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

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

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

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

From Mallopoly’s website:

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

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

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

Images above from mallopoly.ca

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

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

SISTER SUBURB
www.projectsuburb.com

Transit consultant Michael Schabas (BArch 1979) has played an important role in making the London transportation system what it is today. He has shared his insights from the United Kingdom in a new book, The Railway Metropolis: How planners, politicians, and developers shaped Modern London, and spoke with U of T News about what Toronto can learn from London’s successes and missteps.

"Toronto needs to learn that transport is a business as well as a social service," says Schabas. "You need to offer a better service quality – faster and more frequent trains, all day and on weekends. There's a line I use as a title of one of my chapters, which is credited to the mayor of Bogotá: the successful city isn't a place where the poor people have cars, but it's a city where the rich people use public transit."

Read Romi Levine's Q&A with Schabas via U of T News.

Photo by: Dan Dell'Unto via railpictures.ca

Last November, Office OU was announced the winner of South Korea's International Competition for the National Museum Complex Master Plan of New Administrative City (Sejong City). The Toronto-based firm was founded by Daniels Faculty Lecturer Nicolas Koff, along with Uros Novakovic and Sebastian Bartnicki.

From Office OU's press release:

Chosen as the winning design among a field of 81 entries from 26 countries around the world, Office OU's Sejong Museum Gardens will play a crucial role in shaping the cultural landscape of South Korea's new metropolis. The competition entry was made in collaboration with Junglim Architecture as the local architect of record.

Sejong City, the new administrative city of South Korea, shifts many of the national government's functions south from Seoul. Already home to 36 government agencies and over 300,000 residents, Sejong City's growing political and administrative importance will be complemented by what the competition promoters hailed as a “world-class cultural complex that will be on par with Berlin's Museuminsel, Vienna's Museumsquartier, and Washington D.C's Smithsonian museums.”

Situated in the heart of the nascent city along the bank of the Geum River, Sejong’s National Museum Complex will be a major cultural center for all of Korea, hosting a diverse range of new institutions including Museums devoted to Architecture and the City, Design, Digital Heritage, Natural History, Korea's Archival Traditions and Children. In total, nearly a dozen museums — an exact number has yet to be set — will be spread throughout the site.

Office OU's master plan for the 190,000 m2 site draws on surrounding landscape typologies (rice paddies, wetlands, forests and riverbanks, as well as the urban fabric) to create a permeable and interconnected series of individually programmed outdoor spaces, organized around a central square. A subdued architectural expression privileges the distinctive landscapes as the museums’ defining design elements. Each museum’s unique identity will be defined by its relationship with adjacent landscapes, drawing these landscapes onto the site within courtyards and forecourts that characterize the museums. In naming the project Sejong Museum Gardens, the garden is recognized as a vital link between culture and nature, the designers hope that this project can give the people of Sejong—and South Korea—a place to nurture this relationship.

The master plans takes cues from traditional palace architecture of Korea’s Joseon Dynasty. According to Office OU principal Nicolas Koff “the palaces are simple and cohesive complexes, united in their architectural language and yet differentiated by their response to the natural landscape.”

At Sejong Museum Gardens architecture serves as a “vessel for the landscape,” Koff explains, allowing each distinct landscape to shape its respective museum's identity. Just as the buildings in Korea's historic palaces create a lattice of distinctive courtyards, Office OU's design looks for integration between nature and architecture. “The architecture is not iconic,” Office OU principal Uros Novakovic stresses, “it's a permeable, space framing device that allows the unique landscapes to be more fully experienced.” The forecourts and courtyards that front each museum will be framed by the architecture, Novakovic notes, making each landscape a locus of attention.

“There are also programmatic links between landscapes and museum identities,” Sebastian Bartnicki adds, describing the connections between each landscape and its museum. For example, the productive landscape that characterizes the Children's Museum invites kids to play and explore the space. By the same token, the Archives Museum will be tucked within a mountainous topography, fostering an appropriate sense of seclusion. Meanwhile, the Architecture Museum is defined by hard landscaping with a distinctly urban feel, relating to the city’s developing retail and arts district across the Che Creek.

Working in partnership with South Korea's acclaimed Junglim Architecture, Office OU will initially design the first three buildings of the National Museum Complex: The National Children's Museum, the Museum Complex's Central Storehouse and Central Operations Centre.

The competition jury praised the project’s “exquisite control of space,” as well as “the spatial relationship between nature and built form, which is successfully anchored in human scale.” Particular acclaim was also reserved for “the interpretation of nature as an architectural element,” and the unorthodox decision to emphasize landscaping over built form.

The competition jury included South Korea's Sungkwan Lee of Seoul National University, Yongmi Kim of Geumseong Architects & Engineers, Junsung Kim of Konkuk University and Architecture Studio hANd, and Sunghong Kim of the University of Seoul, as well as Japan's Nobuaki Furuya of Waseda University and Studio Nasca, and Christopher Sharples of SHoP Architects from the United States.

The first phase of the project, comprised of 5 museums, is set to be completed by 2023.

 

Office OU's master plan was recently profiled on archdaily and Landezine.

More information on the project can also be found on Office OU's website.

2. "A Place that Fits: Landscape Architecture" with Kathryn Gustafson (March 4, 2014)

3. "Fish pluralities, refraction and decolonization in amiskwaciwâskahikan" with Zoe Todd (March 14, 2016)

4. "Walking Your Talk - Integrating Walkability in Urban Design" with Jennifer Keesmaat (November 7, 2013)

5. Green Roof Gurus Panel (March 6, 2014)

6. "Every building implies a city" with Bruce Kuwabara (January 22, 2013)

7. "Sustainable Drainage" with Laura Solano (November 15, 2012)

8. "Working in Mumbai" with Rahul Mehrotra (March 19, 2013)

9. Uber Urbanism (October 22, 2015)

10. 125th Anniversary Dialogues: Practice in an Expanded Field (May 30, 2015)

More videos can be found on the Daniels Faculty Youtube channel.

Photographer Peter MacCallum has been documenting the construction of the Daniels Faculty's future home at One Spadina Crescent since the spring of 2014. Designed by NADAAA, the new Daniels Building includes a renewal of the south-facing 19th century Gothic Revival building (now complete) and stunning contemporary addition, which will house studio space, an advanced fabrication lab, and an architecture and design gallery.

Below are photos MacCallum took this past November and December. Visit the UofTDaniels Flickr page to view construction images from April 2014 to present.

The Daniels Faculty’s public programming has a tradition of bringing together scholars, professionals, and leaders in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, art, and urbanism. This year, as we prepare for our Faculty's big move to One Spadina Crescent, we decided to take a different approach to the staging of our events.

For the 2016-2017 season, we will mostly forego the traditional monographic lecture format for one that presents interdisciplinary discussions and debates that promise to deepen the discourse on the role our disciplines play in creating more culturally engaged, ecologically sustainable, socially just, and artfully conceived artifacts, cities, and environments.

To this end, we have organized seven signature events in venues throughout the University of Toronto’s St. George Campus.

The first event will take place today, October 17th. Co-organized with the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), “What comes after the environment?” — this year’s George Baird Lecture — will feature a discussion between award-winning author and filmmaker Naomi Klein, and the director of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Mirko Zardini at Convocation Hall (31 King's College Circle).

The events that follow include this year’s Frank Gehry International Visiting Chairs in Architecture Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee in conversation with Michelle Addington from the Yale School of Architecture (“When do looks matter more than performance?”), contemporary media artist Walid Raad on the role of narrative in our understanding of reality (“How can fiction replace reality”), and the 2016-2017 Michael Hough / OALA Visiting Critic Pierre Bélanger in conversation with NYU Environmental Studies scholar Jessica Green, (“What is the geography of energy?”) — among others. Each presentation considers problems that cannot be solved by any one discipline or singular expertise, highlighting the role of architects, artists, and designers in facilitating new modes of research and practice tuned to our changing planet and the evolving needs of society.

For our full schedule of public events, visit daniels.utoronto.ca/events, where you may also find information on our Building, Ecology, Science, and Technology (B.E.S.T.) Lectures, midday talks, Master of Visual Studies Proseminar Series, and other public lectures.

For more information on our public lectures, contact Pam Walls at pamela.walls@daniels.utoronto.ca or 416-978-2253. 2016-2017 Public Lectures
 
MONDAY, OCTOBER 17 | 6:30PM – 8:30PM
What comes after the environment?
Convocation Hall, 31 King’s College Circle
George Baird Lecture
Co-organized with the Canadian Centre for Architecture
Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
Mirko Zardini, director of the CCA and author of the forthcoming book It’s All Happening So Fast — A Counter-History of the Modern Canadian Environment
 
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 3 | 7:00PM – 9:00PM
When do looks matter more than performance?
Innis Town Hall, 2 Sussex Avenue
Gehry Chair Lecture
Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee, Johnston Marklee, Los Angeles
Michelle Addington, Yale University, New Haven
 
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 21 | 6:30PM – 8:30PM
What shapes the city?
Isabel Bader Theatre, 93 Charles Street West
Richard Florida, University of Toronto
Adam Greenfield, Urbanscale, London
 
THURSDAY, JANUARY 19 | 6:30PM – 8:30PM
What is the geography of energy?
Isabel Bader Theatre, 93 Charles Street West
Michael Hough / Ontario Association of Landscape Architects Visiting Critic Lecture
Pierre Bélanger, Harvard University, Cambridge
Jessica Green, New York University, New York
 
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 9 | 6:30PM – 8:30PM
How can fiction replace reality?
Isabel Bader Theatre, 93 Charles Street West
Walid Raad, The Cooper Union, New York
 
TUESDAY, MARCH 14 | 6:30PM – 8:30PM
When is a model a beginning or an end?
Innis Town Hall, 2 Sussex Avenue
Amale Andraos, Columbia University, New York
D. Graham Burnett, Princeton University, Princeton
 
FRIDAY, APRIL 7 | 6:30PM – 8:30PM
Where is the critical voice in architecture today?
Innis Town Hall, 2 Sussex Avenue
Co-organized with the Canadian Centre for Architecture
Kenneth Frampton, Columbia University, New York
Keller Easterling, Yale University, New Haven
Craig Buckley, Yale University, New Haven

“In built form, Toronto looks at first glance like many other large North American cities. But up close, the city reflects the various and often conflicting urban planning and urban design ideas that shaped it.”

Filmmaker Ian Garrick Mason’s latest documentary interviews some of the city’s experts on design, urbanism and history as he unpacks the conflicting visions that have shaped the city of Toronto over the years. He writes: “[The film] explores how the city came to look like it does today -- and the processes likely to determine its future form.”

The faculty’s director of the Master of Urban Design program, Mark Sterling, appears as one of the interviewees, along with a number of Daniels alumni who now serve as leading design and planning practitioners in the city including Anne McIlroy (BArch 1986), Lorna Day (BArch 1984), and Kim Storey(BArch 1978) and James Brown (BArch 1978) of Brown + Storey Architects. UofT Canadian History instructor Richard White joins the panel of experts. As part of the project, Mason will release extended selections from the interviews.

The film was presented at the "Toronto Dialogues 1" symposium last October 4, 2016, and is also available for viewing through Mason’s website.

Live in Miami? Mark your calendar! Meetinghouse, a contemporary art space collective in the penthouse of the historic Huntington Building in Miami, announces the opening of its Fall 2016 exhibition series with Aurora Roomand Type-topia — two installations blending art and architecture, on the evening of September 22nd.

Type-Topia is an idealized and fictitious composite city created from the collaged combination of nine public institutional projects by Khoury Levit Fong (KLF), the firm of Associate Professor Robert Levit, Associate Professor Steven Fong, and former Daniels faculty member-turned Dean of the University of Miami's School of Architecture Rodolphe el-Khoury.

The interactive model calls attention to the iconic status of notable public spaces and buildings in shaping the identity of cities, highlighting the role that architecture can play in the constitution of a geography of monuments. Just as New York has been represented through its monumental icons such as the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center, or Paris by the Eiffel Tower and the Arc-de-Triomphe, Type-Topia is imagined through a series of graphic representations of its civic monuments. Using programmed QR tags, visitors can interact with each project proposal. The composite city becomes a historical metropolis in which the iconic elements instantaneously become memorabilia of this fiction, complete with travel posters and postcards.

Meetinghouse Fall 2016 Opening Night!
Thursday, Sept 22nd
from 7pm to 10pm

Exhibition Design by Robert Levit with Dorsa Jalalian (MUD 2016) and Nick Reddon (current MArch student)
Principals in Charge: Rodolphe el-Khoury and Robert Levit