFT 04 launch on Facebook for more details.