RAIC GOLD MEDAL 2021
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Teaching + Pedagogy
Robe r t Wr ight a nd Br igit te Shim On the occasion of Brigitte Shim winning the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada’s Gold Medal 2021 with her partner, A. Howard Sutcliffe, Professor Shim reflected on her three-decadelong commitment to teaching with her Daniels Faculty colleague, Professor Robert Wright. You have been teaching at the Daniels Faculty at the University of Toronto since 1988. Why is teaching so important to you? Educating the next generation of architects is essential to fostering design excellence in Canada and helping to guide the future of our world. I see teaching as a form of design advocacy: part of permeating, contributing and being deeply invested in what really matters. The Daniels Faculty fosters an environment of tremendous reciprocity. The Faculty is comprised of esteemed colleagues who are equally serious about their commitment to the future of the profession, and students who draw on diverse backgrounds, cultures and perspectives. Together, faculty members invest a tremendous amount of time, energy, and optimism into sharing our knowledge and experience with our undergraduate and graduate students.
How do you determine the topics of your studios? My studios always address pressing themes, and are often taught in collaboration with other architects, landscape architects, urban planners, artists, and academics to cultivate rich, cross-disciplinary perspectives. With each new studio, I try to seek out themes that are not just exercises, but rather opportunities to explore and test issues that are fundamentally shaping the future of cities and the broader environment. We aim to empower our students to not only discover these themes, but to develop a different reading of the city and to think about how they can shape better futures. Take for example: advancing the intensification of Toronto laneways, building for northern climates, rethinking community-based healthcare, interrogating the challenge of contested and sacred sites, and more recently, the role of places of production linking our forests to factories–to name just a few. Can you give me an example of one of your studio projects that has impacted our city and its urbanism? With many new citizens making Toronto their home every year, we need to find innovative ways of housing them. Right now, we have limited options. In the early 1990s, Howard Sutcliffe and I designed a small residence in a back alley in Toronto. It has been our home, but also a kind of laboratory for investigating the physical and psychological impacts of laneway housing. It provided us with a deep understanding of not only
