Thesis Reviews Winter 21
This book showcases final thesis projects produced by Master of Architecture, Master of Urban Design, and Master of Landscape Architecture students at the University of Toronto’s John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, these projects were presented remotely, rather than in person, on April 21, 22, & 23, 2021.
Advisors Behnaz Assadi Petros Babasikas George Baird Ahmed Belkhodja (Fala Atelier) Kelly Doran Megan Esopenko Fredrik Hellberg Christian Joakim Angus Laurie Mariana Leguia Lara Lesmes An Te Liu Filipe Magalhães (Fala Atelier) Liat Margolis Fadi Masoud Laura Miller Carol Moukheiber Gregory Neudorf Peter North Alissa North Aisling O’Carroll Mauricio Quirós Pacheco Matthew Perotto Michael Piper Lera Samovich (Fala Atelier) Gilles Saucier Elise Shelley John Shnier Elisa Silva Ana Luisa Soares (Fala Atelier) Stephen Verderber Jane Wolff
Master of Architecture 10
Yahya Abdullah
11
Nneamaka Amadi
12
Chaya Bhardwaj
13
Christopher Blackwell
14
Ryan Bruer
15
Benjamin Chang
16
Kurtis Chen
17
Juliette Cook
18
Shalice Coutu
19
Yijie Dai
20
Niko Dellic
21
Rachel Doo
22
Xinting Fan
23
Yuan Fang
24
Jeremy Fung
25
Michaela Gomes
26
Alexia Jade Harvey
27
Eisa Hayashi
28
Jessica Ho
29
Curtis Ho
30
Allison Jang
31
Pedram Karimi
32
Damian Kercz
33
Ji Hee Kim
34
Lina Kostoff
35
Eleanor Laffling
36
Timothy Lai
37
Phát Lê
38
Kangmin Lee
39
Jiawen Lin
40
Peiyun Liu
41
Monique Perez Lizardo
42
Melanie Lo
43
Francesca Zenaida Lu
44
Ivana Luk
45
Bess Ma
46
Mikalai (Nick) Makhalik
47
Khaled Megahed
48
Erica Merkley
49
Janice Miyagi
50
Emily Moore
51
Bronte Morris-Poolman
52
Shaz Nasiri
53
Zoha Nekouian Fathi
54
Sangyoun (James) Noh
55
Fibi Pan
56
Yasmina Parto
57
Saaraa Premji Mitha
58
Laraib Qasim
59
Rubab Razvi
60
Autumn Riggan
61
Audrey Rott
62
Irina Rouby Apelbaum
63
Joshua Sam-Cato
64
Rahul Sehijpaul
65
Jiaxin (Jia Jia) Shi
66
Vaibhavi Shinde
67
Julie-Anne Starling
68
Liam Thornewell
69
Sidney Tsao
70
Sky Ece Ulusoy
71
Neil Xavier Vas
72
David Warrick
73
Li Wei
74
Lindsay Wu
75
Fan Xie
76
George Xing
77
Qian Yang
78
Treasure (Jingyuan) Zhang
79
Jie Zhang
Master of Urban Design
82
Siqing Hu
83
Yongxian (Roger) Huang
84
Rida Khan
85
Lindsey Nantes
86
Ruotian Tan
87
Yuxin Ti
88
Manzure Yari
Master of Landscape Architecture 92
Mohamed Al-Huneidi
93
Jin Cao
94
Aobo Chen
95
Blake Creamer
96
Amelia Hartin
97
Xueni Hu
98
Aliya Karmali
99
Gal Kaufman
100
Louisa Kennett
101
Ryohei Kondo
102
Wesley Kwong
103
Fan Liu
104
Kate Lyne
105
Lauren N. McLachlan
106
Hamed Nadi
107
Iqra Naqvi
108
Elif A. Özçelik
109
Morgan Quinn
110
Natalie Sisson
111
Allison E.K. Smith
112
Bingqing Sun
113
Ruixian Tang
114
Andrew Taylor
115
Hilary Anne Todhunter
116
Jennifer Chau Tran
117
Jiazhi Yin
118
Ruiqi Zhao
119
Yufei Zhao
Master of Architecture Advisors Petros Babasikas George Baird Ahmed Belkhodja (Fala Atelier) Kelly Doran Fredrik Hellberg Christian Joakim Angus Laurie Mariana Leguia Lara Lesmes An Te Liu Filipe Magalhães (Fala Atelier) Laura Miller Carol Moukheiber Gregory Neudorf Mauricio Quirós Pacheco Michael Piper Lera Samovich (Fala Atelier) Gilles Saucier John Shnier Elisa Silva Ana Luisa Soares (Fala Atelier) Stephen Verderber
Yahya Abdullah Kirkuk: Fragments, Mirrors How can one create a dialogue with what is nearly lost, before it cannot even be recognized? Or ever recovered? The Citadel of Kirkuk persists today as a fragmented portal into past civilizations and present-day conflicts. Centuries of war and civil tensions have eroded the site and displaced or eradicated its occupants. A decaying city in limbo, the citadel has been effectively “disappeared” to the international community. A library and museum of archaeology are injected into the site, sown as early seeds consolidating Kirkuk’s histories at risk of erasure, creating a place to collect, store, and remember.
Advisor: Laura Miller 10
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Nneamaka Amadi Rising Waters Rising Waters focuses on the conundrum of the climate crisis and its side effects — particularly the way it affects our daily lives and properties. With Earth’s temperatures rising, our environment is no longer safe, our habitats are becoming uninhabitable, and extreme disaster is constantly at our back door. It’s time to not just mitigate the crisis, but to create innovative solutions that aid our adaptation to climate change and make our communities safer and better places for future generations.
Advisor: Kelly Doran Winter 2021
11
Chaya Bhardwaj Trust: It’s in the facade Trust holds societies together. Trust can also be measured. This virtual architecture project broadcasts the data associated with global perceptions of trust in key institutions. Facades of buildings have long been the physical interface between institutions and the public. The facades of banks, stock exchanges, and parliament buildings act as physical markers of trust and symbols of permanence. This project uses the historically driven language of facades to translate contemporary data on the state of trust in the world. These facades are displayed within a stepwell that is the virtual venue for discussion and research to better understand trust.
Advisors: Fredrik Hellberg and Lara Lesmes 12
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Christopher Blackwell Strachan House Renewal This project is an investigation of permanent supportive housing as a solution for chronic homelessness, beginning with an examination of the contemporary state of homelessness and its wide range of causes, with special emphasis on Toronto. Drawing on a thorough examination of permanent supportive housing precedents across North America, as well as relevant assisted living precedents in Europe and Asia, the project elaborates a wholesale redevelopment of Toronto’s Strachan House with the aim of massively expanding its efficiency at improving the lives of the most underserved among Toronto’s chronically homeless.
Advisor: Elisa Silva Winter 2021
13
Ryan Bruer A Sketch of a Description of Building A disregard for skilled construction workers will undermine the building industry’s response to the climate emergency. Reckoning with a history of unhealthy materials will require retraining skilled labour to adapt to lowcarbon methods. However, provincial regulation has siloed thousands of workers into dysfunctional occupations by reducing trades to skillsets. Without a framework that engenders dignity and responsibility, these workers will lack the vocational momentum to transform building from the bottom up. The change begins by overhauling the nomenclature of designated trades in provincial law and integrating the new trade amalgamations with training centre networks.
Advisor: Kelly Doran 14
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Benjamin Chang Virtual Cosmopolitan A space of orbs and hyperboloids. Virtual Cosmopolitan depicts the possibility of a collective reverence for the cosmos in virtual reality. Central to the project is the transformation of information and spatial awareness through a shift in scale and orientation. Travelers are free from their material flesh, enabling novel ways of experiencing the macrocosm. The formal qualities of this virtual universe speak to the intuitive application of archetypal geometric configurations as spatial logos in digital space. What emerges out of the interplay of orbs and hyperboloids is a dynamic way of perceiving virtual worlds that leads to a sense of veneration and connection. Advisors: Fredrik Hellberg and Lara Lesmes Winter 2021
15
Kurtis Chen Where is the City? Our inability to grasp planetary scale betrays us. We pacify ourselves with simple stories of cause and effect, hobbling our capacity to truly scrutinize multi-scalar interactions that exist between you and me, ourselves and the planet — what philosopher Timothy Morton calls “hyperobjects.” What is local about global warming? How global is affordability? Where can we find the city? The Anthropocene forces us to examine these strange properties because we have created these strange objects. To realize broadband change, we must start by acknowledging our broadband realities.
Advisors: Angus Laurie and Mariana Leguia 16
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Juliette Cook Local Harvest This project explores the potential for material reuse in the city of Toronto, focusing on the vernacular material of brick as a case study in a wider transition towards more circular systems of material production and exchange. The proposal addresses the question of halving the amount of embodied carbon with which we construct the built environment. It does this through three lenses: regional materialism, material reuse, and the practice of making. Neighbourhood materials are re-narrativized through secondary uses, layering the city with richer meaning as it evolves. How might these materials, remnants of past extraction, become geological time markers in buildings of the present?
Advisor: Kelly Doran Winter 2021
17
Shalice Coutu The In-Between The most curiously beautiful moment of a heartbeat is not the beat itself, but the silence between beats. What happens in this liminal void? And what happens to this void when different sounds from the environment affect it? Initial research conceptualized the heartbeat into a series of pebbles, orchestrating them with reflection and shadow as a way of understanding the in-between. This project avails the duality of the heartbeat as its lens for the design of a Marine Bioacoustics Research Facility and Art Installation Space. The fluidity of the In-Between choreographs a set of environments inspired by that beautiful moment of silence before the next.
Advisors: Christian Joakim, Gregory Neudorf, and Gilles Saucier 18
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Yijie Dai Hospice Design in a Chinese Urban Context This research focuses on end-of-life care for elderly people in a Chinese urban context. By adopting hospice as an architectural approach, I study and attempt to address the problems that elderly people, as well as their family members, experience in the palliative care process. The project’s goal is to devise ways of providing hospice patients with dignity and quality of life in the end stages of their lives.
Advisor: Stephen Verderber Winter 2021
19
Niko Dellic Liminal 3D: Thresholds to Extended Reality The proliferation of the smartphone has expanded the potential of augmented reality (AR), shifting how we experience and design for the physical realm. This thesis proposes an architectural workflow where digital media structures the identity of space, entailing new architectural tectonics as a hybrid of binary and physical matter. Architecture has the potential to change its identity by reflexively “updating” its virtual counterpart in a perpetual state of becoming. It can be sophisticated, popular, or even a meme. AR presents a new format of master-building, as the architect commits to routinely crafting a digital identity wherein “construction” and “drawing” become one.
Advisor: John Shnier 20
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Rachel Doo Marker of Environmental Change Set against the backdrop of the Anthropocene, an object is introduced as a marker of environmental change. In an initial research phase, the object is inserted in the natural environment, and its transformations as a result of raw forces are documented. Running parallel to this is an architectural implementation, where the object — as a building — becomes the documentation of change. In the object, stratified layers are created by its occupants: artists and geochronologists, who create permanent changes by leaving behind artifacts that both impact the structure and document their presence. This project explores the competing forces of permanence and change through the impact of a building’s occupants on its architecture. Advisors: Christian Joakim, Gregory Neudorf, and Gilles Saucier Winter 2021
21
Xinting Fan Privacy and Interaction Within Multigenerational Housing Multigenerational housing has been a growing trend in home use. There are a lot of benefits to keeping a family unit close together, so they can share costs and support each other. However, multigenerational living is not for everyone. Many people would need to compromise on their independence or privacy if they decided to live with other generations in their families. This project investigates house design typologies in order to find out how the level of privacy or openness in a house can help maintain independence within a multigenerational family.
Advisors: Fala Atelier 22
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Yuan Fang Waves 02 This project proposes a virtual display space for all datasets associated with the production of bananas, taking as an example the case of the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita Brands International). Exploring the virtual space means tracing the journey that brings a banana to our tables. From land use and industry, to infrastructure, shipping, and trading, the project compiles live datasets and organizes them in a spatial diagram that allows us to perceive the impact of banana production at a global scale, as well as the issues it raises for local communities in several Latin American countries.
Advisors: Fredrik Hellberg and Lara Lesmes Winter 2021
23
Jeremy Fung Living Memory In the Anthropocene, it is our responsibility to redeem ourselves by reconnecting with nature, leaving behind a legacy of positive change. Inspiration for this project originated from an observation of a living sapling growing on a decaying stump: death fosters the living, while the living memorializes the past. Marking a moment of change, the past shoreline of the site was erased when land was reclaimed for a new coal power plant. As a metaphor for living memory, the proposed intervention memorializes this history of land transformation while remediating the site in an evident way, giving a new reading of the land.
Advisors: Christian Joakim, Gregory Neudorf, and Gilles Saucier 24
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Michaela Gomes 30° The current system of tourism development in Barbados has contributed to the physical and visual takeover of beachfront land, as well as the gentrification of coastal commercial areas traditionally used as informal business space for locals. With the hospitality sector representing a fundamental resource for national income, the island’s economic survival has become heavily reliant on unsustainable methods of accommodating foreign populations within local towns and communities. 30 Degrees presents a new type of infrastructure for mitigating the impact of commercial tourism on national development, by exploiting the country’s rich history of local markets as a valuable asset for preserving cultural practices while providing opportunities for multiple scales of economic growth. Advisor: Mauricio Quirós Pacheco Winter 2021
25
Alexia Jade Harvey Poetics of the House The “conventional house” obstructs one from having meaningful emotional experiences within it. The historical interlinking of geometry, proportions, and the human body in architecture has unfortunately morphed into standardization. Have we become hermit crabs, carelessly moving from one shell to another? Why does one have an instinct to furnish domestic space? How can a house entice the senses? To answer such questions, an alternative approach to designing a house is explored: Zoey’s House. Zoey feels emotional about her house, which is designed around her daily routine and bodily proportions. Her experiences of daily living are enhanced, and she feels fulfilled.
Advisors: Fala Atelier 26
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Eisa Hayashi Encapsulated Nature In ordinary times, nature plays an important role in constructing healthful living and working environments. Pandemic living has disconnected many from their work spaces and routines in Toronto’s downtown, and it is not clear under what circumstances they can return. Nowhere is this situation more dire than in the PATH, the city’s massive underground pedestrian network. Improbably, is nature the answer here? This thesis overlays the extant patchwork of private development in the PATH with a new public infrastructure of strategically distributed microforests, forming small ecosystems. This ensures access, light, and air quality, and inspires rediscovery of the natural world.
Advisor: Laura Miller Winter 2021
27
Jessica Ho Charging the Future In 20-plus years, electric vehicles (EV) will replace gas-powered, privately owned vehicles. What will the new infrastructure supporting this conversion look like? Where and how will it be located? The city of Toronto has a once-in-several-generations opportunity to leverage this massive change. Toronto’s neighbourhood parks occur with relative frequency within the city. My thesis proposes a new infrastructural hybrid, amplifying the extant infrastructure of these parks with the addition of EV charging stations. The park’s typical programs and users are both augmented and recombined, creating a positive, convenient, and transformative relationship with the community. Advisor: Laura Miller 28
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Curtis Ho Made in HK This project investigates the links between the current “new town” development model and its role in generating conflicts between the indigenous and urban publics of Hong Kong. The thesis aims to trigger dialogue between these clashing publics by visually dissecting complex land policy and presenting alternative futures of collaboration. It proposes a computational method that respects the diversity and granularity of indigenous parcels, allowing for the retention of land ownership and incremental development. At the same time, computation permits controls at the largest scales, which is necessary to respond to the urban public’s desire for housing and resource autonomy. This takes place against the backdrop of an uncertain future for Hong Kong.
Advisor: Michael Piper Winter 2021
29
Allison Jang The Food Gap: Reviving the Legacy of South Central Farm This project is a response to Los Angeles’s pLAn, the city’s local implementation of the Green New Deal. It is an urban and economic design solution that reimagines the future of a 4.2-acre vacant lot at West Manchester Avenue and South Vermont Avenue in South Los Angeles. The project tackles the issue of the food desert phenomenon and social disinvestment in the area by reviving the spirit of the largest urban farm ever operated in the United States, the South Central Farm, which served underprivileged ethnic-minority families. TFG’s objective is to devise a long-term economic, environmental, and socially inclusive model for urban food production.
Advisor: Elisa Silva 30
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Pedram Karimi Performing Communities While the traditional museum’s collection and exhibition of artifacts is instructive, this thesis prioritizes instead the ephemeral “stuff” that is equally important in encountering other cultures: interaction, performance, and experience. Envisioned as a necessary supplement to Toronto’s Aga Khan Museum’s permanent collection of artifacts from Muslim civilizations around the world, this thesis draws upon ceremonial and theatrical spaces in Persian Islamic architecture for inspiration. The concept of narrative-based architecture shapes new formal and informal performance spaces that are culturally and programmatically diverse, reflecting the needs and tastes of contemporary Muslim communities in North America and beyond. Advisor: Laura Miller Winter 2021
31
Damian Kercz Halfway Housing: A Response to Demand for Criminal Justice Reform This project aims to persuade communities to think differently about those subjected to criminal justice systems and encourages a compassionate and empathetic approach to those processed by them. By renovating and proposing an addition to a Victorian home in Toronto, as a response to Toronto’s failing halfway housing system, it is shown that halfway houses can be rehabilitative and therapeutic spaces that play a significant role in helping prisoners desist from their criminal identities while reducing rates of reoffending upon release. This is made possible by appealing to the humanity of house residents, privileging their autonomy and their commitment to self improvement.
Advisor: Stephen Verderber 32
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Ji Hee Kim Field Guide to The Convivial Middle Intended for renters, owners, prospective developers, and Toronto’s forward thinkers, the Field Guide to the Convivial Middle is a guide to help identify, preserve, discover, and reflect on the vulnerable and undervalued typology of low-rise walk-up apartment buildings existing in numerous neighborhoods throughout the city. Rather than seeing such buildings as sub-grade housing ripe for razing and assembly into larger parcels, this thesis redefines them as a network of middle grounds — one that cultivates community, enables densification, and sponsors a richer diversity of housing within the city.
Advisor: Laura Miller Winter 2021
33
Lina Kostoff Architect’s Play House A house is made up of elements, strategically arranged under a single roof. They are all pieces of architecture we know: the wall, the door, the window, the column, the beam, the floor. These architectural facets comprise the house as an object — a vessel devoid of a site or a client, which plays a game of composition, arrangement, and duality where the relationship between two seemingly opposing programs is explored — those of work and of domesticity. This game comes with a set of rules and limitless outcomes. It is a game and an abstract method of constructing architecture from architecture.
Advisors: Fala Atelier 34
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Eleanor Laffling Past Continuous: Urban Infill in Toronto’s Heritage Districts Utilized as a planning apparatus, heritage conservation districts are established in Toronto as a means of preserving the historic character of neighbourhoods. Whilst ensuring the conservation of Toronto’s streetscapes, the designations place undue constraints on new development, limiting densification during a time when housing is both in short supply and unaffordable. Through a combination of urban and building scales, this thesis advances a place-based approach to residential intensification within these neighbourhoods by proposing multi-unit infill projects alongside reconsiderations of current heritage planning policies. Image: Goad Atlas of the City of Toronto: Fire Insurance Map Volume 2 [map], Toronto, 1910.
Advisor: George Baird Winter 2021
35
Timothy Lai Virtual Spaces of Commerce Since the Enlightenment, plural images have been used as a medium to catalogue vast amounts of visual information. The strength of these diagrams stems from their ability to provide quick overviews and organize visual information in the form of two-dimensional figures and objects. Using the non-fungible token (NFT) as an example, the necessity of virtual market spaces in the future is apparent. Currently, online market spaces are mostly accessed through 2D interfaces lacking overview and relying on language-based organization systems. This project explores a respatialization of market data, using architectural form as the medium to organize and display information.
Advisors: Fredrik Hellberg and Lara Lesmes 36
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Phát Lê Cut Fruit Means I Love You How is my nephew going to learn about their Vietnamese and Taiwanese heritage when they grow up? Currently proposed developments in Toronto’s Chinatown threaten the agency of space often found in Asian diasporic communities, continuing oppressive systems of displacement. Using the model of a community land trust, this thesis envisions collaboration between members of the Chinatown BIA and activists Friends of Chinatown, which represent two generational groups that are advocating for the legacy of Chinatown in sometimes conflicting ways. The proposal mediates these tensions while innovating on how architecture can respond to community power and control. Advisor: Michael Piper Winter 2021
37
Kangmin Lee objet. Human traces are left on our planet, either seen or unseen. The Anthropocene can be observed as the current chapter of Earth, since humans entered the climate. As humans stepped into nature, we left imprints by introducing synthetic materials that do not consist of any natural molecules. New patterns and new imprints are generated from the combination of elements that existed here and what we created. This proposal focuses on addressing environmental issues by establishing public awareness and consciousness through architectural intervention.
Advisors: Christian Joakim, Gregory Neudorf, and Gilles Saucier 38
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Jiawen Lin Reinventing Maternity Facilities in Rural Tanzania Tanzania is one of the world’s poorest countries, with 75 per cent of its population living in rural areas and health care facilities often located far from local communities. This makes it extremely difficult for pregnant women and those with complications associated with childbirth to gain access to skilled health care. This project will look closely into the physical condition of the country’s current maternal care facilities and the conflicts between patients and care providers in the institutional care environment. A new maternity care facility typology will be developed to improve the efficiency and quality of the maternity care system, taking into consideration the local culture.
Advisor: Stephen Verderber Winter 2021
39
Peiyun Liu Vancouver Art Gallery Expansion Project This project entails wrapping much of the Vancouver Art Gallery’s existing structure with new public circulation and adding two major volumes to facilitate new public programs and exhibition space. All of this is done while keeping the additions low enough to the ground to allow the facade of the existing building, a 20th-century neoclassical landmark, to be visible from the nearby streets. The resulting scheme gives visitors access to the rooftop of the newly added volume, where they can experience the historical building as a new form of urban terrain by observing it at different angles and altitudes.
Advisor: George Baird 40
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Monique Perez Lizardo Electronic-Empathetic Learning This virtual architecture school defines e-learning as both “electronic” and “empathetic” learning. Beyond the classrooms, one can architecturally experience the dataset from the Daniels Health and Well-Being Report. Questions evaluating ethnic representation, skipped meals, resource accessibility, and equitable treatment are tied to installations that display the impact of those factors on the student learning experience. Thus, when one experiences the virtual dataset, they are left better equipped to practice empathy and to talk about health and wellness.
Advisors: Fredrik Hellberg and Lara Lesmes Winter 2021
41
Melanie Lo Cloud o’ Clock Temporality was once personified by the ancient Greeks as Chronos, who quantified the fundamental duration and measurement of time, and Kairos, who embodied qualities of happenstance and chance. This project is inspired by explorations of the interplay between the Chronos and Kairos essences of cloudscapes and sky media. Expressed within a virtual architecture, it takes the form of a clock woven from the skies, where Chronos and Kairos time can be measured by the serendipitous passing of clouds within space.
Advisors: Fredrik Hellberg and Lara Lesmes 42
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Francesca Zenaida Lu Redefining Spaces for Elderly Healthcare Incorporating biophilic and salutogenic design strategies into long-term care (LTC) facilities allows for a natural approach to protecting the elderly from viruses and social isolation. Redesigning LTC facilities in this way promotes health and well-being among the elderly, and combats the negative effects of a pandemic. Community integration is a big factor in the relevance of LTC facilities. The surrounding neighborhood provides essential support services.
Advisor: Stephen Verderber Winter 2021
43
Ivana Luk Mass en Masse How can a transition to mass timber be catalytic to a broader cultural change? The potential of mass timber in Canada, and the specific implications of a wide-scale adoption of mass timber by the construction industry, require a cultural and industrial paradigm shift. A growing understanding of the potential growth of the forestry industry as a supplier of construction materials offers an opportunity to investigate the cultural implications of mass production of mass timber. By retooling an existing centre of production, this design illustrates how and where the transformation can take hold.
Advisor: Kelly Doran 44
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Bess Ma a house of many places The house of many places is simultaneously a home, a place to work, and a place to gather. This house reimagines the single-family typology as a multi-use space in order to facilitate productive frictions between the public cooperative and the private domestic. The same ordinary architectural elements that make up each of these separate spaces come together in a cacophony of parts. These intentionally accidental moments create a radical new type of space, where each element, program, and inhabitant is freed from all prior preconceptions.
Advisors: Fala Atelier Winter 2021
45
Mikalai (Nick) Makhalik A New Kind of Speakeasy On January 16th, 1919, The Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was signed and ratified. One year later, on January 17th, 1920, the production, transportation, and sale of alcohol became illegal. This was a nationwide enforcement of Prohibition in the USA. The places where people went to drink illegally became known as speakeasies; they were places where taboos such as gambling, Black jazz, queer drag, and flapper feminism were able to exist openly. This thesis proposes a new kind of speakeasy — a virtual architecture of refuge and discourse within a purgatory landscape of censored and banned authors.
Advisors: Fredrik Hellberg and Lara Lesmes 46
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Khaled Megahed Life Kit This thesis explores the possibility of a kit of parts for a flexible building. The kit is intended to facilitate the notion of open “self-build” structures in overlooked urban sites. Conceived as a system of hard and soft components, the framework enables the directed assembly and disassembly of elements. Metal scaffolding (hard structure) supports a lighter interior wood frame (soft structure) capable of changing over time. Residents are engaged in the building process. They share skills and negotiate needs, which promotes a community that is active in the design and redesign of a structure. Housing here acts as a social and economic safety net, addressing the precariousness of many of the city’s inhabitants.
Advisor: Carol Moukheiber Winter 2021
47
Erica Merkley Slow Growth A seed is planted, the story begins. Due to the collective human behaviour of modern societies, we find ourselves at a moment where we must ask: How can design adapt to rapid environmental and ecological change? This project explores how the logic of nature can be used as a basis for evolutionary design. Can urban brownfield sites play host to a new form of growth that encourages reciprocity between nature and humans?
Advisors: Christian Joakim, Gregory Neudorf, and Gilles Saucier 48
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Janice Miyagi The Idle Chatter of the Crowd: An Archive of Memes As we continue to occupy the internet as a space of visual metaphors, designers must acknowledge the ways in which the rapid dissemination of tropes, architectural and otherwise, can conceal and obscure embedded narratives. This project imagines a virtual repository where the history of any meme — the ultimate trope — might be discovered and connected to those that share its likeness. The repository employs the dissonant theoretical and organizational structures of the tree diagram and the rhizome to simultaneously catalogue the past and anticipate the future, so that we may understand the scope and history of the tropes we perpetuate.
Advisors: Fredrik Hellberg and Lara Lesmes Winter 2021
49
Emily Moore Tree Retreat Being sick is stressful. To add insult to injury, hospitalization puts already vulnerable people into environments with unpleasant sights, sounds, smells, and feelings. For those with long-term illnesses, hopes of finding an escape from this reality can be thwarted by ongoing treatment, monitoring, or accessibility concerns. A design for a retreat centre near hospital grounds puts a getaway within reach of those who need it most. This project, set in a wooded valley landscape at a busy Toronto hospital, explores themes of biophilia, coping, family-centred care, respite, and escape.
Advisor: Stephen Verderber 50
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Bronte Morris-Poolman Healing Landscape and People: Asbestos, Québec Asbestos, Québec is home to the world’s largest open-pit asbestos mine, which closed in 2012. The town challenges notions of the word “unhealthy,” with people dying each year from asbestos-related diseases while living close to the massive pit that caused their trauma. To heal, Asbestos must move towards a healthy future. This project is part of a larger scheme to transform the town into one focused on researching and treating asbestos-related diseases, palliative care for patients, and environmental rehabilitation. By intrinsically integrating salutogenic and biophilic principles into the design, a symbiotic relationship between health and landscape forms.
Advisor: Stephen Verderber Winter 2021
51
Shaz Nasiri Be+Twixt Today, new dwellings are becoming smaller and smaller. The functionality of these contracted spaces is becoming less and less hospitable as well. My thesis proposes a new kind of “living” space: one counterintuitively created by reducing the occupiable area even more, contracting it to the scale of the human body, and creating a transformable, transportable, and personalized space. Existing somewhere between a garment and a room, this portable, adjustable environment will augment our shrinking dwellings, permitting us to travel outside of our micro-condos — allowing a recovered sense of privacy, a connection to nature, and, on occasion, connections to one another.
Advisor: Laura Miller 52
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Zoha Nekouian Fathi Temporary to Permanent Providing shelter for affected people after a disaster is crucial until rehabilitation. Nevertheless, people end up living for extended periods in temporary shelters, which can result in severe difficulties. This thesis will focus on earthquake survivors needing emergency shelter for shortterm housing and permanent housing for long-term use. The design will be divided into two steps. The first step is to design a shelter that will provide minimum living requirements for survivors, suitable for a short-term stay. The second step will provide a permanent house comfortable enough for long-term accommodation.
Advisor: Stephen Verderber Winter 2021
53
Sangyoun (James) Noh RE. Cladding Toronto’s Skyline: Metabolic Development “Metabolism is the replacement of the old with the new to be equivalent to the continuous renewal and organic growth of the city.” – Zhongjie Lin The rise and sprawl of glass-tower condos in Toronto has filled the city with facades whose lifespans are extremely limited. The Metabolic Development aims to improve and rehabilitate these shoeboxes we call home.
Advisor: Kelly Doran 54
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Fibi Pan Rethinking the Intergenerational Model The term “transnationalism” often comes up when studying cultural and societal patterns of immigrants in Canada. However, current research into supporting ethnic communities in host countries has paid little attention to individuals’ sustained ties to their homelands. In western society, receiving care at a senior living facility is a very common practice. In Asian cultures, aging independently from your children is still a concept that is in conflict with traditional values. This thesis aims to weave together western and eastern aging practices by creating a “middle ground” through an intergenerational model of care.
Advisor: Stephen Verderber Winter 2021
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Yasmina Parto Wonder A sense of wonder, we have lost ourselves in routine, we are not conscious anymore, we do not notice, or react. we lost our sense of wonder, the core curiosity of human nature. to regain this awareness of the moment, we need to wonder, like a child. A dwelling, a place that renders a feeling of physical unease to the observer, alternating perspectives and spatial impressions, a place to be reminded of the moment, to make you wonder, notice, and respond. A new manifestation of a place called home. Advisors: Fala Atelier 56
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Saaraa Premji Mitha Translations (all my collaborators are dead) We are collectors, hoarding reminders of what we admire because our discipline is rooted and produced through precedent. Looting from decades of recorded works, we take, mix, recompose, layer, shuffle, and re-contextualize what has been. We sample. Sourcing through time. Translating, then re-translating from something far removed in language, history, culture, and context. Each translation seeking not a literal re-representation of thought, but instead re-presenting to convey clear expression and render meaning as completely as possible. This thesis recaptures the lost influence of postwar Japanese residential architecture for our ever-fluid, networked, and omniscient world. Advisors: Fala Atelier Winter 2021
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Laraib Qasim House of Emotions I am interested in the potential of environmental psychology — the scientific study of the transactions and interrelationships between people and their physical surroundings — within the context of virtual space. This project broadcasts information about the changing human behaviors in curated atmospheres. Using the style of miniature paintings as a communication tool and formal expression, these spaces engage in building relationships between colour, visceral intricacy, ornament, pattern, and texture. I welcome you into a virtual house where you can enter any miniature painting and experience any kind of space you want to. I welcome you to the house of emotions.
Advisors: Fredrik Hellberg and Lara Lesmes 58
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Rubab Razvi Home Away From Home Every year, Canada admits thousands of refugees. Their journey from landing in Canada to finding permanent homes and becoming integrated and independent Canadians is full of challenges, and the support systems in place are not enough to solve their problems. This project considers refugee infrastructure — or the lack thereof — and proposes a way for housing to become a vehicle for social, economic, and cultural integration.
Advisor: Kelly Doran Winter 2021
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Autumn Riggan Shorelines and Bathers A shoreline is simultaneously a mediator between water and land and a threshold, providing change as continuity. This thesis is located between underwater and out of water, between humans and other living organisms, between clean and grey water, between an infrastructural system and an immediate location, and between the useful present and an abandoned past. Imagining the ritual of bathing as suspended between a series of architectural spaces that collectively operate as a shoreline, the project is located along a portion of the Newmarket Canal, a derelict watercourse on the Holland River that intersects the Nokiidaa recreational trail.
Advisor: Laura Miller 60
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Audrey Rott The Mirror Reflection carries many meanings. It occurs when light bounces off an object. One may also reflect on themself, through thought and introspection. A mirror acts as a surface upon which reflection occurs, but is not limited to a single plane. This thesis project explores the ways in which the reflection of our surroundings can become a catalyst for change in our built environment and our individual perceptions of our world.
Advisors: Christian Joakim, Gregory Neudorf, and Gilles Saucier Winter 2021
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Irina Rouby Apelbaum Damn, You Live Like This? This thesis looks at the repurposing of a decommissioned hospital in North York as a site for the building of neighbourhood relationships between gossip and loneliness. Drawing from morphological, tectonic, and narrative research into the commons of 14 houses across three cities, this project invents a series of interstitial spaces of encounter in existing and new buildings. Design interventions include housing, public routes, and common spaces created via additions, removals, maintenance, and bricolage. Thresholds and fluid boundaries negotiate connections among agents and neighbours that are based on frankness, and which facilitate mutual aid.
Advisor: Petros Babasikas 62
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Joshua Sam-Cato Re-Institutionalisation: Reimagining Collective Living in Child Care Through the current system of foster homes, a significant number of children and youth in the care of society grow up experiencing a lack of permanency, making it challenging for them to attain membership within communities and establish connections within their neighbourhoods. As a result, they have limited access to resources for physical, social, and cognitive well-being. This thesis reimagines collective living in child care after the orphanage by examining how architecture can facilitate membership within different scales of community while providing safe spaces for young people to grow. By advancing an alternative, this project hopes to spark discussions regarding new forms of domesticity and promote new ways of thinking about home. Image: The Bowery Boys. “Look Back At The Bronx — Images from NYC’s Department of Records.”
Advisor: Mauricio Quirós Pacheco Winter 2021
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Rahul Sehijpaul fables of the domestic the house is more than a work of art; it is an archive of reveries that serve as icons for the anthology of life. so i wrote this life. to examine realms of the domestic. to grasp of how melody can affect concrete. to feel the weight of dwelling. to build for our narratives and live with fables of the domestic.
Advisors: Fala Atelier 64
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Jiaxin (Jia Jia) Shi Abandoned in Athens When a trip to Athens became impossible due to the pandemic, this thesis transformed itself into a virtual tour of the city. From historical records to Google walks, Abandoned in Athens puts together a fragmented digital atlas responding to the legacy of the “grand tour” and focusing on three unique modern ruins across the city. A series of panoramic drawings reconstruct the historical, cultural, and urban context of these ruins and stage speculative fictional projections. The project hopes to open up dialogues on abandoned public spaces, urban agents, subterranean vectors, modern ruins, and how we may start to reoccupy them.
Advisor: Petros Babasikas Winter 2021
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Vaibhavi Shinde The Naaz Located in Toronto’s east end, the Gerrard India Bazaar has been experiencing a decline in its South Asian identity for the past two decades. However, the Festival of South Asia, an annual two-day street celebration, continues to foster cross-cultural exchange by enabling informal encounters between the locals, businesses, and regional visitors. Characterized by this ethos of hospitality, the Naaz aspires to be an inviting, permanent space that acknowledges, embodies, and preserves the cultural history of the area. The fluid and flexible nature of the design is intended to produce spaces that encourage interaction and interpretive use.
Advisor: Elisa Silva 66
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Julie-Anne Starling Reforest to Rebuild This thesis proposes an alternative way to grow the city — one parallel with the temporal rhythms of the ever-changing, dynamic forest. It explores the concept of a self-sufficient carbon cycle: growing, harvesting, processing, and rebuilding. It illustrates how we might surrender to wood’s heterogeneity, uniqueness, and intricacies, where a branch’s dimensions dictate design, and where the volume of built elements are proportional to the species available. It offers a reinterpretation of the use, value, and processes of the forest — not as an unlimited resource to extract, but as part of a greater ecological and urban metabolism. Growing the urban forest becomes the mechanism through which the GTHA rebuilds itself.
Advisor: Kelly Doran Winter 2021
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Liam Thornewell House Overhead The trend of facade retention projects in Toronto has led to a growing collection of scaffolding structures across the city. For years, these structures hover above the public realm while supporting a historic facade in situ. House Overhead questions if this scaffolding could serve a dual purpose, not only to support a facade but also to act as the structure for a temporary dwelling within.
Advisors: Fala Atelier 68
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Sidney Tsao Auntie Collective “If I had something to do, your mom could help pick my kids up. If your mom had something, I could pick you guys up.” Investigating hidden densities within the suburbs, this thesis proposes a new collective development model that responds to the typology of the “astronaut family.” By following a collective of nine Taiwanese aunties in White Rock, British Columbia, the project celebrates the concept of 不要 浪費 (búyàolàngfèi — meaning, “do not waste”) as the basis of a housing model that emphasizes sharing as a means of survival.
Advisor: Michael Piper Winter 2021
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Sky Ece Ulusoy Reconstructing Memory My attachment to things led me to research how other people form attachments to objects. I realized that our individual attachments are reflections of our relationships with people and places, and that these attachments create common ground where the social happens. I am interested in collective and individual memory and how the process of remembering and reconstructing memories relates to disappearing places and what replaces them. This project blurs the lines between fantasy and reality by using storytelling, drawing, and photography as tools to reconstruct the essence of these spaces.
Advisor: An Te Liu 70
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Neil Xavier Vas Post Postwar: Intensification in Toronto’s Blue Belt This thesis identifies potential in areas of low-density postwar housing. This type of housing is characterized by larger lot conditions and lower dollar-per-square-metre values than any other dwelling classification. By revisiting the materiality of building construction and formulating typologies that address Toronto’s housing crisis while being mindful of the city’s embodied carbon footprint, we can unlock the potential of Toronto’s postwar backyards to accommodate intensification.
Advisor: Kelly Doran Winter 2021
71
David Warrick Encapsulating History The Vancouver Art Gallery serves as an arts center, historical landmark, and hub for the city of Vancouver. The proposed design will preserve, integrate, and showcase the existing neoclassical building. An addition will double the existing square footage, improve accessibility, increase circulation, and introduce new programs to the site. Through the implementation of transparency on the ground plane and a centralized atrium, the proposed design will complement the heritage building. The existing north facade will be encapsulated within the large semi-public atrium, inherently expanding the public realm and use of the site.
Advisor: George Baird 72
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Li Wei Vancouver Art Gallery Renovation and Expansion This project aims to explore whether there are realistic development options on the site of the Vancouver Art Gallery. Given the significance of the entire Robson Square Complex, it was essential to establish a clear set of planning objectives that would guide the effort. The design strategy examines the inherent capacity of the Georgia Street Plaza to accommodate expansion of the gallery. The strategy also investigates the implications of creating a substantial new architectural presence on Georgia Street, while emphasizing the necessity of strengthening a sense of civic public space.
Advisor: George Baird Winter 2021
73
Lindsay Wu Past and Present Futures: Exhibiting Domesticity This thesis examines contemporary and historic housing trends, seen through the model home’s exhibition of domesticity. Western Woods’ postwar Trend House Program showcased affordable, architectdesigned, single-family model homes for Canadian consumers, displaying contemporary design trends and new modes of domesticity for the postwar future. What is today’s Trend House? What futures do we face, and envision? The Tiny House Movement provides one answer: making first-time homeownership more accessible and reducing resource consumption. I propose a new exhibition of model homes near Toronto’s Design District, exhibiting past, present, and future modes of domesticity.
Advisor: Laura Miller 74
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Fan Xie New Extension of the Vancouver Art Gallery A proposed extension of the Vancouver Art Gallery embraces the west side of the former courthouse building. This extension provides a unique circulation system that links both new and original programs. It also features an atrium space that connects all three entrances. With geographical information and a solar analysis tool, the angle and the shape of the atrium roof are designed to maximize solar heat gain in the winter and minimize it in the summer.
Advisor: George Baird Winter 2021
75
George Xing In the Closet Can closets choreograph a new form of domesticity? Since the 18th century, various closet typologies have served as retreats from domesticity’s demands and social circumstances, securing fulfillment of psychological needs. The physical occupation of closets activated a spectrum of social conditions, including self-exploration, intimate relations, community building, and social awareness. The postwar home and its emphasis on functional storage severed the closet’s relation to human occupation. After decades of closets blending into daily life’s interstices, this thesis posits a variety of closet typologies adapted to, and expanded within, a multi-family housing development in a suburban Toronto housing complex.
Advisor: Laura Miller 76
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Qian Yang A Quiet Place Attitudes towards death have transmuted as the public has become increasingly secular, prompting the need for the funeral industry to offer new ways of commemoration outside the existing structure. While new forms of commemoration have been taking place in recent years, there remains a need to respond to current global environmental concerns. Traditional funeral rituals are heavily dependent on materialistic symbolism, but the world at large can no longer afford to sustain such practices. This project proposes a new remembrance typology that focuses on the biosphere, and sustainability.
Advisor: Laura Miller Winter 2021
77
Treasure (Jingyuan) Zhang Microclimate Maneuver After the Lakeview Power Station was demolished, the land left behind was classified as brownfield, which refers to severely contaminated soil. This thesis project remediates the soil using the microclimate zones near the site, which include parkland, reserve land, and open water. The architectural intervention is the structural support for this soil remediation maneuver. It defines different microclimates and builds connections among them. The intervention aims for long-lasting impact on the landscape.
Advisors: Christian Joakim, Gregory Neudorf, and Gilles Saucier 78
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Jie Zhang The 7th Direction “The cure for loneliness is solitude.” -Marianne Moore Architects do not often voluntarily design for solitude and isolation. It seems too risky, too irresponsible toward society, and also too insignificant a task in the greater scheme of things. Architecture, nature, and solitude are the topics that I intend to explore through this thesis project. How can we harmonize the relationship between architecture and nature, and thus create spaces to foster the positive value of solitude? This is the ultimate question, for which this project is only the start of the answer. Advisor: Mauricio Quirós Pacheco Winter 2021
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Master of Urban Design Advisors Angus Laurie Mariana Leguia
Siqing Hu Ecological Neighbourhood Toronto has the potential to develop a zero-waste neighbourhood. By following biological methods and formulating a systematically designed framework that links different functions and encourages mixed-density clusters, self-contained and biological cycles will be built within the community microclimate. An “ecological neighbourhood” laboratory will be constructed to create a zero-waste development where occupants can lead a low-carbon lifestyle. The techniques explored here are potentially applicable to the rest of the Greater Toronto Area and other cities around the world.
Advisors: Angus Laurie and Mariana Leguia 82
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Yongxian (Roger) Huang Collage Life in Downtown Hamilton Downtown Hamilton is a centre of culture and heritage. It has convenient public transit, and many towers built in the 1960s and 1970s. It used to be a walkable neighbourhood. Influenced by automobile-driven planning post-World War II, residents gradually moved out to suburbs and small businesses found it hard to survive. Surface parking replaced many of the original mixed-use residential buildings and made downtown a hostile place. With the support of rapid transit and employment policy, downtown Hamilton has another opportunity to thrive. This thesis focuses on how to recover walkability in a densified neighbourhood.
Advisors: Angus Laurie and Mariana Leguia Winter 2021
83
Rida Khan Karachi, Commoning Karachi is home to more than 20 million of us, but the default development trend sacrifices the civic, natural, and urban environments for economic development that leaves the masses with very little. A city is a reflection of power relations, and when the public has no power systemically, collaborative advocacy becomes a beacon. This thesis investigates the potential of radical bottom-up urban design in the face of condescending civic involvement, recalibrating from reactive organizing to proactive envisioning. The commoning of Karachi’s urban seafront, Clifton Beach — a space of wealth that belongs to everyone — is explored as a case study.
Advisors: Angus Laurie and Mariana Leguia 84
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Lindsey Nantes Stitch as a Verb Lima is Peru’s centre for commerce and industry. Since the mid-1900s, spontaneous growth and lack of interest in protecting nature have resulted in a collective blind spot towards ecological systems in favor of the economy. This thesis focuses on Los Pantanos de Villa, a reflection of the urban condition. It is Lima’s only protected natural area, but its role as a wetland of local and international importance continues to be threatened along the edges by urbanization. By exploring the concept of boundaries and borders, this thesis seeks to address how edges can be limits and spatially contribute to urban growth.
Advisors: Angus Laurie and Mariana Leguia Winter 2021
85
Ruotian Tan Build on Edges Build on Edges is an experiment in urban development that aims to devise a cohesive strategy for tactically generating sustainable high-rise communities in urban edge areas. Taking the Ontario Food Terminal as a pilot site, this project draws on case studies across scales to present a comprehensive design toolkit for creating a new type of vertical mixeduse high-rise building. These solutions are expected to be applicable to a wide range of urban territory.
Advisors: Angus Laurie and Mariana Leguia 86
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Yuxin Ti Living with Nature: A Suburban Proposal Along Sixteen Mile Creek Nowadays there is increasing awareness around the protection and rational use of creeks and urban valleys. However, longstanding indifference in urban development is difficult to eliminate. It is time to rethink the city with nature. Taking Sixteen Mile Creek in the Town of Milton as a test site, this thesis defines the creek as a green core. By expanding this “naturalness,” the project proposes a new type of suburban development with an integrated relationship with nature.
Advisors: Angus Laurie and Mariana Leguia Winter 2021
87
Manzure Yari Hybrid City: Industrial Urbanism for Adaptive Land Value Capture Toronto’s economy has been shifting from a heavy-industry-based model to a knowledge-intensive one. More recently, with a growing population and an ever-intensifying housing crisis, the Euclidian zoning governing Toronto’s employment lands is becoming an impediment to sustainable growth, especially along transit corridors. The Bermondsey Employment Area, along the Eglinton light-rail corridor, will be used as a testbed in this thesis to explore a new type of mixed-use zoning, which uses TOD principles and land value capture tools to encourage growth in a more just and sustainable manner while protecting established land-intensive employment uses.
Advisors: Angus Laurie and Mariana Leguia 88
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Master of Landscape Architecture Advisors Behnaz Assadi Megan Esopenko Liat Margolis Fadi Masoud Peter North Alissa North Aisling O’Carroll Matthew Perotto Elise Shelley Jane Wolff
Mohamed Al-Huneidi Self-Reliance Through Landscape Architecture As one of the oldest refugee camps in the Middle East, the Jabal AlHussein Refugee camp is one of the densest urban developments in the city of Amman, Jordan. With poverty and malnutrition playing major roles in the lives of many of the site’s inhabitants, the application of landscape architecture can be a key component in helping them achieve self-reliance. Modular solutions for rain and grey water collection, conveyance, and storage can be used in rooftop agricultural production. The possibilities for a better quality of life, a better diet, and greater access to open space are unlimited.
Advisor: Peter North 92
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Jin Cao The Coexistence of Grey and Green The Pu River has significance for local citizens, but it has been seriously polluted. This project aims to resolve the conflict between ecological habitats, cultural heritage, and heavy industry development. In the design process, I want to bring back the site’s rich traditional culture and native endangered species by constructing space for activities and restoring the natural environment. The design process also includes remediation according to different levels of pollution caused by industrial and agricultural practices.
Advisor: Alissa North Winter 2021
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Aobo Chen Live With Sediment The course of a high-sediment-content river is controlled by levee systems and oriented by water and sediment discharge functions, which cut off the connection between people and the water and destroy habitats. This project selects the Zhengzhou section of the Yellow River as a research case to explore a module system that can be applied to the entire river. The system aims to form a resilient waterfront that can adapt to the dynamically changing floodplain and seasonal flooding events, while treating sediment as a resource to reconnect people to the waterfront and restore the ecological habitat of the river.
Advisor: Megan Esopenko 94
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Blake Creamer Performance Park Responding to a post-industrial, reclaimed waterfront site in Saint John, New Brunswick, Performance Park challenges conventional assessments of landscape performance by proposing a continuum of performative acts of material exchange as a primary mode of design. Phased soft interventions and amenity provisions transform the site into an adaptive testing ground for historical, cultural, and ecological performance. The inquiry-based process of “asking questions physically” through excavation, remediation, and production actively repositions performance goals in relation to an ongoing site-generated dialogue. Continual experimentation and site engagement embraces uncertainty, producing a system of provisional design interventions, as opposed to typical “problem-solving” design solutions. Advisor: Aisling O’Carroll Winter 2021
95
Amelia Hartin Mobile Shore: Reinhabiting the Toronto Island Airport Lands In the 20th century, inhabiting landscapes relied on property lines, hard edges, and a stable climate. The climate emergency means that hard boundaries are increasingly untenable, especially at the water’s edge. On the Toronto Islands, where the airport hovers only a few feet above water, an accident is waiting to happen. Once drastically transformed to suit a techno-engineering agenda, the islands can be transformed again — this time to accommodate a new paradigm that recognizes the importance of water, public space, and habitat creation. Image: City of Toronto Archives; Google Earth.
Advisor: Jane Wolff 96
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Xueni Hu History in the Future: Reimagine Downtown Yonge Street in 2050 Yonge Street is one of the oldest streets in Toronto, representing the start of the city’s history. It has long been the heart and soul of the city. Yet its importance to the cultural identity of Toronto is not revealed in the current streetscape. My thesis focuses on maintaining the street’s significant influence on the cultural identity of the city while applying new landscape technologies that aim to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, and in so doing transforming Yonge Street into an eco-friendly and pedestrianfriendly street of the future.
Advisor: Peter North Winter 2021
97
Aliya Karmali Al Tabee’ah Healing the land, healing the people. An 80-kilometre pilgrimage route (Najaf to Karbala) along an ever-growing, 1,000-acre cemetery (Wadi al-Salam), is the site of an intervention that aims to create a healing landscape. Reviving effective indigenous planting and irrigation techniques while providing free public programming along the way will heal humans and landscape alike. Proximity to this healing landscape will bring solace to those who mourn the loss of loved ones. When we heal the land, we heal the people — because the land and the people are one.
Advisor: Behnaz Assadi 98
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Gal Kaufman Cedarvale Ravine This project examines the idea of revitalizing the aging infrastructure in Toronto’s city centre at the end of its lifespan. The site is located in downtown Toronto, in a natural ravine system impacted by one of the city’s most extensive pieces of infrastructure, the subway. The study examines an opportunity for reviving the ravine system to enable a living infrastructure that will provide a foundation for the city’s future. This project will help the city deal with flood water and develop a greener and more economical transportation culture, while showing how infrastructure interventions can bring about positive long-term change.
Advisor: Alissa North Winter 2021
99
Louisa Kennett The Spaces Between Underutilized open spaces in urban areas hold tremendous potential for addressing social and environmental challenges for vulnerable communities. When reclaimed with small-scale interventions, these spaces can address immediate needs of local residents while increasing long-term community resilience. Twenty per cent of Northeast Montreal North, one of Canada’s most densely populated neighbourhoods, is composed of underutilized spaces. This thesis proposes a framework for reclaiming these spaces through a community-driven approach centred on engaging and empowering local youth, who make up a substantial proportion of the population. The framework prioritizes building capacity from within, thereby presenting an alternative to the traditional community engagement process. Advisor: Elise Shelley 100
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Ryohei Kondo Sacred By Waste Sacred By Waste is located in the human-evacuated zone in Fukushima, where the infamous radiation leak occurred in 2011. This project investigates a new type of memorial and sacred landscape that belongs to Japan’s cultural history of sacred placemaking. As a memorial, mounds made of abandoned materials and contaminated soils become visual indications of the history of the site and reconnect people to the lands after their long absence. This memorial of abandonment is not meant to resolve the dilemmas of catastrophe. Through the journey to the mounds, a visitor reflects on the vulnerability of the landscape and recognizes that the landscape has a history before and after them.
Advisor: Jane Wolff Winter 2021
101
Wesley Kwong Do-over Last year was a record year for hurricanes, typhoons, and cyclones. Meanwhile, the increased intensity of sea-level rise is becoming more of a threat to coastal cities. This thesis uses the contrasting landscape conditions of urbanized and undeveloped coastline in Shenzhen Bay to explore whether traditional knowledge-based development can reduce the risk of flooding in the future. The project investigates the resiliency and vulnerability of the developed coastal edge by analyzing current fortification and coastal management strategies. The Fung Lok Wai, a wetland located on the southern coastline, becomes a site for exploring an alternative design and development strategy.
Advisor: Behnaz Assadi 102
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Fan Liu Shifting Habitat The Yellow River delta is a significant transfer station for avian migration. It attracts over four million birds every year. The existing wetland on the delta is fragmented and vulnerable, and climate change further threatens birds’ habitat. My proposed solution to this crisis is to release the Yellow River’s distributary channels across the delta landscape. This process will enrich and elevate the soil and provide places for vegetation to grow as new branches of the river meander and shift.
Advisor: Jane Wolff Winter 2021
103
Kate Lyne Collaborative and Regenerative Indigenous Stewardship This project aims to develop a long-term remediation and succession design that provides the Serpent River First Nation with a collaborative forest management strategy focused on regenerative ecologies and a nature-based greenhouse gas offset program, all self-led and comanaged by the community. By doing this, we can build long-term local and community-led knowledge that takes into consideration the sevengenerations principle, while also contributing to First Nation communities’ aim of land sovereignty and self-led determination. Overall, this thesis seeks to challenge the existing paradigms of ecological restoration in the context of a First Nation community, in a way that can lead to environmental justice for the Serpent River First Nation.
Advisor: Liat Margolis 104
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Lauren N. McLachlan In the Crowsnest This project juxtaposes our perceptions of ecological and physical systems by casting landscape architecture as a mediator of our relationships and experiences with freshwater inhabitants within the Southern Alberta eco-cultural region. Insights gained through grappling with the stunning contrast between the region’s legacy of coal mining and contemporary narratives of outdoor recreation shape considerations of technical remediation and place-based ecological learning, which inform reconsideration of a brownfield site near Blairmore, Alberta. In the Crowsnest, the scientific and cultural speak together in a new poetic through a novel ecology reflecting this history.
Advisor: Alissa North Winter 2021
105
Hamed Nadi PPP: Pop-up Parks and Parking How will COVID-19 reshape Toronto? This pandemic has changed the way we operate — and, with schools and offices sitting empty, some of these changes are here to stay. In the past, health crises helped create new urban amenities like alleyways, freshwater reservoirs, and large city parks. As the city’s population rises, Torontonians are in need of more open space, so that they can escape their tiny apartments and take care of their mental and physical health, now and in the future.
Advisor: Fadi Masoud 106
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Iqra Naqvi Reconnecting Stories The Scarborough Bluffs are a unique landscape in the middle of an urban core with limited accessibility and broken connections. The surrounding neighbourhoods have been developed over time with different systems of circulation that facilitate fast and slow movement. How can landscape architecture create systems that bridge broken links in landscape, history, and culture? This thesis advances a design proposal that enhances existing fragmented systems of movement and introduces paths that bridge broken connections and connect to a larger system. Along with circulation, this design provides a potential for creating coastal habitat and managing landscape issues, such as runoff.
Advisor: Megan Esopenko Winter 2021
107
Elif A. Özçelik The Çeşme: Reconstructing Istanbul’s Fountains The Ottoman fountain was a well established public good and charitable enterprise that mediated an integral and profound relationship between people and their life source. Following a thorough examination of historical ideas around water that Turkish people have inherited, this thesis revisits the fountain to engage in civic discussion on the importance of water. Employing an interdisciplinary study of all the traditional and contemporary roles of the Ottoman fountain, the project aims to explore ways in which water infrastructure can be an active design tool that will lead towards the future development of engaging civic and public environments.
Advisor: Liat Margolis 108
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Morgan Quinn Space for Water How can landscape architecture approach systems that extend beyond the spatial and temporal scales of the human experience? California’s Central Valley Aquifer is a massive body of subsurface freshwater that formed over millions of years. Unsustainable water management has resulted in significant groundwater depletion and lowering of the water table. Design solutions must rely on alternative disciplinary conceptualizations developed to operate at these scales. Notions used by geologists bridge scales from the microscopic to the continental to understand long-term processes. Space for Water reframes the theoretical basis of these concepts to generate new strategies for water table restoration.
Advisor: Matthew Perotto Winter 2021
109
Natalie Sisson Unearthing Memory: St. James’ Cemetery Reimagined Unearthing Memory critiques Toronto’s oldest operational cemetery, St. James’ Cemetery, its rigid conceptualization of cemetery program and aesthetics, and its lack of adaptation to changing needs of site users. Despite framing the site around memory and healing, St. James’ current strategies scar the earth, obscure history, and limit visitor access and agency. Through a targeted and phased planting strategy with infrastructure addressing needs of the bereaved, public visitors, and nonhumans, this project aims to revitalize physical and social site components, reclaim the cemetery for the living, and address an expanded understanding of memory and healing in humans, nonhumans, and landscape.
Advisor: Aisling O’Carroll 110
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Allison E.K. Smith 21 Years: Landscape Architecture Strategies for a Post-Carbon Future This is a pilot project that aims to initiate the urgently needed shift in landscape architecture design towards not only sequestering carbon, but also considering embodied carbon in materiality, construction, and maintenance. The site is a neighbourhood in the industrial city of Hamilton, Ontario, where the life expectancy of residents is 21 years shorter than in another neighbourhood located only six kilometres away. 21 Years asks the field of landscape architecture to rethink its practice using a systematic approach that tests possible outputs to attain carbon neutral and “climate positive” design solutions for a necessary post-carbon future.
Advisor: Behnaz Assadi Winter 2021
111
Bingqing Sun Connection Beyond the Physical This thesis will explore landscape architects’ role in connecting people with the environment. The Ashbridges Bay Treatment Plant is not only a huge piece of urban infrastructure, but also a historical laboratory that carries the memory of the city. Currently, the cultural connection between people and sewage treatment plants is missing. How can we break the wall and eliminate the barrier between the public and the ABTP?
Advisor: Matthew Perotto 112
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Ruixian Tang Seawall Improvement in the Qiantang Tidal Area The wonderful tidal bore of China’s Qiantang River comes cyclically twice a day. The shoreline has been shaped by the rising and falling of this tidal water for thousands of years. As a result, there is a long history of local people attempting to control the waterway. Currently, the river’s mouth is protected by over 400 kilometres of concrete seawalls, which act as barriers between humans and nature. My thesis focuses on seawall improvement, with a view towards restoring ecological habitats and improving human interaction with the water.
Advisor: Megan Esopenko Winter 2021
113
Andrew Taylor Returning to A’se’k A’se’K, meaning “the other room,” is a former tidal estuary in Pictou County, Nova Scotia that was once the provider and the heart of the Pictou Landing First Nation. For the Mi’kmaq community, it supported the “good life” — nourishing, thriving, and sustaining. The “good life” was halted in 1967 when the Northern Pulp mill contaminated A’se’K beyond recognition with industrial pulp effluent. In 2020, the mill ceased operation and now remediation is underway. This thesis aims to offer a landscape strategy for the community to reclaim and re-engage in lost local knowledge and cultural practices associated with the waters of A’se’K.
Advisor: Liat Margolis 114
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Hilary Anne Todhunter Spring Melt This thesis confronts the inadequacies of the dike infrastructure often utilized in Canada’s wetland regions as a flood response. With a focus on the convergence of Fort Albany and the Albany River, this project is rooted in non-solutionist design and does not dictate what should be done. Rather, it proposes a palette of land-based responses that recognize the river’s agency alongside community infrastructure within a rich and unparalleled ecosystem. In contrast to hard-engineered solutions that damage ecological integrity, landscape architecture can harness natural hydrology and land formation to build flood mitigation infrastructure.
Advisor: Peter North Winter 2021
115
Jennifer Chau Tran Versailles Landscape Planning Organization: Landscape as Advocacy Environmental racism can be defined as the unequal distribution of environmental benefits and pollution burdens based on race. The New Orleans neighbourhood of Versailles, home to the densest Vietnamese diaspora population in America, has historically been a passive receptor for the environmental repercussions of industry and extraction. This thesis proposes an operational framework for the Versailles Landscape Planning Organization, which introduces an environmental monitoring system that can continuously sense the health of the neighbourhood moving forward. The new framework creates a system of landscape programs that challenge the requirements of the extractive industries that have negatively affected residents’ wellbeing.
Advisor: Fadi Masoud 116
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Jiazhi Yin Reimagining the Aquascape of the Wuchuan Littoral Zone By analyzing a land reclamation plan in Wuchuan, a coastal city with a disaster-prone, economic-fringe, and aquaculture-focused identity, this thesis reimagines a response to the typical coastal land reclamation practiced in Chinese littoral cities, such as Shenzhen and Hong Kong. The design proposes integrating aquaculture and urban growth as resilient aquaculture armor. In so doing, the project aspires to support and expand the roles that aquacultures play in building resilient coastlines, urban ecologies, and a cohabited public realm.
Advisor: Fadi Masoud Winter 2021
117
Ruiqi Zhao Surviving Between Water This thesis addresses the long history of detrimental human activities on the Yangtze River, which have resulted in a systematic decline of the Yangtze finless porpoise population. The proposed urban porpoise reserve in Nanjing, China will create a unique opportunity to help safeguard this critically endangered species by restoring degraded habitat in a highly visible and public context. Design interventions will construct a public porpoise habitat that helps restore the river’s damaged ecology, encourages biodiversity, and raises awareness by engaging and educating people, all of which will aid in saving this species from extinction.
Advisor: Elise Shelley 118
Daniels Faculty Thesis Review
Yufei Zhao Weaving the Seven Kilometres The once thriving riverfronts in industrial cities on the Yangtze River now serve as dumping grounds for industrial contamination, which is intensified by seasonal flooding. The legacy of contamination results in gaps between riverine open spaces and adjacent neighbourhoods, which have become barriers to future development in those areas. Using Wuhan’s industrial riverfront as a testing ground, this project seeks to develop a phased strategy that makes a redesigned levee a spine of protective and accessible public infrastructure. The design combines different remediation strategies to embrace and structure future development.
Advisor: Elise Shelley Winter 2021
119
