Past Undergraduate Course Descriptions

Summer 2023 Course Descriptions

Please note that the Design Research Internship, Studies Abroad, Design Build & Independent Study courses are not available for ACORN enrolment, and can only be requested through the application process detailed below.

Information Sessions

Application for Design Research Internship, Studies Abroad & Design Build

Application form:
(Please note the form is limited to 1 submission).

Application deadline: Monday, March 20, 11:59 p.m.

Design Research Internship

  • ARC495Y1F LEC0101: Design Research Internship

This course bridges academic knowledge with professional practice and advances for upper level, undergraduate students models of design research. It offers students, in the form of a six-week internship, the opportunity to apply critical research and visual communication skills to focused work within the professional office of a local practitioner. Successful students will be hired to work on a research project defined by the host office that is intrinsically linked to their ongoing professional activity.

DRIP places 3rd and 4th-year BAAS students in leading Toronto design practices for a period of 6 weeks during the May-June Summer period, beginning May 8th, 2023. During this time, interns will work full-time, four days per week with their employer; while Wednesdays will be reserved for academic activity and attending a weekly seminar with Professor Petricone. DRIP will define for students models of practice, research, and interdisciplinary design, and will also help the participants build connections with members of Toronto's professional community.

Information sessions for this course will be held on Thursday, March 9, 2023 from 1:00 p.m.–2:00 p.m.

Studio Abroad

The Daniels Faculty will be offering four global studios to our undergraduate students in the Summer 2023. The first one, "X-Athenas" will travel to Athens Greece and work on public spaces across the city in collaboration with students from the Department of Architecture, University of Patras. The second one, “Developing Micro-Public Spaces” will focus on the design of new typologies of public spaces in the Medina of Fez, Morocco in collaboration with the School of Architecture and Industrial Design at the University of EuroMed in Fez, Morocco and the Municipality of Fez. The third one, "What is the Good City?" will focus on several rural and urban community sites in Canada and Ghana, in a global virtual collaboration with students from the Department of Architecture of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) based in Kumasi, Ghana. The forth one, “Berlin, a City in Film” will explore Berlin and its filmic representations through an intensive schedule of site visits, paired with a series of daily film screenings.

Information sessions for this course will be held on Wednesday, March 8, 2023 from 12:30 p.m.–2:00 p.m.

Travel dates in course descriptions will be fully confirmed upon fixing all individual course lists, by mid-April.

Design Build

Please note that ARC395H1 is not available for ACORN enrolment, and can only be requested through the application process detailed below. The following are descriptions for the four ARC395H1 design/build sections offered in the Summer 2023 session. These courses are available by application to current Year 3 and Year 4 undergraduate students in any of our Architectural Studies programs.

Information sessions for this course will be held on Wednesday, March 8, 2023 from 12:30 p.m.–2:00 p.m.

Travel dates in course descriptions will be fully confirmed upon fixing all individual course lists, by mid-April.

Independent Study Opportunity - Workshop

Please note that ARC399H1 is not available for ACORN enrolment, and can only be requested through the application process detailed below. 

Application deadline for ARC399H1 is Monday, April 17, 2023.

Travel dates in course descriptions will be fully confirmed upon fixing all individual course lists, by mid-April.

 

Fall/Winter 2022-23

ARC 400-Level Advanced Topics

The Advanced Topics courses listed below are distinct credit offerings, and eligible students can enrol in more than one of the following courses, despite repeating course codes. For example, students can enrol in ARC451H1F LEC0101 and ARC451H1S LEC0101, as their course content will differ depending on the instructor.

The Fall/Winter 2022-23 ARC 400-level Advanced Topics will be available for early enrolment to eligible students by ballot. The balloting webform can be found here, and the deadline to submit for the Fall/Winter 2022-23 session is Monday, June 27 at 11:59 p.m. EST. Additional descriptions will be posted as they become available.

Fall 2022

Winter 2023

(*1) Courses eligible to be used towards the Certificate in Global Studies of the Built Environment (U of T Global Scholar) (AHCERGLOB)

(*2) Courses eligible to be used towards the Certificate in Sustainability of the Built Environment (AHCERSUSP)

Senior Seminar and Multidisciplinary Urban Capstone

Architectural Studies students pursuing one of the AHSPE1001, AHSPE1002, or AHSPE1003 specialist programs of study may be eligible to apply for The Senior Seminar (Research) and Senior Seminar (Thesis) courses for the upcoming Fall/Winter 2022-2023 academic session. Eligibility requirements are listed in the Academic Calendar.

  • ARC461H1F: Senior Seminar in Design (Research)
  • ARC462Y1S: Senior Seminar in Design (Thesis)
     
  • ARC456H1F: Senior Seminar in History and Theory (Research)
  • ARC457Y1S: Senior Seminar in History and Theory (Thesis)
     
  • ARC486H1F: Senior Seminar in Technology (Research)
  • ARC487Y1S: Senior Seminar in Technology (Thesis)

Daniels students applying to Senior Seminar, may also indicate interest in the School of Cities or Multidisciplinary Urban Capstone Design course, which is a creative, iterative and open-ended course in which students from different disciplines across the University of Toronto work in teams for the academic year (September – April). Both courses are 1.5 credits.

  • Students must apply using the Senior Seminar Research Thesis Application form.
  • Students only submit one application.
  • Students can apply for both Senior Seminar and Multidisciplinary Urban Capstone Design course on the attached form, but can only be enrolled in one, not both.
  • Capstone nominees will be asked (later in June) to complete an additional application.

The deadline for submission is June 8, 2022. Email completed applications to programofstudy@daniels.utoronto.ca.

Summer 2022

Design Research Internship

  • ARC495Y1F LEC0101: Design Research Internship

This course bridges academic knowledge with professional practice and advances for upper level, undergraduate students models of design research. It offers students, in the form of a six-week internship, the opportunity to apply critical research and visual communication skills to focused work within the professional office of a local practitioner. Successful students will be hired to work on a research project defined by the host office and approved by the professor. Interns will work full-time (Monday to Friday) with their employer for the duration of the first summer term, May 9th to June 20th, 2022, with the exception of Wednesday afternoons when they will meet with the professor at the Daniels Faculty. These Wednesday afternoon meetings will allow for group and individual discussions on the various forms of design research as well as the positioning of this work in the broader discipline. Interns will be compensated at a rate of $300 per week for the duration of six weeks. This will balance the academic versus practical aspects of ARC495 as an academic internship.

The deadline to submit your application is Tuesday, April 5th, 2022 at 12:00pm (noon) EST. More information pertaining to this course, including the list of participating firms, can be found below.

Summer Studio Abroad / Summer Research Studio

The Daniels Faculty will be offering two global studios to our undergraduate students in the Summer 2022. The first one, "What is the Good City?" will focus on several rural and urban community sites in Canada and Ghana, in a global virtual collaboration with students from the Department of Architecture of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) based in Kumasi, Ghana. The second one, "X-Athenas" will travel to Athens Greece and work on public spaces across the city in collaboration with students from the Department of Architecture, University of Patras.

Both courses will be open to applications for eligible students, with a submission deadline of Monday, March 28th at 11:59pm. More information on these offerings can be found below.

Design Build Studios

Please note that ARC395H1 is not available for ACORN enrolment, and can only be requested through the application process detailed below. The following are descriptions for the four ARC395H1 design/build sections offered in the Summer 2022 session. These courses are available by application to current Year 3 and Year 4 undergraduate students in any of our Architectural Studies programs.

The Summer 2022 Design Build Studio Application can be found here. The deadline to submit is Friday, April 8th.

ARC 400-Level Advanced Topics

The Advanced Topics courses listed below are distinct credit offerings, and eligible students can enrol in more than one of the following courses, despite repeating course codes. For example, students can complete in ARC451H1F LEC0101 and ARC451H1S LEC9101, as their course content will differ depending on the instructor. Please note that a section number LEC9101 denotes an online course offering.

The Summer 2022 ARC 400-level Advanced Topics Balloting webform is now closed. The deadline for eligible Year 4 students to submit was Monday, April 4th, 2022 at 11:59pm EST.

  • ARC465H1F LEC0101: Advanced Topics in Architecture: Urban Leftovers
    Instructor: Reza Nik

A critical study of vacant and underutilized spaces - both architectural and infrastructural - some of which are in que to be demolished for future development. This is a course about looking closer at the existing fabric of the city through research, documentation, drawing, archiving, and in turn re-imagining and designing alternate outcomes. These urban leftovers perhaps once held stories and histories that are culturally significant to the city of Toronto, and we will explore these themes and alternate realities throughout the semester.

  • ARC480H1F LEC0101: Advanced Topics in the Technology of Architecture: Lazy Computing
    Instructor: Andy Bako

If our current design software has enabled a transformative re-allocation of an architect’s labor, it has also resulted in a posture of disciplinary nonchalance. In efforts to consolidate repetitive inputs through the integration of constraints, object properties and “families”, today’s automata have made the production of architectural form incredibly easy. The ability for walls to stand up straight without falling over, for objects to float in electronic space or collide without impact are all representational behaviors of stillness we have engrained into our software for our convenient use as practitioners. However, difficulties arise when the suspension of materiality and physical forces are ignored when translating the simulative object into the physical realm.

In response to the embedded constraints that define contemporary digital practice, the focus of this course leans toward inconvenient motion made easy – utilizing the tension between an object’s physicality and digital simulation to become a new working method. In this course, we will examine the implications of our commands, constraints, and OS interactions towards adjacent disciplinary polemics. Students will be asked to develop their digital skill sets through the production of architectural animations, mixed-reality models, and unconventional usages of everyday computational platforms. To compliment the application of these skills, students will be asked to work in teams in the presentation of weekly readings, and in driving student-led debates based on conflicting positions in digital discourse.

Through a series of computational exercises that fit within a broader contextual framework, students will explore the rapidly shrinking gap between the digital abstraction of form, its resolution and eventual production into the built environment.

  • ARC451H1S LEC0101: Advanced Topics in the History and Theory of Architecture: Architecture & the Sea
    Instructor: Christy Anderson

We live on a watery world. Yet too often we ignore the connection between our buildings and the sea that is all around us. This course will look at the history of port cities, maritime infrastructure, ships, shoreline interactions, and island habitations. As sea levels rise, we will study examples of the terraqueous constructions from the ancient world to the present day and how architects are by necessity thinking more about an increasingly liquid landscape. Students will develop projects through the lens of history and environmental criticism. This course will be delivered online synchronously.

Fall/Winter 2021-22

ARC 400-Level Advanced Topics

The Advanced Topics courses listed below are distinct credit offerings, and eligible students can enrol in more than one of the following courses, despite repeating course codes. For example, students can complete in ARC451H1F LEC0101 and ARC451H1S LEC9101, as their course content will differ depending on the instructor. Please note that a section number LEC9101 denotes an online course offering.

The Fall/Winter 2021-22 ARC 400-level Advanced Topics Balloting webform can be found here. The deadline for eligible Year 4 students to submit is Thursday, July 8th, 2021 at 8:00am EST.

  • ARC451H1F LEC0101: Advanced Topics in the History and Theory of Architecture: Mobility and Architecture
    Instructor: Ipek Mehmetoglu

This seminar aims to expand our understanding of the role of mobility in architectural history, education, knowledge, theory, and culture throughout the twentieth century. We will explore how architects have built, traveled to, or recorded in different landscapes, how mobility has affected the tools, vehicles, and machines that architects have engaged, and how mobility has shaped the spatial encounters and architectural perceptions of communities and individuals around the world. The course offers an opportunity to revisit the ways in which personal and professional identities have been negotiated on the move. To do this, we will turn to marginalized and in-between forms and spaces through which architects as well as users have altered architectural knowledge. We will develop the necessary skills to analyze historical material within a methodological framework and make use of interdisciplinary and intersectional approaches in uncovering new meanings of architectural production, appropriation, and representation using the concept of movement. Students are expected to complete the weekly readings prior to meetings and to participate in class discussions.

  • ARC451H1F 1 LEC0102: Advanced Topics in History and Theory of Architecture: Architecture and Extractive Landscapes: Ecologies and Empires
    Instructor: Jason Nguyen

The quest for natural resources like gold, silver, sugar, spices, coffee, furs, and fish motivated the expansion of European trade and empire from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. During this period, merchants and settlers exploited resource-rich lands and seas through mining, farming, hunting, fishing, and trade. This seminar looks at the buildings, infrastructure, and planned landscapes that facilitated the extraction of resources from the earth for imperial purposes. The aim is to consider how architectural forms and technologies brought theories of the natural world into dialogue with the politics and practices of empire (among other things, these included settler colonialism, which involved the forced removal and genocide of Indigenous people and the importation and subjugation of enslaved labourers). We begin by considering different philosophies of the natural world as they concerned the cultivation and stewardship of the lands and seas (from both western and non-western perspectives). We will then interrogate the architectural forms, landscape ecologies, and labour operations of different extractive settings, including mines, plantations, gardens, hunting grounds, harvestable forests, and fisheries. We conclude by assessing the legacies of extractivism and empire for architecture and landscape today, including their connections to the current environmental crisis and enduring systems of geopolitical and racial inequality. Readings, discussions, and writing exercises will lead to a final project of each student’s choosing.

  • ARC453H1F LEC0101: Advanced Topics in the History and Theory of Urbanism: THE DEEP TIME OF MEDIA: The Geological Materiality of Planetary Computing
    Instructor: Kearon Roy Taylor

The myth of dematerializing infrastructure and the post-industrial economy hides an essentially colonial truth: we are industrializing at a faster rate than ever before.

Planetary-scale computing relies on a heavy, energy- and resource-hungry globe-spanning physical apparatus, from subsea cables and server farms to the lithium and rare earth mines in the Global South that furnish them. Beginning with a historical perspective on the development of communication networks,The Deep Time of Media will trace the nature and ecology of the contemporary spaces and infrastructural-logistical systems that comprise what Benjamin H. Bratton terms the accidental megastructure.

While Marshall McLuhan saw media as “extensions of man,” The Deep Time of Media addresses the materiality of technology as Robert Smithson describes, “made from the raw materials of the earth.” Students will be tasked through case studies to develop a critical language to address the physical, ecological, and geological footprint of “the post-industrial.”

  • ARC465H1F LEC0101: Advanced Topics in Architecture: Digital Twinning
    Instructor: Jay Pooley

In autumn of 2020 as the Biennale Architecttura would have been coming to a close, if not for the global pandemic that became the leading antagonist of the year, a different piece of architectural news was leveraged from the beloved Venetian Lagoon. A team of researchers, scientists and architects had recently completed a high resolution digital scan comprising the entirety of San Giorgio. A means to preserving the compromised archipelago and a demonstration of methods to create a digital twin of architecture in peril.

Through a series of compounding exercises, Digital Twinning will study point cloud, LiDAR and photogrammetry scanning practices as seen through a mixture of theoretical study, physical application and experiential field work. Students will engage with industry experts in the development of a photogrammetry-based digital model of a an elusive and serpentine site from a selection of decommissioned provincial industrial spaces. The model will underpin the semester, acting as both co-conspirator and interrogator in the process of designing with a digital twin.

  • ARC480H1F 1 LEC0102: Advanced Topics in the Technology of Architecture: Designing [with] Machines
    Instructor: Maria Yablonina

In this class we will be developing skills in computational design and physical computing through building digital and physical machines that respond, interact, and occasionally misbehave. Specifically, we will be looking into techniques and methodologies for creating computational and robotic systems that can simulate properties of living organisms: behaviours, stimuli responses, self-organisation, and even learning.

Throughout the course technical skilling will be supplemented with discussions and reading assignments focusing on the critical aspects of computational design and robotics in architecture, art, and culture. By the end of the course the students will be expected to develop a project that responds or reacts to one of the issues raised in the reading assignments using the technical skills they will develop throughout the course.

The first seven weeks of the course will focus on computational skill building in Rhino, Grasshopper, Python, and Arduino, through a series of smaller technical exercises and assignments. We will specifically be looking into sensor data collection and processing, data scraping, agent-based computational systems, and basic machine learning. Technical tutorials will be accompanied by lectures delivered by instructor and guest speakers. In the second part of the course the students will focus on the development of their individual projects. During this project phase additional tutorials and technical expertise will be introduced based on the project requirements.

Previous experience with Grasshopper and Arduino is preferable but not required. It is highly recommended that students interested in this course take the ARC385 (Physical Computing) class first as a prerequisite.

  • ARC480H1F LEC0101: Advanced Topics in the Technology of Architecture: Building Envelopes: Systems, Responses, and Affect
    Instructor: Daniel Chung

This seminar will explore the past, present, and future of building envelopes as technological and societal responses to our environmental desires. Building enclosures are often multilayered systems designed to respond and adapt to external forces and occupant needs. They are also designed to communicate spatial affect that extends beyond the basic needs of shelter and climate protection. This course will examine past and existing envelope designs to understand how the technical systems that were employed were a response to their climate, context, and cultural conditions. After developing a methodology for parsing and analyzing existing enclosure designs, the course will then project how future envelope designs will address new challenges and aspirations.

This course will combine analytical evaluations of building envelopes (structure, heat, air, moisture, lighting) and critical reflections on how envelopes respond to social and cultural forces through readings, assignments, presentations, and discussions. Student should expect to perform technical analysis, critical discussions, and speculative design exercises.

  • ARC451H1S LEC0101: Advanced Topics in History and Theory of Architecture: Architecture, Media, Local and Global Imaginaries
    Instructor: Mary Louise Lobsinger

We inhabit a local within global imaginaries, this has been our lived experience, confronted, intimately, since March 2020. This class examines the ways that architecture and the varied scales of infrastructures participate in making global imageries. We will engage methods of inquiry that enable thinking about architecture as a medium; this approach asks us to think built forms through material processes. It shifts our focus from formal aesthetic attributes to consider the infrastructural dynamic within which architecture participates and challenges received histories of modernism to track technical, social, political, and material techniques that enable global imaginaries. If the 19th century saw the idea of world system pursued through inventions, institutions and corporate entities, timetables, treaties, and territorial organization, we now experience the geopolitics of, for example, education, materials such as concrete, labour to “belt and road” initiatives that, then as now, align with imperialist aspirations to settlement and empire. The course draws on varied scales and types of evidence, from built and unbuilt architecture, types such as the library, technical advances, to the exportation of planning across the globe. We will be particularly attentive to questions of land, settlement, and bodies; to the techniques and infrastructures that underpin resource and labour extraction, racialization and the making of the modern self-possessed subject within a global imaginary. The course seeks to engage the overlooked, the ways in which built form participates in a complex dynamic that materializes financial capitalism and has produced spatial inequalities, colonization, the enslaved and racism. Each week will focus on a central question, a lecture and a student group led discussion of required course materials. The deliverables include scaffolded short assignments that will assist an enthusiastically pursued final project. NOTE: this course is similar to ARC_451_Winter 2021. The course includes new materials on the ethics of care, petroleum and territorial planning in Canada, and the local within the global.

  • ARC465H1S LEC0101: Advanced Topics in Architecture: Reality and its Representation
    Instructor: Adrian Phiffer

It is obvious that if one is to consider the problem of “red pill / blue pill” in architectural representation, the architect has decided to swallow the “blue pill”. Nowadays, most of the architectural imagery is soaked in a blossoming happiness with nauseating effects and always overly controlled and precise to the point of acquiring non-humanistic tones. And despite the high level of legibility, what you see is not what you get. The result is hard on the edge but slimy on the inside. It can be grasped, but when confronted or squeezed it slips away.

This advanced seminar in architecture will start from the premise that representation may produce rather than repeat reality. Via thorough analysis of past and present modes of architectural representation, we will engage in speculations about a future reality shaped by responsibility, acceptance, and inclusion.

While the main structure of the class is lecture based, we will often operate in a design studio mode through open and collective critiques. The students will be asked to constantly draw, model, and write. A minimum knowledge in computer graphics and model construction is required. Finally, the objective of this seminar is to enable the students to think very clearly about architectural representation in particular, and the world in general, while building up advanced skills in image making.

  • ARC465H1S 1 LEC0102: Advanced Topics in Architecture: Guided Distractions 4.0 - Abstraction and Experimentation in Architecture
    Instructor: Reza Nik

Guided Distractions 4.0 is focused on alternate design processes while addressing socio-political and spatial injustices in the urban setting. Each iteration explores a specific theme and students are encouraged to distract themselves creatively while involved in deep research. GD4.0 will closely study past and present experimenters such as Virgil Abloh, John Cage, Harryette Mullen, Lebbeus Woods and many others, We will learn about their particular experimental processes for example the zig-zag approach, chance and indeterminacy and the importance of failure. The course is fast-paced with an emphasis on how to fine-tune your creative process. Students are constantly encouraged to abandon their comfort zones in order to tap into their unconscious creative-selves. Alternate materials and techniques will be explored in a studio setting to look beyond the typical architectural toolbox. The course will terminate with a group exhibition at a gallery space in downtown Toronto.

  • ARC465H1S 1 LEC0103: Advanced Topics in Architecture: Casting
    Instructor: Angela Cho

Casting materials undergo many changes of state as they are worked—they have a perfect ability to copy and retain information of the bodies with which they come into contact. They remember everything: the intentionally indexed object or formwork, the influence of the operator, and even one's loss of control over the substance because of environmental forces. It is because these substances are so volatile that they have great material memory. Such ruthless memory lends itself to analytical processes.

This seminar will ask its students to begin by carefully examining an architectural precedent. By studying existing photographs of the building's interior (or exterior), you will select an object found therein and sculpt a representation of this object to create a positive, “original” form. Complex mould systems (negative/void forms) will be made as frameworks for producing replicas (positive/solid copies) of this object, in a new material. Thoughtful mutations will be performed on the mould in order to cast a new exploration. Short written reflections along with readings on our subject will impact choices of material, process, and manipulation made by the student throughout the semester. These exercises will provide the groundwork for returning to a casting-driven study of the architectural precedent at a different scope.

Students will be exposed to a wide variety of casting and mould-making techniques, and will become versed in working with materials such as plaster, silicon, clay-slip, and concrete.

The objective of this seminar is to think through the nature of casted forms, to encounter themes including material memory, authenticity, and the dichotomy between index and representation, and to bring artifacts of process to the fore.

  • ARC467H1S LEC0101: Advanced Topics in Urban Design: Sustain and Support: In The Military Orbit
    Instructor: Miles Gertler

This seminar examines accidental, clandestine, and under-acknowledged urbanisms and environments of the US military and establishes a journalistic research method to unpack the situation and the extra-architectural for discursive analysis. Week by week, this course encourages students to apply architectural tools toward the production of a rigorous, documentary account of radical, contemporary episodes from daily life within the expanded orbit of the United States’ military. Working through drawing, digital models, and the production of a comprehensive visual report, students will trace an avatar’s operations and advance findings on the nature of city- and infrastructure-building in the military context.

  • ARC480H1S LEC0101: Advanced Topics in the Technology of Architecture: Re-integrating Design 1
    Instructor: Salman Khalili-Araghi

This seminar will examine the term integrated practice which has emerged over the past several years. Integration in the building industry is referred to a multidisciplinary approach in design and an outcome of collaboration in architecture, engineering and fabrication from the earliest stage of design. Inspired by nature, the emergence of complex form has brought a close collaboration, out of necessity. The binding agent of the professional integration is digital and information technologies that provide for seamless exchange of information from conception to construction. This course is about that which could be borrowed from elsewhere (i.e. from another disciplinary context) and potentially pursued as a promising trajectory in design. Through a series of lecture and workshop, students will be introduced the topic and asked to critically discuss selected articles. Students will be asked to research and develop a potentially ‘integrative’ proposal (approved by the instructor) of design prototypes that will be created and presented at the end.

  • ARC480H1S 1 LEC0102: Advanced Topics in the Technology of Urbanism: Lazy Computing
    Instructor: Andy Bako

If our current design software has enabled a transformative re-allocation of an architect’s labor, it has also resulted in a posture of disciplinary nonchalance. In this course, we will examine our commands, constraints and OS interactions, and their implications in contemporary digital practice.

Students will be asked to develop their digital skill sets through the production of architectural animations, and through unconventional usages of everyday computational platforms. Through a series of software exercises, students will explore the feedback between architectural form and its representation, and the shrinking gap between simulative abstraction and the physical realm.

Summer 2021

Design Research Internship

  • ARC399H1F LEC9101: Research Opportunity Program:
    Design Research Internship

This course bridges academic knowledge with professional practice and advances for upper level, undergraduate students models of design research. It offers students, in the form of an intensive, on-line internship, the opportunity to apply critical research and visual communication skills to focused, development phases of Giannone Petricone Architects’ professional projects. Successful students will participate in group and individual work that collectively contributes to a compendium for exhibition that traces various custom light fixtures, built and under construction for a range of the firm’s projects. The work will begin with a review and analyses of the collection through drawings, shop drawings and construction photos, alongside an accelerated design project for the graphic representation of the final ’atlas’. Students will be guided by presentations of models for design research and its systems of representation as well as individual and group feedback.

Course Dates

  • The course will be delivered synchronously May 31st - June 14th from 9am – 5pm, Monday to Friday.
  • Students who are admitted to this course will automatically be considered for an extended internship from May 31st - July 12th via the Work-Study program, pending approval.

Application Requirements

  • Applicants must submit a CV and a cover letter.
  • Applications should be emailed to ugdirector@daniels.utoronto.ca with the subject ‘ARC399H1 Design Research Internship: LASTNAME, STUDENT NUMBER’ as early as possible and no later than Monday, April 12, 2021.
  • Results: Successful students will be enrolled into ARC399H1F: Design Research Internship by end of day Monday, April 26, 2021.

ARC 400-Level Advanced Topics

The Advanced Topics courses listed below are distinct credit offerings, and eligible students can enrol in more than one of the following courses, despite repeating course codes. For example, students can complete in ARC451H1F LEC0101 and ARC451H1S LEC9101, as their course content will differ depending on the instructor. Please note that a section number LEC9101 denotes an online course offering.

None of our Summer 2021 ARC 400-level Advanced Topics courses are eligible for satisfaction of AHCERGLOB or AHCERSUSP certificate program requirements.

  • ARC451H1F LEC9101: Advanced Topics in History and Theory of Architecture:
    Earth, Air, Water, Fire: Architectural Matter

Materials are the transformation of matter into useable form, and this seminar will look at the four principal elements as the basis for all architectural making and experience. We will spend two classes on each of these elements, reading philosophy, literature and historical writing as well as looking at the traditions of architectural practice. Course material will include the full range of historic buildings as a way for students to develop their own approach to studying architecture. Gaston Bachelard’s writing on the elements will form our core text, and students will be encouraged to study the architecture they have close at hand in order to put his approach and theories into practice. Frequent short writing assignments and classroom discussion will lead to a final project based around each student’s interests

  • ARC465H1F LEC9101: Advanced Topics in Architecture:
    Reality and its Representation

It is obvious that if one is to consider the problem of “red pill / blue pill” in architectural representation, the architect has decided to swallow the “blue pill”. Nowadays, most of the architectural imagery is soaked in a blossoming happiness with nauseating effects and always overly controlled and precise to the point of acquiring non-humanistic tones. And despite the high level of legibility, what you see is not what you get. The result is hard on the edge but slimy on the inside. It can be grasped, but when confronted or squeezed it slips away.

This advanced seminar in architecture will start from the premise that representation may produce rather than repeat reality. Via thorough analysis of past and present modes of architectural representation, we will engage in speculations about a future reality shaped by responsibility, acceptance, and inclusion.

While the main structure of the class is lecture based, we will often operate in a design studio mode through open and collective critiques. The students will be asked to constantly draw, model, and write. A minimum knowledge in computer graphics and model construction is required. Finally, the objective of this seminar is to enable the students to think very clearly about architectural representation in particular, and the world in general, while building up advanced skills in image making.

  • ARC467H1F LEC9101: Advanced Topics in Urban Design:
    Sustain and Support - Urbanism in the Military Orbit

This seminar examines accidental, clandestine, and under-acknowledged urbanisms of the US military and establishes a journalistic research method to unpack transurban phenomena and the extra-architectural in preparation for discursive analysis. Week by week, this course encourages students to apply architectural tools toward the production of a rigorous account of radical, contemporary episodes from daily life within the expanded orbit of the United States’ military operations. Working through drawing, digital models, and the production of a comprehensive visual report, students will trace an avatar’s operations as it engages military urbanism in the Learning From spirit.

  • ARC451H1S LEC9101: Advanced Topics in History and Theory of Architecture:
    Written Out of History; Architecture in Europe Since 1945

This lecture course revisits European architecture since 1945, with a focus on what is standing in the shadow of the continent’s greatest hits. It looks at a range of lesser known people, projects and episodes, such as Friis og Moltke’s welfare state architecture in and around Aarhus; urban middle class housing in Rome and Milan; the architecture in the Swiss canton of Ticino before the ‘Ticino School’; and tourist infrastructure in the South of France, former Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Rumania.

By addressing other echelons of designers than the most familiar names, and other architecture than the most famous projects, the course aims to broaden students’ understanding of the history of architecture in Europe. The emphasis on architecture that is often only mentioned in passing, relegated to footnotes, or completely ignored, allows for a discussion of the mechanisms behind the writing of history. During this course, students have to write 12 short lecture/reading responses, and an essay on an underexposed European architectural project of their choice.

  • ARC480H1S LEC9101: Advanced Topics in the Technology of Architecture:
    Lazy Computing

If our current design software has enabled a transformative re-allocation of an architect’s labor, it has also resulted in a posture of disciplinary nonchalance. In efforts to consolidate repetitive inputs through the integration of constraints, object properties and “families”, today’s automata have made the production of architectural form incredibly easy. The ability for walls to stand up straight without falling over, for objects to float in electronic space or collide without impact are all representational behaviors of stillness we have engrained into our software for our convenient use as practitioners. However, difficulties arise when the suspension of materiality and physical forces are ignored when translating the simulative object into the physical realm.

In response to the embedded constraints that define contemporary digital practice, the focus of this course leans toward inconvenient motion made easy – utilizing the tension between an object’s physicality and digital simulation to become a new working method. In this course, we will examine the implications of our commands, constraints and OS interactions towards adjacent disciplinary polemics. Students will be asked to develop their digital skill sets through the production of architectural animations and unconventional usages of everyday computational platforms. To compliment the application of these skills, students will be asked to work in teams in the presentation of weekly readings, and in driving student-led debates based on conflicting positions in digital discourse.

Through a series of computational exercises that fit within a broader contextual framework, students will explore the rapidly shrinking gap between the digital abstraction of form, its resolution and eventual production into the built environment.

  • ARC482H1S LEC9101: Advanced Topics in the Technology of Urbanism:
    Drawing Out Urban Interfaces

A drone glides unbothered through Bangkok’s sky. Here Thai media artist, Korakrit Arunanondchai, employs the aerial view in revealing the urban form and life of Thailand’s capital city. In a climactic scene the artist faces a hovering drone, the artist then extends his hand and touches the opposing figure. This scene enacts one of the most prevalent forms of relationship today – that of human-machine interaction (HMI). While Arunanondchai’s gesture is actual, he physically touches a machine, this type of interaction more commonly occurs mediated by a collection of interfaces that have become central to how people move, orient themselves, and narrate their experience of cities.

This advanced seminar in the technology of urbanism will investigate a territory for design much broader than the traditionally defined city. One aspect of this is the ascendance of network culture since the 1960s, in which the interface – a user’s site of contact with digital networks – joins older forms of media (e.g. streets, pipes, power lines, etc.) as infrastructures through which societies organize themselves. Here, the role of private enterprise in building and maintaining the present-moment’s most common interfaces cannot be overlooked.

In this hybrid seminar/lab students will engage an expanded definition of urbanism through reading in architectural history and theory, skills-based workshops in physical computing, and the creation of a prototype. It models a method of design research relevant for students interested in engaging questions pertaining to design practice, technology, and the city. Student’s will develop their prototype through a term-long investigation into an extraterritorial environmental condition. In this regard, the course explores urban interfaces as infrastructures for creating new kinds of relationships between people and place, as Korakrit’s use of the drone demonstrates.

Fall/Winter 2020-21

1Course satisfies AHCERGLOB certificate program requirements.
2Course satisfies AHCERSUSP certificate program requirements.

  • ARC451H1F 1 LEC9102: Advanced Topics in History and Theory of Architecture: Architecture & the Sea1
    Instructor: Christy Anderson

We live on a watery world. Yet too often we ignore the connection between our buildings and the sea that is all around us. This course will look at the history of port cities, maritime infrastructure, ships, shoreline interactions, and island habitations. As sea levels rise, we will study examples of the terraqueous constructions from the ancient world to the present day and how architects are by necessity thinking more about an increasingly liquid landscape. Students will develop projects through the lens of history and environmental criticism.

  • ARC452H1F LEC9101: Advanced Topics in History and Theory of Landscape Architecture: Charismatic Landscapes: Zones of Exclusion1, 2
    Instructor: Elise Hunchuck

This seminar will consider the diverse and charismatic landscapes of exclusion zones of the twentieth and twenty-first century. This includes border zones, construction zones, military exclusion zones, and nuclear disaster exclusion zones, among others, across the Americas, Asia, and Europe. We will examine case studies that include the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone of Ukraine, the Polesie State Radioecological Reserve of Belarus and the Fukushima Exclusion Zone of Japan. We will study the Berlin Wall in present-day Germany and the former German Democratic Republic and the Korean Demilitarized Zone on the Korean Peninsula.
 
Broadly speaking, exclusion zones are territorial units, established by sanctioning bodies to manage activity (human, nonhuman, material, and otherwise) in a specific geographic area. This seminar will consider exclusion zones as charismatic landscapes. Like charismatic megafauna, these landscapes have been ascribed a symbolic value—as sites of so-called spontaneous or unplanned rewilding, of nationalistic endeavours, and of conservation to name a few—and in displaying some form of widespread appeal, are often leveraged by activists or other interested parties towards achieving environmentalist or conservatory—but always political—goals.
 
This seminar takes a transdisciplinary approach to landscape studies and will move between, across, and beyond the disciplines of architecture, art, biology, ecology, gardening, geography (physical and human), media studies, science and technology studies, and of course, landscape architecture itself. We will draw upon a diverse network of external guests—from activists, artists, designers, philosophers, researchers, scientists and theorists—who will join the course through conversations, sharing ways in which we can consider landscapes and landscape architecture and the entanglement of the human and the nonhuman within the frame of these charismatic landscapes.
 

  • ARC465H1F LEC9101: Advanced Topics in Architecture: Lazy Computing
    Instructor: Andrew Bako

If our current design software has enabled a transformative re-allocation of an architect’s labor, it has also resulted in a posture of disciplinary nonchalance. In this course, we will examine our commands, constraints and OS interactions, and their implications in contemporary digital practice.

Students will be asked to develop their digital skill sets through the production of architectural animations, and through unconventional usages of everyday computational platforms. Through a series of software exercises, students will explore the feedback between architectural form and its representation, and the shrinking gap between simulative abstraction and the physical realm.

  • ARC465H1F 1 LEC9102: Advanced Topics in Architecture: Guided Distractions 3.0 - Abstraction and Experimentation in Architecture
    Instructor: Reza Nik

This course aims to use experimental processes in various disciplines such as poetry, film, drawing and sculpture to address a currently charged socio-political issue within the city. These techniques will be explored through a series of parameter-based experiments with an emphasis on abstraction (and its varying levels), chance (and indeterminacy), and failure. Alternate materials and techniques will be explored in a workshop setting to look beyond the typical architectural toolbox. We will closely study and hear from a multidisciplinary team of current and past experimenters such as John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, Virgil Abloh, Harryette Mullen, Lebbeus Woods, Theaster Gates amongst other guest lecturers. The course will conclude with a group exhibition.

  • ARC466H1F LEC9101: Advanced Topics Landscape Architecture: Zones of Exclusion1, 2
    Instructor: Elise Hunchuck

This seminar explores the political dimension and potential of landscape architecture as a practice of design and maintenance through the recombinant strategies of research, documentation, and representation of zones of exclusion from throughout the twentieth and twenty-first century. This includes border zones, military exclusion zones, and nuclear disaster exclusion zones, among others, across the Americas, Asia, and Europe. We will examine case studies that include the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone of Ukraine, the Fukushima Exclusion Zone of Japan, the Berlin Wall of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR/DDR), and the Korean Demilitarized Zone on the Korean Peninsula.
 
Our inquiry is premised on the idea, as proposed by Ross Exo Adams in Landscapes of Post-History, [1] that landscapes function both as archives and historiographic texts. Considered on their own, these landscapes are hyper-localised, intimately tied to the materiality of their locations and the history of their making. In agglomeration, they speak to emergent planetary effects: they tell us about the material flows of our environments subject to different forces at different scales. To critically think how these landscapes become charismatic, that is, how they (only) become manifest (to humans) when they become anomalous, dangerous, or otherwise unusable, this seminar will take a transdisciplinary approach, moving between, across, and beyond the disciplines of architecture, art, biology, ecology, gardening, geography (physical and human), media studies, science and technology studies, and landscape architecture. Practically speaking, this will entail site-specific engagement through careful, rigorous and inquisitive documentation of landscapes that range from their materiality to the relationships found therein between resources, infrastructures, natural processes, and lives lived (human and nonhuman). In so doing, the framing of such charismatic landscapes as distinct political ecologies may serve to “deliberately outline an activism by which to achieve a certain outcome.” [2] It may also serve to further develop an understanding of landscapes and environmental design as ongoing projects in the immediate present, not limited to the aftermath of an emergency.
 
It is in this re-articulation of planetary relations and realities that we might visualise and develop new alliances, legal framework, or spatial strategies. For if, after all, as William Gibson so famously remarked “the future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed,” [4] then it also stands to remind ourselves that there are multiple futures possible. It is up to us—as individuals and together—to determine how equitable and inclusive and caring they may be. 
 
1. “Landscapes of Post-History” can be found in Landscape and Agency: Critical Essays. Edited by Ed Wall and Tim Waterman (London: Routledge. 2017).
2. Ibid.
3. William Gibson in conversation on “The Science in Science Fiction” on Talk of the Nation, NPR (30 November 1999, at timecode 11:55).

  • ARC480H1F LEC9101: Advanced Topics in the Technology of Architecture: Re-integrating Design
    Instructor: Salmon Khalil Araghi

This seminar will examine the term integrated practice which has emerged over the past several years. Integration in the building industry is referred to a multidisciplinary approach in design and an outcome of collaboration in architecture, engineering and fabrication from the earliest stage of design. Inspired by nature, the emergence of complex form has brought a close collaboration, out of necessity. The binding agent of the professional integration is digital and information technologies that provide for seamless exchange of information from conception to construction. This course is about that which could be borrowed from elsewhere (i.e. from another disciplinary context) and potentially pursued as a promising trajectory in design. Through a series of lecture and workshop, students will be introduced the topic and asked to critically discuss selected articles. Students will be asked to research and develop a potentially ‘integrative’ proposal (approved by the instructor) of design prototypes that will be created and presented at the end.

  • ARC480H1F 1 LEC9102: Advanced Topics in the Technology of Architecture: Designing [with] Inherited Data
    Instructor: Maria Yablonina

The course will introduce students to computational design tools and methods that leverage externally generated and inherited data as design drivers.

The first part of the course will focus on computational skill building in Rhinoceros and Grasshopper, specifically the development of custom Grasshopper components using the programming language Python. In the second part of the course these skills will be applied to simulation and design exercises utilizing: agent-based and behavioral systems, and data collection from sensors and web sources.

Throughout the course technical skilling will be supplemented by critical discussions about the responsibilities of designing with collected or inherited data: What type of information can be used (or mis-used) as design parameter? Can we make sense of messy data through design of physical artifacts? Can a designed object carry or represent the information used to generate it? What are our responsibilities as designers when considering such objects?

The course will conclude with a final digitally designed and fabricated project coupled with a written narrative component which describes the story of the data underpinning the design.

  • ARC451H1S LEC0101: Advanced Topics in the History and Theory of Architecture: Architecture, Media, and World System1
    Instructor: Mary Louise Lobsinger

In this seminar we will examine the infrastructures through which architecture and urbanism participate in the making of a global imaginary. The projection of a world system precedes contemporary terms such as ‘the global,’ ‘globalization,’ or ‘globalism.’ In the nineteenth century the idea of world system was pursued through techniques and technological inventions that aligned with and facilitated imperialist aspirations in pursuit of land, peoples, and resource extraction. These techniques and technologies have material and conceptual properties and consequences. These provided the underpinnings, they enabled the infrastructural, from institutions and national roadway systems to the legal means, the exportation of pedagogy, and the making of objects and subjects.

The seminar will draw upon various methods of inquiry including media theory, cultural techniques analysis, and readings from philosophy, on globalism, and political economy. From this grounding we will engage a perspective that considers architecture as medium specific and in relation to many media. The approach questions those histories and theories that limit architecture to formal attributes and disciplinary preoccupations with representational value and status. It seeks to engage the overlooked, that is, the ways in which architecture participates within a complex dynamic that materializes financial capitalism and has produced spatial inequities, colonization, the enslaved, and racism. The seminar will look at specific cases. For example, the university and education (the British or American systems of expansion), the library and the book, bureaucracy and corporations (the Hudson Bay Company etc.), the development agency and funding, and housing and gentrification as infrastructures of imperialism.

Interested students should be willing to contribute to the interactive components of the class, be willing to work collaboratively on-line, engage with the readings, and lead one of weekly discussions of an assigned reading. Students will pursue a term project. The seminar will have synchronous and asynchronous components.

  • ARC451H1S 1 LEC0102: Advanced Topics in the History and Theory of Architecture: “The Only Two Arts of Our Time": Film and Architecture 1877-Present
    Instructor: James MacGillivray

In the latter half of the 19th century new building technologies were separating a concept called “space” from its trappings in tectonics. At the same time, the medium of photography was combined with the successive instants of the Gatling gun, liberating it from stasis and creating a new kind of pictorial space called “cinema”. The deep kinship of these two arts--Le Corbusier called them “the only two arts of our time”-- is the topic of this lecture course. We will look at what these two art forms have meant to each other for the past hundred years and how each has managed to challenge, usurp or exploit the other. Students will be expected to read theoretical texts, watch difficult and hard to see films every week, and prepare remarks on source materials for each class. The course will consider work by: Marie Menken, Michael Snow, Takeshi Murata, Andrei Tarkovsky, Sergei Eisenstein, Carl Th. Dreyer, Dziga Vertov, Maya Deren, Oskar Fischinger, Howard Hawks, Michelangelo Antonioni, Steven Holl, Diller Scofidio Renfro, Bernard Tschumi, Hans Poelzig, Le Corbusier, and Edweard Muybridge among others.

  • ARC452H1S LEC0101: Advanced Topics in the History and Theory of Landscape Architecture: "Hewes of wood, drawers of water": Designing Canadian Energy Futures2
    Instructor: Douglas Robb

Harold Innis famously claimed that Canadians are mere “hewers of wood and drawers of water”; in other words, that Canada is a nation of abundant natural resources ripe for the taking. We now recognize how Innis’ simplistic remark obscures important debates about the role of energy resources in Canada. Current discourses on decarbonization, climate justice, and Indigneous sovereignty (among others) reveal the complex and contradictory perspectives that characterize Canadian energy landscapes. While some argue for the continued extraction of hydrocarbons as a pragmatic "bridge" to a low-carbon future, others advocate for a more rapid (and radical) socio-technical transition. Myriad pathways exist in between, all of which present unique uncertainties and risks. These debates typically unfold in abstract institutional settings or at the local community level. However, their political, economic, and environmental implications resonate across the country and throughout the global energy system.

This course engages contemporary debates on the future of energy in Canada through the lens of landscape architecture. Organized around the structure of a formal debate—affirmative, negative, and rebuttal—the course will explore historical processes of landscape transformation related to the pursuit of energy resources, and will challenge students to analyze and envision potential energy futures through the medium of design.

  • ARC453H1S LEC0101: Advanced Topics in the History and Theory of Urbanism: Heavy Intangibles: The Geological Materiality of Planetary Computing
    Instructor: Kearon Roy-Taylor

The myth of dematerializing infrastructure and the post-industrial economy hides an essentially colonial truth: we are industrializing at a faster rate than ever before.

Planetary-scale computing relies on a heavy, energy- and resource-hungry globe-spanning physical apparatus, from subsea cables and server farms to the lithium and rare earth mines in the Global South that furnish them. Beginning with a historical perspective on the development of communication networks, Heavy Intangibles will trace the nature and ecology of the contemporary spaces and infrastructural-logistical systems that comprise what Benjamin H. Bratton terms the accidental megastructure.

While Marshall McLuhan saw media as “extensions of man,” Heavy Intangibles addresses the materiality of technology as Robert Smithson describes, “made from the raw materials of the earth.” Students will be tasked through case studies to develop a critical language to address the physical, ecological, and geological footprint of “the post-industrial.”

  • ARC453H1S 1 LEC0102: Advanced Topics in the History and Theory of Urbanism: Informal Urbanisms1
    Instructor: Tara Bissett

The world is urbanizing at an unprecedented pace and in unexpected ways. By 2030, five billion people will be living in urban areas that increasingly defy our ideas of ‘city’ and ‘citizenship’ as has been historically defined. The objective of the course is to reconsider global urbanism through a selection of readings in grounded theory and to analyze selected global cities—Johannesburg, Medellin, Mumbai, Cairo, Calais, Darfur, Casablanca, and others—that have formed uniquely in relation to phenomena such as shifts in global real estate markets, crises in war, decolonization, the rise of informal economies, and that have developed microcities and migrant enclaves. Students will be asked to reflect critically on participatory frameworks in design processes, incremental building practices, and kinetic urbanism through collaborative assignments with other students and the instructor. Please note that this course is the same as previous years "ARC 453: Exile and the Modern City.”

  • ARC465H1S LEC0101: Advanced Topics in Architecture: Reality and its Representation
    Instructor: Adrian Phiffer

It is obvious that if one is to consider the problem of “red pill / blue pill” in architectural representation, the architect has decided to swallow the “blue pill”. Nowadays, most of the architectural imagery is soaked in a blossoming happiness with nauseating effects and always overly controlled and precise to the point of acquiring non-humanistic tones. And despite the high level of legibility, what you see is not what you get. The result is hard on the edge but slimy on the inside. It can be grasped, but when confronted or squeezed it slips away.

This advanced seminar in architecture will start from the premise that representation may produce rather than repeat reality. Via thorough analysis of past and present modes of architectural representation, we will engage in speculations about a future reality shaped by responsibility, acceptance, and inclusion.

While the main structure of the class is lecture based, we will often operate in a design studio mode through open and collective critiques. The students will be asked to constantly draw, model, and write. A minimum knowledge in computer graphics and model construction is required. Finally, the objective of this seminar is to enable the students to think very clearly about architectural representation in particular, and the world in general, while building up advanced skills in image making.

  • ARC465H1S 1 LEC0102: Advanced Topics in Architecture: The rise, fall and future of 1960’s megastructures: reimagining Ontario Place
    Instructor: Aziza Chaouni

The 1960’s saw the emergence of the megastructure typology, which refers to a range of futurist proposals and experiments in architecture and urban design. Introduced by Reyner Banham’s seminal 1976 book "Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past”, the term megastructure usually refers to a single building or structure acting as an expandable frame that can hosts architecture, infrastructure, landscape and utilities, thereby creating its own, self-contained ‘city’. The 1960’s megastructures of Yona Friedman, Cedric J. Price and Archigram attempted to address issues of overpopulation, densification and technology.

During the 1970s, the design of megastructures was influenced by both the environmental and American ‘counter culture’ movements, and shifted to projects more integrated with nature, such as floating habitats. Examples of this later phase include Buckminster Fuller’s Triton City, Kenzo Tange’s Tokyo Bay Project, Kikutake’s Ocean City, Frei Otto’s Artic City and Ontario Place.

This advanced seminar will introduce students to the megastructure movement, its emergence and evolution, then focus on the few built megastructures projects such as Jean Prouvé’s Free University of Berlin, Soleri’s Arpsanti, Georges Candilis’ Le Mirail in Toulouse, Zevaco’s Sidi Harazem Thermal Bath, the Helicoide in Caracas, and closer to home, Montreal expo 67, Massey’s Simon Fraser and Ontario Place. The course will reflect not only on the relevance and values that these megastructures hold today, but also on their challenging relationship to aging technology, users’ needs, public opinion and conservation groups and activists.

In addition, through semester long self-guided drawing experimentations and onsite immersion, the course will use Ontario Place - designed in 1971 by Eb Zeidler and Michael Hough on 3 artificial islands along the Toronto waterfront and is today under threat of being demolished- as a case study to reveal a megastructure’s potential to adapt to new political, environmental and socio-economic requirements.

  • ARC465H1S A LEC0103: Advanced Topics in Architecture: Between the Lines: Borders, Territory and Space1
    Instructor: Anne-Marie Armstrong

This course focuses on urbanism and architecture’s relationship with borders as political, ecological, and topological conditions. As key instruments in defining the logistics of space and territory, borders operate at multiple scales from the local to the global, and from the constructed to the imaginary. Students will explore how borders reinforce inclusion and exclusion in urbanism, and how designers can engage with, and transform, border conditions as they navigate on the edge, margins and thresholds in-between

  • ARC467H1S LEC5101: Advanced Topics in Urban Design: Sustain and Support: In The Military Orbit
    Instructor: Miles Gertler

This seminar examines accidental and under-acknowledged urbanisms of the US military and establishes a journalistic research methodology to unpack transurban phenomena and the extra-architectural in preparation for design intervention and discursive analysis. Week by week, this course encourages students to apply architectural tools toward the production of a rigorous account of radical contemporary episodes from daily life within the expanded orbit of the United States’ military. Working through complex drawings and digital models, and ultimately the production of a comprehensive report, students will trace an avatar’s operations as it engages users, objects, energies, situations, and the administrative super-strata that manage its existence. The course demands that students cast a wide net, accounting for a rigorous and expanded picture of the urban and infrastructural consequences of transnational military activity. In each situation, students will be required to produce a detail-oriented account of their episode and avatar as it participates in and establishes remote urbanisms across sites and in virtual and material domains.

  • ARC480H1S LEC5101: Advanced Topics in the Technology of Architecture: Drawing Out Urban Interfaces
    Instructor: Simon Rabyniuk

Interfaces are thresholds that bind people together with a commonwealth of machines. They are also channels that augment the human sensorium –opening new visits. Additionally, they are zones of activity that bound a user’s experience. As such, users act through them in shaping the world, and in turn are also acted on by them. With the ascendance of network-culture, the interface –a user’s site of contact with networks– joins older forms of media (e.g. streets, pipes, powerlines, etc.) as an infrastructure through which society organizes itself. However, surely the role of private enterprise in refining the present-moments most commonly used interfaces cannot be overlooked here.

This course investigates the urbanism of mediation. It explores critical frameworks and skillsets relevant for students engaging questions about design practice, technology and the city. For the first half of the semester students will develop a typology of urban interfaces in which they will represent relationships between users, machines and the spaces in which both transit. Through this activity students will develop an analytic relationship with interfaces excavated from everyday life, media art, architecture and speculative design. Towards bridging theory and practice, during the second half of the semester, students will develop collaborative proposals and prototypes that engage issues pertaining to the use of open data, physical computing, data visualization and digital fabrication.

  • ARC482H1S LEC0101: Advanced Topics in the Technology of Urbanism: Thermal Resilience in Building Design2
    Instructor: Bomani Khemet

The objective of the course is to develop an advanced understanding of the link between building enclosure systems, environmental systems, and low energy building designs, and approaches. Specific objectives are to:

  1. Explore typical and high performing wall designs through a series of discussions, debates, and workshops.
  2. Explore how uncontrolled heat flow, air flow and, moisture flow through the building enclosure affects sustainability and design.
  3. Explore the bond between architectural design and select sustainability inspired building code changes.
  4. Examine integration of environmental systems with buildings at the local and district scale through a series of site visits and discussion with experts.

Summer 2020

ARC 200-Level Close Readings

The Close Readings courses listed below involve detailed examination of case studies in the history of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design with close attention to the objects of study. The relationship between design, context, and theory will be explored through analyses of artifacts and texts.

ARC 400-Level Advanced Topics

The Advanced Topics courses listed below are distinct credit offerings, and eligible students can enrol in more than one of the following courses, despite repeating course codes. For example, students can complete in ARC451H1F LEC0101 and ARC451H1S LEC9101, as their course content will differ depending on the instructor. Please note that a section number LEC9101 denotes an online course offering.

  • ARC451H1F LEC9101: Advanced Topics in History and Theory of Architecture:
    Written Out of History; Architecture in Europe Since 1945

This lecture course revisits European architecture by focussing at what is standing in the shadow of the continent’s greatest hits, from the welfare state architecture of Friis og Moltke in Jutland (Denmark) to the infrastructural work of Rino Tami in the canton of Ticino (Switzerland); from the middle-class housing of Monaco e Luccichenti in Rome to the social housing of Jadwiga Grabowska-Hawrylak in Wrocław (Poland); and from the light-hearted postwar reconstruction of the seaside resort of Royan (France) to the uptight classicism of Cäsar Pinnau in Germany.

The ambition of global history to encompass a culturally and geographically broader territory than just the same set of Western people, projects and perspectives that surface in every book, will be applied here to European architecture itself. The course will focus on the wealth of postwar European architecture which is only mentioned in passing, relegated to the footnotes, or almost completely ignored.

The course not only discusses overlooked aspects of the architectural culture of Europe, but also offers insights why certain architecture is ignored while other undervalued architecture has made a comeback. By doing that, it addresses mechanisms behind the writing of architectural history.

  • ARC465H1F LEC9101: Advanced Topics in Architecture:
    Reality and its Representation

It is obvious that if one is to consider the problem of “red pill / blue pill” in architectural representation, the architect has decided to swallow the “blue pill”. Nowadays, most of the architectural imagery is soaked in a blossoming happiness with nauseating effects and always overly controlled and precise to the point of acquiring non-humanistic tones. And despite the high level of legibility, what you see is not what you get. The result is hard on the edge but slimy on the inside. It can be grasped, but when confronted or squeezed it slips away.

This advanced seminar in architecture will start from the premise that representation may produce rather than repeat reality. Via thorough analysis of past and present modes of architectural representation, we will engage in speculations about a future reality shaped by responsibility, acceptance, and inclusion.

While the main structure of the class is lecture based, we will often operate in a design studio mode through open and collective critiques. The students will be asked to constantly draw, model, and write. A minimum knowledge in computer graphics and model construction is required. Finally, the objective of this seminar is to enable the students to think very clearly about architectural representation in particular, and the world in general, while building up advanced skills in image making.

  • ARC467H1F LEC9101: Advanced Topics in Urban Design:
    Sustain & Support; Urbanism in Military Orbit

A close interrogation of the U.S. military's architectural and infrastructural arsenal reveals that the military-industrial complex is alive and well and increasingly intertwined with the technological strata of daily civilian life. This seminar examines clandestine, accidental, and under-acknowledged urbanisms sponsored by the Department of Defense and establishes a journalistic research methodology to analyze the spatial and logistical operations of statecraft. Through the gradual development of a comprehensive report, students will produce drawings and texts to articulate, visualize, and critique a world which is so often made opaque by design. Working in pairs, students will develop a body of research around a single episode chosen from the recent history of the military and adopt an avatar to focus their inquiry for the duration of the semester.

  • ARC480H1S LEC9101: Advanced Topics in the Technology of Architecture:
    Lazy Computing

If our current design software has enabled a transformative re-allocation of an architect’s labor, it has also resulted in a posture of disciplinary nonchalance. In this course, we will examine our commands, constraints and OS interactions, and their implications in contemporary digital practice.

Students will be asked to develop their digital skill sets through the production of architectural animations, and through unconventional usages of everyday computational platforms. Through a series of software exercises, students will explore the feedback between architectural form and its representation, and the shrinking gap between simulative abstraction and the physical realm.

  • ARC482H1S LEC9101: Advanced Topics in the Technology of Urbanism:
    Drawing Our Urban Interfaces

Interfaces are thresholds that bind people together with a commonwealth of machines. They are also channels that augment the human sensorium –opening new visits. Additionally, they are zones of activity that bound a user’s experience. As such, users act through them in shaping the world, and in turn are also acted on by them. With the ascendance of network-culture, the interface –a user’s site of contact with networks– joins older forms of media (e.g. streets, pipes, powerlines, etc.) as an infrastructure through which society organizes itself. However, surely the role of private enterprise in refining the present-moments most commonly used interfaces cannot be overlooked here.

This course investigates the urbanism of mediation. It explores critical frameworks and skillsets relevant for students engaging questions about design practice, technology and the city. For the first half of the semester students will develop a typology of urban interfaces in which they will represent relationships between users, machines and the spaces in which both transit. Through this activity students will develop an analytic relationship with interfaces excavated from everyday life, media art, architecture and speculative design. Towards bridging theory and practice, during the second half of the semester, students will develop collaborative proposals and prototypes that engage issues pertaining to the use of open data, physical computing, data visualization and digital fabrication.

Summer Studio Abroad

Please note that due to the COVID-19 situation, the following Daniels Summer Abroad courses have been cancelled for the Summer 2020 session.

Design/Build Studios

Please note that due to the COVID-19 situation, the following Daniels Design/Build Studio courses have been cancelled for the Summer 2020 session.

  • ARC395H1F PRA0101: Haliburton Forest / Timber Pavilion / May 11-22. Instructor: Jay Pooley
  • ARC395H1F PRA0102: Bentway / Playing in Public / May 4-15. Instructor: Clint Langevin
  • ARC395H1F PRA0103: Toronto / Mobilizer / June 1-12. Instructor: Reza Nik
  • ARC395H1S PRA0101: PEC / Coastal Community / July 6-19. Instructor(s): Mark Erikson and Matt Kennedy Studio North
  • ARC395Y1S PRA0101: Fogo Island / Building Community / June 1-12 and August 3-14. Instructor: Todd Saunders

Design Research Internship

Please note that due to the COVID-19 situation, the following Daniels Design Research Internship opportunity has been cancelled for the Summer 2020 session.

  • ARC495Y1: Design Research Internship / May 4 – June 12. Instructor: Pina Petricone

Fall/Winter 2019-20

ARC 400-Level Advanced Topics

The Advanced Topics courses listed below are distinct credit offerings, and eligible students can enrol in more than one of the following courses, despite repeating course codes. For example, students can enrol in ARC451H1F LEC0101 and ARC451H1S LEC0102, as their course content will differ depending on the instructor.

Periodic updates to course descriptions and instructors will occur throughout the Summer 2019 session. (last updated: November 18, 2019)

  • ARC451H1F LEC0101

No Description available yet.

  • ARC451H1F LEC0102: Architecture and the Sea

We live on a watery world. Yet too often we ignore the connection between our buildings and the sea that is all around us. This course will look at the history of port cities, maritime infrastructure, ships, shoreline interactions, and island habitations. As sea levels rise, we will study examples of the terracqueous constructions from the ancient world to the present day and how architects are by necessity thinking more about an increasingly liquid landscape. Students will develop projects through the lens of history and environmental criticism.

  • ARC465H1F LEC0101: Guided Distractions 2.0 - Abstraction & Experimentation in Architecture

This course aims to use experimental processes in various disciplines such as poetry, film, drawing and sculpture to address a currently charged socio-political issue within the city. These techniques will be explored through a series of parameter-based experiments with an emphasis on abstraction (and its varying levels), chance (and indeterminacy), and failure. Alternate materials and techniques will be explored in a workshop setting to look beyond the typical architectural toolbox. We will closely study and hear from a multidisciplinary team of current and past experimenters such as John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, Virgil Abloh, Harryette Mullen, Lebbeus Woods, Theaster Gates amongst other guest lecturers. The course will conclude with a group exhibition.

  • ARC465H1F1 LEC0101: Lazy Computing

If our current design software has enabled a transformative re-allocation of an architect’s labor, it has also resulted in a posture of disciplinary nonchalance. In this course, we will examine our commands, constraints and OS interactions, and their implications in contemporary digital practice.

Students will be asked to develop their digital skill sets through the production of architectural animations, and through unconventional usages of everyday computational platforms. Through a series of software exercises, students will explore the feedback between architectural form and its representation, and the shrinking gap between simulative abstraction and the physical realm.

  • ARC466H1F LEC0101: Extraction Landscapes

Landscape plays a significant role in the Canadian cultural imaginary, yet this landscape is formed through systems of extraction - lumber, oil, and mining. This course examines the diverse landscapes of Canadian resource extraction: its global reach as the center of mining conglomerates, its timber resources, and its oil and natural gas reserves. Canada is the dominant financial market for mining – the Toronto Stock Exchange being the principle of listing of global mining concerns – whose sites of extraction extend to South Asia, Africa, and South America. Canada also holds one of the world’s largest oil reserves, much of it in the form of tar sands whose extraction comes at a significant environmental cost. Taken together these sites plot a landscape of global material and energy and systems.

We will consider these “extraction landscapes” to comprise a socio-technical arrangement forming connections between materials (crude oil, ores, trees, minerals), modes of expertise, financial operations, juridical systems, and territorial relations. We will thus study the actual points of extraction as well as the infrastructures of refining and distribution. Our inquiry will be historical as well as contemporary; we will consider Canada’s transition from a colonial outpost in the eighteenth-century Atlantic System that saw lumber exchanged for finished goods, to its current status as a center of mining and extraction economies. Our aim will be to develop tools of visual, formal, and landscape analysis through which we will examine these global assemblages.

  • ARC480H1F LEC0101

No description available yet.

  • ARC480H1F1 LEC0101 (formerly ARC481H1F LEC0101): Thermal Resilience in Building Design

Resilient design is a cost-effective form of climate change adaptation that architects must seriously adopt in order to protect occupants and building assets. This seminar will focus on the time-based performance metrics and robust passive measures which can be used to inform the early stages of design to enhance comfort and thermal resilience in buildings. In the first half of the course, students are expected to conduct research and present their findings on selected topics such as; passive heating and cooling, climate and meteorological influences, passive survivability, climate adaptive building shells, responsive structures and living systems. In the second half, the students will practice using computer simulation models to design a thermally resilient building.

  • ARC451H1S LEC0101: Architecture, Media, and World System

This course explores architecture as a medium of technological, social, and knowledge transmission within the context of the pre-history of globalization. The projection of a world system precedes more familiar contemporary terms such as ‘the global,’ globalization, or globalism. In the nineteenth century the idea of a world system was pursued through technological advances which easily aligned with imperialist aspirations. The course investigates the role of architecture in the production of a global imaginary where architecture as an infrastructural medium shifts our perspective beyond the formal built realm to the varied means or vehicles of transmission (such as paper or electronic, or institutional types and relay stations (educational facilities, libraries, radio, railway, and transmission towers, for example). While the theoretical perspective focuses on mid-twentieth century transatlantic exchanges in media and communications theories, we will also engage select materials from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Students will have an opportunity to pursue a project to be developed through term assignments and workshops that aim to advance research and recording skills. Course delivery will combine lectures with a seminar discussion format and will include at least one fieldtrip to the University of Toronto's archives and the Fisher Library..

  • ARC451H1S1 LEC0102: “The Only Two Arts of Our Time": Film and Architecture 1877-Present

In the latter half of the 19th century new building technologies were separating a concept called “space” from its trappings in tectonics. At the same time, the medium of photography was combined with the successive instants of the Gatling gun, liberating it from stasis and creating a new kind of pictorial space called “cinema”. The deep kinship of these two arts--Le Corbusier called them “the only two arts of our time”-- is the topic of this lecture course. We will look at what these two art forms have meant to each other for the past hundred years and how each has managed to challenge, usurp or exploit the other. Students will be expected to read theoretical texts, watch difficult and hard to see films every week, and prepare remarks on source materials for each class. The course will consider work by: Marie Menken, Michael Snow, Takeshi Murata, Andrei Tarkovsky, Sergei Eisenstein, Carl Th. Dreyer, Dziga Vertov, Maya Deren, Oskar Fischinger, Howard Hawks, Michelangelo Antonioni, Steven Holl, Diller Scofidio Renfro, Bernard Tschumi, Hans Poelzig, Le Corbusier, and Edweard Muybridge among others.

  • ARC452H1S LEC0101: Women and the Making of Architecture

This course concentrates on case studies of the built work of women in landscape architecture and architecture from the nineteenth century to the present. Simultaneously, it traces the growth of women’s rights through a timeline, beginning with the Enlightenment through waves of feminist theory to the present. Working female architects as guest lecturers will present gender issues of inclusion through their own work history. The main structure of the class is lecture based, however students will operate in a studio manner when exploring case studies and partner into groups for a final presentation through drawings and diagrams.

  • ARC452H1S1 LEC0101: Gardens of the Atlantic: Landscape and Enlightenment in the Atlantic World

This seminar considers the diverse landscapes of the Atlantic World at the end of the eighteenth century. This includes productive as well as formal landscapes and gardens across Europe, the Americas, West Africa, and the Caribbean. We examine the plantation landscapes of the West Indies and the Southern United states; French and English gardens of a rising colonial bourgeoisie; the slave factories of western Africa; “repatriation” projects to relocate freed slaves in Africa; and the botanical gardens that served as testing grounds for agricultural development. These landscapes existed as privileged sites within the networks of agricultural, capital, and human exchange that, taken together, constitute the modern phenomenon of the Atlantic System - networks that also served as conduits for the transnational circulation of revolutionary ideas, stemming equally from the European Enlightenment discourse and the lived experiences of enslaved peoples. We thus consider the landscapes of marronage and slave insurrection as efforts towards a radical reconfiguration of the Atlantic System.

  • ARC453H1S LEC0101: Critical Globalisms

The world is bigger than our thoughts. If we accept this conceit, then the only way we can approach the world’s complexity is by abstracting it, substituting its irreducible alterity with manageable concepts. The very idea of globalization is one such abstraction, a way of imagining the world in a way that makes it convenient for some to navigate it. As Gayatry Spivak as argued, “"The globe is on our computers. It is the logo of the World Bank. No one lives there.” Throughout history, the world has been imagined through different abstractions. Colonialism, modernity, development, progress, nationalism, neoliberalism, all are different ways of imagining the world. Each of these imaginations have also produced violent ways of managing it, from slavery, to sweatshops to colonies and client-states. This course will introduce students to these different historical imaginations of the world and will explore their political and ideological implications. We will look at a wide variety of sources to enter these imagined worlds, from manifestoes, to historical accounts, to interviews, to novels, and short stories, constantly confronting how we too operate with, and within, their shadows. 

  • ARC453H1S1 LEC5101: Exile and the Modern City

The world is urbanizing at an unprecedented pace and in unexpected ways. By 2030, five billion people will be living in urban areas that increasingly defy the concept of ‘city’ as it is currently defined. This course examines the spectrum of reactions over the last five decades to the changing patterns in urbanization due to various phenomena such as global real estate market shifts, crises in war, decolonization, and economic instability. The course will begin by considering historical precedents of building for and learning from informal settlements in Europe, North America, Latin America, and Africa from 1930 until 1980. We will proceed by defining concepts of exile, mapping paths of migration, and establishing tentative and broad typologies of urban informality. The weekly themes consider case studies from across the globe. They include the city within a city, camps and arrival cities, First Nations Communities, borderlands, and informal settlements (both housing and the grey economy). Some of the cities and areas studied in this course include Algiers, Caracas, Mumbai, Taipei, Detroit, Calais, Tijuana, northern Canadian communities, Johannesburg, and Manila among others.

  • ARC465H1S LEC0101: Reality and its Representation

It is obvious that if one is to consider the problem of “red pill / blue pill” in architectural representation, the architect has decided to swallow the “blue pill”. Nowadays, most of the architectural imagery is soaked in a blossoming happiness with nauseating effects and always overly controlled and precise to the point of acquiring non-humanistic tones. And despite the high level of legibility, what you see is not what you get. The result is hard on the edge but slimy on the inside. It can be grasped, but when confronted or squeezed it slips away.

This advanced seminar in architecture will start from the premise that representation may produce rather than repeat reality. Via thorough analysis of past and present modes of architectural representation, we will engage in speculations about a future reality shaped by responsibility, acceptance, and inclusion.

While the main structure of the class is lecture based, we will often operate in a design studio mode through open and collective critiques. The students will be asked to constantly draw, model, and write. A minimum knowledge in computer graphics and model construction is required. Finally, the objective of this seminar is to enable the students to think very clearly about architectural representation in particular, and the world in general, while building up advanced skills in image making.

  • ARC465H1S LEC0102: Between the Lines: Borders, Territory and Space

This course focuses on urbanism and architecture’s relationship with borders as political, ecological, and topological conditions. As key instruments in defining the logistics of space and territory, borders operate at multiple scales from the local to the global, and from the constructed to the imaginary. Students will explore how borders reinforce inclusion and exclusion in urbanism, and how designers can engage with, and transform, border conditions as they navigate on the edge, margins and thresholds in-between.

  • ARC467H1S LEC0101: Sustain & Support - Urbanism In the Military Orbit

A close interrogation of the U.S. military's architectural and infrastructural arsenal reveals that the military-industrial complex is alive and well and increasingly intertwined with the technological strata of daily civilian life. This seminar examines clandestine, accidental, and under-acknowledged urbanisms sponsored by the Department of Defense and establishes a journalistic research methodology to analyze the spatial and logistical operations of statecraft. Through the gradual development of a comprehensive report, students will produce drawings and texts to articulate, visualize, and critique a world which is so often made opaque by design. Working in pairs, students will develop a body of research around a single episode chosen from the recent history of the military and adopt an avatar to focus their inquiry for the duration of the semester.

  • ARC480H1S LEC5101: Drawing out Urban Interfaces

Interfaces are thresholds that bind people together with a commonwealth of machines. They are also channels that augment the human sensorium –opening new visits. Additionally, they are zones of activity that bound a user’s experience. As such, users act through them in shaping the world, and in turn are also acted on by them. With the ascendance of network-culture, the interface –a user’s site of contact with networks– joins older forms of media (e.g. streets, pipes, powerlines, etc.) as an infrastructure through which society organizes itself. However, surely the role of private enterprise in refining the present-moments most commonly used interfaces cannot be overlooked here.

This course investigates the urbanism of mediation. It explores critical frameworks and skillsets relevant for students engaging questions about design practice, technology and the city. For the first half of the semester students will develop a typology of urban interfaces in which they will represent relationships between users, machines and the spaces in which both transit. Through this activity students will develop an analytic relationship with interfaces excavated from everyday life, media art, architecture and speculative design. Towards bridging theory and practice, during the second half of the semester, students will develop collaborative proposals and prototypes that engage issues pertaining to the use of open data, physical computing, data visualization and digital fabrication.

 

Summer 2019

Please note that ARC399H1 is not available for ACORN enrolment, and can only be requested through the application process detailed below. The following are descriptions for the ARC399H1 design/build sections offered in Summer 2019, indicating the course instructors, dates, and design prompts.

ARC399H1F LEC0101 - Mobile Activator Instructor: Reza Nik (June 3rd - 14th)

How do you design and build a simple mobile activator that can be used by various existing social movements in Toronto as a communicative tool while being economical, light, and architecturally impactful? Students will work closely with the community in Parkdale and the Parkdale Land Trust, an advocacy group that has been working for a more just approach to gentrification through novel forms of urban intervention.

ARC399H1F LEC0102 - Daniels x Lululemon. Instructor: Jay Pooley (June 17th - 28th)

Working together as a small and concentrated team, students will spend two weeks designing and building a pavilion in partnership with Lululemon Toronto. The structure will explore challenges of site, program, scale and fabrication across a spectrum of techniques. The goal of the course is to enable students to form a sense of self-reliance towards making, and to narrow the gap between designing and building.

ARC399H1S LEC0101 - Urban Dock. Instructor: Clinton Langevin & Max Yuristy (July 8th - 19th)

The Urban Dock will be a working prototype for human occupation of the existing breakwater structure in Toronto’s west end. This scalable proof of concept project will identify and test the necessary processes, partners, community allies and expertise to successfully deploy segments of a linear public space along the western Toronto waterfront and beyond. In this studio, students will be given the opportunity to design, build, and launch a prototypical segment of the Urban Dock at the west end beaches or as an installation at The Bentway.

ARC399H1S LEC0102 - Wellington, PEC. Instructors: Studio North (July 15th - 28th)

In this course, we will be working closely with the community of Wellington, Prince Edward County to create a civic project that will be incorporated in to the streetscape of the town. Using simple, locally available materials that are easy to source and assemble, this could include materials such as SPF lumber, concrete, steel, and plywood. Camping site options will be provided; there are also plenty of rental accommodations, but students will be responsible to find accommodations that are comfortable for them.

In a brief paragraph (maximum 250 words), please indicate the studio you are interested in and describe how you will gain a better understanding of the role of the architect through this collaborative design-build studio. Applications should be emailed to ugdirector@daniels.utoronto.ca with the subject “ARC399H1: LASTNAME, STUDENT NUMBER” as early as possible and no later than Friday April 5th.

Note: This course can be considered an exclusion for ARC314H1 upon student request.

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University of Toronto
John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture,
Landscape, and Design

1 Spadina Crescent
Toronto, ON M5S 2J5
Canada
T + 416-978-5038