Each semester, the Daniels Faculty publishes a booklet with short descriptions of every graduate thesis project being presented during final reviews. The Winter 2021 Thesis Booklet is an easy way to get an overview of the work produced by the latest cohort of Master of Architecture, Master of Urban Design, and Master of Landscape Architecture students before you attend their presentations on April 21, 22, and 23.

The booklet can be read in its entirety below. (Download a PDF to read offline by clicking the "download" button in the upper righthand corner.)

The Urban Land Institute Hines Student Competition is a prestigious annual contest in which student teams compete to create the best solution to a complex urban design problem. In the past, the grand prize has always gone to students from American universities. That streak ended this week when a Canadian team, including two students from the Daniels Faculty, took the competition's top spot for 2021.

The winning team included Ruotian Tan, a Daniels Faculty Master of Urban Design student, and Chenyi Xu, a Daniels Faculty Master of Architecture student. They had three teammates from other Toronto universities: Frances Grout-Brown and Leorah Klein, urban planning students at Ryerson University, and Yanlin Zhou, a student in York University's Master of Real Estate and Infrastructure program. The group was supervised by Steven Webber and Victor Perez-Amado, both assistant professors at Ryerson's School of Urban and Regional Planning. Raymond Lee, a senior associate at Weston Williamson + Partners, and Christina Giannone, vice president of planning and development at Port Credit West Village Partners, acted as advisors.

The group made its final submission to the competition's jury on April 8, in a videoconference presentation. The Urban Land Institute, which holds the competition, announced the win on Monday.

The all-Toronto team bested a field of 104 other entires from schools around North America. The four other finalists represented a number of America's top schools, including Penn State, Columbia, Berkeley, and the Georgia Institute of Technology.

In addition to the bragging rights that come with having impressed the competition's high-powered jury of practitioners from the fields of design, land use, and real estate, the students will get something a little more tangible: a $50,000 (U.S.) prize to split.

"Reflecting on this experience in its entirety, it’s surreal how much we’ve learned along the way," the team said in a statement to the Urban Land Institute. "Though each member of the team brought different skills to the table, we were strongly aligned in our aspirations for the site and were proud to present our proposal rooted in enabling physical and social connectivity and achieving economic and environmental resilience."

The group's master plan includes a 107,000-square foot community centre.

The ULI Hines Student Competition asks students to form multidisciplinary teams and tackle a multifaceted urban design project. This year's competition brief called for groups to develop master plans for the East Village, a neighbourhood in Kansas City, Missouri. Student proposals had to take into account a number of goals, including positive economic impact, sustainability, housing affordability, and access to transportation. Teams were required not only to design ways of transforming the neighbourhood, but also to develop phased implementation plans and financial pro formas.

The Daniels/Ryerson/York team's design, titled "Fusion," was unique among the competition's finalists in that it didn't include any tourist infrastructure. Instead, the group chose to focus on building a lively pedestrian promenade for locals, lined with mixed-income residences, office space, retail, and a 107,000-square-foot community centre with housing for seniors inside.

The Fusion site plan.

The group's master plan also included a network of green infrastructure intended to control the flow of stormwater across the site. Permeable pavement and street bioswales would allow the East Village to absorb rain and store it for reuse in a series of local gardens and green roofs. A vertical farming greenhouse would make it possible for the neighbourhood to produce some of its own food.

This attention to environmental sustainability and agriculture won the competition jury's approval. "Fusion stood out as it pushed a new paradigm for an urban neighborhood based on the strong regional legacy of agriculture," ULI Hines jury chair Diana Reid wrote in a statement. "Their financing plan and design enabled economic resilience through small scale food growth and distribution, local culinary incubation, and research-driven employment opportunities."

Learn more about Fusion and the other ULI Hines Student Competition 2021 finalists on the Urban Land Institute Americas website.

Top image: The group's design for a vertical farming greenhouse.

Alumni, future students, and members of the public are welcome to join us online for final reviews (April 15-23). Daniels Faculty students in architecture, landscape, and urban design will present their final projects to their instructors, as well as guest critics from the professional community and local and international academic institutions.

Daniels On Air is the Faculty’s online platform to navigate through final reviews. Here you’ll sign up, browse the schedule, and learn more about each studio. Daniels On Air will re-launch in time for reviews beginning on April 15. All reviews will take place over Zoom (create a free account here).

Current students do not need to sign up for Daniels On Air to access reviews. Check the Review and Examination Schedule for all dates and times.

Follow UofTDaniels on Twitter and Instagram and join the conversation using the hashtag #DanielsReviews. Reviews take place 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. unless otherwise stated. Please note that the times and dates may change, and there may be scheduled breaks in a Zoom throughout the day.

Undergraduate 

Thursday, April 15 

Design Studio I | JAV101 
Time: 9 a.m. – 1 p.m.
Instructors: Jay Pooley (Coordinator), Alex Josephson, Danielle Whitley, Peter Sealy, Jennifer Kudlats, Katy Chey, Luke Duross, Chloe Town, T. Jeffrey Garcia, Mauricio Quiros Pacheco, Nuria Montblanch, Scott Sorli, Anne Ma, Marcin Kedzior, Avi Odenheimer 

Friday, April 16 

Design Studio II | ARC201 
Time: 9 a.m. – 1 p.m. 
Instructors: Fiona Lim Tung (Coordinator), Daniel Briker, Carol Moukheiber, Tei Carpenter, Maria Denegri, Alex Josephson, Mauricio Quiros Pacheco, Andrew MacMillan 

Drawing and Representation II | ARC200 
Time: 2-6 p.m. 
Instructors: Michael Piper (Coordinator), Jon Cummings, David Verbeek, Reza Nik, Fiona Lim Tung 

Monday, April 19 

Architecture Studio IV | ARC362 
Instructors: Dina Sarhane (Coordinator), Chris Cornecelli, Sam Ghantous 

Landscape Architecture Studio IV | ARC364 
Time: 9:30 a.m. – 1 p.m. 
Instructor: Alissa North 

Technology Studio IV | ARC381 
Time: 10 a.m. – 3 p.m. 
Instructors: Tom Bessai (Coordinator), Tomasz Reslinski  

Thursday, April 22 and Friday, April 23 

Senior Seminar in History and Theory (Thesis) | ARC457 
Instructor: Jeannie Kim 

Senior Seminar in Design (Thesis) | ARC462 
Instructor: Jeannie Kim 

Senior Seminar in Technology (Thesis) | ARC487 
Instructor: Nicholas Hoban 

Graduate 

Monday, April 19 

Design Studio 2 | ARC1012 | MARCH 
Instructors: Adrian Phiffer (Coordinator), Tei Carpenter, Petros Babasikas, An Te Liu, Brigitte Shim, Tom Ngo, Aziza Chaouni, Mauricio Quiros Pacheco 

Design Studio 2 | LAN1012 | MLA  
Instructors: Liat Margolis (Coordinator), Elise Shelley, Terence Radford 

Urban Design Studio Options | URD1012 | MUD 
Instructors: Ken Greenberg, Simon Rabyniuk 

Tuesday, April, 20 

Design Studio 4 | ARC2014 | MARCH 
Instructors: Sam Dufaux (Coordinator), Carol Moukheiber, James Macgillivray, Chris Cornecelli, Aleris Rodgers, Maria Denegri, Anne-Marie Armstrong, Francesco Martire 

Design Studio 4 | LAN2014 | MLA 
Instructors: Behnaz Assadi (Coordinator), Todd Douglas 

Wednesday April 21 

Architectural Design Studio: Research 2 | ARC3021 | MARCH 
Instructors: Adrian Phiffer, Vivian Lee, Mason White 

Architectural Design Studio: Research 2 | ARC3039 | MARCH 
Instructors: Jesse LeCavalier, Mauricio Quiros Pacheco 

Architectural Design Studio: Research 2 | ARC4018 | MARCH 

(L9101) Redeployable Architecture for Health—Pop-up Hospitals for Covid-19 
Instructor: Stephen Verderber 

(L9109) Towards Half: Climate Positive Design in the GTHA 
Instructor: Kelly Doran 
 

Design Studio Thesis | LAN3017 | MLA 
Instructors: Liat Margolis (Coordinator), Behnaz Assadi, Fadi Masoud, Peter North, Alissa North, Jane Wolff, Elise Shelley, Matthew Perotto, Megan Esopenko, Aisling O’Carroll 

Urban Design Studio Thesis | URD2015 | MUD 
Instructor: Angus Laurie 

Thursday, April 22 

Architectural Design Studio: Research 2 | ARC3021/ARC4018 | MARCH  

(L9103) STUFF  
Time: 1-6 p.m.
Instructor: Laura Miller 

(L9105) ARCHITECTURE ♥ MEDIA 
Instructors: Lara Lesmes, Fredrik Hellberg 

(L9106) Designing Buildings with Complex Programs on Constrained Urban Sites that include Heritage Structures 
Time: 1-6 p.m. 
Instructor: George Baird 

(L9107) What is Inclusive Architecture (Landscape Architecture, Urban Design)? 
Time: 9 a.m. – 12 p.m. 
Instructor: Elisa Silva 

(L9108) The Usual Suspects  
Time: 8:30 a.m. – 5 p.m. 
Instructors: Filipe Magalhaes, Ahmed Belkhodja, Ana Luisa Soares 

Design Studio Thesis | LAN3017 | MLA 
Instructors: Liat Margolis (Coordinator), Behnaz Assadi, Fadi Masoud, Peter North, Alissa North, Jane Wolff, Elise Shelley, Matthew Perotto, Megan Esopenko, Aisling O’Carroll 

Post-Professional Thesis 2 | ALA4022  
Time: 12-4 p.m. 
Instructors: Mason White (Coordinator), Adrian Phiffer, Maria Yablonina, Carol Moukheiber, Jesse LeCavalier, Paul Harrison 

Friday, April 23 

Architectural Design Studio: Research 2 | ARC3021/ARC4018 | MARCH  

(L9110) Anthropocene and Herd 
Instructor: Gilles Saucier, Christian Joakim, Gregory Neudorf 

(L9103) STUFF  
Time: 1-6 p.m.
Instructor: Laura Miller 

Architectural Design Studio 7: Thesis | ARC4018 | MARCH 
Time: 10 a.m. – 4 p.m. 
Advisors: Petros Babasikas, Michael Piper 

Architectural Design Studio 7: Thesis | ARC4018 | MARCH 
Time: 1-6 p.m. 
Advisors: John Shnier, Mauricio Quiros Pachecho, Carol Moukheiber, An Te Liu 

Design Studio Thesis | LAN3017 | MLA 
Instructors: Liat Margolis (Coordinator), Behnaz Assadi, Fadi Masoud, Peter North, Alissa North, Jane Wolff, Elise Shelley, Matthew Perotto, Megan Esopenko, Aisling O’Carroll 

Photo by Harry Choi.

Each year, hundreds of student teams from across North America make submissions to the ULI Hines Student Competition, in which entrants are challenged to tackle a complex urban planning and design exercise. Only four teams advance to the competition's final round. This year, one of those teams includes two Daniels Faculty students: Ruotian Tan, a student in the Faculty's Master of Urban Design program, and Chenyi Xu, a Master of Architecture student.

Ruotian and Chenyi are working as part of a five-member, multidisciplinary crew. The other three students on the team are Frances-Grout Brown and Leorah Klein, both Ryerson University urban planning students, and Yanlin Zhou, a student in York University's Master of Real Estate and Infrastructure program. The group was supervised by Steven Webber and Victor Perez-Amado, both assistant professors at Ryerson's School of Urban and Regional Planning. Raymond Lee, a senior associate at Weston Williamson + Partners, and Christina Giannone, vice president of planning and development at Port Credit West Village Partners, acted as advisors.

The students will give their final presentation during a video call with the ULI Hines Student Competition jury on April 8. The competition's winning team receives a prize of $50,000. The three runner-up teams receive $10,000 each.

The competition is a rare opportunity for students to work with people in disciplines other than their own. "It was a great multidisciplinary learning experience for me," Ruotian says. "It was a very good chance for me to practice and get some good results before I actually go into a professional career."

The competition brief called for each student group to develop a detailed master plan for the East Village, a neighbourhood in Kansas City, Missouri. The East Village is a lightly developed 16.2-acre site located within the city's central business district. The student proposals had to take into account a wide variety of ambitious goals, including positive economic impact, sustainability, housing affordability, and easy access to transportation. In addition to redesigning the site, students had to produce implementation plans and financial pro formas that described exactly how their designs might be made into reality.

The Daniels Faculty/Ryerson/York team designed its master plan, titled "Fusion," around two central ideas: connectivity and resilience. Although the East Village is a relatively blank slate, with plenty of room for megaprojects, the group's plan doesn't contain any large tourist attractions, like stadiums or museums. "One thing that distinguished our proposal from the other finalists is that we wanted to create a community for people who are actually living there, rather than attracting tourists or visitors to the site," Ruotian says.

In the first phase of the group's three-step implementation plan, the city would build a new pedestrian promenade at the centre of the neighbourhood, then line it with the beginnings of a dense new urban neighbourhood. The plan calls for an initial 615 mixed-income rental units, a 107,000 square-foot community centre with some seniors housing inside, plus office space and ground-floor retail.

The group's site plan.

Over two subsequent phases of redevelopment, the neighbourhood would evolve into a continuous row of mixed-use housing, office, and retail structures. The community centre and an adjacent water-feature park would serve as gathering points not only for neighbourhood residents and workers, but also for other Kansas City residents, who would be channeled into the East Village by cross streets and bus routes parallel to the pedestrian promenade.

The "resilience" piece of the group's plan manifests in the form of a neighbourhood-wide network of green infrastructure aimed at allowing the site to gracefully accept rainwater. Permeable pavement would allow precipitation to seep into the ground. Street bioswales would collect rainwater for reuse. A series of rain gardens, community gardens, and green roofs would use stormwater for irrigation. And a vertical farming greenhouse would allow the neighbourhood to produce food at scale, in an environmentally friendly way.

The vertical farming greenhouse.

"Kansas City has a long history with agricultural industries," Leorah says. "We noticed to the east of the site, they have really strong community networks with urban agriculture, so we wanted to build on networks that were already existing and provide a place for them to build up their networks and build up their businesses. And COVID really showed the importance of a local food system."

Visit the ULI Americas website to learn more about this year's ULI Hines Student Competition finalists.

In the Daniels Faculty's Integrated Urbanism Studio, students from the Master of Architecture, Master of Landscape Architecture, and Master of Urban Design programs spend a semester working together on shared, large-scale projects.

The studio is one of the most complex in the Daniels Faculty's curriculum and is a staple of its interdisciplinary design pedagogy. Now, it has a web presence to match its importance. The new Integrated Urbanism Studio website launched last semester, and will be the studio’s permanent online home.

The new site, designed under the direction of studio coordinators Fadi Masoud, Michael Piper, and Mason White, is a clearing house of information. “It is a repository of the incredible research and design work produced by over 100 graduate students across 11 teaching sections," Masoud says. "It is our hope that we can continue to build on the rich work presented here year after year."

Visitors to the website can view an interactive map of the city of Toronto, browse through an extensive catalogue of urban precedents, and view project proposals.

In the first week of the studio, students mapped the locations of various social, environmental, demographic, and infrastructural policies as well as a wide list of geospatial conditions. By combining various research and mapping layers, students identified a series of “design action zones” — areas of the city that are especially vulnerable to environmental, economic, and social pressures, and are therefore particularly ripe for design intervention.

These design action zones became sites of urban transformations. Students imagined projects that followed prompts from the international Green New Deal Superstudio to create designs that bring new, equitable, and environmentally sustainable forms of housing, mobility, and social services to their study areas.

All of the studio's final projects from the fall 2020 semester are available for viewing online.

Take me to the Integrated Urbanism Studio website

Chris Lee

The graphics that accompany the listings for the Daniels Faculty's 2020-2021 lineup of "talks" — meaning, online events where several expert participants have a conversation on a pre-selected topic — are a little confounding to the eye. The text is chunky and pixellated, and the backgrounds are made up of asymmetrical assortments of shapes, scattered seemingly randomly across a black field.

All of that visual dissonance is, of course, entirely by design. And the one who did the designing is Chris Lee, a freelance graphic artist and educator.

Top: Lee's design for the winter talks series. Bottom: Lee's design for this week's talk with Douglas Cardinal and Arthur Dyson.

The Daniels Faculty's design brief called for graphics that could be presented in static images and also in animations. Other than that, all Lee had to go on was the title of the talks series, "Resolutions and Agencies."

He began to think about the meaning of the word "agency" in the context of graphic design. "The scale of the graphic designer's agency is circumscribed by formal technical concerns," he says. "What colour? What typeface? What's the type program? What's the spatial conceit?"

Lee began by creating what he calls a "map" — a large digital canvas of abstract, monochrome geometric forms on a black background. By zooming in and out on different parts of his geometric map and making rectangular cut-outs of particular sections, Lee was able to create unique backgrounds for each different event graphic. "It's playing with the fundamentals of 2D form: the line, the dot, and the plane," he says.

Two designs by Chris Lee for the Daniels Faculty's fall talks series.

Lee's font choices are intended to subtly reference the "resolutions" component of the series theme. The event titles are rendered in "Lo-Res," a typeface by the digital type foundry Emigre. The series title, meanwhile, is set in Wremena, an angular serif typeface. "Lo-Res is very crass and low-resolution," Lee says. "In my mind there's a kind of counterposition between the low resolution of Lo-Res and the sharp geometry of Wremena, which resonated with thinking about scale."

Lee isn't only a graphic designer; he's also an educator. His current appointment is at Pratt Institute's Communications Design department, where he's an assistant professor.

Although he now splits his time between Toronto, Brooklyn, and Buffalo, he's originally from Toronto. After graduating from OCAD University in 2006, he landed a job as a designer at The Walrus, a Canadian magazine known for its long-form journalism. At around the same time, Lee started doing regular freelance work for C Magazine, an art periodical.

Lee's poster design for “Unmapping Eurasia,” an exhibition curated by Binna Choi and You Mi.

His introduction to the world of architecture came in 2010, when he joined the editorial board of Scapegoat, a journal of architecture, landscape architecture, and political economy. "Working for these clients got me thinking about the world of ideas in graphic design," Lee says. "I started wondering, what are people thinking about? What are the issues?"

He enrolled at the Sandberg Institute, a graduate school in the Netherlands. His master's thesis was a treatise on alternative currencies as a genre of graphic design. Today, he continues to study the design of official documents, like currencies and passports. "In spite of their banality, these genres of form are probably the most consequential types of design artifacts that we engage with," he says.

Memory Bank, a work created by Lee for an exhibition at El Museo, a gallery in Buffalo.

Lee graduated in 2010 and then spent two more years in the Netherlands, teaching and freelancing. Upon his return to Canada, he started teaching as a sessional instructor at OCAD U, worked for a while as a designer for Bruce Mau, and then landed his first full-time academic appointment at SUNY Buffalo. He was an assistant professor there until 2019, when he made the move to Pratt.

He hopes to use his designs for the Daniels Faculty's talks series as part of his teaching at Pratt. "The play with elemental two-dimensional forms is of interest to me from a pedagogical perspective," he says. "I think of it as a way for me to generate examples that I can show my students of how one can construct a visual syntax by the way one arranges elements. A circle isn't big until you put something smaller next to it."

The Daniels Faculty is pleased to announce that Juan Du will be joining the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design as its new dean, effective July 1, 2021, for a five-year term. She will join the Daniels Faculty at the rank of full professor.

Professor Du is an internationally recognized architectural scholar whose creative practice, teaching, and research explore urban theories and architectural designs to address the social and environmental impacts of rapid urbanization. She brings to Daniels over 15 years of experience at the University of Hong Kong's Faculty of Architecture, where she has served in various leadership and academic roles.

“The appointment is a great honour, and I am energized by the University of Toronto’s direction to be not only an institution for intellectual pursuit but also one of societal pursuit," said Du. “With architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, forestry, and visual studies programs under one roof, here is an opportunity for us to combine the studies of the natural environment with the built environment – and view the city as one environment.”

Juan Du.

Du will succeed interim dean Robert Wright, who assumed leadership of the Daniels Faculty on July 1, 2020. Wright has been instrumental in leading the Faculty's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and has worked to improve the Faculty's social equity practices, both by diversifying the curriculum and by creating a new, permanent staff position for a senior diversity officer.

"It has been an honour to be able to work with the Daniels Faculty and the university during this extraordinarily challenging time in history," interim dean Wright says. "I'm glad to know that we have been able to hire a dean of Du's caliber and welcome her to the Faculty. Du's socially conscious outlook, and her demonstrated skill at research and administration, make her the ideal person to lead our school into the future."

In a memo issued today announcing the new appointment, Cheryl Regehr, the University of Toronto's vice president and provost, praised Du for her extensive academic resume. "Professor Du's breadth of professional and academic experience, passion for interdisciplinary design philosophies, and dedication to student success in all aspects of her work will be key to the Daniels Faculty in the years ahead," Regehr wrote.

The Shenzhen Experiment.

Du is the founding director of IDU_architecture, an award-winning design and research practice that focuses on responsible urban planning and design. She is also the author of many journal articles for leading architecture and design publications, including e-flux, Domus, and The Architectural Review. Last year, she published a monograph, The Shenzhen Experiment (Harvard University Press), which challenges established misconceptions of top-down planning as the key to the Chinese city’s success, and provides humanistic narratives that convey the importance of history, ecology, politics, culture, and people.

In 2005, Du worked with Shenzen's city government on the inaugural Shenzhen Hong Kong Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism — an event to which she continued to make regular contributions in subsequent years. In 2010, she was the curator of Quotidian Architectures, Hong Kong's contribution to the Venice Architecture Biennale, which explored the relationship between collaborative design and socially and environmentally responsible architecture.

Du's research focus is the relationship between urban planning and informal development within rapid urbanization, as well as impacts on marginalized communities. She also engages in architectural practice and activism in collaboration with various NGOs, social organizations, and governmental agencies, to work with resident communities and improve their living conditions in informal settlements. She currently is collaborating with Habitat for Humanity on "Housing in Place," a social impact project to supply residents living in cramped or substandard conditions with new and better housing and provide them with improved community resources and supports.

Read U of T News

Read e-flux

Alumni, future students, and members of the public are welcome to join us for final reviews. Daniels Faculty students in architecture, landscape, and urban design will present their final projects to their instructors, as well as guest critics from the professional community and local and international academic institutions. 

This semester the Daniels Building is closed to the public, because of COVID-19. As a result, all reviews will be held online, on Zoom. If you'd like to attend, all you have to do is pre-register on Eventbrite and you'll receive login instructions for Daniels On Air.

We welcome our alumni/members of the professional community tuning in to this year’s reviews. Although we won’t be able to greet you personally, please do let us know if you plan to attend the online reviews by confirming your name/affiliation with jacqueline.raaflaub@daniels.utoronto.ca. Your continued engagement with the Daniels Faculty and its talented students is appreciated by us all.

Register for Graduate Reviews on Eventbrite now

Register for Undergraduate Reviews on Eventbrite now

See our Daniels Reviews Online - Instructions

Follow UofTDaniels on Twitter and Instagram and join the conversation using the hashtag #DanielsReviews. All reviews take place from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. (unless otherwise stated). Please note that the times and dates of the review schedule may change.

Monday, December 14 | Undergraduate

Drawing and Representation I ARC100H1F
Instructors: James Macgillivray, Genevieve Simms, Fiona Lim Tung, Daniel Briker, Chloe Town, Danielle Whitley, David Verbeek, Kearon Roy Taylor, Nicolas Barrette, Scott Norsworthy, Anne Ma, Tom Ngo, Nuria Montblanch, Andrea Rodriguez Fos, Kara Verbeek, Luke Duross, Jamie Lipson

Tuesday, December 15 | Undergraduate

Drawing and Representation II ARC200H1F
Instructors: Michael Piper, Francesco Martire, Leon Lai, Simon Rabyniuk, Sam Ghantous, Katy Chey, Samuel Dufaux, Mohammed Soroor, Monica Hutton

Design Studio II: How to design almost nothing
ARC201H1F Instructors: Miles Gertler, Jennifer Kudlats, Aleris Rodgers, Brian O'Brian

Wednesday, December 16 | Undergraduate

Architecture Studio III ARC361Y1F
Instructors: Petros Babasikas, Anne-Marie Armstrong, Adrian Phiffer

Landscape Architecture Studio III ARC363Y1F
Instructors: Behnaz Assadi

Technology Studio III ARC380Y1F
Instructors: Nicholas Hoban, Nathan Bishop

Thursday, December 17 | Undergraduate

Senior Seminar in History and Theory ARC456H1F
Instructors: Jeannie Kim

Senior Seminar in Design (Research) ARC461H1F
Instructors: Jeannie Kim

Senior Seminar in Technology (Research) ARC486H1F
Instructors: Nicholas Hoban

Friday, December 18 | Undergraduate

Senior Seminar in History and Theory (Research) ARC456H1F
Instructors: Jeannie Kim

Senior Seminar in Design (Research) ARC461H1F
Instructors: Jeannie Kim

Senior Seminar in Technology (Research) ARC486H1F
Instructors: Nicholas Hoban

Friday, December 11 | Graduate

Design Studio I ARC1011YF
Instructors: Vivian Lee, Tei Carpenter, Miles Gertler, Sam Ghanthous, Aleris Rodgers, Carol Moukheiber, Maria Denegri

Design Studio I (The Language of Landscape) LAN1011YF 
Instructors: Behnaz Assadi, Peter North, Elnaz Sanati

Monday, December 14 | Graduate

Design Studio III (Integrated Urbanism Studio) ARC2013YF / LAN2013YF / URD1011YF
Coordinators: Fadi Masoud, Mason White, Michael Piper
academic.daniels.utoronto.ca/urbanism

Tuesday, December 15 | Graduate

Architectural Design Studio: Research I ARC3020YF

(L9101) Redeployable Architecture for Health—Pop-up Hospitals for Covid-19
Instructor: Stephen Verderber

(L9103) STUFF 
Instructor: Laura Miller

(L9105) ARCHITECTURE ♥ MEDIA
Instructors: Lara Lesmes, Fredrik Hellberg

(L9106) Designing Buildings with Complex Programs on Constrained Urban Sites that include Heritage Structures
Instructor: George Baird

Design Studio Option LAN3016YF: Toronto Ravines—CREATURE
Instructor: Alissa North

Design Studio Option LAN3016YF: Our Plant Relations and Decolonizing Design
Instructor: Sheila Boudreau

Wednesday, December 16 | Graduate

Architectural Design Studio: Research I ARC3020YF

(L9107) What is Inclusive Architecture (Landscape Architecture, Urban Design)?
Instructor: Elisa Silva

(L9108) The Usual Suspects 
Instructors: Filipe Magalhaes, Ahmed Belkhodja, Ana Luisa Soares

(L9109) Towards Half: Climate Positive Design in the GTHA
Instructor: Kelly Doran

(L9110) Anthropocene and Herd
Instructor: Gilles Saucier, Christian Joakim, Gregory Neudorf

Design Studio Option LAN3016YF: Our Plant Relations and Decolonizing Design
Instructor: Sheila Boudreau

Design Studio Option LAN3016YF:  Mediated Reconstructions: Developing a historiographic design method in landscape
Instructor: Aisling O'Carroll

Design Studio III URD2013YF
Instructors: Angus Laurie, Mariana Leguia

Thursday, December 17 | Graduate

Architectural Design Studio VII: Thesis ARC4018YF
Instructors: Adrian Phiffer, Petros Babasikas, Laura Miller, Robert Levit, John Shnier, Michael Piper, Mauricio Quiros Pacheco, Carol Moukheiber

Friday, December 18 | Graduate

Architectural Design Studio VII: Thesis ARC4018YF
Instructors: Adrian Phiffer, Petros Babasikas, Laura Miller, Robert Levit, John Shnier, Michael Piper, Mauricio Quiros Pacheco, Carol Moukheiber

Post-Professional Thesis I ALA4021YF (12:00-4:00 pm)
Instructors: Mason White (Coordinator), Adrian Phiffer, Maria Yablonina, Carol Moukheiber, Jesse LeCavalier

Photo by Harry Choi.

A project by associate professor Jesse LeCavalier has made the shortlist in a competition to envision an ambitious future for Sudbury, Ontario.

Le Cavalier's project is one of eight finalists in Sudbury 2050, a design competition initiated by the McEwen School of Architecture, at Laurentian University. The competition brief called upon entrants to create proposals for a complete overhaul of Sudbury's city centre, keeping in mind the city's setting amidst the forests of Northern Ontario, its history as a mining town, and its future as a hub for research and development. The jury includes Marianne McKenna, of KPMB Architects, and Bruce Mau, of Bruce Mau Studio.

LeCavalier titled his design "Alimentary Urbanism" — a name meant to suggest a style of redevelopment that places residents and their wellbeing ahead of financial profits. The core of the proposal is a pair of new rail spurs that connect the existing Sudbury VIA Rail station with the downtown GOVA transit hub and the nearby Elm Place shopping centre. These new spurs would become the centrepiece of a new network of rail lines that would provide rapid transit, community programming, and other services to neighbourhoods throughout the city centre.

As a way of leveraging all this new rail, Alimentary Urbanism proposes transforming Sudbury's former mining sites into locations for new industries, like agriculture, cold storage, and geotourism. The proposal also calls for substantial new land development. The city would conduct a survey of its existing building stock and decommission obsolete structures so that the space they occupy could be repurposed for collective uses. The businesses that occupy those old buildings would be incentivized to move their operations into modern mass-timber structures alongside the new rail corridors.

The project was developed with assistance from Jake Rosenwald, Connor Stevens, Jennifer Tran, Siqi Wang, and Michael Wideman.

To learn more about Alimentary Urbanism and the other Sudbury 2050 finalists, visit the Sudbury 2050 website.

Top image: A slide from the Alimentary Urbanism master plan.

Statement from the Dean's Office

Earlier today, President Gertler made a University-wide announcement about an important change in the start date for winter term. This shift is intended to support the U of T community's health and wellness during an unprecedented time. 

I understand how difficult this year has been for so many in our Daniels Faculty community, and I want to assure you the wellbeing of students, faculty, and staff remains our highest priority. That is why winter break will be extended by one week for all Daniels undergraduate and graduate students.

The new start date for Daniels Faculty winter 2021 undergraduate and graduate classes is January 11.

This extra time will allow us to regroup and refresh before our next term begins. As a reminder, all winter 2021 classes, labs, and tutorials will be conducted online.

Reading week dates will remain the same (February 15-19), and any previously scheduled field courses will continue remotely during that time as planned. Classes will end on April 9; final exams and reviews will be completed by April 30.

While our classes will start on January 11, the University will still be reopening on January 4. President Gertler also announced three additional paid days off for staff, to be taken individually or as a block. At the Daniels Faculty, only essential staff-related meetings are to occur during the week of January 4–January 8. Managers will meet with staff to discuss how we can organize this time to provide as much of a break as possible during this week.

We will share more information about what to expect next term very soon. The Daniels Faculty COVID-19 FAQs will be updated to reflect new information on an ongoing basis, as will the UTogether website.

For now, I want to reinforce how important it is to strike a balance between work and the other aspects of our lives. If you ever feel that it's impossible to find that balance, remember that we are here to support you. Ask for help, and you will receive it.