Associate Professor Aziza Chaouni’s Shobak Special Protected Area Masterplan was commended by the Architectural Review as part of its 2016 MIPIM Future Projects Awards.

The Masterplan was developed under the Designing Ecological Tourism (DET) — a research platform led by Chaouni out of the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design. DET collaborated with the Royal Society of Conservation of Nature (RSCN) in Jordan, as well as Canadian and Jordanian experts and scholars on the masterplan, which was the only project by a university team to receive an award.

The groundwork research for the masterplan was initiated by an option studio at the Daniels Faculty. Students in the studio spent two weeks in Shobak and later developed speculative ideas for its future and eco-accommodations. The project was subsequently developed and detailed with RSCN, an interdisciplinary group of experts, and three Daniels students: Mani Tabrizi, Nicolas Roland and Keren Golan. In 2015, the masterplan was recognized with a ACSA Collaboration Award.

The project is explored in great detail in Chaouni’s book Ecotourism, Nature, Conservation, and Development: Re-imagining Jordan’s Shobak Arid Region.

Writes DET on its website:

In the field of desert conservation, this book presents a new conservation approach that preserves ecosystems, fosters local economic development and capitalizes on both natural and cultural landscapes for ecotourism. Situated in the special protected area of Shobak, a Jordanian desert region rich in historical background and biodiversity, the innovative strategic plan unites the goals of nature preservation and regional development in a groundbreaking way, by developing tools for promoting the untapped potentials of wild arid areas. It integrates the professions of landscape architecture and architecture with various other disciplines including natural resources management and ecology in order to provide complex, tailored solutions that are resilient to shifting socio-political contexts and harsh arid environments.

Related:

• Research team at Daniels launches a new website: Designing Ecological Tourism
• Daniels Faculty students complete two-week research workshop in Jordan
• Designing Ecological Tourism (DET) presents: "Living in the 'Rurban' — The furture of Guaratiba," in partnership with the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro
• Aziza Chaouni volunteers to design a music school for 2,000 children and youth in Morocco
• Aziza Chaouni participates in the New Cities Summit 2015

Lateral Office — the firm of Associate Professor Mason White and Lola Sheppard — has won a  Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (RAIC) Urban Design Award for Impulse — a playful installation in the Place des Festival in Montreal.

The full team for the project included: Lateral Office (Architect & Co-Designer); CS Design (Lighting Design & Co-Designer); EGP Group (Engineering); Generique Design (Fabrication); Mitchell Akiyama (Sound); Robocut (Interactive); Iregular (Video); Maotik (Video).

Held in cooperation with Canadian municipalities, the winning projects are announced by the RAIC along with the Canadian Institute of Planners (CIP), and the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects (CLSA).

Impulse transforms Montreal’s arts district “into a space of urban play through a series of thirty interactive acoustic illuminated see-saws that respond and transform when in motion. The seesaws form repetitive units of light and sound that can be activated and played by the public to create a temporal, ever-changing event.”

The installation also incorporates a series of nine commissioned videos that visualize sound and are projected on buildings in the neighbourhood.

The Jury for the award commended the project for bringing people out into the city — even on cold winter evenings.

Related:

• Lateral Office transforms Montreal's art district with playful installation
• Lateral Office 'Makes Camp' at Chicago Architecture Biennial
• CBC Radio features Making Camp on Spark
• Mason White and Lateral Office win the Arctic Inspiration Prize
• Mason White and Lateral Office chosen to represent Canada at the 2014 Venice Biennale

Pin-ups have been un-pinned, exams have been written and students are undoubtedly catching up on some much needed sleep. Before shifting into summer mode, we thought this would be a good time to reflect on the past academic year. Here are the six most read news stories of the last 8 months.

6. Architectural Studies graduate Omar Gandhi "one of Canada's most exciting emerging designers," says the Globe and Mail

January 18, 2016

5. View the competition entries and have your say in the redesign of U of T's St. George Campus

October 5, 2015

View the winning design by KPMB Architects, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA) and Urban Strategies.

4. #ReadingList: 3 books to read over the holidays

December 15, 2015

3. Photographs by Peter MacCallum document the transformation of One Spadina

June 4, 2014 (updated regularly)

View all One Spadina photos on the Daniels Faculty's Flickr page

2. Multigenerational housing: Daniels faculty and alumni rethink the family home

February 25, 2016

1. 12 things every grad student presenting their thesis should know

March 25, 2015

This year's Jane's Walks — a series of free, citizen-led walking tours held in nearly 200 cities around the world — take place this weekend. Inspired by writer and activist Jane Jacobs, the event gives participants the opportunity to explore neighbourhoods through the eyes of local residents.

With over 175 walks to choose from in Toronto alone, deciding which walks to attend can be overwhelming. Here is a list of 9 Jane's Walks being led by Daniels Faculty alumni and faculty May 6-8.

1. Why Socks Are Not Enough: Social Justice on the Danforth
Walk leader: Denise Pinto (MLA 2011) and Lois Didyk
May 6, 2016, 4:00 PM, 1.5 Hours
May 8, 2016, 4:00 PM, 1.5 Hours

2. East Danforth East - A Culinary Walking Tour
Walk leader: Phil Pothen (MLA 2006), Elise Aymer, Danning Liao, and Janet Masching
May 6, 2016, 11:00 AM, 2 Hours
May 8, 2016, 1:00 PM, 2 Hours
 

3. King and Spadina: One of The Two Kings
Walk leaders: Margie Zeidler (BArch 1987) and Paul Bedford (U of T Adjunct Professor)
May 7, 2016, 10:00 AM, 2.5 Hours

4. Walking around Gerrard Square
Walk leaders: Todd Irvine (Co-Instructor, Urban Ecology Field Course) and Dylan Reid
May 7, 2016, 10:00 AM, 2 Hours

5. Listening to the Language of Plants
Walk leaders: Yi Zhou (MLA 2013), Jasmeen Bains (MLA 2013), and Tyler Bradt (MLA 2013)
May 7, 2016, 11:00 AM, 1 Hour

6. Summerhill Summerdale
Walk leader: John van Nostrand (BArch 1972)
May 7, 2016, 2:00 PM, 2 Hours

7. Little Free Libraries: An Impromptu Reading Walk With Neighbours
Walk leader: Denise Pinto (MLA 2011)
May 7, 2016, 4:00 PM, 1.5 Hours

8. Walk the Green Line: Infrastructures of Park Space
Walk leader: Netami Stuart (MLA 2004)
May 8, 2016, 10:00 AM, 1 Hour

9. Walk with us Woodbridge!
Walk leaders: Gail Shillingford (BLA 1995) and Moira Wilson (MLA 2006)
May 8, 2016, 2:00 PM, 1 Hour

Did you know?

• Jane's Walk originated in Toronto, and Master of Landscape Architecture alumna Denise Pinto (MLA 2011) is the Global Director of the festival. Read our Q&A with Pinto, published last year.
• Jane Jacobs, who lived in Toronto from 1968 until her death in 2006, would have celebrated her 100th birthday this year on May 4. In honour of her centenary, a number of events are planned throughout Toronto (and beyond), including an exhibition at Urbanspace Gallery, Jane at Home, curated by Jim Jacobs and Margie Zeidler (BArch 1987).

Tonight marks the opening of the Future of Suburbia — an exhibition hosted by the MIT Centre for Advanced Urbanism. A number of Daniels Faculty alumni and professors were involved in the curation, design and construction of the exhibit including Fadi Masoud (MLA 2010), Matthew Spremulli (MArch 2011), and Assistant Professor Liat Margolis, who participated in a 2-day workshop in March 2015 as part of the Future of Suburbia Biennial.

The work showcased in the exhibition aims to expose the nuance and complexity of the suburban condition and visually document suburbanization around the world. Four design frameworks for future suburban conditions were produced to describe a future of suburbia that is heterogeneous, experimental, autonomous, and productive.

The exhibition centers on a dynamic physical model of a future polynodal suburb, which is complemented by contextual research displayed in text and graphics, and aerial videos of existing global suburbs.

Fadi Masoud — a Lecturer of Landscape Architecture and Urban Design at MIT, who also previously taught at the Daniels Faculty — was co-chair of the workshop and is on the exhibition team.

Matthew Spremulli — a Research Associate at the MIT Center for Advanced Urbanism, and previous Instructor at the Daniels Faculty — is the lead exhibition designer. 

The Daniels Faculty is one of the the academic sponsors of the event.

For more information visit the MIT Centre for Advanced Urbanism website.

Related:

• Liat Margolis participates in Future of Suburbia design charrette at MIT's Center for Advanced Urbanism
• Drew Adams (MArch 4), Fadi Masoud (MLA 2010) published in Design for Flooding
• Fadi Masoud / Magda Dobranowski / Carla Pareja project selected for Saint Étienne International Design Bienniale
• Matthew Spremulli awarded 2010-11 Howarth-Wright Fellowship
• U of T's Mason White and Lateral Office at Venice Biennale

Assistant Professor Erica Allen-Kim presented a lecture titled Storefront Museums and Pagodas: Memory and Place on Argyle St. at the 68^th Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) Annual Conference. The event took place April 15^th – 19^th at the Holiday Inn Chicago Mart Plaza in Chicago, with Allen-Kim presenting on April 16th.

Allen-Kim’s lecture was based on research from her manuscript Mini-malls and Memorials: Building Saigon in the American Suburb.

“During the late 70s and early 80s, Southeast Asian refugees were resettled in Uptown near Argyle Street, which had been proclaimed a ‘New Chinatown’ by restaurateur Jimmy Wong and the Hip Sing Association in 1971,” writes Allen-Kim. “Through a reading of the vernacular architecture of Argyle Street, this paper illuminates the integral role of buildings and cultural landscapes for communities seeking a center in Chicago.”

The SAH conference aims to bring “discussions of the built environment into the present day.” It will feature “local architects, historians, and policy makers addressing two important issues in architecture and planning: the history and future of Chicago waterways, including Lake Michigan and the Chicago River; and issues of community and preservation in Chicago neighborhoods such as Pilsen.”

Allen-Kim’s research on the Pagoda at the Argyle Red Line ‘L’ Station was also featured in an article published by Curbed Chicago earlier this month. “Her research into its construction brought to light the intricacies of race and resettlement in Chicago's Asian neighborhoods,” writes Patrick Sisson in the article's introduction.

For more information about the conference, visit: http://www.sah.org/conferences-and-programs/2015-conference-chicago/program

Photo courtesy of Erica Allen-Kim

Last fall Dean Richard Sommer spoke to U of T News writer Brianna Goldberg about regional transit, the commuter experience and the urban-suburban divide. A portion of the interview, which was featured on U of T’s Cities Podcast, was recently published in U of T Magazine.

“For many Torontonians, the daily commute is a spirit-crusher,” reads to introduction to the Q&A, “but what if it could enrich your life instead?”

Sommer argues that when the debate around transit is narrowly focused on how to simply move people from A to B, we often “fail to ask questions about the overall network experience we are trying to build, who we’re building it for, and what the bigger picture looks like.” In other words how does our transit system affect our quality of life?

The interview also discusses the book Huburbs, which the Daniels Faculty published in partnership with Metrolinx, the provincial agency that helps coordinate transportation infrastructure in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area.

“Huburbs looks at the inconvenient-to-access and often-ugly transit hubs in the outer GTA,” explains Sommer. “It uses complex documentation analysis and visually sophisticated models to explore how these hubs could be lively and enriching, instead of barren platforms surrounded by parking lots and vacant space.”

On the urban-suburban divide, Sommer argues it’s not always helpful to label one place a suburb and another a city. “It really has to do with the level of maturation of the geography in question,” he says. “It’s all urbanization, and some of the most interesting and diverse areas, culturally, are in what some think of as a suburb.”

For the full Q&A, visit the U of T Magazine website.

Related:

• Professor Liat Margolis and Dean Richard Sommer featured in new U of T Cities podcast series
• John Lorinc reviews the Daniels Faculty's new book: Huburbs
   

Assistant Professor Michael Piper's research into the design of more efficient parking lots — ones that require fewer spaces, but still meet demand — received coverage in the most recent issue of the Toronto edition of Novae Res Urbis:

University of Toronto professor and dub Studios principal Michael Piper is thinking circles around the way we park our cars — and how much space those cars really need to take up.

Piper is researching ways people can share their parking spaces in order to create new uses for essentially extraneous space. He uses the example of a residential and commercial building, side by side—why not have the commercial folks use some of the parking that’s not needed by residents during the day, and vice versa at night?

The idea, he admits, is not without its opponents. But he thinks, with a little prodding, it can gain traction.

“We often try to solve parking problems by building more parking. But if you optimize what you already have, you can build less.”

Piper recently led a team that included Daniels Faculty graduate and current instructor Ultan Byrne in the design of a new parking lot for the Long Island village of Patchogue. Long Island's downtowns are home to more than 4,000 acres of surface parking lots, space that could be redesigned to be made more vibrant, welcoming, and useful.

His team's design looked at making the parking lots not only more efficient, but safer and more welcoming as well. “People don’t often walk on six lane arterial roads in the suburbs, but they do walk around in parking lots. And so concentrating space in a parking area where people are encouraged to walk would create a more public atmosphere for people using the lots,” he told Novae Res Urbis' Municipal Affairs Reporter Sarah Ratchford.

The full article is available to subscribers. For more information, visit: http://www.nrupublishing.com/nru-toronto/

Related: Assistant Professor Michael Piper takes the ParkingPLUS Design Challenge

The Long Island Index — an organization that gathers and publishes data on the Long Island region — recently held a ParkingPLUS Design Challenge, inviting prominent architecture firms to re-imagine how parking lots in the region's downtowns could better address residents' needs. Long Island's downtowns are home to more than 4,000 acres of surface parking lots, space that could be redesigned to be made more vibrant, welcoming, and useful.

The firms' designs were unveiled on January 16 at the Performing Arts Center at Adelphi University.

Daniels Faculty Assistant Professor Michael Piper's firm, dub Studios, was commissioned to create one of the designs. Piper's team included recent Daniels Faculty graduate and current instructor Ultan Byrne.

Piper and his team proposed a new, modestly sized parking deck in the village of Patchogue. Airy, open, and easy to access, the parking deck would be connected to a shared parking system called "Brackets." A new way-finding system consisting of automated signage, lighting, and landscape improvements would direct drivers to lots with free spaces, making it easier for people to find available parking. The team's design would not only make the area more pleasurable to walk though, it would also promote better usage of the current supply of scattered surface parking lots.

"You can actually build fewer parking spaces because you're using them more intelligently," Piper explained to FiOS1 news.

Roger Sherman, co-director of the cityLAB at UCLA, who taught a studio course at the Daniels Faculty last semester, also headed up one of the four teams that participated in the challenge. Sherman's team transformed a 30-acre surface parking lot in the town of Ronkonkoma into a family-focused, all-season recreational park complete with soccer fields, a hockey rink, mini-golf, a driving range, a go-cart track, and cricket field stadium. Because the parking lot is adjacent to a regional airport as well as a commuter rail station, Sherman's design for the park also includes a covered outdoor space sheltering a train platform and a parking structure for an airport shuttle stop.  

“The ParkingPLUS Design Challenge is intended to spark a vibrant conversation in Long Island and nationally about new ways of thinking about parking structures and their relationship to downtown suburban settings,” said Nancy Rauch Douzinas, President of the Rauch Foundation, which started the Long Island Index. “While the designs are specific to particular locations, they are intended to generate a broader discussion about the ideal attributes of future parking structures.”

For more information, visit the Long Island Index website.

On Tuesday, June 11, the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design unveiled its plans to revitalize and renew One Spadina Crescent, one of Toronto's iconic landmarks. At an event held at One Spadina that day, the lead architects for the project, Nader Tehrani and Katie Faulkner of the firm NADAAA, gave a short presentation to media, donors, and members of the community about the design of the new complex, which will incorporate the existing heritage building.

A 10-minute video of this presentation is posted below and is also available on the Daniels Faculty’s YouTube channel.

The One Spadina project is part of the Faculty’s recently announced 50 million dollar fundraising campaign, of which 24 million remains to be raised. Tehrani, Faulkner and the broader Toronto-based design and engineering team have worked with Professor Richard Sommer, Dean of the Daniels Faculty — as well as faculty, students, and staff across the entire university — on transforming this historic site.

“This project is the result of a collaboration that brings together the accumulated talents and experiences of many, many people,” said Dean Sommer at the June 11 event. “Imagine designing a project for a group of architects, landscape architects, and urban designers — it’s like cooking for a room full of fussy chefs.”

The result is a building that has been thoughtfully considered from countless perspectives — from those of the students and faculty to those of the surrounding communities.

Tehrani and Faulkner brought a wealth of experience to the project. Both have designed award-winning buildings for other educational institutions and schools of architecture, including the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning; the Rhode Island School of Design's Fleet Library; and Georgia Institute of Technology’s Hinman Research Building.

A key part of Tehrani and Faulkner’s presentation on June 11th was the role that sustainability played in the building’s design.

“One can't talk about a building in this day and age, and least of all a school of architecture, without speaking about sustainability and environmental responsibility,” said Faulkner. “We were given a mandate that the building had to be absolutely overtly sustainable, that it needed to be a teaching tool for the students, the faculty and those in the city of what a building can be.”

Some of the sustainable features of the building include:

Daylighting: The roof and north-facing windows will bring light into the core of the building. In total, 61% of the building will be served by daylighting, resulting in energy savings that will amount to 54% less emissions than would otherwise be needed.

Storm water harvesting: The roof of the new building has been designed to channel and harvest rainwater (approx. 1096 m² per year). Rain that falls on the roof will be directed into a cistern and will be used to irrigate green roofs and surrounding landscape. One hundred percent of the site’s greywater needs will be satisfied by storm water harvesting.

Accommodation for pedestrians and cyclists: Parking spaces for 280 bikes will be provided underneath a terrace in front of the historic building on the south side. The current fencing around the site will be removed and walkways will be created around the entire site to ensure open pedestrian access.

Heat reduction: The new building will incorporate white roofs (to reflect, rather than absorb, the sun) and green roofs (which help keep buildings cool). Calculations to date suggest that this will make the building up to 30 degrees Celsius cooler on a hot, sunny day, without the use of air conditioning. The new building’s green roof will provide an additional site for the Faculty’s Green Roof Innovation Testing Laboratory (also known as the GRIT Lab), where researchers working with industry partners and the City of Toronto, are working to determine how to improve the efficiency of green roofs.

Overall building emissions rate: 58% of Model National Energy Code for Buildings.

The video of the architects’ presentation on the expansion and renewal of the Daniels Faculty at One Spadina Crescent can be found on the Daniels Faculty’s YouTube Channel here.

For more on the Daniels Faculty's campaign and the One Spadina project, click here.