The Daniels Faculty is pleased to announce a new student-edited publication, titled Scaffold* Journal: A Process-Oriented Publication for Design & Spatial Inquiry. Created by student-run publishing collective SHIFT*, the journal will highlight various processes of research and inquiry across disciplines within the Faculty. An official call for submissions will be released in the new year, with the anticipated release of the first edition in April 2024.

“Scaffold* seeks work that investigates and interrogates the processes and practices that contribute to successful research,” the student group writes. “Publishing on fields of visual inquiry within disciplines relating to the built environment, Scaffold* intends to demystify the research process and present researchers with the opportunity to curiously and critically reflect upon their own creative and design processes. Our first volume will contain two editions, the first featuring entirely in-process work from our contributors and the second featuring this same work in its completed iteration, with a focus on critical considerations of the creative process from our contributors.”

The submission period will begin in January, with the journal open to all levels of scholarship within the Faculty. From undergraduate students and research assistants to emerging scholars, practitioners and doctoral candidates, all community members are invited to contribute insights into their processes of design inquiry and research.

In its transition from its original medium of the risograph zine, the SHIFT* Collective would like to also acknowledge the support it has received from the Daniels Faculty community through the production and launch of three thematic magazines over the past two years. The collective is grateful for the Faculty’s readership and is excited to continue working with emerging designers, scholars and artists in the next developmental phase.

The John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto is excited to present its Winter 2024 Public Program. 

Our program this semester addresses a range of pertinent issues concerning the natural and built environments, continuing the Faculty’s tradition of fostering dialogue and exchanging knowledge through a curated series of exhibitions, lectures, book talks, panel discussions and symposia. 

Through these events, we aim to engage our local and international communities on the important social, political and environmental challenges confronting our disciplines and the world today. Topics addressed include design and ecology, space and social justice, urbanization and housing, art and biopolitics, and architecture land sovereignty. 

All of the events in our program are free and open to the public. Register in advance through Eventbrite and consult the calendar for up-to-date details at daniels.utoronto.ca/events. 

January 23, 6:30 p.m. ET 
Jeffrey Cook Memorial Lecture: HEALING
Featuring Võ Trọng Nghĩa (VTN Architects)

RSVP

February 1, 6:30 p.m. ET
I heard you were looking for me
Featuring Germane Barnes (School of Architecture, University of Miami)

RSVP

February 8, 6:30 p.m. ET
Michael Hough/OALA Visiting Critic in Landscape Architecture Lecture: Design and the Just Public Realm
Featuring Chelina Odbert (Kounkuey Design Initiative) 

RSVP

February 15, 6:30 p.m. ET
Black Diasporas Tkaronto-Toronto
Featuring Kholisile Dhliwayo (afrOURban Inc.)

RSVP

February 27, 6:30 p.m. ET
MVS Proseminar: In Ekstase
Featuring P. Staff (visual and performance artist)

RSVP

February 29, 6:30 p.m. ET
Architecture’s 21st-Century Promise: Spatial Justice Practices
Featuring Dana Cuff (UCLA Architecture and Urban Design) 

RSVP

March 7, 6:30 p.m. ET
Designing Delivery: An Examination of the Intersection of Design and Birth
Featuring Kim Holden (School of Architecture, Yale University) 

RSVP

March 21, 6:30 p.m. ET 
Architecture and the Right to Housing
Generously Supported by the Irving Grossman Fund in Affordable Housing
Featuring Leilani Farha (The Shift) and  Paul Karakusevic (Karakusevic Carson Architects) with Karen Kubey (Daniels Faculty, University of Toronto)

RSVP

March 28, 6:30 p.m. ET 
CANCELLED: Cabin as Tactic and Strategy
Featuring John Bass (School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, University of British Columbia) and Snxakila Clyde Michael Tallio (Cultural Director, Nuxalk First Nation)

Events will be livestreamed and available to view on the Daniels Faculty’s YouTube channel. 

EXHIBITIONS ON VIEW

October 25, 2023-March 22, 2024
ᐊᖏᕐᕋᒧᑦ / Ruovttu Guvlui / Towards Home
Organized by the Canadian Centre for Architecture with the Daniels Faculty

December 11, 2023-February 26, 2024
USING TREES AS THEY ARE
Curated by Zachary Mollica (Daniels Faculty, University of Toronto) 
Public Lecture: USING TREES AS THEY ARE, February 26, 6:00 p.m. ET 

RSVP

March 6-May 14, 2024
How to Steal a Country
Curated by Lukas Pauer (Daniels Faculty, University of Toronto)
Exhibition Opening: March 6, 5:30 p.m. ET

RSVP

Public Lecture: Recognizing Facts on the Ground: Deconstructing Power in the Built Environment, March 14, 6:30 p.m. ET 

RSVP

“Berlin is a food you have to marinate carefully.”

With this metaphor, the writer, musician and podcaster Musa Okwonga (pictured at centre below) welcomed a group of 18 Daniels Faculty students on their first morning in Berlin as part of a unique global studio led by Assistant Professor Peter Sealy.

Having read Okwonga’s Berlin memoir In The End, It Was All About Love (Rough Trade Books, 2021) before travelling there, the students engaged in a lively discussion about his creative process, why he left Britain for Berlin, and what life is like as a Black, bisexual man in Germany’s capital.

“Musa is a wonderfully generous person whom the students were thrilled to meet,” says Sealy. “His writing captures Berlin’s essence: It’s a city that requires patience to discover in all its complex flavours; you have to find your own way in.”

For Sealy, that “way in” to learning about Berlin is through films. He titled his iteration of ARC 300/2016 “Berlin, A City in Film,” and designed the course to reflect cinema’s powerful role in the construction of Berlin’s image as a modern metropolis. “Berlin’s unique status as a place where movies are made, whether that was in the 1920s or today, makes film an ideal lens for deciphering this huge city,” according to Sealy.

As a historian of media such as film and photography, Sealy himself has studied the Berlin Wall as it has appeared in films. “I believe film is a uniquely accessible medium for students to learn about new places,” he says. “As a society, we constantly consume moving pictures, which often show how people inhabit urban spaces.”

Prior to travelling to Germany, the students watched a series of films set in Berlin, beginning with Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire (1987). Their spectatorship continued with a series of nightly screenings during their three-week stay in Berlin. Highlights included seeing Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin—Symphony for a Metropolis (1927) at a freiluftkino (open-air cinema) in one of Berlin’s ubiquitous courtyards. The film was accompanied by a live performance by the electronic music group Tronthaim. Other films watched included Roberto Rosseillini’s Germany Year Zero (1948), Heiner Carow’s The Legend of Paul and Paula (1973), Cynthia Beatt’s Cycling the Frame (1988) and Sebastien Schipper’s Victoria (2018).

By day, the students explored the city through an intensive schedule of guided tours, site visits, meetings with local experts, and workshops. Among the highlights was an emotionally moving tour of the archives of the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police: a repository showcasing the banal bureaucracy of evil. Architect and U of T alumnus Bruce Kuwabara arranged a tour of the Canadian Embassy on Leipziger Platz, which he designed with his firm, KPMB Architects. The students also took day trips to Potsdam, Hamburg and Dessau, seeing the famous Bauhaus in the latter.

Yixuan Zhang, a third-year student in the Daniels Faculty’s Bachelor of Arts, Architectural Studies program, “loved exploring buildings we usually only see on [lecture] slides…going inside a building and being able to feel its materials is something I treasured from all our site visits.”

In addition to Okwonga, local Berliners who met the students included the architects Christoph Heinemann, Jochen Jürgensen and plattenbaustudio, the photographer Stefan Berg, and the author Maria Zinfert. In the course’s spirit of experimentation and discovery, one afternoon was spent learning to use analog printing presses at galerie p98a, and an evening was set aside for a Hertha Berlin soccer match at the Olimpiastadion.

The students’ main assignment was to make an eight- or 16-millimetre film using Super-8 or Bolex cameras. To do so, they were guided by three young Berlin-based filmmakers from the LaborBerlin collective: Christian Flemm, Jules Leaño and Adèle Perrin. Working in small groups, the students traversed Berlin, each trying to capture some aspect of the city’s unique spatial tapestry. “The goal of the project,” Sealy says, “was to introduce a new, unfamiliar medium [analog filmmaking] while prompting the students to see Berlin ‘through the lens.’ In other words, making films provided an opportunity to glimpse the city as filmmakers do.”

For Auden Tura, a fourth-year student in Daniels’ Bachelor of Arts, Visual Studies program, “the slowness and careful preparation required for 16mm filmmaking” allowed her and groupmates Ella Spitzer-Stephan and Gillian Stam to consider “Berlin’s urban spaces from a new perspective. With our Bolex, we began to see Berlin’s overgrown courtyards and empty buildings as mystical spaces.” Inspired by Maya Deren’s ground-breaking 1943 short Meshes of the Afternoon—which the students watched at a special screening curated by Flemm—their film investigated the surreal qualities of these semi-abandoned spaces found all over Berlin.

For Taylor Joseph, a second-year student in the Faculty’s Master of Architecture program, the entire cinematic focus of the course proved edifying. “Without the context of the course, I don’t think I would have watched or had the knowledge to be pointed in the direction of these films, most of which are in the German language. They provided a wealth of information on and such insight into the metropolis over generations. As an architecture student, I was able to understand the built environment of the past through the films and thus experience it [more richly] in the present.”

The participating students (both undergraduate and graduate) were drawn from the Daniels Faculty’s many disciplines, including architecture, visual studies and landscape architecture. “I was blown away by the way the students’ own knowledge of architecture and urban practices—how people inhabit cities—helped them decipher a multicultural city like Berlin,” Sealy says. “I took a lot of joy from the students’ own moments of discovery and cannot wait to return as soon as possible!”

“All in all,” concludes Joseph, “every moment of Berlin could make the highlight reel, as it was an unforgettable experience and hopefully will be ongoing.”

“Berlin, A City in Film” was one of four global studios offered by the Daniels Faculty in 2023. Other courses included studies in Athens, Greece; Kumasi, Ghana; and Fez, Morocco. A domestic studio also took place on Fogo Island, Newfoundland and Labrador.

Banner image by John Henry. Last image by Mint Song. All other photos by Peter Sealy.

Monday, December 4 to Tuesday, December 19
Daniels Building
1 Spadina Crescent

Whether you're a future student, an alum, or a member of the public with an interest in architecture, forestry, landscape architecture or urban design—you're invited to join the Daniels Faculty for Fall 2023 Reviews. Throughout December, students from across our graduate and undergraduate programs will present final projects to their instructors and guest critics from academia and the professional community.

All reviews will take place in the Daniels Building at 1 Spadina Crescent from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. (unless otherwise stated). Follow @UofTDaniels on social media and join the conversation using the hashtags #DanielsReviews and #DanielsReviews23.

Please note that times and dates are subject to change.

Monday, December 4 | Graduate 

Design Studio I
LAN1011Y
Coordinators: Alissa North, Peter North 
Room: 330 

Tuesday, December 5 | Graduate 

8:45 a.m.–6:30 p.m. ET 
Design Studio I 
ARC1011Y
Coordinator: Chris Cornecelli 
Instructors: Fiona Lim Tung, Anya Moryoussef, Aleris Rodgers, Julia Di Castri, Tom Ngo 
Rooms: 215, 230, 240, 330 

Wednesday, December 6 | Graduate 

Integrated Urbanism Studio
ARC2013Y, LAN2013Y, URD1011Y
Coordinators: Mauricio Quiros Pacheco, Rob Wright, Roberto Damiani
Instructors: Karen Kubey, Aziza Chaouni, Jon Cummings, Christos Marcopoulos, Mariana Leguia Alegria, David Verbeek, Megan Esopenko
Rooms: 200, 215, 230, 240, 330 

Thursday, December 7 | Graduate  

Integrated Urbanism Studio
ARC2013Y, LAN2013Y, URD1011Y
Coordinators: Mauricio Quiros Pacheco, Rob Wright, Roberto Damiani
Instructors: Karen Kubey, Aziza Chaouni, Jon Cummings, Christos Marcopoulos, Mariana Leguia Alegria, David Verbeek, Megan Esopenko
Rooms: 200, 215, 230, 240, 330 

Friday, December 8 | Graduate  

Design Studio Options 
LAN3016Y

The Hart House Farm
Instructor: Liat Margolis 
Room: 330 

Urban Design Studio Options 
URD2013Y
Instructors: Kanwal Aftab, Maya Desai 
Room: 230 

Monday, December 11 | Undergraduate  

Drawing and Representation I 
ARC100H1
Coordinator: James Macgillivray
Instructors: Matthew De Santis, Dan Briker, Mauricio Quiros Pacheco, Nicolas Barrette, Anne Ma, Jeffrey Garcia, Monifa Charles-Dedier, Angela Cho, Mariano Martellacci, Connor Stevens, Ji Hee Kim, Kyle O’Brien, Lara Hassani, Brandon Bergem 
Rooms: Main Hall (170A, 170B), 215, 230, 240, 315, 330, 340 

Tuesday, December 12 | Graduate & Undergraduate 

9 a.m.–2 p.m. 
Drawing and Representation II 
ARC200H1
Coordinator: Roberto Damiani
Instructors: Nova Tayona, Simon Rabyniuk, Reza Nik, Paul Howard Harrison, Sam Dufaux, Karen Kubey, Katy Chey, Phat Le, Samantha Eby, Alejandro Lopez 
Rooms: Main Hall (170A, 170B, 170C), 209, 215, 230, 240, 315, 330, 340 

10 a.m.–3 p.m. 
Capstone Project in Forest Conservation 
FOR3008H
Instructor: Catherine Edwards 
Room: 200 
View detailed schedule.

Wednesday, December 13 | Graduate & Undergraduate 

Architectural Design Studio: Research 1 
ARC3020Y

Rehearsing the Parade: Ephemeral Assemblies and Persuasion on the Move
Instructor: Miles Gertler 
Rooms: Main Hall (170C), 209 

Architecture and Health Equity in an Imperiled World
Instructor: Stephen Verderber 
Room: 330 

Architecture Studio III
ARC361Y1
Coordinator: Adrian Phiffer
Instructors: Shane Williamson, Carol Moukheiber 
Rooms: Main Hall (170A, 170B), 230 

10 a.m.–3 p.m. 
Capstone Project in Forest Conservation (FOR3008H)
Instructor: Catherine Edwards 
Room: 200 
View detailed schedule.

Thursday, December 14 | Graduate & Undergraduate 

Architectural Design Studio: Research 1 
ARC3020Y

The Certainty of Uncertain Forms, or in search of anexact typologies
Instructor: Carol Moukheiber 
Room: 330 

Counterhegemonic Architecture
Instructor: Lukas Pauer 
Rooms: 215, 240 

If robots are the answer, what was the question?
Instructor: Brady Peters 
Rooms: 209, 242 

Bridging the Divide: An Architecture of Demographic Transition
Instructor: Shane Williamson 
Room: 230 

Design Studio Options 
LAN3016Y

Generative Design in Landscape Architecture: Explorations and Applications
Instructors: Rob Wright, Matthew Spremulli 
Room: 200 

Landscape Architecture Studio III 
ARC363Y1
Instructor: Behnaz Assadi 
Rooms: 315, 340, Main Hall (170C) 

Technology Studio III
ARC380Y1
Instructors: Nicholas Hoban (Coordinator), Maria Yablonina 
Room: Main Hall (170A, 170B) 

Friday, December 15 | Graduate 

Architectural Design Studio: Research 1
ARC3020Y

Swarm / Counterarchive
Instructor: Jeannie Kim 
Room: 330 

ARCHIPELAGO, 4.0: Docu-Drawing, Activism, Re-Building
Instructor: Petros Babasikas 
Room: 230 

SUPERNATURAL
Instructor: Laura Miller 
Room: Main Hall (170A, 170B) 

USING TREES
Instructor: Zachary Mollica 
Room: 240 

HOUSE FOR PIRANESI at Hadrian’s villa: TRIUMPH OF THE FRAGMENT DRAWING AS THESIS An allegory for illustrated ARCHITECTURAL narrative
Instructor: John Shnier 
Room: 1st Floor Hallway 

Monday, December 18 | Undergraduate & Graduate

9 a.m.–2 p.m. 
Design Studio II
ARC201H1
Coordinator: Miles Gertler
Instructors: Brian Boigon, Jennifer Kudlats, Aleris Rodgers 
Rooms: 215, 240, 315, 340 

9:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m. and 1:30-4:30 p.m.
Post-Professional Thesis Review
ALA4021
Rooms: 209, 242

Senior Seminar in History and Theory (Research) 
ARC456H1
Instructor: Petros Babasikas 
Room: 330 

Senior Seminar in Design (Research) 
ARC461H1
Instructor: Laura Miller 
Room: Main Hall (170A, 170B) 

Senior Seminar in Technology (Research) 
ARC486H1
Instructor: Nicholas Hoban 
Room: 230 

Tuesday, December 19 | Undergraduate 

Senior Seminar in History and Theory (Research) 
ARC456H1
Instructor: Petros Babasikas 
Room: 330 

Senior Seminar in Design (Research)
ARC461H1
Instructor: Laura Miller 
Room: Main Hall (170A, 170B) 

Senior Seminar in Technology (Research)
ARC486H1
Instructor: Nicholas Hoban 
Room: 230 

The annual Eyeball exhibition showcasing recent artwork by the Daniels Faculty’s undergraduate students in Visual Studies is currently on view at 1 Spadina Crescent.

Featuring works by nearly two dozen students, the yearly survey will be on display in the Daniels Building's Larry Wayne Richards Gallery until December 1.

Students represented this year include Jacob Muller, Megan Croft, Samahdi Alvarado Orozco, Denise Akman, Elly Yoo, Rory Marks, Jared Rishikof, Fatima Tahir, Nara Wrigglesworth, Cathy Zhou, Jasmine Mohan Zhu, Gillian Stam, Evan Bulloch, Veeshva Rana, Dorsa Sarvi, Prasham Shah, Massimo Giannone, Hanna Kamehiro, Sophie Woelfling, Mandy Chiu and Jinyan Zhao.

The exhibition encompasses a range of media, including painted works on paper and canvas, film and video pieces and mixed-media installations.

A closing celebration will be held in the LWR Gallery from 4:00 to 6:00 p.m. on Friday, December 1. All artists, supporters, Visual Studies faculty and Daniels Faculty staff are invited to attend. Light refreshments will be provided.

In Rehearsing the Parade: Ephemeral Assemblies and Persuasion on the Move, a Design Research Studio (ARC3020) led by Assistant Professor Miles Gertler, Master of Architecture students have spent the semester examining parades, processions, pageantry and other ephemeral events as pragmatic tools for city-building.

“Processions, convoys, assemblies and parades are all about performance,” writes Gertler in the studio description. “They have order and itinerary. Parades affirm a here and a there and, often, a center. Parades are spatial and animate. Parades are wholes made of many parts. They transmit messages, have audiences, and are themselves rehearsals of prospective worlds or realities to come. We could similarly attribute these conditions to architecture, and indeed, parades are designed and behave like so many artifacts shaped by design labor.”

Within the context of the studio, student Jia Chen Mi has been studying Quebec’s Mitis River Salmon Run as a logistical convoy that develops ecosystemic collaboration between humans and fish. Since the damming of the river in 1973, designated stewards of its salmon population have stepped in with various mechanical and vehicular tools to assist the salmon in their annual return upriver.

Jia’s drawings study this situation with a focus on the epigenetic instrumentation that salmon use to navigate their journey, and the sensorial tools that humans and fish use to orient their engagement with the site.

Jia writes: “Every spawning season, in the Mitis River, as in many other rivers in Quebec, salmon are captured and driven past hydroelectric dams to prevent their extinction. The Mitis salmon transportation is a meticulously rehearsed operation. The salmon cage and truck can accommodate only a dozen bodies at a time. A human worker is always on watch, counting, loading, and driving. Inattention can spell death. In this regard, the Mitis salmon run is a delicate parade requiring close inter-species collaboration. It is a waltz of flesh and machines, orchestrated by a myriad of devices. A drive for renewable energy has made the fish dependent on human intervention, yet humans also rely on salmon. For Wolastoqiyik and Mi’gmaq communities of Eastern Quebec and New Brunswick, fishing and eating wild salmon has always been vital for survival—both spiritually and culturally, as well as biologically. For many settler anglers visiting the Mitis River every summer, Atlantic salmon fishing is a way to heal from the strains of urban life. What is the story of the participants in this parade, and what tools do they use to choreograph their mutual survival?”

Lara Sedele’s research into Toronto-based art collective General Idea’s 1971 Miss General Idea Pageant examines how the city and its urban and social infrastructures were instrumentalized toward the construction of an art practice. Lara has enriched her inquiry with archival research at the Art Gallery of Ontario and interviews with AA Bronson, a founding member of General Idea.

Lara writes: “To tell the story of General Idea and the art ecosystem that surrounded them in Toronto, The Miss General Idea Pageant in 1971 takes center stage as a temporal and performative means of challenging the art economy and the value placed on traditional visual art formats.”

Lara’s examination has focused chiefly on three aspects: the mythology crafted by General Idea themselves, the documentary ephemera disseminated through mail, and the financial records of 1971 and 1972, documented by the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Navjot Dhanoa, another student in the studio, has been investigating the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade through the lens of inflation. Navjot has studied how variations in the value of the US dollar track with the scale of the parade's balloons, Macy's revenue, and the value of helium, which is a rare and finite resource.

By studying trans-continental helium infrastructure, recent Macy's store closures across the United States and the locations and audiences of advertisers who participate in the parade, Navjot has developed a nuanced understanding of today's mass consumer market, "where merchandising and spectacle meet."

Rehearsing the Parade: Ephemeral Assemblies and Persuasion on the Move will conclude this semester with a first sketch of a float vehicle or device, and a schematic outline for next term’s focus on thesis, where students may lean into the format of parades or depart from it entirely. Final assignments will be added to a single-issue magazine produced by the studio with this semester's collective research.

Image credits: 1) Banner image: Students participate in a “Speed dating” Typology Workshop in the first part of the studio, which focused on Representation and Language. "BOOMING COMMENTARY" image by Gianlorenzo Giannone and Emilie Tamtik. 2) Student Work: Jia Chen Mi, "Choreographing the Natural: The Mitis Salmon Run" 3) Student Work: Lara Sedele, "The General Idea Behind the Pageant: The 1971 Miss General Idea Pageant Grand Awards Ceremony" 4) Navjot Dhanoa, "Inflating Traditions: The Ballooning Consumption of Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade" 5) A sample publication spread from the research articles each student has prepared for the single-issue magazine that will collect all of the semester's projects. 

How do networks of technology, resources, energy, transportation and culture operate in contexts as far-flung as Canada and Ghana? Are there similarities that might prove illuminating? Differences that could inspire new strategies? More broadly, how can architecture, landscape architecture and urban design become catalysts for positive change at the scale of both communities and whole systems?

These were just a few of the questions on the minds of 14 University of Toronto students (both graduate and undergraduate) when they set out for West Africa this past July to take part in the Daniels Faculty’s summer studio in Kumasi, Ghana, the second-largest city in the African nation and a centre of Ashanti culture.

The two-week overseas course, conducted in collaboration with the Department of Architecture at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), was part of a multiyear initiative seeking to exchange local knowledge among participants and to encourage cooperation on innovative and sustainable strategies for transforming communities and cities.

This year —the course’s second, following a collaborative online studio studying four communities in Canada and Ghana over six weeks last summer—the 14 students from U of T met up in Kumasi with approximately 20 students from KNUST.

“Last summer we looked at four sites: two in Ghana (Assin Kushea and Kyebi) and two in southern Ontario (Innisfil and York South Weston),” says Associate Professor Jeannie Kim, who taught the Summer 2023 course in Ghana and Toronto with Farida Abu-Bakare, a Sessional Lecturer at the Daniels Faculty and the director of global practice at the architecture and urban design firm WXY.

“With mixed teams from both schools,” says Kim, “students examined the hard and soft infrastructure of each site while taking into consideration the ambitious future-oriented plans for all of them. Despite the very different contexts, the teams found that some of the challenges and opportunities were similar, and we had a very productive series of discussions that we sought to build upon this summer and will continue to study in subsequent summers.”

This year, what the contingent from Canada experienced collectively, Kim says, “was a valuable cultural immersion in parts of Ghana that most international tourists do not visit, as well as privileged access to various stakeholders in these contexts and the opportunity to better understand what the practices of architecture, landscape architecture and urbanism look like in the West African context.”

Moreover, “we were very fortunate to spend time with the individuals who live with and work on these issues and to get some sense of what practice is [there] and how it is similar to or different from what we know in a North American setting.”

The highly immersive nature of the trip, which took in the Ghanaian capital of Accra as well as Kumasi, Kyebi and Assin Kushea, was especially appealing to second-year MARC student Mo Bayati, who “was interested in studying the typology of buildings in Ghana and the vernacular approach towards construction.”

The course, he feels, “allowed us to think about bottom-up opportunities for improving cities. And it was amazing to see and to hear from the people and institutions involved in designing and overseeing not only cities, but also forestry and education. [Accessing them] allowed us to understand both their problems and their strategies.”

For Leila Rashidian, currently in her third year of the undergraduate program in Architectural Studies, the people she met throughout the course, from her fellow KNUST studio mates to Ghanaian royalty, also stood out.

“Thanks to our hosts in Kyebi and Assin Kushea, an experience that was exclusive to this trip was the opportunity to meet and interact with the chiefs and kings of these regions. I would never have imagined receiving this honour if I had visited these places on a personal trip.”

Rashidian was also impressed by the multiyear structure of the studio, especially the ability to build on past research. “Based on the previous year’s research in Assin Kushea and Kyebi, we could focus on subjects such as healthcare, mining, cocoa products, drainage and many others. This meant that I could concentrate on one system and create a unique project based on the context and my first-hand observation.”

Bayati, too, was struck by the cumulative aspect of the Ghanaian studio. “After the trip,” he says, “I created a photo journal documenting the landscape, the building typologies, the building materials and the everyday interactions in urban and village settings.

“Also, I made a short video of our full time there. The video examines the urban fabric and the street life of all the places we visited. I would like the journal to help students next year have a clear understanding of the context and build upon different research topics presented in the sections.”

The Summer Studio in Ghana was one of four global studios offered by the Daniels Faculty in 2023. Other courses included studies in Athens, Greece; Berlin, Germany; and Fez, Morocco. A domestic studio also took place on Fogo Island, Newfoundland and Labrador.

How can development, transition and growth in a city still accommodate urban memory and a connection to the past? How does the visual bias present in an image refer to the biases of the general public? How can closely reading the history of ownership, materiality and economic deployment of a site and its material history reveal the forces that have shaped the city?  

These are just a few of the questions posed by 2022-2023 thesis students in the Bachelor of Arts in Architectural Studies (BAAS) program. A new website serves as an online exhibition showcasing a sampling of the richly diverse creative work of students in the program’s three Specialist Streams: Design, Technology, and History and Theory.

View the 2022-2023 BAAS Thesis website here.

Thesis is a year-long endeavor at the Daniels Faculty. At the end of the third year in the undergraduate program, students in the Specialist Streams are eligible to apply for thesis, which takes place during the fourth and final year of the program. Once selected, all BAAS thesis students take a Senior Research Seminar led by one of three Daniels Faculty members who continue as advisors throughout the year.  

For the 2022-2023 academic year, the themes were: 

• The Digital, Nicholas Hoban, Technology Stream 
• On Generosity, Laura Miller, Design Stream 
• Visualizing Planetarity, Simon Rabyniuk, History and Theory Stream; Design Stream 

During the fall term, students work to develop individual thesis proposals—pursuing their research through reading, writing, design, fabrication and case study analysis as well as discussion and debate. Then in the winter term’s Senior Thesis Design Studio, students further develop their research, extending into design projects. Final Thesis Reviews, the culmination of a year’s work, are held at the end of April. 

View the thesis projects online and learn more about the BAAS program. 

Student work featured in banner image:

1) The Architecture of Impermanence: Rebuilding in Post-Disaster Japan
Student: Hanna Kamehiro, Design Stream
Advisor: Simon Rabyniuk

2) In Defense of Urban Play
Student: Adela Hua, Design Stream
Advisor: Laura Miller

3) Machine-Knitted Structures and Material Variability in Textile Construction Automation
Student: Habiba Elezaby, Technology Stream
Advisor: Nicholas Hoban

4) Unprompting: Text-to-Image Software’s ‘Understanding’ of Non-Western Contexts
Student: Raymelene Apil, Technology Stream
Advisor: Nicholas Hoban

5) Pulling and Pushing the Envelope: Reimagining Toronto’s Failing Glass Towers
Student: Massimo Giannone, Design Stream
Advisor: Laura Miller

6) Planetary Voids and Architectural Solids
Student: Marly Ibrahim, Design Stream
Advisor: Simon Rabyniuk

This past summer 14 undergraduate and three graduate students led by Assistant Professor Petros Babasikas investigated Athens as a living laboratory of urban change—testing contemporary theories of urbanism against different sites and itineraries. 

In constant transformation since its foundation as the capital of modern Greece in 1834, “the urban fabric, landscape and publics of Athens have been an unpredictable, diverse and complex laboratory of change,” says Babasikas.

The course considered a genealogy of architectural projects against the ancient building typologies, walkscapes and water networks of Athens today. Over three weeks, students explored, documented and navigated the city via a series of seven routes or “walking seminars” that focused on specific Athenian commons—squares, gardens, walkways, buildings, monuments, waterscapes and ancient sites—to produce a set of composite drawings and images curated in a travel log.  

“Exploring public space, learning through observation and walking, became the essence of the experience,” says Haseena Doost, a fourth-year student in architectural studies, who participated in the studio abroad. 

The walking seminars immersed the students in Athenian history and modern life. The itinerary included:

• Walk 01: Core, Erasures, Bricollage - moving through Neoclassical, Ottoman and Byzantine Athenian monuments and ruins in the Historic Center discussing histories that have been erased.
• Walk 02: Walkscapes + Ideology - ascending from Kerameikos' archaeological excavation to the public parks and hills of Areopagos, Filoppappou, and the Muses, documenting a unique landscape reconstruction of routes, walls, gates, canopies, floorscapes and rocks.
• Walk 03: Seven Versions of a Monument - discussing the different lives of the Acropolis, looking at the tectonics of three catastrophes, two reconstructions, a mythic path and one forgotten landfill.
• Walk 04: Domino Urbanism - crossing the urban density, publics and migrant community spaces of Patisia and Kypseli within the Polykatoikia's incremental, flexible, mixed-use typology.
• Walk 05: Civics, Basements, Arcades - cutting across the urban blocks of post-war Athens, through ground and basement, commercial passageways, hidden among the city's public landmarks.
• Walk 06: Drosscapes, Pickup Ball, and Plato - wandering across the streets, post-industrial infrastructures and neighborhood politics of the Olive Grove, Kolonos, Sepolia, and Plato's Academy.
• Walk 07: Waterscapes and the Non-Coast - following natural and channeled Athenian riverbeds, buried streams, and sewers ending on three expansive, coastal public spaces-under-transformation, revealing political, ecological, and climate emergencies.

“This immersive approach allowed us to directly observe and understand the intricate layers of Athens' urban fabric—both its physical structures and the intangible aspects that have continually shaped the city's evolution,” says Kenny Vo, a third-year student in architectural studies, for whom the trip marked a first visit to Europe.

“Through our studies, it became apparent that Athens serves as a representative case study for many other contemporary cities as well. By closely examining these elements, we gathered insights that were crucial for our travel documentation, focusing on specific facets of Athens' public spaces,” he says.

The X-Athenas: Public Space Stories in Contemporary Athens course, workshops and presentations were hosted by the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens (EMST). 

Following their on-site documentation, the students formed groups and focused on a single, dormant Athenian public space advised by interdisciplinary experts, including EMST curators. The group projects took the form of a one-week design charette where students produced design proposals for the reconstruction of a public space to the north of the museum, “transforming it into a public garden and civic extension of the building toward the center of Athens,” says Babasikas. 

“Something that surprised me about the course was how much I enjoyed working in a group on a design project,” says Grace McKibbon, a fourth-year student in architectural studies. “I found that because we all had different study focuses for our travel logs, we had different approaches to designing our public space project. I thought that the ability to bounce ideas off of each other and build off of our different perspectives led to a richer final product.” 

McKibbon and Doost, along with their fellow group members William Li and Sherry Zhu, identified an unused underground space that could be revitalized for public use. Their proposal aimed to uncover this space, creating a direct entrance to the museum with a bridge connecting it via stairs and an elevator. The envisioned urban park included a café and performance area, as well as a waterfall to mitigate noise from a busy intersection nearby.  

“My research concentrated on the memory of water in Athens, emphasizing its significance. Our design incorporated a waterfall flowing into a splash pad, symbolically connecting to the Illisos River beneath the EMST museum,” says Doost. “Despite Athens' distance from the coastline, water, facilitated by hydro infrastructure, remains a vital part of its history and contemporary challenges.” 

McKibbon's travel logs focused on how plans can create spaces in an urban environment, and she brought that approach to the design: “I found it really interesting to study plants in a different growing region than Toronto and how the types of plants that can grow in Athens affect how public space is used," she says. "In our site specifically, one of the features was a canopy that spanned most of the park with vines growing on top of it to provide shade, which is something that we saw on one of our walks through Dimitris Pikionis’ paths around the Acropolis.” 

Other teams in the design charette envisioned the creation of large-scale canopies from the main volume of the museum—these structures extended the space of the museum to the north with outdoor cultural and play spaces accessible by the public. Students also designed covered areas accessing the nearby subway station and underground parking facilities and created direct connections with a public park. (See a selection of project images above.)

Vo’s final project (seen below) took a different approach and centered on capturing the essence of everyday life in Athens, primarily using film photography.

“The project represented a collection of memories from my brief time in the city, viewed from the perspective of a traveler seeking to understand the concept of familiarity in a foreign place,” Vo says.

“What initially seemed transient and fleeting revealed itself to be shared, cyclic experiences of everyday life. This exercise allowed me to gain deeper insights into the lives of ordinary people, set against the backdrop of Athens' coexisting spaces,” he says. “It was an exploration of the city's layered history, capturing moments that ranged from the intense and mundane to the informal and intimate.” 

While their experiences abroad and approach to the final project differed, Doost, McKibbon and Vo all agree that the trip is a highlight of their time at Daniels—and continues to have an impact on how they view public space today. 

“Being able to see all of the layers of the city, whether it be seeing a portion of the Athens city walls in the basement of a building or visiting a Byzantine chapel built from remnants of classical buildings, was what made the course the most engaging, and really displayed how it is a city that has a lot of history but is constantly moving forward and changing,” says McKibbon. 

“X-Athenas was unforgettable,” Vo adds. “Although it lasted only three weeks, it felt like a lifetime of experiences packed into a brief period.” 

The Summer Studio Abroad in Athens, Greece was one of four global studios offered by the Daniels Faculty in 2023. Other courses included studies in Kumasi, Ghana; Berlin, Germany; and Fez, Morocco. A domestic studio also took place on Fogo Island, Newfoundland and Labrador.

Image credits: 1) Banner image - Young-Mi Kim; 2-3) Petros Babasikas; 4-10) Slideshow of X-Athenas student work; 11) Group photo - Sofia Frick; 12-13) Petros Babasikas; 14-16) final project by Kenny Vo.

Celebrated architect Douglas Cardinal will be giving a lunchtime lecture at the Daniels Faculty on Thursday, November 16.

Entitled “Indigenous Principles for Architecture,” the talk will take place from 12:30 to 1:30 p.m. in Room 200 of the Daniels Building at 1 Spadina Crescent.

To register for the lecture, at which lunch will be provided, click here. The talk is free and open to all Daniels Faculty students and instructors.

In addition to designing such iconic buildings as the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau (pictured above) and the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., Dr. Cardinal has been a long-time advocate for the dignity and advancement of Indigenous peoples and last year joined the Daniels Faculty as Decanal Advisor on Indigenous Knowledge.

In his talk on November 16, he will outline how adopting an Indigenous worldview can guide architects and planners in the creation of sustainable built environments that harmonize with nature for at least “seven generations,” the traditional Indigenous benchmark for decision-making and stewardship. Among his key focuses will be planning.

“The planning that cities and communities are conducting presently,” he says, “is not only not sustainable, but destructive to all life, including our own. Indigenous principles offer an innovative way [of building] that is rooted in their traditions [and] accounts for all life-givers that the land hosts, so plants, animals and humans may have a future together.”

One of the projects that Dr. Cardinal will cite in his talk is the 2017 planning work he conducted for the Ojibway community of Stony Point in Ontario. Previously, the land in question had been occupied by Canada’s Department of National Defense as a military training base. “I will show the multifaceted analysis and holistic integration necessary to reach a sustainable community,” he says of his work, which at Stony Point “integrated all my life experience” in terms of both process and result.

Prior to signing on as Decanal Advisor on Indigenous Knowledge, Dr. Cardinal was the Faculty’s 2020-2021 Frank Gehry International Visiting Chair in Architectural Design. He was also awarded an Honorary Doctor of Laws degree by the University of Toronto in June of 2022.