Augustine Wong: Portfolio Spring 2024

AUGUSTINE WONG

selected works

augustine wong INTERESTS

SKILLS

Street Photography Hiking Urban Exploration Journalism Music

Qualitative Research Photography Computer Modelling Magazine Publication & editing

EXPERIENCE

PROGRAMS

Research Assistant Prof. Peter Sealy | May 2022 - May 2023 Research Assistant Prof. Richard Sommer | May 2023 Volunteer Urban Minds | July 2023 - August 2023

Rhinoceros 3D Grasshopper 3D VRay Adobe Suite Lightroom Capture One Sketchup

LEADERSHIP

LANGUAGES

Vice President Applied Architecture, Landscape & Design (AALD) | September 2023 -

NATIVE English

Staff Writer & Editor SCAFFOLD* Magazine | August 2022 Associate Photo Editor The VARSITY | September 2022 - May 2023

contents 01 design build 02 disposition 03 koyaanisqatsi 04 parc-du-parking 05 apparatus 06 late fragment 07 anthropocene 08 battling corporate fiefdoms

PROFICIENT Cantonese French BEGINNER Russian German Mandarin

+1-647-564-6489 augustine.wong@mail.utoronto.ca website | linkedin | resume

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DESIGN-BUILD ARC395: Design Build Studio Collaborative construction project, completed June 2023.

Instructor: Jay Pooley Design-build projects offered at the University of Toronto are intensive 2-week courses that see a design carried out from conception to real-life completion.

At Haliburton Forest, the team designed two outdoor showers fitted with skylights, seating, an accessibility ramp, and wooden shutters providing private yet breathtaking vistas of Bone Lake.

The showers mimic surrounding buildings’ traditional timber-frame form and structure but visually separate into two distinct forms.

HALIBURTON, Ontario, Canada | 45.233666, -78.636179

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02 DISPOSITION

Winning finalist commission for id8Downsview: Inside on the Outside photography competition from over 90 candidates. | PUMP HOUSE, Downsview Airport, 43.737125, -79.467994

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DISPOSITION Long exposure photography on self-developed black and white photographic film.

Collaboration with performance artist Claire Allen, July 2023 Downsview Airport is set for decommissioning by the end of 2023. As Bombardier Aerospace migrates to integrated manufacturing at Pearson Airport, Bombardier facilities are set to be redeveloped. The transformative arts & cultural authority, id8Downsview invited four photographers to capture remaining infrastructure in current conditions before demolition or reuse.

Built in 1954, the de Havilland fire pump house is a tiny space crammed with hydroworks which snake around the room, or hover above the floor.

While it remains in its original condition. It is now used as an informal storage shed for all kinds of things — decommissioned fire extinguishers, bicycles, and other miscellany.

Latent energy is embodied within and underneath the building as a massive catharsis of water during emergencies. This inspired light painting as a performance in contrast to static architectural photos in instances of unsuspecting, powerful and yet instantaneous momentum.

website

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FUJI GSW690II, T-Max 100, Ilfosol 3| PUMP HOUSE, Downsview Airport, 43.737125, -79.467994

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Installed work by Future Simple Studio.| 43.737125, -79.467994 | Image credit: id8Downsview

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KOYAANISQATSI ARC363: Planetary Gardens Adobe Illustrator drawing, fall 2023 Instructor: Behnaz Assadi Ko·yaa·nis·qatsi (from the Hopi language), n. 1. crazy life. 2. life in turmoil. 3. life out of balance. 4. life disintegrating. 5. a state of life that calls for another way of living.

Canada must confront a history of violent European invasion and colonial transgressions. On shared Haudenosaunee, Anishinabeg and Missisaugan land, Downsview Park was transformed through federal appropriation for military and aerospace remediated through terraforming. Land was irreversibly altered, poisoined with de-icing agents and military contaminants over two centuries of colonial ownership. As the airport prepares for decommissioning, the Federal Government plans gentrified residences, symbolizing profit extraction amid economic challenges. Koyaanisqatsi represents lost Indigenous culture and a chance for physical reconciliation simultaneously.

A CHANGE IS PROPOSED TO THIS SITE.

Proposed Intervention| DOWNSVIEW AIRPORT, 43.7369, 79.4718

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Tkaronto currently faces several crises, key to which is a real estate crisis that drives up the cost of living and food for many. In some cases, this leads to food insecurity for Tkarontonians. In other cases, homelessness can be observed.

Indigenous peoples are disproportionately susceptible to homelessness, highlighting colonial governance’s role in land occupation.

An urban agricultural operation rooted in Indigenous practices aims to empower Indigenous land management. From tarmac redesigns to companion planting, interventions span ten years, repurposing aircraft hangars for food banks, establishing greehouses as Indigenous knowledge hubs, and reclaiming the airstrip for community purposes. Four important Indigenous medicines — sage, sweetgrass, tobacco and cedar are planted in circles across the airfield in an interpretation of

medicine wheels.

Following page: Detailed plan.

Current urban farms in Downsview cover 13 hectares, feeding 72 people. The proposed regime on 520 hectares addresses Toronto’s food insecurity, supporting over 2600 people and introducing Indigenous cuisine. Beyond a land acknowledgement is an interrogation of colonial power to restore lost Indigenous cuisine and culture.

Repurposing tarmac for a community market, establishing agricultural fields around airstrip, greenhouses as libraries for medicinal species of national Indigenous importance, and wind turbines for electrical generation. Indigenous planting of sacred plants are cultivated within non-rectilinear forms.

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Left: Section drawing of elevated circular mound hosting coniferous and deciduous oldgrowth simulacra, as well as greenhouses acting as Indigenous knowledge hubs, housing specimens of national Indigenous importance.

Right: Bioswale remediation on fringe conditions are maintained by Canadian-bred Arcott sheep.

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10-year phasing, remediation and planting diagram for KOYAANISQATSI.

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PHYTO-REMEDIATION REGIME

INDIGENOUS MEDICINAL REGIME

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INDIGENOUS PLANTING REGIME

GRAZING REGIME

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04 PARC-DUPARKING ARC200: Drawing & Representation II Rhino and Adobe Illustrator drawing, fall 2022.

Partner project with Mohamad Sinjab.

Instructor: Michael Piper Overpasses create dead spaces underneath them due to height limits and noise, which are unlucrative to real estate developers. Unproductive uses of land emerge, such as parking lots beneath Adelaide Street East and Richmond Street East.

Credit: Augustine Wong

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A parkette linked via a new crosswalk is proposed. The programme incorporates pre-existing Passer domesticus sparrows, in situ detritus and automotive context by creating bird baths, and tires housing local flora (Acer saccharum and Betula papyrifera) in rubber tires. On the east side, a dog park compliments a nearby pet hospital. The west side’s flat dirt surface has been reworked as a gently sloped plane.

Credit: Augustine Wong

Credit: Mohamad Sinjab

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05 APPARATUS

Conceptual render of the weaponised towers’ effect on protesters attempting to occup Nathan Phillips Hall.

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APPARATUS ARC280: Modelling and Fabrication in Design Rhino and Grasshopper project, spring 2023.

Professor: Nicholas Hoban Hostile architecture is the practice of excluding unwelcome demographics, such as the homeless, from privately funded public fixtures such as park benches, using passive deterrents.

Could architecture use active deterrents to demarcate space? This tower uses mirrors to focus light from the sun to ignite personnel and property alike to assert spatial control over a given area.

This project imagines weaponised architecture as an instrument of a state with corrupted ideals. Its positioning atop New City Hall symbolises a authoritarian perversion of democratic power, suppressing protests in Nathan Phillips Square.

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06 LATE FRAGMENT ARC201: How to Design Amost Nothing Rhino and Adobe Illustrator drawing, spring 2023 Instructor: Shane Williamson TO FRAGMENT: to break up, or apart into fragments. A cube on 90 Devonshire Place is fragmented using forms intended to shape volumetric light into strong, angular expressions. These forms are directed along paths of desire, informed by the land parcel’s void-like qualities.

For its stressful workload and academic demands, the University of Toronto goes by a nickname: ‘UofTears’, to some. Based on proximity to Robarts Library, this study space divides programmes across a scale of social energy, from communal study spaces to a space dedicated to spiritual repose, and emotional relief through stress-crying.

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07 ANTHROPOCENE 28

ARC386: Landscape Ecology Adobe Illustrator drawing, fall 2023.

Professor: Hadi El-Shayeb Imagined section drawing of a future Monterrey landscape in drought and resource-depleted scarcity.

Anthropogenic influence on occupied landscapes are indelible. The population of Monterrey in Nuevo Leon, Mexico, its demographic changes, and entangled relationship to industrial development and water shortage was scrutinised.

Working in a team of five (Crystal Chau, Jerry Chen, Rain Shen, Vivian To), Monterrey was examined from various natural and anthropogenic perspectives across time with an imaginative glimpse into a future intertwined with its underlying environment. website

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08 BATTLING CORPORATE FIEFDOMS full paper

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do corporations wield more power than nationstates? do corporations support their employees through regulations set upon them by the state? or do they proactively create social support networks in legal jurisdictions where the state fails to do so?

How can learnings from the evaluation of company town developments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries be applied to modern corporatedominated settlements?

Left: Location of key Amazon distribution centres around San Bernardino International Airport, California, USA.| 34.100915, -117.247022| via Google Earth

Above: land distribution map of BASF Ludwigshafen headquarters, Germany.

41.694312, -87.608953 | 49.530216, 8.422210

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introduction 2023 Laidlaw Scholars Leadership & Research Programme Mixed-media research paper, summer 2023.

Research Advisor: Prof. Peter Sealy Powerful corporations have previously usurped responsibilities of the nation-state, such as the East India Trading Company’s control of the Indian subcontinent from in the 19th century.

Corporate domination is more than a social phenomenon. It also manifests architecturally, through the infrastructure it occupies, including but not limited to warehouses, distribution centres and corporate offices.

Similarly, in the 19th century, American and British companies were responsible for creating company towns - communities that are dependent on a corporate firm for most to all of functional town life, showing that overdependence on corporations is not new. In a neoliberal economic revival, are corporations still capable of dominating non-economic spheres of life?

Company towns were used as a gauge to examine to what extent companies wield influence over their employees through physical infrastructure and how company towns can be modified to reduce corporate detriment.

metholodogy

documentation

Four company towns were identified by establishing two dichotomies of company town archetypes (Modern-historical and tabula rasatakeover) to determine core mechanisms behind company towns. Pullman Town, Chicago, IL, USA; and San Bernardino, CA, USA were examined through in-person visits for an understanding of Pullman Palace Car Company and Amazon respectively. Studies of the area were documented via photography, videography, archive visits and hand sketches. Where visiting other locations was not possible due to circumstantial constraints, films such as The Internship (2013) and Nomadland (2021) were used as secondary study sources. Figure-ground drawings at various scales, and axonometric diagrams were the primary drawing methods in presenting research and solutions.

Above: typology of worker housing before and after the Great Chicago Fire constructed by Pullman; land distribution map of Googleplex surrounding areas.

Below: stitched panoramas documenting industrial and housing zones in San Bernardino.

Right: legal jursidiction of the City of Chicago compared to Hyde Park Township highlighting de facto legal impunity.

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locations Pullman, Chicago, IL, USA San Bernardino, CA, USA Googleplex, Mountain View, CA, USA Ludwigshafen, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany

findings The study scrutinised company towns to determine whether corporations provided services for employees out of a genuine concern for employee well-being, or disingenuous moves intended to meet the requirements of a functional, but juridically weakened state in both liberal and neoliberal economic periods.

The findings of this study were unexpected.

Whereas the original intent of this study was to examine the effects of physical corporate infrastructure as an exercise in spatial planning, the inherent socioeconomic context behind all four case studies were nuanced and complicated, which resulted in an examination of how corporations establish control over employees through physical infrastructure. No company town is ever the same, and neither are their motives for conception.

However, all company towns were created to establish and exert control over employees in one way or another.

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findings In all three American case studies, employees were viewed as vehicles for the company’s maximal gain, whether through incentives or disincentives.

Whether companies preferred incentives or disincentives differed via each workers’ perceived value. On one end in Amazon’s workforce, workers were cheap and plentiful in a transient environment. Their jobs were simple, and thus they were expendable. Amazon therefore opted for an explosive, but ultimately unsustainable use of workers. On the opposite end, the Googleplex was rated as America’s best workplace for multiple years in a row with amazing benefits, recreational facilities and food. Nonetheless, this subtly coerced employees into an imbalanced work life, whereby the company itself provided the ‘life’ aspect to work-life balance, clearly overstepping its social responsibility. Therefore, depending on how much value employees appear to hold to the corporation, companies will invest as much as financially sustainable into their employees.

Conceptual drawing of current industrial processes within Amazon distribution centres based on LGB5 fulfilment centre.

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spatial solution San Bernardino is identified as the most problematic example of company towns in this study and is therefore highly recommended for spatial and political interventions that will break up Amazon’s labour monopsony and dignify workers. What often goes unnoticed in typical economic studies is an understanding of the relationship between physical proximity between executives and employees. In Ludwigshafen, both groups of workers were concentrated together at a site of pollution, which may have triggered the company to provide amenities and pollution measures to accommodate their executives. This resulted in ordinary workers benefiting from company services out of pure proximity.

In the short term, Amazon warehouse workers should continue to pressure Amazon into consolidating beneficial labour deals. However, change does not stop at labour organising.

Amazon workers also need to diversify their skill sets or become obsolete in a robotics-dominated future, which could be supported by intensifying education programmes within the county.

However, to break up Amazon’s notorious workplace culture, short-term spatial interventions can be practiced. Here, a set of micropavilions is proposed as a template for Amazon warehouses.

These break areas reduce the time workers need to spend by travelling across the warehouse, and provides more frequent relief compared to Amazon’s current conditions.

Proposed intervention for micropavillions within Amazon distribution centres.

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for your consideration AUGUSTINE WONG 36