THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2014 ANNE LOUISE ABOUD SARA AHADI NEGIN AKHLAGHPOUR NORA BARBU MATTHEW BLUNDERFIELD DAVID GORDON JOHN BURNS MANDY CADGER MATTHEW CARDINAL JUAN CAVIEDES BULENT CETIN AMANDA CHONG ANDREW CHOPTIANY PAUL CHRISTIAN CHRISTOPHER CHUNG MICHAEL DAVID COOK MEGAN ESOPENKO MAXIME GRANDMAISON MEHDI HADI MARY HICKS EMILIA HURD JUNFENG LI XIAO SUNNY LI
STELLA YUAN LIN BO LU XIAOXIAO LU DARLENE MONTGOMERY SCOTT NORSWORTHY EBRAHIM OLIAZADEH ELIZA OPRESCU PETER CHARLES OSBORNE IPSHITA RAMASWAMY JUSTIN RIDGEWAY DOUGLAS ROBB SAMIRA ROSTAMI BOUKANI JUSTIN SABOURIN MEENAKSHI SHARMA ELLIOTT STURTEVANT REBECCA TAYLOR SONJA TIJANIC GINTARAS VALIULIS VINH VAN VICTORIA WALKER KEREN WEISZ KENNETH WONG
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This book showcases the final thesis projects presented by Master of Architecture, Master of Landscape Architecture, and Master of Urban Design students at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design on April 16 & 17, 2014.
Thesis Reviews Winter 2014
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THESIS ADVISORS George Baird Aziza Chaouni Rodolphe el-Khoury Georges Farhat Ted Kesik Robert Levit David Lieberman Francesco Martire John J. May Laura Miller Alissa North Pete North Pina Petricone Michael Piper Elise Shelley Mason White Jane Wolff Robert Wright
Thesis Reviews Winter 2014
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Anne Louise Aboud Sara Ahadi Negin Akhlaghpour Nora Barbu Matthew Blunderfield David Gordon John Burns mandy Cadger Matthew Cardinal Juan Caviedes Bulent Cetin Amanda Chong Andrew Choptiany Paul Christian Christopher Chung Michael David cook Megan Esopenko Maxime Grandmaison Mehdi Hadi Mary Hicks Emilia Hurd Junfeng Li Xiao Sunny Li
52 54 56 58 60 62 64 66 68 70 72 74 76 78 80 82 84 86 88 90 92 94
stella Yuan Lin bo lu Xiaoxiao lu Darlene Montgomery Scott Norsworthy Ebrahim Oliazadeh Eliza Oprescu Peter Charles Osborne Ipshita Ramaswamy Justin Ridgeway Douglas Robb Samira Rostami Boukani Justin Sabourin Meenakshi Sharma Elliott Sturtevant Rebecca Taylor Sonja Tijanic Gintaras Valiulis Vinh Van Victoria Walker Keren Weisz Kenneth Wong
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g+row=greening the right-of-way
Anne Louise Aboud, MLA This thesis project seeks to challenge the traditional right-of-way (ROW) paradigm and explore how a municipality can effectively redeploy interstitial areas between property lines to control stormwater runoff. The ROW of an older, established urban residential neighborhood in East York is retrofitted with Low Impact Development (LID) technologies, generating additional community benefits beyond stormwater management. The City of Toronto’s Wet Weather Flow Management Master Plan (WWFMMP) provides a framework for controlling precipitation flows, and its 25-year implementation plan outlines measures ranging from eliminating Combined Sewer Overflows (CSO) to disconnecting downspouts. The neighborhood being retrofitted is located in the CSO zone and its combined sewer system should convey a two-year design storm without surcharge. The extreme storm event of July 8th, 2013 again highlighted the vulnerability of the existing combined sewer system to basement flooding and sewer backups. To minimize potential surcharge occurrences, stormwater flows entering the combined sewer system must be drastically reduced. Implementing source controls rather than end of pipe solutions can be an effective strategy, reducing impervious cover and treating stormwater at point of generation. Retrofitting existing developments with LID technologies can create performative landscapes capable of mitigating normal rainfall amounts. In growing urban areas, available land for LID implementation is limited and largely unavailable for public works. An overlooked yet key constituent of the public realm is the ROW, typically associated with transportation corridors. The ROW is arguably one of the most underexploited resources at a municipality’s disposal.
advisor: elise shelley Thesis Reviews Winter 2014
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revitilize:
installations of material ecologies
Sara Ahadi, MLA The Okanagan Valley of British Columbia is an ever-changing panorama that stretches across 250 km of distinct sub-regions. In the southern portion of the valley lies the town of Osoyoos, which represents the rare and disappearing antelope brush ecosystem. Over the years, its unique semi-arid climate — the only one of its kind in Canada — has made the Okanagan a major hub for viticulture and tourism. With over 130 wineries and an expanding population, the region is facing a series of political, cultural, and ecological challenges that landscape architecture has the potential to help resolve. The area’s growth is a contentious issue involving multiple boundaries, ones that expand and impinge upon diminishing adjacencies, as well as ones that fail to align and leave remnant fragment parcels in between. This project proposes to mitigate these gaps by using pomace, the by-product from the wine industry, as a building material that speaks to the local identity of the site. The pomace is combined with local soil and seeds from the antelope brush ecosystem to create forms designed to break down and propagate native plants over time. Through experiencing these spaces from both up-close and afar, the design aims to highlight a material not often seen by the public and use it to help regenerate a declining ecosystem that is occurring due to the same industry from which the material also originates.
advisor: alissa north Thesis Reviews Winter 2014
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Transformative Urban Experience
Negin Akhlaghpour, MUD Transformation of both local strip malls and regional shopping malls into more urban spaces has been a significant focus for growth in Toronto. This study explores the regionally shaped mall, Centerpoint Mall, which is the only suburban-type mall still existing along Yonge Street. Centerpoint Mall is located on the south-west corner of Yonge Street and Steeles Avenue, the joint between 3 major cities: the City of Toronto, the City of Markham, and the City of Vaughan. It is the largest property along Yonge Street with an area of 14.6 hectares, and approximately 10 hectares of surface parking. A significant street, Yonge Street is continuing to develop and evolve. This area is currently undergoing an assessment for public transit expansion. A new subway station will introduce opportunities for more attractive urban development and intensification. My strategy for redevelopment is to integrate the shops and stores into the new landscape, providing an interface between private commerce and public life — a programmatic and distinctive relationship that benefits commercial, community, and cultural spaces.
advisor: robert levit Thesis Reviews Winter 2014
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COMMERCIAL
COMMERCIAL
INSTITUTIONAL
KNOWLEDGE WORKERS TECHNOLOGY
RESIDENTIAL
INTELLECTUALS SOCIAL GATHERINGS
CULTURE
ARTISTS WORKING IN ALL MEDIA
INDUSTRIAL
creating commercial products and consumer goods pedagogical/public event driven programs
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creative and innovative problem finding
audience-driven museums commerce-type fundraising activities by non-profits
sliding role of commercial galleries
Cultural synergy:
Emplacement and Permanence
Nora Barbu, MArch This thesis advances the need for our cultural and creative industries to reattain a state of permanence and independence in our built environment. When plans for such developments explore their relationship to the environment, to the site, and to each other, a new architectural potential will develop that will have a lasting and evolving influence on a community. By finding unique moments of synergy, the proposed modules resist current temporary typologies and question the future of studio workspaces, incubators, and showcases. The distinctive features and needs of the Junction Triangle, as a mixed-use neighbourhood, will be emphasized, redrawn, and addressed by the project, while inevitably intertwined with the program of the cultural facilities designed.
advisor: mason white Thesis Reviews Winter 2014
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pigeon park
Matthew Blunderfield, MArch If place is always retrospective, how do we begin? With blatant flaws. Place of cringing. Place where the awnings shelter political loss. Inefficient place of tents, structures and objects. Tarpaulin of place, and blanket. Nothing authorizes place to speak. Not the putrefaction. Not the pruning. Not the cold ache. Place where the tired people make stained records of passivity. Place of what is to come, place that shows us, among the degradation of conditions, to be capable, to achieve a flawed vision. We live on top of this place fragile and overlapping, the time pouring through and moulding, from the inside, our body. We walk in our garments and in our governments towards the errors in humanism, the bungled asphalt roofing torn by pigeons’ feet and patched with tar. Our feet are pigeons with leisure of pigeons tearing holes in the rooms made of pollen and chance and noise, the rooms that are streets. We are pigeons. We are disobedient. Some of us are paperless. In this place those without papers carry all the civic emotion. This is called service. Even the most passionate resistances register as components of immeasurable repetition extending outwards from the body in all directions, like a tilework. This is a market. Always its scale is wrong. Thus we are introduced to our bodies, fashioning and adoring, cladding and coating, and the synthesis of our emoting minds is an environment. Beyond topography the sky purples. We have called it purple. We were standing outdoors in our bodies. We called hey Steve. We come here plainly and openly to be part of what change is. This is our face. — Lisa Robertson, from Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture
advisor: john j. may Thesis Reviews Winter 2014
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sites of conveyance
David Gordon John Burns, MLA Every problem has in it the seeds of its own solution.
- Norman Vincent Peale
In 2013, the Global Nature Fund designated Lake Winnipeg as the World’s Most Threatened Lake of that year. Situated in the heart of North America, Lake Winnipeg reflects a growing issue across the continent, and the world — eutrophication. Eutrophic waters are evident of an ailing watershed; to develop a solution we must look upstream along the paths of conveyance. These waterways are conduits of excessive contamination from overburdened landscape and urban centres. This thesis proposes to utilize these waterways as infrastructures that heal instead of degrade ecosystems, while conveying a broader understanding of resource management and natural processes.
advisor: robert wright Thesis Reviews Winter 2014
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vote no to megacity
mandy Cadger, MUD Toronto amalgamated in 1998 contrary to considerable public disproval involving a referendum in which 76% voted against the new “megacity.” The decision was nonetheless implemented, promising a stronger presence for Toronto in the region and a logical reduction in duplicate departments. This simplification of public services further resulted in the harmonization of city standards and a “one size fits all” approach, regardless of Toronto’s diverse mix of distinct neighbourhoods. The plea for de-amalgamation still resonates today, 16 years later. Competing values within the city have left many feeling as if their neighbourhoods are not being represented or properly funded. This thesis offers an alternative to de-amalgamation by proposing new legislation that could redirect investment to the former municipalities without reestablishing their autonomy. Further exploration of converting the civic centres of the previous municipalities into new centres of intensification that are unique to the neighbourhoods in which they reside would celebrate Toronto’s diversity and multicentric city form.
advisor: michael Piper Thesis Reviews Winter 2014
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allan gardens
Matthew Cardinal, MArch Embroidery you will have, of course, but don’t, I pray you, have everything covered with embroidery as if it were washing day. Don’t do little things with embroidery, but cover large surfaces with delicate designs; good embroidery must be done on a larger scale than you do it: cushions, curtains, covers, and every large surface should be covered with delicate embroidered patterns, but don’t use silk – it is too iridescent. — Oscar Wilde, May 1882, Allan Gardens
advisor: laura miller Thesis Reviews Winter 2014
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ENVISIONING THE FUTURE OF URBAN HABITAT IN BARRANQUILLA Juan Caviedes, MUD Any given territory, including any settlement, city, or township, is part of a more complex system of networks at different scales, from the local and the regional to the global scale. At present, the international context is ruled by open economies and the international focus of regional markets, which are supported by a network of systems and global flows. In recent decades, regional and urban models have been transformed as a result of increased competition, technological change, economic interaction, and market globalization. The regional urban phenomenon that characterizes the growth of cities and settlements in Colombia has led to high-impact infrastructure projects and the construction of a series of networks, which have become a valid alternative to the consolidation of the territory, as well as a great alternative to the construction of new urban developments. This thesis proposes a new urban development in the northern part of Barranquilla. It aims to consolidate urban settlements in the northern part of the city in order to strengthen its core functions, which will be an asset in this part of the country. A new morphological element at a metropolitan scale will be part of the region. Networks and nodes will be multipurpose and different in nature, and can include recreational uses, facilities, or core functions of public transport.
advisor: rodolphe el-khoury Thesis Reviews Winter 2014
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Reclaiming the Bosphorus
Istanbul’s new edge / (or waterfront)
Bulent Cetin, MLA The emergence of new tourism-related developments at historic port cities has brought with it a range of physical, economic, and social benefits. However, there are often challenges in developing tourism infrastructure in a dense urban fabric while still preserving the unique heritage resources that attract visi¬tors and tourists to these cities. With its unique history dating back to the seventh millennium BC and its growing tourism industry, the transcontinental city of Istanbul is a prime case of one of these cities. Currently, the stretch of Istanbul’s waterfront in the Galata district along the shores of Bosphorus, the strait that divides Europe from Asia, is occupied by a large international ferry terminal, institutions such as universities and museums, and former industrial sites. This thesis addresses the current state of the waterfront in Istanbul, and proposes design strategies to create a continuous public space on the water’s edge while maintaining the large cruise ship terminal that is an important revenue source for the city. Preserving working waterfront use, this project aims to provide public programs and uses while creating a sense of place in Galata, Istanbul and has the potential to restore the city’s connection to its waterfront.
advisor: pete north Thesis Reviews Winter 2014
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makeshift and the productive public realm Amanda Chong, MArch Once interwoven in the pre-industrial craft economy, mass production split the containers of work — the “office” and the “factory” — into separate programs, pushing industrial production out into the periphery of the city. However, the players in industry are changing with recent advancements in digital fabrication technology, as tools for production, once exclusive to large corporations, are made accessible to anybody with a computer and Internet connection. These disruptive tools, coupled with recent cultural phenomena of democratized design through online social networking — including Do-It-Yourself “Maker” communities, as well as cocreation, hacking, and open source design — are quickly growing from hobbyist scale to a paradigm shift in the nature of manufacturing. Such transformation, rooted in access and technology, is provoking discussions on the revival of factories in the city, creating new relationships between urban and industrial life. This thesis recombines the containers of work to create a neighbourhood-scaled “Maker Factory” — a place of collaborative enterprise for local production, file-tofabrication, and community repair. Sandwiched between low-scale warehouses, a rail-line, and the residential fabric of an industrial neighbourhood under transition, the underutilised parking lot of Value Village at Bloor and Lansdowne was selected as a testing ground for a new architectural typology of Makers. The post-industrial paradigm of flexibility and mobility is explored through the rising trend of “coworking” to create an interdisciplinary facility that links design, production, and consumers back into the urban context, while providing opportunities for cultural and civic interaction.
Image source: Hamilton Gear Company circa 1913, courtesy of Donald Weston, published in Taddle Creek Magazine (Dec 1998)
advisor: aziza chaouni Thesis Reviews Winter 2014
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project tokyo/toronto
Andrew Choptiany, MArch Toronto is a city of houses. Despite recent condo development, the vast majority of the housing stock in Toronto is still fully detached housing. Huge portions of the city fabric are low-rise, low-density neighbourhoods. These areas have been largely left untouched since their construction, and despite being designed on suburban principles, rarely show the traces of the current housing boom. Condominiums have served to house the increasing population but are increasingly being viewed as an undesirable option in terms of urban morphology and quality of housing. Tokyo is known for its efficient housing but also for it’s crowding and lack of outdoor space. How then to increase the density of Toronto, contend with rising property prices, provide ideal housing conditions and maintain the characteristic neighbourhoods of the city? Project Tokyo/Toronto builds on existing infrastructure and typology in order to intervene in the residential areas of Toronto that are the least dense, but also the most delicate in terms of neighbourhood character. Drawing upon research and experience in Tokyo, the project is a series of intimate, fully detached houses inserted into existing residential blocks. It uses a prevalent condition in Toronto, where driveways provide access to rear garages, to give access to new buildings, set at the rear of the property. Project Tokyo/Toronto delves into the meaning of a house in an age of increased density, asking questions of privacy, quality of life, and ownership. The project seeks to create intensified neighbourhoods and well designed housing at an urban scale.
advisor: george baird Thesis Reviews Winter 2014
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Wellington Destructor
Paul Christian, MArch In the pre-industrial conception of landscape, man-made creations were embedded in nature, and, as such, could be considered as extensions of that world. Following the Industrial Revolution, in increasingly urbanized areas, this relationship reversed. Nature became restrained by technological forces that seemed completely detached from it, forming a new definition of landscape.1 Just as the urban environment seems to encompass more and more of the world, the culture of mass consumption renders it increasingly fragile. A landscape that appears to be ever more connected and functional is simultaneously becoming obsolete at a greater and greater rate,² to the point where the newly built can be conceived of as an instant ruin, a ruin in reverse.3 But what if this obsolescence is reframed not as an end, but as a point in a transition to something else? The focus of this project will be to examine an area of urban ruination in Toronto, centred on the abandoned Wellington Street Destructor. Owing to its origins as an area where residential and industrial uses intersect, this a neighbourhood that has always displayed a dilapidated but vital character, where a ball game would take place before a backdrop of smoke stacks and busy rail yards. As much a documentation of what is already there as an addition of something “new,” this proposal seeks to work sensitively within an “as found” condition. The aim is to bypass a nostalgic freezing of time and process, employing the framework of the ruin as an instrument in illustrating the inherent transitional character of the site and working within it, exploring the possibility of a more optimistic future and highlighting the true interconnectedness of city and nature. 1Antoine Picon, “Anxious Landscapes: From the Ruin to Rust,” Grey Room, 01 (2000): 66-67 ²Ibid, 67 3Smithson, Robert. “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey.” Art Forum, Dec 1967, 52
advisor: john j. may Thesis Reviews Winter 2014
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Social Media/Social Spaces
Christopher Chung, MArch Digital devices are becoming exponentially more powerful, smarter, faster, and lighter while continuing to connect people all over the world. Aspects of our everyday life have been changed and revolutionized forever. The way we communicate with friends, family, co-workers, and strangers; the way we learn about culture and politics; and the way we consume products and advertising have all started to slowly shift from the physical to the virtual realm. Contributing to this change has been the immediate rise of social media and social media networks. The growth and popularity of social media has resulted in an important and fundamental cultural shift from the traditional vertical mode of communication to the horizontal mode of communication. It has effectively changed the constitution of public and private space, while also giving an unprecedented amount of control to individuals when sharing and receiving information. This thesis encompasses three similar but different projects that look at novel social interactions through social media and social spaces. It does not prescribe any particular kind of spatial experience but enables them all; it is an invisible architecture that makes numerous parallel virtual worlds visible. The aim is to provoke discussion about the future possibilities of interactivity and connectivity between people, spaces, and objects.
advisor: rodolphe el-khoury Thesis Reviews Winter 2014
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Watershed Toronto
Michael David cook, MLA The July 8, 2013 storm showed that much of Toronto is fundamentally vulnerable to above-model rainfalls. Toronto’s basement flooding retrofit program focuses on a narrowly defined engineering response: expanding capacity and resolving constraints within the municipal road and sewer systems. An attention to landscape systems remains all but absent in Toronto’s flood mitigation and wet weather flow planning. Evidence from July 8th suggests that terrain features, obscured by development, play a key role in where and how flooding happens. Despite its official attribution to isolated, “low-lying” areas, basement flooding in Toronto is widespread and occurs overwhelmingly on upland sites associated with headwater ridges or with the low-order stream systems once fed by those ridges and now obliterated. This combination of a terrain-situated hazard and the stacked flow or flux of surface runoff, piped runoff, and hydrostatic loading of the prevailing clay soils cannot be addressed solely through conventional sewer retrofits and calls for lotlevel improvements. In fact, some measures like downspout disconnection may be decidedly non-beneficial in much of Toronto, where clay means that rainfall is quickly converted into either infrastructural runoff or additional loading of an already-saturated ground. Addressing this suburban hazard requires rethinking the assumptions that inform the engineering of both ‘grey’ and ‘green’ stormwater infrastructure. Using the Richview neighbourhood of Etobicoke as a testing ground, this project proposes a terrain-based assessment methodology and a system of interventions that can reduce the probability of damaging flooding in Toronto’s upland suburbs.
advisor: elise shelley Thesis Reviews Winter 2014
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REEForestation
Megan Esopenko, MLA Furifá huri badiyale(r) gudu gude(r) nagáre (Divehi: “The water pot that is full will not shake”) This old Maldivian proverb describes the stability and confidence of a person or society in control of their life. Water acts as a driver of economy and stability in the Maldives, but, ironically, rising sea levels are creating instability and threatening the very existence of this nation. In 2008, Maldivian President Mohamed Nasheed proposed using income from the country’s tourism industry to purchase land in India, Sri Lanka, and Australia to relocate the entire country. Along with the political difficulties of inserting one sovereign nation into another, the Maldivian economy and culture is intimately linked to its immediate ecosystem. A full-scale emigration from the Maldives is a sad and final option resulting in the disappearance of a culture and identity of a group of peoples with a long and rich history. This thesis will focus on finding opportunities and developing strategies to avoid such a drastic act and envisions a culturally specific future — one that will be able to adapt and change over time — by creating new diverse economies focused around reef regeneration. It will establish a symbiotic relationship between tourism and the local community and increase the livability, ecological richness, and island identity of the Maldives.
advisor: francesco martire Thesis Reviews Winter 2014
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Waking the Giant
Continuing the Life Cycle of Giant Mine
Maxime Grandmaison, MLA In Northern Canada, mining is a significant industry, contributing to the creation of settlements, employment, and improving the economy. It also permanently alters the landscape. At first, mining can be perceived as an opportunity for growth and prosperity; however, post-production, all that remains is destruction and desolation. Are there methods in which landscape architecture may heal these scarred landscapes and contribute to the growth of their community? This thesis focuses on Giant Mine, a once thriving gold mine located 4 km north of the Northwest Territories’ capital city, Yellowknife. Throughout its 56 years of operation, Giant Mine has produced 237,000 tonnes of arsenic trioxide, a by-product created from gold extraction, which seeped into the environment leaving a legacy of death and fear. The current remediation strategy is to freeze the 15 underground chambers containing arsenic trioxide in place to limit subterranean circulation of arsenic — an indefinite strategy rendering the site a dormant toxic space without economic opportunities. This thesis proposes a strategy to reuse the site’s infrastructure and waste to follow the concept of industrial ecology. It considers in-situ processes, flows, and functions with a connection to larger systems. In time, toxic elements from the production of mining will be transformed to benefit Yellowknife and northern communities, thus removing the negative connotation of Giant Mine.
advisor: pete north Thesis Reviews Winter 2014
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Cultural Landscape
Designing For Multiculturalism On Mississauga Lakeview Mehdi Hadi, MLA
The thesis will address issues of multiculturalism and cultural forms of expression in landscape architectural design using Mississauga Lakeview as a testing ground. Also, it will address how landscape plays a basic role as a medium for communication in a multicultural city. Canada is considered to be a multicultural country with a long history of cultural diversity. As a metropolis, Toronto and the Greater Toronto Area have the largest immigrant population in Canada. Like most other cities in Canada, the population of Mississauga (755,000 people) and Toronto (2.79 million people) are made up of immigrants from different countries. As a consequence of immigration, Mississauga has become a cosmopolitan city that is home to people from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds and remarkably diverse ethnocultural, linguistic, and religious communities. The result is a city rich in cultural diversity, with individual communities and neighborhoods that reflect a distinct culture. Open spaces such as streets, parks, and civic squares are the highlights of any city and demonstrate the culture of its communities. I have chosen to use Mississauga Lakeview as the location for the design of explicitly multicultural public space. It is a site where public open space is deficient in Mississauga; it intersects many diverse cultural neighborhoods; and it can join areas that are geographically and culturally divided. Also, it is a space with the potential to provide ecological green spaces and unique civic spaces where multiculturalism could work.
advisor: francesco martire Thesis Reviews Winter 2014
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Littoral Gradient:
finding opportunity in processes of change on Georgian Bay Mary Hicks, MLA As part of Lake Huron and the larger Great Lakes system, eastern Georgian Bay is subject to water level fluctuations that are complex and unpredictable. Water level fluctuations occur episodically through wind-driven seiche effects lasting a few hours, seasonal cycles, and through multi-year variations associated with the lag effects of regional precipitation patterns. In addition, a combination of climate change, isostatic rebound, unmitigated human actions, and erosion have resulted in water levels that are currently at the lowest end of the historic range, including the setting of a new record low in January 2013. These changes endanger drinking water supplies, prevent the water-borne mobility of goods and people, threaten the economic, cultural, and spiritual needs of communities, and create an additional stress on an already degraded ecosystem. Given the complex and unpredictable nature of future water levels, the Georgian Bay shoreline presents a unique opportunity to investigate how inevitable water level fluctuations can open up opportunities for experimentation in the littoral zone. This thesis investigates how, rather than intervening in the landscape to mitigate or stabilize processes of change or disturbance, we can instead operate with the processes and cycles of change that exist to devise new littoral zone strategies that generate benefits for the most affected shoreline communities, both human and ecological. This investigation uses the littoral cross-section to exploit the potential of shifting environmental gradients. It is situated in Parry Sound on the eastern shoreline of Georgian Bay.
advisor: alissa north Thesis Reviews Winter 2014
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Captive Nature Captive Audience Emilia Hurd, MLA someone told me it’s all happening at the zoo... I do believe it, I do believe it’s true
— Simon & Garfunkel
The zoo and the national park are both captive natures expressed either through political and administrative boundaries or the construction of spatial barriers that clearly delineate the human domain from the wild. Lying east of Toronto and within reach of 20% of the nation’s population, the Rouge Valley is in the process of becoming a National Urban Park. While this new federal designation seeks to establish sites of cultural and natural significance, it excludes a landmark site falling within the watershed — the Toronto Zoo. Through a curated transition from zoo to post-zoo, this project explores how one captive nature can serve as a gateway to another. Employing spatial and ecological devices that recall the materials, landscape, and experiential diversity of the zoo site, this project documents the ecological processes found within the Rouge Valley. Formal captive plantings act as didactic samplings of the ecologies of the National Urban Park, while also acting as seed sources for ecological succession and recombination to occur beyond captivity. Novel views and active programming allow visitors to participate and be engaged in an unfolding narrative that explores ideas of captivity, wilderness, and humanity’s relationship to the “wild”.
advisor: georges farhat Thesis Reviews Winter 2014
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BORDER-LAND-FORM
Junfeng Li, MLA & Xiao Sunny Li, MArch The Context The suburbs often appear to be a continuous space. Endless miles of subdivisions, strip malls, and parking lots form a homogenous built surface, superimposed on the natural topography. However, the experience of travelling through the suburban landscape is far from continuous and smooth. The suburban fabric is divided by borderlands and occupied by transportation and environmental infrastructure. Parks, homes, malls, and institutions exist as fragmented and segregated elements. The Desire This thesis examines the capacity of the Performative Landform Building approach to synthesize the fragmented elements of architecture and landscape. The approach considers landform building as the direct expression of the combination of the built form and landform, a relationship that is often considered contradictory: the rigidity of spaces in built form versus the continuous human circulation and ecological systems expressed in landscape. We propose to let landform building create the basis of a form that sews together the suburban fabric to provide high ecological performance while allowing people to enjoy the notion of “living in a park.” The resulting design has been tested and scrutinized within the residual spaces created by the GO Train corridor and a functional engineered storm water “marshland.” The objective of the design is to resolve the contradiction between form and landform, but it also provides access and connectivity to the larger network of nearby development and existing land uses. continued on next page...
advisors: robert wright & ted kesik Thesis Reviews Winter 2014
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BORDER-LAND-FORM
Junfeng Li, MLA & Xiao Sunny Li, MArch ...continued from previous page Shifting Parameters Income inequality in the suburbs is growing. Markham, a sub-urban city branded as the “high-tech capital� of Canada, has a poverty rate that is higher than provincial average and has the highest concentration of Asian ethnic communities. In the Mount Joy Community, the number of lower income immigrants is still on the rise, fueled by relatively lower land prices. The residents in these new neighbourhoods are facing many challenges: broken pedestrian connections, lack of convenient access to local shopping and community facilities, distance from employment areas, and ever-widening artificial separations created by the residual lands of the GO train corridor and storm water facilities. Strategies for densification are needed to transform and integrate theses areas into a community-wide social and economic centre that will accommodate a diversity of new residents. The thesis explores how this new form accommodates residential development, commercial spaces, office spaces, and civic programs. The design seeks to create a diversity of integrated spaces that will create opportunities for increased economic diversity and community identity. The design also seeks to further connect and enhance mass transit facilities, which will provide better connections between the existing commuter lines within the framework of a continuous open space that connects the once-separated landscape and community into a synthesized space.
advisors: robert wright & ted kesik Thesis Reviews Winter 2014
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Pedestrianizing:
Overcoming Automotive Infrastructure
stella Yuan Lin, MLA By the end of the 20th century, the automobile and the land sequestered for its exclusive use (transportation infrastructure) had become synonymous with formulations of large North American cities. Many cities have been designed around their transportation systems, to the detriment of their own people. Now, transportation infrastructure accounts for 30-60 % of all urban land in North American cities, while only 3-6% is dedicated to the pedestrian. Massive transportation infrastructure presents physical and social obstacles in surrounding neighborhoods, and causes problems for other infrastructure: cycling routes and pedestrian connections. This thesis project focuses on the interchange of the Brooklyn Bridge and F.D.R Drive in New York to deeply explore the possibility of pedestrian infrastructure overcoming automotive infrastructure. The Brooklyn Bridge is a major piece of transportation infrastructure and a New York destination. It hosts more than 8,000 pedestrians and cyclists every day, connecting the significant neighbourhoods of Manhattan and Brooklyn. However, the long length of the Brooklyn Bridge limits the crossing experience and connectivity potential for non-vehicular travelers. Below the bridge is the recently constructed threekilometre East River Esplanade, which connects five of Manhattan’s neighborhoods. This proposal aims to strategically intervene at the junction of these significant infrastructural investments, at South Street Seaport, which benefits, annually, from 9 million visitors. A pedestrian and cyclist connection at this location solves significant circulation issues and itself becomes a new destination.
advisor: alissa north Thesis Reviews Winter 2014
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Turning the Waste Ring into Green Ring bo lu, MLA As one of the fastest developing cities in the world, Beijing, like other cities, is overburdened by waste. Nowadays, it is besieged by more than 400 illegal dumping sites and landfills. The city is surrounded by six Ring Roads; its notorious 7th Ring — the Garbage Ring — is made up of these dumping sites and landfills. Seven of the 12 large landfills will close in under five years. How can Beijing sustainably manage its waste so the 7th Ring can no longer exist? This project proposes an integrated waste management system to process and divert waste before shipping it to landfill. It also includes the planning of the “wasteshed” based on an analysis of landfill suitability research. The largest landfill in Beijing, A Su Wei landfill, was chosen as the study site. The overall strategy is to sustain the lifespan of this landfill by eliminating capping in favour of a bio-reacting process. This will allow the waste to be reclaimed as nutrient soil and landfill space to be reused. The reclaimed soil can be used for urban agriculture programs. In addition, the landfill site can be stitched back into the surrounding urban fabric. The site will become a hub for green space, residences, and economic activity. If this proposal is implemented, the city will have more capacity for waste management, and the landfills will no longer be seen as a hazardous space but a generator of green space, which in the future can form a green belt to improve the ecological resilience of the city.
advisor: alissa north Thesis Reviews Winter 2014
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MULTI-LAYERED CITY
Xiaoxiao lu, MUD A real challenge to urban design is to accept that infrastructure is as important to the vitality and the experience of the contemporary metropolis as the town hall and the square once was. As we move into the twenty first century, one of the primary roles of urban design will be the reworking of movement corridors as new vessels of collective life. — Alex Wall The effects of urbanization today are multiple and complex, but three are of particular significance with regard to planning and design. First, modern urbanization has led to the rise of new kinds of urban sites. Second, it has contributed to a remarkable increase in mobility and access. A third effect is a consequence of the two above and involves a fundamental paradigm shift from viewing cities in formal terms to looking at them in dynamic ways. Familiar urban typologies — the square, park, district, and so on — are of less use or significance than the infrastructure, network flows, ambiguous spaces, and other polymorphous conditions that constitute the contemporary metropolis. By developing new urban typologies, this thesis is an attempt to develop a multilayered pedestrian system in downtown Toronto to paint a picture of urbanism that is dynamic and temporal.
advisor: rodolphe el-khoury Thesis Reviews Winter 2014
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the poppy and the pine
Darlene Montgomery, MLA The cultivation of opium poppies in the mountains of Colombia and the efficient system by which they are turned into heroin, packaged and funneled through JFK, disseminated throughout eastern North America, and tracked by the UN via satellite forms the basis of an approach to cultivate and monitor remote landscapes in northern Canada.
advisor: georges farhat Thesis Reviews Winter 2014
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An archive of internet ephemera
Scott Norsworthy, MArch In an accelerating world that is connecting us evermore with the distant, how can we avoid losing touch with the near, the dear, and the present? If we see the Internet today as an infinite universe of bytes, containing all manner of truth and falsity, how can we ensure that in a sea of surplus information, things of importance retain value and relevance? Media technologies evolve, but do not destroy their predecessors. The edifice, the printed book, the photograph, the radio broadcast — today, these coexist. But with Internet content that is both ephemeral and overabundant, there is a greater risk that our cultural heritage may either be manipulated by those who wish to write (or re-write) history or forgotten altogether in the forever-expanding Internet. Within the regime of technical information, can we see the Internet like a new cosmos, wide and elusive? How do we make sense of this monster we have made? Is there a way to mine the Internet as a resource field for fragments worth preserving? What is a possible mandate, organization, and architecture of a new institution charged with the preservation of Internet-born cultural heritage?
advisor: laura miller Thesis Reviews Winter 2014
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Frozen Cloud
Ebrahim Oliazadeh, MArch The Frozen Cloud is a data vault that compresses and records exabytes of our current digital age in the form of synthetic ice cores, safeguarding them for future analysis or future reconstruction. When analyzed, arctic ice sheets hold records of hundreds of thousands of years of climate data, while the Svalbard seed vault in Norway holds duplicate seeds from gene banks worldwide. Respectively, these examples house the bits of information that contain a record of useful historical data and data essential for future regrowth.
advisor: mason white Thesis Reviews Winter 2014
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iLandscape
Eliza Oprescu, MLA This thesis challenges the way landscapes are designed and realized, by parsing components of landscape architecture and allowing for a dynamic reassembling of parts in order to achieve a specific goal. By giving individuals the ability to construct landscapes through a given set of landscape components, rules, and goals, a new landscape typology can be formed and design can be a truly inclusive process. iLandscape is a game app played online through handheld devices. Designs generated by the app are then constructed on a real site. Players will adhere to a specific set of rules to develop landscapes, altering the way the site is being used and contributing to the design of a dynamic site that addresses the needs and wishes of the community. Giving individual players the ability to explore and learn through play is not new. In fact, the prevalence of video games in today’s society can be seen through not only the staggering number of players, but also the 93-billion dollars generated by the video game industry in 2013. This approach to landscape design is best suited for highly urban areas, where high population densities and towering buildings are prevalent. Bordered by the city’s busiest streets, the Toronto Dominion Centre is a financial hub, where more than 20,000 people to work. The importance placed on human use and function makes this location the perfect testing ground for iLandscape to take shape, allowing the manmade landscape to be altered through human interaction and design.
advisor: robert wright Thesis Reviews Winter 2014
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return(render)
Peter Charles Osborne, MArch There may be no form of architectural representation simultaneously so powerful in effect, yet critically unchallenged by our discourse than the rendering. Consider first how a rendering — an idealized image depicting bright skies and happy people — can drive a room full of clients into a frenzy. In terms of communicative efficacy, nothing else compares to its diffusive power to turn orthographic drawings into something more productive for those less technically inclined. The rendering’s “sweet light” has eclipsed all other forms of architectural representation and, more importantly, has helped spawn a variety of new genres and sub-genres in contemporary practice. Is it possible to destabilize the rendering, to strip away its associations in order to produce novel readings other than a final output? The difficulty in even conceptualizing this issue increases when we admit to a second, more concealed question: what happens when we are forced to work with standardized software? The answer brings to bear what it means for something to be “rendered,” or more broadly, what it means to use a tool. Our tools and software govern the way we work and confine the possibilities of design to their necessarily limited scope. As long as we refrain from questioning these practices — and don’t respond by creating our own tools and software — our disenchanted and bounded creative condition will persist. return(render) is a tool — a catalogue of methods and processes — that responds to this context, instrumentalizing the principles of rendering as a generator of design, rather than a final product.
advisor: john j. may Thesis Reviews Winter 2014
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The ‘sacred’and the ‘secular’ of Madurai Ipshita Ramaswamy, MUD Temple cities of South India are unique examples of pre-modern South Asian Urbanism at its best. The ‘sthandila mandala’ determines the spatial arrangement of the South Indian temple and its sacred urban landscape by providing the concepts for the recreation of cosmic order on earth. My thesis focuses on the unique cultural landscape of the temple city of Madurai, where the ancient design of the city is still relevant in our globalized era. The physical urban form of the ancient core is reinforced and revisited through ritualized activities and festivals every year, at the scale of the city itself. I am concerned with the wider urban context of the temple complex, specifically the ways in which rites and rituals can provide structure to urban space and vice versa. Religious practices can connect several places across the wide cityscape, especially through processions. These religious networks are what I call “Ritual Topography.” The temple cities of South India are now endangered as a result of haphazard development due to globalization. Like any other second tier city of the Indian subcontinent, Madurai has experienced exponential development that is mainly dictated by market forces that have no future vision for the city. Can the temple cities be saved and reinvented for future generations? If so, how? I will be exploring a meaningful way to preserve the historic fabric of temple cities, by proposing dual interventions to the urban fabric at strategic points in the “Ritual Topography.”
advisor: aziza chaouni Thesis Reviews Winter 2014
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Historical Notes and Survival Tips for Our Society of Children (2075) Justin Ridgeway, MLA Sometime in the not-too-distant future the Technological Singularity will blossom like a mushroom cloud on our collective horizon. One of the potential outcomes, posits futurist Raymond Kurzweil, is the development of neuro- and nanotechnologies enabling the digitization and uploading of human consciousness: we will transcend to a post-human existence. What impact will the deleted swathes of a physical population have on our landscape? What will such a landscape look like when only a few remain to inhabit it? Our site lies an hour north of Toronto, on the border of the Town of Caledon, along the recent confluence of highways 410 and 10. Former farmlands have been subsumed by sprawling subdivision housing tracts as the highway advanced. The site has been selected as the location for the thesis’ future scenario as it represents manifold boundaries, both physically and metaphorically, as infrastructure slashes a chasm through the landscape. What once stood as a staunch divide between the rural and suburban has become something of a blurred transition. For this thesis’ purpose, the interstice also manifests the overlap and convergence of the biosphere and the noosphere. This thesis’ intent is to explore, using design tools (inventory, analysis, overlay), potential subsistence strategies for those who remain in this world as biological humans. The design itself is a topological narrative, one that suggests the implications of anthropo-emergent (as opposed to architectural) design on visual, mental, and physical landscapes.
Image: Topological site inventory
advisor: georges farhat Thesis Reviews Winter 2014
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Measuring the Immeasurable
Douglas Robb, MLA This thesis explores how a designed landscape can reveal the tensions between simultaneous and contradictory forces that determine how we value a place: for resource extraction, for ecotourism, or as the locus of unique cultural practices and traditions. All of these forces collide on the Reykjanes Peninsula in southwestern Iceland, an alien topography of smouldering craters, bubbling fumaroles, and razorsharp plains of volcanic glass. Steeped in generations of mythology and folklore, the Reykjanes Peninsula is scheduled to become Iceland’s second UNESCO World Heritage Geopark, and a centrepiece of the country’s bourgeoning ecotourism industry. This designation coincides with increasing international pressure to develop the Reykjanes as a global nexus of geothermal energy production. Existing sites of geothermal tourism conflate the narratives of industrial development and geologic process, resulting in a contrived experience of the Icelandic landscape that perpetuates an illusory symbiosis between energy production and the natural world. This thesis proposes a new form of geotourism which couples sites of geothermal power with programs and amenities aimed at a foreign tourist audience. By co-opting the spatial logics of geothermal extraction, this project illuminates the hidden forces shaping the Icelandic landscape and imagines new strategies for economic growth and cultural expression.
advisor: jane wolff Thesis Reviews Winter 2014
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Healing Campus
Samira Rostami Boukani, MLA More than 80 percent of Canadian university students are struggling with psychological distress, and almost one fifth of these students have been classified as having a serious mental illness. Although there are facilities providing services for coping with mental difficulties, not all students will take advantage of them. The transformation of everyday environments to allow moments of reflection can help ease the pressures on these existing services. The University of Toronto is the largest post-secondary institution in Canada with over 74,000 students. The goal is to build calming spaces throughout St. George campus to ease the challenges students face and make it a much more peaceful and manageable experience. This can be achieved by applying physical interventions that follow certain guides regarding color therapy, visual stimulation, and auditory experience, while considering climate, culture, context, and safety. With the consideration of the previously mentioned guides, this thesis brings forward typologies for designing a system that enhances the experiential quality of spaces, specifically residences on St. George campus, in order to create a contemplative environment that promotes visual and auditory silence to help users escape from daily stresses. By addressing mental health through physical design solutions, these contemplative spaces will not only enhance the quality of the campus’ physical form, but better society in general.
advisor: elise shelley Thesis Reviews Winter 2014
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Fluid Opportunity
Justin Sabourin, MLA Urban waterfronts across Canada have historically been associated with industrial land uses. Waterfront cities would thrive, largely because of their advantageous shipping locations along rivers, harbors, or canals. Many of these industrial activities have shifted away from positioning themselves along waterfronts to positioning themselves along more contemporary transportation networks. This shift has led to the obsolescence of a large portion of waterfront industries and has created new opportunities for human interaction with these waterfronts. This is the case in Cornwall, Ontario where a former paper mill adjacent to the historic Cornwall Canal has been decommissioned and the landscape has largely been erased. Fluid Opportunity exploits this waterfront condition to create a waterfront destination for the city and the surrounding region. This project also aims to serve as a catalyst for the subsequent urban development of the Domtar Lands north of the canal. Fluid Opportunity takes a unique approach to programming: By adjusting the flow of water through the canal, a variety of programmatic activities can be generated that satisfy the multiple stakeholders. At a particular time, the canal may be suitable for rafting and surfing, while at other times it may be suitable for swimming. It is a waterfront destination in continuous flux.
advisor: robert wright Thesis Reviews Winter 2014
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Syncretic Pragmatism
Meenakshi Sharma, MUD Chandigarh, capital of Punjab state in India was designed by renowned architect Le Corbusier. Many argue that in an attempt to design Chandigarh as a modern city, Corbusier lacked an understanding of the urban needs of Indian society and its contextual fabric. The result was a magnificent mega-building within green spaces that could not host the social and cultural character of the place. Therefore, even though the dream of making Chandigarh a modern city was achieved by Corbusier, debate and argument about the success of the master plan still prevails. One of the main reasons for these shortcomings may be that India as a context has a very complex character and people are accustomed to certain systems of housing patterns contrasting those seen in the design of Chandigarh. An inquiry into the conflict requires an understanding of India as a context and the forms of community living in India. Syncretic Pragmatism is an attempt to combine Le Corbusier’s design ideas with the elements and design strategies specific to the Indian context. It culminates with an alternative design proposal that is a possible solution to the problems identified in the planning of Chandigarh.
advisor: robert levit Thesis Reviews Winter 2014
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A Tool Library
Elliott Sturtevant, MArch Cultural critics and economists alike have recently identified the emergence of the “Third Industrial Revolution.� Broadly defined by a shift in economies of scale to economies of scope, it has been characterized by a strengthening of the manufacturing economy as smaller businesses capitalize on quicker turnover times, shorter productions runs, and made-to-order manufacturing. Likewise, the preponderance of web-based retail stores and crowd-funding platforms (Etsy, IndieGoGo, Kickstarter) have allowed the individual manufacturer of unique goods to prosper in spite of well-established competition. The site, scale, and labour involved in manufacturing have changed drastically and yet the spaces of production we conjure belong to a past presided over by Ford and his acolytes. The thesis then is for an urban institution dedicated to making and technical literacy with facilities for small-scale production, paradoxically: a center for distributed manufacturing. A library of sorts, this institution would occupy a similar vocation within the city, with tools and workbenches replacing books and armchairs, but with two significant caveats: the forfeiture of auditory restraint and the creation of space amenable to filings and sawdust. Citing historical precedents, the architecture engages the ceiling and its associated technical plenum as a means of establishing specificity and variety between flexible, open work spaces. spaces.limitsofvariation.org
advisor: john j. may Thesis Reviews Winter 2014
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the hobbyist’s caravan
Rebecca Taylor, MArch This thesis project is interested in developing a sensibility that celebrates the fleeting and dynamic relationship between physical structures and user-determined programs. This is a dynamism that forces one to think beyond rhetorically empty architecture that desperately clings to illusions of its symbolic significance, in the positivist sense of the 1950s, or in the consumerist sense of today. Charged with the focusing of bodies and energy into the power “the event” — this project proposes an on-demand spectacular transportable environment that can provide a physical place for the temporary gathering of dispersed sub-culture communities. This mobile, multi-use structure connects to the cross-regional fabric via the main railway networks along the Quebec-Windsor corridor. The user is an active participant in the location and programming of this organic structure, altering its composition and form throughout its life-time, from its likely virtual birth, to its procession to the site, its deployment, its hosting of the event, and its eventual disappearance and re-assembly. The Hobbyist’s Caravan is a social architecture. On the one hand, it takes inspiration from the ephemerality, whimsy and spectacle of the travelling circuses of the 19th century. On the other hand, it is interested in the contemporary convention center typology that considers emerging trends in social networking and collective participation in niche interests across the region. This thesis proposes a strategy for cultural regeneration in transforming urban conditions through mobility, interaction and architecture.
advisor: Laura miller Thesis Reviews Winter 2014
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Through the Proscenium
Sonja Tijanic, MArch You artists who perform plays in great houses under electric suns before the hushed crowd, pay a visit some time to that theatre whose setting is the street. — Bertolt Brech’s On Everyday Theatre Concerned with sets and the spatial conditions of performance, this project seeks to question how ideas of theatre and performance can change, enhance, and revitalize underused infrastructural spaces. It employs performance as a device to engage with the built environment and to understand architecture as a spatial action rather than merely a fixed form. The project positions itself at the juncture of everyday life and staged performance, allowing each to become a set for the other. It presents varied functions of spatial reality where the immediate, intertwined presence of both real and imaginary becomes possible. The result is a simultaneous invocation of multiple but differentiated places both physical and fantastical. By juxtaposing the existing physical site with contrasting spaces of imagination, the project creates a metaphoric extension, an in-between space.
advisor: laura miller Thesis Reviews Winter 2014
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toronto bus terminal
Gintaras Valiulis, MArch Currently, downtown Toronto services its regional bus commuters through two bus terminals: the Union Station Go Bus Terminal and the Toronto Coach Terminal. As the commuter population continues to grow, these two terminals will become inadequate to service the large number of people entering Toronto daily. The bus terminals are small, not located in optimal locations, and inefficiently laid out. This thesis proposes the design of a new bus terminal in downtown Toronto at the northeast corner of Bay Street and Lake Shore Boulevard West. This new terminal would be large enough to service all the Toronto bound commuting buses in one location, essentially replacing the two current, downtown bus terminals. A helical shape would be implemented in its design, as if the public roadway branched off and curled onto itself, forming a continuous vehicular pathway for buses. Buses ascend and descend these ramps daily, reducing roadway congestion and using a greater number of bus bays to offer passengers the most efficient commute. Due to its location and vicinity to highways and Union Station, the Toronto Bus Terminal would establish itself as an important node in the greater Toronto transportation network.
advisor: robert levit Thesis Reviews Winter 2014
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Current Passage
Vinh Van, MLA all the water there will be, is.
— National Geographic
The Athabasca River has become a symbolic and mythical river in its contemporary context of both vast wilderness and extensive industrial activities in Canada. The river currents begin at the headwaters in the Canadian Rockies and flow fifteen hundred kilometers before draining into the Athabasca Delta, reflecting the landscape and water-based activities found within the watershed. The cumulative effects of large-scale industrial activities extend far beyond political and administrative boundaries, affecting downstream communities, jeopardizing livelihoods, and disturbing ecosystems. Design interventions will explore the Athabasca River through its diversities and similarities, engaging a multitude of audiences in a discussion concerning the complex challenges befalling the river and its residents. These interventions will reveal the ecological gradients through the identification of three unique sites along its length. Programmatically unified, these sites strategically gather water quality data to continually monitor and assess the health of the river. These monitoring and research stations provide facilities and laboratories for researchers, students, and the general public to access unbiased scientific information and to observe environmental change. These stations will also operate as interpretive sites providing various amenities to wilderness paddlers, roadside tourists, and local residents revealing the dynamic and expansive narrative of a shifting river system.
advisor: pete north Thesis Reviews Winter 2014
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Breadalbane Square
Victoria Walker, MArch The relationship between the absence of use, of activity, and sense of freedom, of expectancy, is fundamental to understanding the evocative potential of the city’s terrain vagues. Void, absence, yet also promise, the space of the possible, of expectation. — Ignasi de Solà-Morales Rubió, “Terrain Vague.” Quaderns d’Arquitectura y Urbanisme 212 (1996): 119. The lot at 11 Wellesley Street West has been vacant for 27 years. In that time, it has been the focus of near-constant speculation and expectations of change by private developers, civic advocacy groups, and passersby. After nearly three decades of varied proposals and false starts, ground has just broken on a 61-storey condominium tower set within a small privately owned park. As part of Toronto’s incentive zoning program, the park is a privately owned “public” space; an exchangeable commodity whose placement in the urban amalgam is determined by the manipulation of abstract financial instruments rather than site-specific programmatic necessity. This thesis project presents an alternative: an urban square which reacts to the rapid development in the surrounding neighbourhood — a formalized erasure, a recoil from the void.
advisor: john j. may Thesis Reviews Winter 2014
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Desalination Reimagined in Ashdod, Israel Keren Weisz, MArch Water shortages can cripple a country; reductions to agriculture and industry have a negative ripple effect on the country’s economy and population. A dependable supply of potable water is critical to the continued survival of the population and the agricultural supply chain. Israel is a country that requires more water than is readily available to support its growing population, infrastructure, and industry. To make more water, Israel looked at desalinating water directly from the Mediterranean Sea, which is the only large-scale viable solution. Israel is currently home to 4 reverse osmosis plants. Construction of a fifth plant is intended for the city of Ashdod. Can we expand awareness of environmental and social factors within the host city when considering the design of the new reverse osmosis plant? Can we modify the design of the plant so as to integrate it both functionally and aesthetically with the natural and built environment?
advisor: aziza chaouni Thesis Reviews Winter 2014
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The Architecture of Anxiety and Depression Kenneth Wong, MArch This thesis is about representation in architecture, specifically, the visual representation of different mental states using architectural language, such as walls, floors, stairs, columns, and windows. It uses conventions of architectural representation to communicate human behavior and cognitive processes. We exist in space; and physically move between different spaces. Because people can relate to spatial understanding, it can be used as a method to engage them with ideas and issues that are difficult to understand. Unlike physical illness, mental illness is difficult to understand; it isn’t always visually apparent. Language is insufficient to convey the totality of mental illness. There are examples of different mediums dealing with issues of “madness” in art, film, literature, and anecdotes. In a similar way, architectural language in combination with text is used to materialize something that may seem very immaterial. This project, The Architecture of Anxiety and Depression, spatializes the twentyfive major symptoms of Social Anxiety and the thirty major symptoms of Major Depressive Disorder. Each space conveys a possible thought process and perception of the world and of oneself during a specific mental state. This project provides a view into a larger landscape of mental states, with no beginning and no end — a continuous journey. The selection and organization of the spaces provides a way to better understand an infinite possibility of experiences of mental states.
advisors: david lieberman & pina petricone Thesis Reviews Winter 2014
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