Last week, Assistant Professor Fadi Masoud presented a paper titled “Landscape’s Comprehensive Standards” at the 17th annual National Conference on Planning History under a session titled "Projects by the Olmsted Firm: Sourcing the Past to Improve Resilience” hosted by the Society for American City & Regional Planning History in Cleveland, Ohio.

The paper explored a selection of Olmsted's landscape-driven comprehensive planning projects from the turn of the last century, and compared them to corollary principles exemplified in contemporary resilience and adaptation design strategies today.

Masoud conducted the research on Olmsted’s projects as part of the 2016 Beveridge Fellowship at the Fairsted National Olmsted Archives. A set of strategies were extracted by analyzing coastal projects completed by the Olmsted office such as:

• Plan for the Rockaways (1879),  
• New York City's Regional Plan (1920) (pictured above),
• The Toronto Island’s Waterfront Plan (1912),
• Riverside Park Park and Extension in Manhattan’s Upper West Side (1913),
• Florida’s Lakelands and Winterhaven Subdivisions (1921), and
• Boston’s Back Bay Fens (1877)

Concepts such “Landscape as Filter”,  “Space for Dynamic Flexibility”, the “Integration of Green and Grey Infrastructure”, and “Landforms as Buffer”, are critical planning and design strategies present in both Olmsted’s coastal planning work, and the winning entries of contemporary design competitions such as Rebuild by Design (2014), MoMA’s Rising Currents (2010), and WaterfronToronto (ongoing).

The Society for American City and Regional Planning History (SACRPH) is an interdisciplinary organization dedicated to promoting scholarship on the planning of cities and metropolitan regions over time, and to bridging the gap between the scholarly study of cities and the practice of urban planning. The organization’s members come from a range of professions and areas of interest, and include historians, architects, planners, environmentalists, landscape designers, public policy makers, preservationists, community organizers, and students and scholars from across the country and around the world.

This fall, as students and faculty at the University of Toronto’s John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design start school in their new home at One Spadina Crescent, questions around the changing nature of the disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, art, and urbanism and their evolving pedagogical approaches have become especially urgent.

To celebrate the school’s new home and speculate about how to make best use of it in the coming years, the Faculty is mounting a series of discussions, lectures, and workshops, as well as a symposium. These events will explore the relationship between our workspaces and the pedagogies, research projects, and forms of public outreach in which we engage.

What kind of a pedagogical instrument is a school? What is its scope and reach? How do we conceptualize its relationship to the public? How can a school be a both a place where ideas are cultivated and where they are subject to continuous experimentation? And what implications does this productive tension have for the politics at play in our approach to art, architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design? The series will host a rich array of educators, theorists, historians, and practitioners and will culminate in a symposium in the spring that will bring together thinkers who are at the forefront of conceptualizing and designing our schools.

“My mantra has been that architecture and its allied disciplines are as much a way of finding the world, as they are of forming it, and how it follows that a great design school models practice by acting as a hinge between study and action,” says Professor Richard Sommer, Dean of the Daniels Faculty. “With our new platform at One Spadina, we have an unprecedented opportunity to explore and demonstrate this.”

Upcoming lectures include:

• Daniels Faculty Associate Professor and founding partner of Lateral Office Mason White, architect and urbanist Charles Waldheim, research manager at Harvard’s Urban Theory Lab Daniel Ibañez-Moreno, and architect, educator, and writer Clare Lyster, who will talk about their new book Third Coast Atlas, which strives to capture emergent and shifting forms of urbanization, increasingly understood as socio-spatial and political processes that defy conventional modes of description,
   
• Associate Professor and architectural historian Mary Lou Lobsinger and Joaquim Moreno, guest curator of the exhibition The University is Now on Air: Broadcasting Modern Architecture at CCA from Novebmer 14, 2017 to April 1, 2018, who will discuss how schools disseminate knowledge and what role mass media play in the transformation of the culture of architecture and design in conversation with Associate Professor John Harwood,
   
• Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture Liat Margolis and President of the Nunavut Association of Landscape Architects Chris Grosset, who will address the ongoing dialogue between Canadian landscape architecture practices and indigenous culture, and how this discussion informs how we might train the next generation of landscape architects.

For more information about this series, visit www.daniels.utoronto.ca/events/what-is-a-school

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

Questions addressed in the exercise include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On October 27, Lecturers Adrian Phiffer, Alex Josephson, and Monica Adair will join discussions on marketing and promotion of architecture at this year’s POP // CAN // CRIT symposium. In its second year, POP // CAN // CRIT 2017 will bring together Canadian architects, marketing professionals, photographers, advocacy groups, and media to discuss and debate the vital roles that architects, media, marketing personnel, and the public play in shaping the general discourse surrounding architecture.

Featured Panel Discussions

Panel 2: advocacy + activism
Moderator: Matt Blackett (Spacing)
Speakers: Toon Dreessen, Susan Algie, Monica Adair, Johanna Hurme

Panel 3: image + architecture
Moderator: Adrian Phiffer
Speakers: Ben Rhan, Younes Bounhar, Amanda Large, Norm Li, Naomi Kriss

Panel 4: architecture as icon/ branding + Toronto condo revolution
Moderator: Nicola Spunt (PARTISANS)
Speakers: Alex Josephson, Alex Bozikovic, Adrian Phiffer

In these discussions, participants will be answering questions such as, “In what ways do we market architecture?" "How can we best advocate for the profession?" "And what impact does a photograph have on our understanding of the built environment?” The event will take place at the Design Exchange in Toronto with $45 general admission and $35 student admission. Tickets can be purchased on Eventbrite.

For more information, visit http://spacing.ca/popcancrit/

Listen to audio from last year’s discussions:

Photo, top: Tinker's Orchard by Acre Architects, founded by Monica Adair and Stephen Kopp.

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

The Daniels Faculty is thrilled to participate in EDIT: Expo for Design, Innovation and Technology, which opens at East Harbour (formerly the Unilever soap factory) at 21 Don roadway in Toronto’s Port Lands this Thursday, September 28.

Inspired by the United Nations Development Programme’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals, the 10-day expo, produced by the Design Exchange, will explore the future of architecture and city-building through a variety of participatory programming, talks, and experiences.

Intended to spark discussion and debate about how we understand and envision the city as it prepares for ensuring growth, the Daniels submission to EDIT entitled, Where is the big picture, Toronto?, is a large, detailed 25-foot-long “fun-house mirror” of a future Toronto looking south to the lake from Steeles Avenue. Produced by a team of faculty and students, it asks how we might best capture the experience and future hopes of the city’s heterogeneous citizenry.

From the project description:

What picture of Toronto do those who imagine its future hold in their mind’s eye?

One would think that in the age of Google Earth and Big Data, there would be some big pictures that might help more people see, or begin to understand, a vision of their city beyond the specific lens of their own experience or self-interest — pictures that might place the parts of the city we believe are important within a more complex whole, pictures that might illuminate where individual decisions and actions are taking us, so that we might begin to imagine how to achieve something better.

A great city, like a great book, painting, or piece of music must be constructed. At the Daniels Faculty of Architecture Landscape and Design we consider the city from many angles. Ultimately, we believe there should be competing pictures of our urban future, pictures that can inspire vision and stimulate meaningful debate. The image we have constructed is a work-in-progress, a fun-house mirror of a future the city is already building. This is the first in a series of picture/provocations our school will produce aimed at asking:

What’s missing?

WHERE IS THE BIG PICTURE, TORONTO?

Stayed tuned…

EDIT: Expo for Design, Innovation and Technology runs from September 28 to October 8. The 10-day expo includes 150,000-square-feet of exhibition space and 100 speakers in an abandoned factory. Visit http://editdx.org for more details.

The presidents of Toronto’s four universities – the University of Toronto, OCAD University, York University and Ryerson University – have teamed up for a new initiative called StudentDwellTO to tackle one of the biggest issues facing post-secondary students in the Greater Toronto area: affordable housing.

The initiative brings together nearly 100 faculty and students from the four universities to take an in-depth look at student housing in the GTA. The Daniels Faculty is thrilled to have faculty and students participating in this project.

This follows a previous collaboration between the four universities: a massive survey of student travel behaviour, called StudentMoveTO, which revealed that long daily commutes for students – many of whom live far away where housing is more affordable – were leading to lower campus engagement and in some cases limiting students’ class choices.

StudentMoveTO and StudentDwellTO are parts of an initiative by the presidents of the four universities aimed at improving the state of the city-region – and, in turn, the experiences for university students in the GTA.

“This is another example of how the impact of our collective efforts can be far greater than the sum of individual contributions,” says Professor Shauna Brail, U of T’s presidential adviser on urban engagement and director of the urban studies program.

Given the number of post-secondary students in the GTA – more than 180,000 spread across the four universities alone – studying the basic issues facing our students as they live in and navigate the city is critical, says Brail, who will be U of T’s representative for StudentDwellTO’s steering committee.

StudentDwellTO will look at housing affordability from a range of perspectives, bringing together disciplines including architecture, art, education, engineering, environmental studies and design, geography, psychology, real estate management and urban development and planning.

The two-year initiative will have heavy research and advocacy components, and the researchers will collect data using a variety of research methods that include:

• wide-scale focus groups and accompanying surveys to draw out narratives surrounding students’ lived experiences,
• interactive website and community arts programming and communication tools, and
• interactive maps to develop affordable housing strategies.

The subject matter will also be incorporated into experiential learning courses, across all four universities and various disciplines, to propose and test solutions to the student housing experience and crisis.

Along the way, researchers will collaborate with government, non-profit, private sector and community partners in the GTA.  Each university will hold public events, including affordable housing charrettes, to get a wide range of input on solutions.

Image, top: by Suhaib Arnaoot, from his Master of Architectrure thesis titled Responsive Social Housing

Architects and urban planners have been working with residents of high rise towers built in the 1960s and 1970s in Toronto to determine how to bring life and much needed neighbourhood amenities to the empty parking lots and unused green spaces at their base.

One of the results — after a decade of research and community outreach (h/t Graeme Stewart, MArch 2007) — is a new approach to zoning dubbed Residential Apartment Commercial (RAC) — which would allow for farmers markets, restaurants, small businesses, and artist spaces, among other uses that were previously not permitted. The goal is to increase the livability of the neighbourhoods — creating places where neighbours can easily walk, meet, interact, find employment, and build community.

According to Globe and Mail architecture critic, Alex Bozikovic, “The idea is that the spaces between the towers, which belong to no one in particular, will no longer be vacant and arid.”

What would these new spaces look like? To find out, Bozikovic took a stroll around some 1970s apartment blocks in Mississauga with Associate Professor Michael Piper. An architect and urban designer, Piper has been studying the design of tower neighbourhoods with his students from the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design.

Writes Bozikovic:

We parked my car in the lot of one 28-storey white-brick tower to check out the commercial offerings – a hair salon, a convenience store – which seemed to be doing fine; in Mississauga, unlike in Toronto, they're allowed by city bylaws. Nearby, a flying-saucer-shaped medical building perched between driveways and bent pines. It was nobody's idea of a shopping paradise, but it seemed to work. "This is the sort of precedent we need to be looking towards," Piper said.

But when we tried to visit the building next door, there was no walkway – and the driveways, just a stone's throw apart, didn't connect either. This sort of dysfunctional site planning is typical. "While these buildings, in their design … aspire to have a big public space that's open to everyone, these sites are chopped up into small pieces," Piper explained. Combining driveways and parking lots makes a lot of sense, but good luck bringing together different landlords or condo boards to make it happen.

Piper warned that simply applying urban design ideas typical to downtown Toronto would not likely be successful.

"These sites are very resistant to the current formulas," he told Bozikovic. "Rather than resort to the city-centre type of urban form, we should seek to create liveable spaces that suit the people who live there rather than enforce an outside vision on them."

Visit the Globe and Mail’s website to read the full article.

Photo, top: by Jesse Colin Jackson (MArch, 2009). Jackson's Radiant City series focused on Toronto’s tower apartment neighborhoods.

Associate Professor An Te Liu is working with Daniels Alumus Graeme Stewart (MArch 2007) to brighten up Kensington Market.

Writes Dave LeBlanc for the Globe and Mail:

What do you get when you mix the following? An architect with a particular interest in “tower renewal” – the science of reskinning 1950s-1970s buildings to be more energy efficient – who also works at one of the city’s top heritage firms; a world-class sculptor who has had solo exhibitions in Berlin, Shanghai, Los Angeles and New York; a condominium board filled with artists, educators, architects, engineers, writers and other creative types; and a wall that didn’t exactly look good after some much-needed structural repairs.

You get a new gateway to Kensington Market on the east wall of the Kensington Market Lofts at 160 Baldwin St.

“This will be his biggest public piece,” said Stewart of Liu’s design. A professor in the Master of Architecture program at the Daniels Faculty, Liu has been engaged in sculpture and installation work that explores issues of funtion, occupation, and cultural coding in the domestic and urban realms since 1999. A principal at ERA Architects, Stewart was a key initiator of the Tower Renewal Project, which examines the future of Toronto’s modern tower neighbourhoods, and a founding director of the Centre for Urban Growth and Renewal.

Writes ERA on their website:

While not a tower renewal project, there are several aspects that have been informative for tower renewal endeavours. This has included:

• Detailed thinking about construction sequencing without displacing residents.
• Instituting a best practice approach to recladding of existing assemblies that takes into account long term durability, fire protection, improved insulation, and continuity of vapour barriers.
• Showing how an initially functional imperative can be leveraged to provide a design approach with additional meaning for the residents and the community.

Visit the Globe and Mail’s website to read the full article by Dave LeBlanc.

Image, top: Artist An Te Liu once painted a postwar bungalow ‘Monopoly green’ as part of the ‘Leona Drive Project’ in Willowdale, Ont.