Winter 2015 Thesis Reviews Booklet

thesis reviews winter 2015 John Patrick Bautista Tayler Bishop Nykola Blozowski Hui Chen Xi Cheng Xiaoyue Ding Rui Felix Misha Franta Karimah Gheddai Astrid Greaves Lisa Gregory Xinting He Venessa Diana Heddle Ehran Holm tsan Can Huang Zhengyan Jin Reza Karimi Donya Kiani Kaari Kitawi Sarry Klein David Kossowsky Andrea Angelika Linney Carla Ann Lipkin Logan Littlefield Shelley Long Mark Lowe Yujing Ma James A. MacDonald-Nelson Sarah MacLean Nabia Majeed Valerie Manica Kaly Manson

Robert Gordon McIntosh justin Mostacci Kevin Murray Jergus Oprsal Regina Park Robert Erwin Patterson Matthew Perotto Sadaf Pourjavaheri Jonah Ross-Marrs Riya Sarker Tarun Saurabh Weiming Shi Ziv Shtrikberger Martha Sparrow Katie Strang Mikael Sydor Saghar Talaei Shaimaa Tantawy Raymond Tung Nathan VanEgdom Andrew James Vlcek Ye Wang Rachel Weston Sarah Lucy Whitehouse Grace Yang Jou-Heng Yeh Catherine Yoon Michael Yu Rui Yu Shilu Zhao Guangyu Zhao

thesis reviews winter 2015 John Patrick Bautista Tayler Bishop Nykola Blozowski Hui Chen Xi Cheng Xiaoyue Ding Rui Felix Misha Franta Karimah Gheddai Astrid Greaves Lisa Gregory Xinting He Venessa Diana Heddle Ehran Holm tsan Can Huang Zhengyan Jin Reza Karimi Donya Kiani Kaari Kitawi Sarry Klein David Kossowsky Andrea Angelika Linney Carla Ann Lipkin Logan Littlefield Shelley Long Mark Lowe Yujing Ma James A. MacDonald-Nelson Sarah MacLean Nabia Majeed Valerie Manica Kaly Manson

Robert Gordon McIntosh justin Mostacci Kevin Murray Jergus Oprsal Regina Park Robert Erwin Patterson Matthew Perotto Sadaf Pourjavaheri Jonah Ross-Marrs Riya Sarker Tarun Saurabh Weiming Shi Ziv Shtrikberger Martha Sparrow Katie Strang Mikael Sydor Saghar Talaei Shaimaa Tantawy Raymond Tung Nathan VanEgdom Andrew James Vlcek Ye Wang Rachel Weston Sarah Lucy Whitehouse Grace Yang Jou-Heng Yeh Catherine Yoon Michael Yu Rui Yu Shilu Zhao Guangyu Zhao

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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 15, 16 & 17, 2015.

Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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THESIS ADVISORS

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George Baird Fionn Byrne Roberto Damiani JosemarĂ­a de Churtichaga Benjamin Dillenburger Georges Farhat Robert Glover Ken Greenberg Rodney Hoinkes David Lieberman Andrea Mantin Liat Margolis Francesco Martire John J. May Laura Miller Alissa North Pete North Brady Peters Michael Piper Shadi Ramos James Roche John Shnier Mark Sterling Stephen Verderber Mason White

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John Patrick Bautista Tayler Bishop Nykola Blozowski Hui Chen Xi Cheng Xiaoyue Ding Rui Felix Misha Franta Karimah Gheddai Astrid Greaves Lisa Gregory Xinting He Venessa Diana Heddle Ehran Holm tsan Can Huang Zhengyan Jin Reza Karimi Donya Kiani Kaari Kitawi Sarry Klein David Kossowsky Andrea Angelika Linney Carla Ann Lipkin Logan Littlefield Shelley Long Mark Lowe Yujing Ma James A MacDonaldNelson 64 Sarah MacLean 66 Nabia Majeed 68 Valerie Manica

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Kaly Manson Robert Gordon McIntosh justin Mostacci Kevin Murray Jergus Oprsal Regina Park Robert Erwin Patterson Matthew Perotto Sadaf Pourjavaheri Jonah Ross-Marrs Riya Sarker Tarun Saurabh Weiming Shi Ziv Shtrikberger Martha Sparrow Katie Strang Mikael Sydor Saghar Talaei Shaimaa Tantawy Raymond Tung Nathan VanEgdom Andrew James Vlcek Ye Wang Rachel Weston Sarah Lucy Whitehouse Grace Yang Jou-Heng Yeh Catherine Yoon Michael Yu Rui Yu Shilu Zhao Guangyu Zhao

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Return to Type

John patrick bautista, MArch The podium tower has become a quintessential building type in the contemporary city centre. The combination of the mat building and tower activates the ground plane and accommodates vertical density while providing street level and aboveground legibility and pattern. Program is not always limited or exclusive to the typical configuration of a retail base and market-driven condominiums; form can adapt to program and vice versa. While appropriate for the city centre, the podium tower has also been transferred to suburban contexts. Such areas are characterized by sparsely scattered big box stores and residential and office buildings in a sea of concrete parking and undeveloped parcels. These sites lack the infrastructure that supports a pedestrian experience that the podium tower is commonly used to produce.

The typological approach in methodology allows for the classification of existing case studies, identification of different permutations, and recognition of issues inherent to the type in the hope of providing raw materials and a base knowledge for analysis and design proposals. With the propensity to reduce and simplify into simple geometric forms devoid of function or economic and political inclinations, the exploration of the podium tower as a type offers greater freedom for architectural solutions to surface that could have been ignored otherwise.

advisor: michael piper Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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Contested Corridors

Tayler Bishop, MLA Although hydroelectricity is considered the world’s leading renewable energy, the infrastructure required to generate and transport it has already created an extensive network of scars throughout the Canadian wilderness, clear-cutting forests and flooding landscapes.

How do we value the Canadian landscape in relation to these large infrastructural projects? The thesis explores a hydroelectric high-voltage direct-current transmission line, Bipole III, located in Manitoba. Bipole III was originally proposed to run along the eastern side of the province and cross through what is considered pristine boreal forest and a proposed Unesco World Heritage Site. Environmental groups, aboriginal communities and the provincial government forcefully opposed this plan, which led to a mandate that Bipole III revise its course. The succeeding route traverses what is largely considered a more fragmented landscape and has therefore been met with less opposition.

This thesis seeks to reevaluate our perceptions of hydro corridors; would we respect their presence if they were multi-dimensional, serving other purposes in addition to transporting energy? Using sites along Bipole III as an example, this project demonstrates how positive contextual opportunities can be exploited in hydro corridors by enhancing adjacent habitat, consolidating recreational use to minimize environmental impact, and growing community relations with the right-of-way.

advisor: pete north Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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Morphing Anti-Catenary Geodesics Nykola Blozowski, MLA Ephemeral landscapes are all around us. Whether it is out in the wild where landscapes evolve through the natural processes of erosion, water movement, and the change of seasons or within a built landscape where sound, light, and vegetation create the ephemeral experience, our interactions with such spaces can be more dynamic than our interactions with landscapes designed statically in form.

However, the experience of ephemeral sights and sounds has limited influence on the user. Seldom do we see ephemeral places built to deeply engage the sense of touch and the sense of actual physical space that is most present to us. A space that develops in 3 dimensions over time can increase the vitality of a user experience more profoundly than might the changes in sight or sound. Through the creation of a structural assemblage that is flexible in composition, the spatial experiences of users can be changed on command or with the use of collected sensory data.

Flexible structures can be created through the use of interlocking rings, which, under angles of tension, slide against each other in rows to torque parts of the structure up into inhabitable domes.

advisor: francesco martire Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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Retreat & Rendezvous Operation

Hui Chen, MLA Estuaries are some of the most productive ecosystems on earth. Simultaneously, because of their geographic features, estuaries provide great opportunities for development and safe navigation.

Galveston Bay provides almost half of Texas’s fishing product, and is home to the Houston Ship Channel, which connects the City of Houston to the Gulf of Mexico.

This channel carries more than 8,000 cargo ships each year and holds one of the world’s largest oil and petrochemical complexes. It is representative of the intertwinement of industrial infrastructure and significant habitat.

The shipping industry is carrying out a long term, ongoing process of dredging the navigational waterway and is responsible for oil spills from these engineering operations. While the shipping industry and dredging operations provide jobs and income, they also inevitably damage the environment and habitat of Galveston Bay. This project challenges the engineering status quo and provides realizable solutions for the future of the Houston Ship Channel and associated landscape. Beginning with the assumption that the oil industry will expand, slow, and finally contract, this thesis asks how landscape infrastructural strategies can be designed to take advantage of the present to prepare for a future with low-impact development, estuarine recovery, and responsible tourism that can be shown to benefit both economy and ecology.

advisor: fionn byrne Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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WINTER CONNECTION

Xi Cheng, MLA How can we enhance pedestrians’ mobility on the street in winter?

Since the beginnings of the winter cities movement in the early 1980s, many cities have adopted approaches to improve the planning, design, and management of the pedestrian environment in this harsh weather. Famous projects, such as Plus 15 in Calgary, connect major commercial buildings by skywalks. The PATH network in Toronto links most of the downtown area underground and will cover more area in the future. These are common strategies that have been used in winter cities. However, both still deny winter by leaving at-grade street life in the winter almost dead.

This thesis explores opportunities to enhance winter street life and make cities’ existing pedestrian networks more friendly spaces for people to circulate during colder months.

advisor: rodney hoinkes Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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Phase to Phase

Xiaoyue Ding, mla Transportation infrastructure built in the 1960s and 1970s had significant effects on urban development but prioritized efficiency. This thesis studies how landscape architecture can address traffic and ecological problems caused by Ontario’s transportation infrastructure. Neighbourhoods typically isolated from one another by this infrastructure can potentially be stitched together through a strategy of phased landscape interventions.

Allen Road in Toronto is a scar bifurcating adjacent neighbourhoods as well as a large precinct of the city. It is experiencing significant traffic and ecological problems and thus was chosen as the site for this thesis. This project outlines challenges and explores possible solutions for the site, ultimately leading to a proposal for a decked linear park strategically crafted in phases.

Decked Allen will gradually stitch the urban neighbourhoods around Allen Road together. The phased development begins with the construction of east west structural units at the most critical nodes. A north-south connection will slowly evolve as areas adjacent to the east-west units develop. The form of the new park would facilitate the development of healthier ecological systems, and provide a flexible infrastructure for continued change and adaptation as these systems shift and transform.

advisor: francesco martire Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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Borderless Landscapes of Control Rui Felix, mla Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed. — Francis Bacon, Aphorisms Concerning the Interpretation of Nature and the Kingdom of Man (1620) The airport landscape from its early pastoral scenes has evolved through its various wildlife and human security measures to become one of the most regulated and unparalleled landscape typologies. Today, with the advancement of monitoring and surveillance technology, the airport has also become a pivotal case study in the reconceptualization of the contemporary border as it shifts from mere concrete demarcations into complex, multidimensional landscapes of control.

This thesis uses Toronto’s Pearson International Airport as a test site to imagine the role of emerging surveillance and data control systems in a new land management approach. Much like the ancient nomadic shepherd that managed an economy through a symbiotic common land system, this new technology has the capability to operate at the same borderless and complex state of nature itself.

advisor: alissa north Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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Decarceration

Urban sentences for urban offenders

Misha Franta, mla Canada is in the process of increasing its prison population. With tough on crime policies and prison expansion, we are sending more and more people to prison at a time when crime rates are at an all-time low. Non-violent and first-time offenders make up the majority of people serving time, and in provincial correctional facilities the majority of offenders are being held on remand (legally innocent and awaiting trial). If a prison, by nature, is a place of coercive confinement fostering violence and bullying, is it suitable for people who pose no imminent threat to the public to be incarcerated? This thesis looks at an alternative to incarceration that uses an existing technology (electronic monitoring) as a sentencing option and way of reducing the prison population. Rather than being removed from the community and the city altogether, offenders could serve their sentences within their communities and amongst their support systems as a way of assimilating back into society as a rehabilitated member of the community. This exploration chronicles the perception of the city through space and time as defined by a sentencing technology.

advisor: francesco martire Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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The Parallel City

Karimah Gheddai, MUD & Shaimaa Tantawy, MUD The Parallel City is an initiative to investigate the relation between formal and informal fragments of a city, focusing on African cities. Informal settlements evolve with no prescribed planning, proper design, or legal guidelines. They are the normal progression of the continuous disregard of the demands of the informal settlement dwellers to have a proper human life with basic human needs. The difficulties that settlement dwellers face are interconnected on multiple levels in areas such as economics, health, and socio-cultural issues. Despite these difficulties, there are many opportunities that can be unearthed or better utilized to achieve stronger links between the formal and the informal city. Formality and informality cannot be approached without understanding the economic activity of both. Our objective is to provide a sustainable livelihood for informal settlement dwellers and enhance the image of their neighbourhoods in order to create a welcoming and inviting environment. This project proposes a better way to handle the growing density of unplanned areas and to spread awareness on how urban design can empower communities. A framework for intervention is divided into three stages: upgrading accessibility, redeveloping the business network, and anticipating the growth of the in-between spaces.

advisor: ken greenberg Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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URBAN ANOMOLIES AND THE (TRANS)FORMATION OF THE NON-PLACE Astrid Greaves, mla In its current form, Toronto presents vastly differing conditions within the span of blocks, from cultural hub to dead zone. This project began with the question: what factors contribute to the creation of “non-places” within an otherwise vibrant city?

Toronto’s urban fabric predominantly consists of an orthogonal grid. This was believed to be the most rational form of urban design, a systematic approach intended to streamline the parcelization of land, transportation, growth, and development. There are certain streets, however, that stray from the grid, often due to topographic, geopolitical, or infrastructural motivations. These irregular streets, rail corridors, and freeways create plots of land that deviate from Toronto’s typical rectangular allotments. Lacking a common urban type in the context of Toronto, these abnormalities (resulting from anomalies in the urban grid) often manifest as parkettes, small patches of grass, or dilapidated concrete areas. The unusually shaped plots too frequently function as ‘non-places’ within the otherwise dense metropolis.

Using the junction point of Dundas Street and College Street as a case study, this project explores the transformative possibilities that lie within these “nonplaces” to ease the discontents that innately surround them while activating the spaces themselves.

advisor: alissa north Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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South Side in Horto

Forming a new relationship​between chicago’s park system and its south side

Lisa Gregory, mla In 1830, Chicago adopted the motto Urbs in Horto meaning “City in a Garden.” From that point forward, the city aimed to live up to this ideal by creating a network of parkland spanning the lakefront to the inner boulevards. This extensive parkland system was intended to civilize Chicago’s increasing urbanity.

Today, the role of Chicago’s boulevard and park system has transformed as the surrounding urban fabric has changed over time. The city’s South Side, the historical heart of the park system, suffered economic devastation starting in the 1940s, which resulted in the present landscape of abandoned lots, vacant buildings, and high crime rates. Due to this transformation, the struggling urban fabric of the South Side has very little relationship to the historical park system.

This thesis aims to propose a new relationship between Chicago’s South Side and the park system. The creation of a new system of landscape connections which makes use of abandoned lots in the South Side’s Washington Park neighbourhood will form a new bond between the urban condition of the South Side and the city’s valuable park system.

advisor: georges farhat Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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Markham common

The cultural identification in landscape

Xinting He, mla Toronto has the second-highest percentage of foreign-born residents among global cities. Due to its rich ethnic diversity and economic power, the city has the potential to introduce people from different cultural backgrounds to the charms of different cultures. However, the existing ethnic districts are not always that successful, usually because they are only tied to commercial activities and lack innovative planning. When Chinese immigrants come to Toronto, for example, the population density around them drops drastically; the pace of life slows down; the architecture and public spaces looks different; and familiar rituals and habits like shopping are totally altered. These changes leave many feeling lost in their new home. Drawing on this observation, this thesis strives to use landscape as a medium to bridge the gap between an immigrants’ native culture and their experience living in Toronto, thus providing them with a greater sense of belonging. Taking cues from the important and diverse role that the commercial market place holds in daily life in China, this thesis re-envisions an existing shopping center as a hybrid shopping and cultural district.

Such a neighbourhood could also provide an exotic experience for second-generation immigrants and locals. As such, landscape can facilitate cultural identification.

advisor: andrea mantin Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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Funeral Well

Excursus on a Hole

Venessa Diana Heddle, MArch A thing is a hole in a thing it is not.

— Carl André

Atop the highest peak of the Cantabrian Mountains of Northern Spain opens a chasm of disputed depth. It is known regionally as the Pozo Funeres, or Funeral Well.

In Asturian Spanish, the term “pozo” lends itself to multiple meanings, denoting a hole, a well, and a mine shaft — conduits between worlds.

The Pozo Funeres is a singularity and a manifold: it is a site of plenty, a mass grave, the pride of a region, and the Gateway to Hell. Its halo of narrative unfolds into a series of recurring gestures which articulate the activity and ontological possibility of the Asturs and reveal a mythical life-world inseparable from the epic terrain of the Cantabrian Mountains and the tortured geology that lies beneath. These narratives, originating in different historical temporalities, when collapsed are reframed as transhistorical rituals wherein the boundaries between myth and modernity, sacred and profane, are blurred.

An archeology of the hole exhumes a struggle between procession, progress, and preservation, exploring the persistence of the sacred towards a depiction of a palpable mythological real. ...because playing with memory sorcerously reinvents events not as localizable beings but as deathless.

— Reza Negarestani

advisor: john j. may Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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towards a technics of roundness

Ehran Holm, MArch Let no one enter who is not a geometrician.

— Plato

The centered nature of Renaissance and Baroque architecture placed the individual and the collective in a microcosmic-macrocosmic relationship, simultaneously physical and intangible; placing orbs within orbs. The creation of spiritual relationships and understanding of one’s place in the universe was imagined through geometry as a creation of the human mind.

Within abstract ideas of projective and descriptive geometry, architecture was not only visualized, described, comprehended, and measured, but imagined as the stereotomic piecing together of intricate components. Orthography, as a tool, manipulated rigid geometric forms and representations to make architecture.

The rapid churning out of the “algorithmic” forms has swept the once admired architectural object and its representations into an ungraspable aether. The collapse of reality into electro-simulated 1:1 forms focuses on the efficient production of a presentation; this process is not met with the productive ambiguity, distance, and resistance of scaled architectural objects.

Contained in a dialogue between constraints of inherited techniques and contemporary technics lays idle a capacity to reinvigorate the forlorn architectural object. Hidden ambiguities that arise between various techniques provide space for unknown imaginings, turning representations into tools for experimental thinking.

This is a technics of roundness.

advisor: Laura miller Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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Layered Cultural Landscape

Memorizing the Past, Bridging the Future

tsan Can Huang, MLA The National Capital Region, known as Ottawa-Gatineau, has clear geo-political boundaries. A series of cultural landscapes with simplicity or multiplicity have been defined, preserved, or developed by the National Capital Commission.

The thesis takes issue with an existing condominium proposal and explores alternative uses of riverfront urban wasteland in the Chaudière islands area, a multi-layered cultural landscape. The many layers of the site include the industrial complex of the timber industry, the spiritual significance of the falls and river for aboriginal people, and the community connections between Ottawa, Ontario and Gatineau, Quebec.

The goal and vision is to mend green space, renovate industrial buildings, and relocate the proposed condominiums so as to facilitate site remediation and reflect the historical and social layers of Chaudière islands area.

advisor: pete north Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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Urban Design Ideas for Winter City Zhengyan Jin, MUD Cities in the north ought, because of their isolation, to be made more attractive and pronounced than their counterparts in southern parts. They ought to be gathered in a cluster to create a human environment in the desert. — Ralph Erskine, 1959 Urban design often only considers negative connotations with respect to winter.

Most human activities, therefore, take place indoors. If design approaches were to embrace more positive opportunities, designing for winter could make significant contributions to sustainable outdoor activity spaces that reflect northern values and lifestyles in winter cities.

This thesis explores how design can engage urban life and behavior in winter cities.

How can design encourage people to engage in outdoor activities during the winter?

This project includes site analyses and case studies on three winter cities around the world that are influenced by different winter issues. The cities include Harbin, China; Kiruna, Sweden; and Winnipeg, Canada. The design envisions a typical winter residential block that addresses winter issues and creates opportunities for spaces and programs that confront and celebrate winter.

advisor: mason white Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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Deviations

Reza Karimi, MArch John Frazer states: “Architecture becomes the expression of equilibrium between the endogenous development of architectural concept and the exogenous influences exerted by its environment.� However, material, as an environment factor, often influences visual or haptic aspects of architecture only. It is a medium to realize the already-conceived architectural intent. Consideration of physical properties of material follows development of form. In digital environment this, material influences, is reduced to textures, maps, and hues.

Another approach to form is involving structural qualities of material in the process of form making. The form becomes a result of dialogue between architectural concept and material while there is no order and hierarchy.

This thesis investigates non-hierarchical approach to form through digitizing structural properties of material. The outcome is a digital tool that allows the architect to sense structures in form-making process as the sculptor senses physicality of sculpture.

Using this tool allows geometry and material to co-evolve. The embedded structural criterion in the form making algorithm lets the user explore the deviations in forms within the zone of the minimum and maximum structural performance.

advisor: brady peters Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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LinkScape

Donya Kiani, mla In the 19th century, rail lines were built across Toronto transforming certain precincts of the city from rural communities into major industrial areas. Due in part to increased population densities within the urban environment these industrial lands are transforming into residential communities. These neighbourhoods today face a major problem of connectivity; industrial infrastructures such as railway corridors, roadway corridors etc. have created separation between the urban fabric.

This thesis intends to challenge the transportation infrastructure and connect neighbouring communities isolated from one another. Liberty Village is an ideal site of study as a prototypical isolated neighbourhood, one that is located in an area bound for accelerated development and with the potential to become a cultural hub due to its history and location. It is considered one of Toronto’s most dense neighbourhoods embedded between two railway tracks and a major highway, while other tracks serve as a boundary for other industrial neighbourhoods.

The focus of this thesis is to link Liberty Village to its surrounding neighbourhoods by means of landscape architecture. The design will act as a corridor to reconnect these pieces of urban fabric to the waterfront, nature, and the city through strategic public connections, improved mobility, and programming of the landscape features.

This thesis explores ways that landscape architecture can provide public connections that accommodate contemporary urban growth.

advisor: Francesco Martire Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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Peniel

The Place of Re-birth

Kaari Kitawi, mla I am because we are.

— John Mbiti

The current rate of re-offending amongst juvenile offenders from secure detention facilities in Canada is staggering. Experiences range from temporary relapses to chronic lives of crime and cycles of incarceration. Scholars in the justice system have identified “reintegration” as the critical element missing in the design and development of rehabilitation programs1. Research has also shown that youth are more prone to criminal behaviour when they have weak links with community whilst strong community links or social capital limits deviant behaviour².

Communities around the world have a long history of using rites of passage rituals as a means of integrating youth into their broader community. These are often marked by a period of separation where the youth receive instruction from leaders in their community and culminates with celebration and exchange of gifts upon reintegration as bona fide members.

This thesis re-imagines the relationship between community and detainee by employing components of rites of passage at the Roy McMurtry Youth Center in Brampton, a secure detention facility for boys aged 12 to 17 years old.

By manipulating the physical and social landscape of incarceration to create areas of graduated porosity, new opportunities are created for youth and community to interact and build bonds without compromising the correctional and safety mandates of the facility, ultimately reducing re-offending.

1American Correctional Association. Juvenile Justice Programs and Trends. 1996. Page23 ²Coalition for Juvenile Justice “Positive Youth Justice”. 2010. Butts Jeffrey A., Bazemore Gordon, Meroe Aundra Saa. http://www.njjn.org/uploads/digital-library/resource_1548.pdf Image by Richard Ross. http://www.juvenile-in-justice.com

advisor: Georges Farhat Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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Flows of Industry, Materials of Past Sarry Klein, mla The Old Mill is an Abitibi Consolidated pulp and paper mill located in Kenora, Ontario, once designated as the ‘Forest Capital of Canada’. The Old Mill was decommissioned in 2006 and is now the site of an ongoing development debate.

In the past, industry such as pulp and paper has been dependant on natural resources and geographic situation for their survival. Similarly, locating water routes, flows, and forests were crucial for early explorers and Canada’s First Nations in their efforts to navigate territory, trade goods, and establish communities on fertile land.

The decline of the pulp and paper industry has caused much of this industry’s operations to be decommissioned, leaving behind both palimpsests and voids in the urban fabric. This is illustrated in Canada and North America where structures are left to become relics and stories told through traces of contamination and memory.

This thesis will propose a new landscape architecture model for industrial site development. The community can reintegrate itself within the previously inaccessible site, affording a re-understanding of place. New social and ecological opportunities will grow out of a reallocation and reorganization of remaining site materials.

advisor: Alissa North Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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Sensory Mediation

testing the human experience with virtual nature

David Kossowsky, mla With over 4 million Canadians suffering from anxiety and stress-related mental health issues, and an estimated increase of a million people over the next 25 years, it is increasingly important to find improved ways of connecting therapeutic elements to landscape and urban environments.

It has been shown that human exposure to nature has a positive therapeutic influence on wellness and mental health. Full immersion in real natural landscapes is often thought to be most beneficial to the human condition; however, studies have shown that even looking at a photograph of a natural landscape for a short amount of time can have therapeutic benefits. While some feedback has been recorded in these scientific studies, little is known about the specific elements and sensory qualities that cause people to respond positively to natural settings.

Mediated reality and simulation technologies provide an opportunity to test specific elements of nature in a controlled environment. This thesis creates a testing field to study the human response and exposure to virtual nature and simulated environmental situations, in order to better understand human-environmental sensory connections and to advance research-based evidence surrounding elements of therapeutic landscapes.

advisor: Liat Margolis Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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Rising Seas

Andrea Angelika Linney, mla With climate change, extreme rise in water levels is dramatically impacting coastlines through erosion and submersion. With continual land loss, property damage, and the projected retreat of entire cities, populations and their respective economies are facing serious pressures. Typical contemporary strategies tend to favour the implementation of heavy infrastructure, such as seawalls. These strategies, however, are static, have low ecological value and high maintenance costs, and cause damage to neighbouring areas. A landscape ecology approach using hybrid or living shoreline techniques, can provide a less intrusive, a more economically viable, and ultimately, a more engaging solution.

This project highlights landscape ecology approaches that can be used in Halifax Harbour to not only address the rising sea level but also protect the city from subsequent storm surges.

The goal of this project is to minimize the impact of sea level rise by establishing adaptable shoreline strategies that help to absorb the energy of storm surges before they come into contact with populated urban areas. The most efficient way to achieve this is through the establishment of a performative park system that engages visitors and ultimately ensures the social, economic, and ecological resiliency of Halifax’s harbour edge.

advisor: Pete North Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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Biomimetics

Delaminating the Tree

Carla Ann Lipkin, mla What evokes the affinity we feel for trees? What role does the tree play as a landscape typology and how can we extend the conversation beyond what is already practiced and talked about?

The practice of additional urban greening — such as vertical landscapes — plays an important role in connecting the urban public to “nature.” Similarly, ornament in architecture, various articulated skins, built surfaces and forms include natural living systems and structures that can be scaled up as a way of enhancing functional and aesthetic vocabulary.

The tree is a vehicle for environmental functionality: carbon sequestration, air filtration, provision of habitat, climate cooling, and city beautifying. I argue that there should be an environmental ambition to increase their presence and function. For this thesis I am led to ask what is the middle ground between the living and the built (non-living), and how can I test this idea utilizing terms of imagery and functionality?

This thesis will dissect the tree and its multitude of contributions to our every day experience. This close examination will then contribute to the design of tree-formreplicas that can inhabit the urban realm as functioning entities that perform both aesthetically and environmentally.

advisor: Liat Margolis Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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CONFRONTING THE PRESENT

Constructing the civic realm on Beirut’s Urban Fringe Logan Littlefield, mla

After gaining independence in 1943, Lebanon saw thirty years of relative peace as a new republic before descending into a fifteen-year sectarian civil war. In public and political life, these thirty ‘golden years’ are heavily romanticized, while the tumultuous civil war is often intentionally forgotten. Romanticizing the past combined with a cynical approach to moving forward has resulted in both a physical and cultural erosion of the public realm. This, in tandem with the continued political instability spawned by the civil war, has allowed areas of natural, cultural, and civic heritage to be co-opted by private luxury development, preventing them from serving as potential devices to foster social cohesion and civic identity. The unprecedented tabula rasa re-construction of Beirut’s central district by a private development company exemplifies this condition.

This thesis responds by confronting present conditions; opportunity is found in the vernacular manifestations of public space that occur despite a lack of designated public space. The multivalent potential of the urban landscape is embraced by drawing on these types of spaces to project a new prototype of civic space on a neglected infrastructural landscape, where two urban highways, the Beirut River, and multiple contrasting neighbourhoods intersect.

advisor: Georges Farhat Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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Wilderness and Exodus

The Production of a National Landscape

Shelley Long, mla Canadian art, popular culture, and a history of frontierism all support a strong connection between Canadian identity and our perception of wilderness and Canada’s vast natural landscapes. Canada’s national parks act as a living repository of these images of the wild, with an ecological mandate to represent significant examples of all of Canada’s ecozones. However, the current landscape viewing experience in national parks reinforces a nature-as-other mentality and the preservation vs. conservation ideologies that birthed them. Bringing the national park into the anthropocene demands an approach that includes anthropomorphic biomes (anthromes) and spatial experiences that implicate and involve human ecological processes.

This thesis aims to construct new languages of identity and ecology through the reimagining of the Trans-Canada Highway as Canada’s next national park. A master plan delineating a new moving border, along with five roadside viewing areas along the highway transect, define a continuum of representative anthromes between the protected nature of Banff National Park and the urban nature of the City of Calgary.

The transformation of the highway from a former vector of wilderness exodus into a place for registering new perceptions and experiences, enables visitors to become agents of positive change in the production of a new national landscape.

advisor: Alissa North Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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Exit

Mark Lowe, MArch Data is meaningless; it may only be given shape through a referential method of unfolding into form. As a construct, data is fragmentary and irrational and in its translation of an analogue it inevitably generates errors and decay. Bound by mediation there must be an attempt to assert points of departure, relational in nature.

The decay and errors imbedded within the data become instances of opportunity.

To coalesce divergent systems is to exploit a methodology involving the process of translation, where points in space become form. With each point there is an opportunistic exit. A derivative construct reveals itself as a spatial artifact, bearing little resemblance to the origin. However, every artifact remains familiar in spite of its radical deviation from analogue instance.

This process adopts an operation of assembly involving the stitching of a line within a complex set of fragmentary data. Stitching together translated fragments of a disfigured architectural element allows them to become discrete digital forms. This is the mediation of an untethered fragment into a novel reconceptualised construct.

As reconstructed renditions, these forms are at once autonomous and inextricably linked to an origin, which is now manifested in a new identity. Exploring these artifacts through representational outputs that reveal their form, my intervening hand provides an exit from the presumed closed system of logic.

advisor: john j. may Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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Redesign of the Largest Square in the World Yujing Ma, Mud Originally conceived of as the largest square in the world, Xinghai Square in Dailan, China fails to provide a useable and symbolically recognizable public space for the city. The simplistic formal elliptical open space occupies a vast and valuable land area, which is surrounded by very dense residential, cultural, and commercial districts. The emptiness of Xinghai Square is an inappropriate reflection of the vitality of the city that surrounds it. My thesis is about finding a way to make the space meaningful. I have examined three approaches to the future of the square: the first is to keep the scale of the square and make it more intense and positive; the second is to make the square smaller but still maintain its status as the largest square in the world; the third is to conclude that it is impossible to make a meaningful square on such a huge scale and that the idea of the largest square in the world should be abandoned. In this third approach, the space could become a new neighborhood.

After research and analysis of the site and the city and testing each approach the final decision is to select the third solution: the square would be transformed to a new neighborhood in the city in the form of a CBD area.

advisor: Mark Sterling Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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[In]flux

confronting patterns of community and environmental detachment in fort mcmurray James A. MacDonald-Nelson, mla The massive success of Canada’s tar sands has branded Fort McMurray as a place to be exploited for its abundance in oil reserves. While the financial gains from this process have been enormous, extracting and processing oil from sand is one of the most volatile methods that exists today. As a result, periods of boom and bust characterize the general pattern of success for Canada’s most contentious natural resource.

This variability has caused sporadic and uneven growth in Fort McMurray. While many have relocated permanently, there are nearly 40,000 people who live transiently, between Fort McMurray and their home in other provinces or countries. This nomadic workforce spend very little time in the city, which has led to a growing detachment between transient workers and the permanent community of Fort McMurray.

[In]Flux seeks to confront this schism, using landscape as the medium to reconcile these divergent experiences. By integrating natural processes into the urban fabric and organizing community spaces that conform to this framework, the resulting design is intended to obscure the typical divisions between natural/urban, transient/ permanent, and landscape as disposable/landscape as indispensable.

advisor: Andrea Mantin Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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HIGHLANDS REBOOT

[Re]visiting the national park landscape

Sarah MacLean, mla Whereas the Government of Canada wishes to establish an Agency for the purpose of ensuring that Canada’s national parks, national historic sites and related heritage areas are protected and presented for this and future generations...

— Parks Canada Agency Act Canadian National Parks emerged in the late 19th century as urban centres became increasingly industrialized and upward mobility of the working class began to take hold. People filled their leisure time with wilderness recreation — leaving the city for the countryside to improve their health and enjoy the scenery. Simultaneously, the 19th Century marked the infancy of the Canadian nation state. National Parks were a way of creating a more cohesive national identity and provided a platform for the display of the nation’s natural history.

The park design choreographed visitors’ experiences — guiding them along winding roads and up steep mountains, to lookouts where they could gaze upon vast landscapes. Although promoted as “unspoiled” wilderness, parks were highly curated and managed by humans.

The threat of global climate change heightens the need for a more integrated approach to planning and interpreting our national landscapes.

Image: Picnic on the Cabot Trail, Nova Scotia Info Pamphlet, 1950s

advisor: Andrea Mantin Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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Life and death in the future system Nabia Majeed, MArch You believe in a crystal edifice, eternal and imperishable, an edifice at which one can never stealthily stick out his tongue or make a fist, even in one’s pocket. As for me, I am perhaps afraid of this edifice just because it is crystal and forever imperishable, and because it will be impossible even stealthily to stick out one’s tongue at it.

“You see, if there should be a chicken coop instead of your palace, and it begins to rain, I may crawl into this chicken coop to avoid getting wet; yet I will not imagine that this chicken coop is a palace out of gratitude, because it gave me shelter from the rain. You are laughing, you even say that in such a case a chicken coop and a mansion are the same.

Surely – I answer you – if the sole purpose of living is to keep from getting wet.

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

advisor: Stephen Verderber Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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Mediating Landscapes

in between preservation and progress

Valerie Manica, mla Heritage planning in Ontario has created a landscape of protected properties that are disassociated with surrounding urban and agricultural development.

Waterloo Region is one of the fastest growing municipalities in Ontario and must meet the demands of an increasingly diverse population while maintaining cultural and natural heritage resources.

The Region’s protected landscapes represent a narrow view of history, denying the cyclical nature of ecological processes and giving little weight to the violent and exploitive aspects of our past and present society.

By acknowledging multiple perspectives of time, there is potential to manage landscapes that engage present and future communities in a meaningful way.

This thesis aims to critique the practice of selective and opportunistic preservation of the built form and ecological regions while offering the designed landscape as a catalyst for heritage preservation and urban intensification.

The elements of stasis and flux, form and process are integrated into typological site designs across the Region.

Located at the intersection of heritage and urban growth districts, the designs create a public territory between the two domains. This third space becomes a safe place for constructive conflict, a stage for rehearsing alternative scenarios, and a new common ground for people with diverse histories.

advisor: Fionn Byrne Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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WHERE TO ROAM

Kaly Manson, mla Toronto has a remarkable natural ravine system that was formed by the Ice Age over 12,000 years ago. This ravine system has the greatest terrestrial value within the city for a diverse range of species.

Over the past number of decades, the Black Creek Subwatershed has experienced massive pressure from urban development, which has led to a dramatic increase in non-permeable surfaces and a severely fragmented ravine network. These conditions, combined with the consequences of climate change and outdated urban infrastructure, have resulted in more frequent and severe flood events, and unhealthy urban ecologies and vegetative communities.

Where to Roam questions how landscape architecture can use ecological design theories to mitigate the negative effects of urban encroachment on the Black Creek Ravine. It questions current practices used to keep Toronto’s ravine system healthy and resilient.

In order to ensure there is a strong ravine network in Toronto, it is imperative that landscape architects develop multivalent strategies of reclamation, reuse, and adaptation. The design strategy for the Black Creek Ravine presented in this thesis does not propose a creek naturalization or restoration approach; rather it takes a systems approach, exploring the possibilities for retrofitting and expanding the 21st century ravine and the ecologies that exist there today.

advisor: pete north Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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After Steel

Toward an Industrial Evolution

Robert Gordon McIntosh, mla Many cities are defined by and built upon the success of a single industry. When a defining local industry is lost, there can be complex issues that arise related to place identity. Such is the case in Hamilton, Ontario, where the collapse of the steel industry on the former Stelco site, after over 100 years of productivity, brings into question the identity of “Steeltown” after steel.

The 865-acre site on Hamilton Harbour is a byproduct of a century of global consumption and decentralized material flows, but richly layered with local history and cultural identification. Approaches to addressing similar brownfield sites around the world typically fall into two categories: that of romanticizing and memorializing the past, or that of capping and forgetting the history of the site in a form of “amnesia,” as Elizabeth Meyer describes similar practices in Large Parks.

With the end of steel production on the Stelco site comes the opportunity to rethink how we address culturally charged brownfield sites. This thesis seeks to commence a deconstruction of the site and a localization of material flows, establishing processes that are grounded in the realities of the site while setting up the framework for an ecologically driven industrial evolution.

advisor: Alissa North Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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DecompositionRecomposition

justin Mostacci, MArch This thesis is a case study in how we perceive and interact with ruinous environments. The Depot Harbor Roundhouse is an example of 19th century industrial facilities in the Great Lakes region. Ruins within densely populated areas are often demolished or repurposed for new inhabitants. As such, ruins that are not subject to urban intensification are left to be subsumed by their surroundings. The Depot Harbor Roundhouse is an instance of this; in the late 1800s a town grew up, but was abandoned fifty years ago. It was, at the time, an integral trade hub. When longer-range transportation such as rail and road became a reality, the port town was rendered unnecessary and its residence departed.

The Roundhouse’s primary functions were the servicing and reorientation of locomotives. Now merely the exterior foundation walls remain in a state of decay.

To the visitor, it is a privilege to witness the atmosphere of decomposition at odds with the perpetually changing density of the metropolis. The act of building here is a question of composing moments of human interface, where we are intimately involved with the process of disintegration where man and nature meet. Visitors to this site are asked to participate actively in a collaborative ephemeral experience, the binary between space and participant disintegrating along with very walls of the Roundhouse. The visitors are reminded of the passage of the train; they are also reminded of those who have gone before them, and their shared impermanence with the eroding walls.

advisor: David Lieberman Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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TERMINAL FLOW

Kevin Murray, MArch Mass transit’s success in its ambition to smoothly contract distance has contributed to the overdetermination of transit architecture as sites of flow. Yet the prominence of mass transit in our everyday lives continues to confront us with the elemental urban condition of our visibility and proximity to others.

This thesis addresses the relationship between transit, public space, and perception at the Yonge and Bloor Street subway station interchange. Designed during Toronto’s initial phases of subway development (1954-66), the station is the most active node in a network originally designed as a larger whole, sharing an architectural language of shapes, spatial configurations, materials, colours, and font. Decades of casual additions and inconsistent repairs have contributed to obscuring the early stations design intent, or worse, now serve to justify reframing the stations as problems in need of spectacular remediation.

The first part of this thesis is a retroactive manifesto and remediation of the early network of stations as public monuments, realigning them as coherent experiments in modernist architecture and planning.

The second part of the thesis addresses the stations capsularity by establishing relationships with the adjacent built fabric. The station is stitched into a network of common spaces — sidewalks, escalators, corridors, and plazas — moments of legibility amidst a sea of commercial residue.

advisor: George Baird Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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CAPTURING THE IMMATERIAL

Jergus Oprsal, mla Much of landscape architecture has been preoccupied with issues of land and water, yet atmosphere still remains an underexplored territory — despite the fact we all live in this envelope of gasses made mostly out of nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide.

Our bodies are encased in a world of gases; we react to it and its changes with all of our senses. We perceive spaces not only visually, but also haptically, allowing us to be not mere observers (through sight) but also participants who are immersed in the space, experiencing it through multiple senses.

This project deals with light matters, atmosphere and capturing of immaterial phenomena. It aims to engage atmosphere in both senses of its meaning: as a state of weather and climate but also as a generator of sensual experiences and moments in the time and network of a city.

advisor: Liat Margolis Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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inter-HUB

Regina Park, MArch inter-HUB is a new social condenser proposed at the intersection of Spadina Avenue and College Street (Spadina & College) in Toronto. It will welcome and empower people to dynamically interact by bringing the existing program (services for homeless) and several new programs (resource center, transitional housing, and retail) together to create a new welcoming place for the neighbourhood.

The North West corner of Spadina & College consists of the Scott Mission, which has been providing resources including shelter, food, and clothes to homeless and marginalized people. However, it struggles to meet the increasing demand for shelter and transitional housing units and to integrate into the neighbourhood. This project proposes inter-HUB as an architectural response to these issues, which acknowledges, accepts, and responds to the needs of complex stakeholders.

The design methodology is to create a design iteration by moving back and forth between the creation of diagrams and the creation of form: a parallel or interrelated set of investigations of spatial form, material, circulation, and quality of life in each program. The project utilizes diagram as a medium to produce a series of critical iterations based on a specific field of study resulting a number of design alternatives. The methodology provides the freedom to explore various possible outcomes from the design permutation of diagrams and physical models, and will ultimately lead to a design that will offer spacious rooms to accommodate various resources and welcoming places — by utilizing programmatic layers and interactive threshold conditions — that more dynamically interact with the neighbourhood.

advisor: john shnier Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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What are we to do now?

Robert Erwin Patterson, mla Toronto today is at a turning point as the city struggles to accommodate the arrival of nearly one hundred thousand residents annually, as young Millennials and aging Baby Boomers increasingly reject the suburbs and seek to live in dense connected urban locations.

While the city has focused on accommodating this sea-change in growth through tall building development in the downtown and various growth centers, Toronto as a city has ignored the question of how its predominately single-family downtown adjacent neighborhoods might respond to this shift in demographics as the intensification of the downtowns and avenues spills over into established neighborhoods.

My thesis explores how a series of landscape level changes to Toronto’s laneway networks might serve as a spine for accommodating new residential development in the city’s older historic neighborhoods, while providing space for infrastructure to respond to Toronto’s changing climate. Borrowing from the Dutch tradition of the city block as the fundamental planning unit, and early twentieth-century streetcar suburb design models, my thesis explores the potential of the block and the lane to manage the ongoing intensification of Toronto’s downtown neighborhoods.

advisor: Rodney Hoinkes Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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DECODING WATER – RECODING URBANISM

The dry truth behind The American Dream in the Valley of the Sun Matthew Perotto, mla Decoding Water – Recoding Urbanism explores the cultural and morphologic relationships between urban development and water metabolism within the Phoenix Metro Area, and finds that the ubiquitous implementation of the American Dream and the resulting sprawling suburbs fail to acknowledge their role in unsustainable urban resource management. Furthermore, despite a certain future of water scarcity, the region has clearly prioritized the continuity of consumption and sprawl over the preservation of cultural heritage and environmental management.

Decoding Water – Recoding Urbanism investigates alternative urban typologies for the region and proposes that environmental context and sustainable water management are paramount considerations in developing urban form and community. It investigates parametric computation as a tool to bridge the gap between contextual environmental and global infrastructural research on the physical design of landscape and urban form. Through this exploration, various models of water sustainability and decentralized system design are evaluated, exposing opportunities for conservation, treatment, and reuse directly within the urban fabric of the community, while integrating opportunities for public interaction with water in its productive, ecological, and recreational environments.

By developing new archetypal relationships between water-integrated urban form and multi-scalar landscape infrastructures, Decoding Water – Recoding Urbanism proposes a new typology of urbanism for the 21st century, adaptively redesigning the existing city from directly within the city.

advisor: Liat Margolis Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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Lower Yonge Street

A New Public Realm between the historic City and its Waterfront

Sadaf Pourjavaheri, mud Historically, Yonge Street has been Toronto’s most important civic street. It originally met the water’s edge at Front Street. It established the east and west sides of Toronto and connected the early City to the small towns and rural areas to its north.

It was Toronto’s iconic main street.

Over the years, with the filling and industrialization of the harbour, the street was extended south of Yonge on landfill and junction of the street with the water was pushed farther south to Queens Quay. Access to the water was also cut off by great infrastructures of rail corridor, elevated highway and dock lands. Within the context of the redevelopment of the waterfront, the objective of this thesis is to determine and show how this portion of Yonge Street and the areas around could be changed and developed in a way that better respects and integrates its history, natural context, physical infrastructure and future development within the context of a re-invented public realm along Yonge Street south of Front Street to the water’s edge and beyond.

advisor: ROBERT GLOVER Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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Experimental Tooling

Jonah Ross-Marrs, MArch In Translations between Drawing and Building, Robin Evans describes the “blind spot between the drawing and its object” as a productive space in the discipline of architecture. In recent time, this “gap” has become a frictionless plane where representations can be transformed directly into 3D objects through CNC (Computer Numerical Controlled) processes.

This research is an exploration into the space between representation and object through hands-on tinkering with the CNC process. This thesis first explores the CNC tool chain and then develops a series of experimental interventions which begin to project into the realm of design.

advisor: Laura Miller Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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LIVE WORK PLAY

Riya Sarker, MUD Markham, Ontario is located at the periphery of the Greater Toronto Area. When viewed within the context of the Greater Golden Horseshoe Region, Markham is part of the continuous sprawl that is the Greater Toronto Metropolitan Area. In the next 20 years, the population of Markham is projected to grow from 301,705 to 421,600 people. To support this growth, the City of Markham proposes development and transit corridors and new urban centres, with employment and mixed use spaces at key intersections and nodes, as well as within commercial sections of main arterials, throughout the inner suburbs.

In addition, a new taxonomy of mixed use places are replacing the traditional pattern of single use zones. As German planner Thomas Sievert’s asserts, the suburb “is neither city nor countryside, but both.” The village centres are replacing shopping centres, and town centres are replacing office parks and malls. The new planned centres will function as urban hybrids that are mixed use, compact, transit-oriented, and pedestrian-friendly. This thesis is an attempt to reinforce the notion of using connectivity, walkability, and integration as tools to design this new hybridized urban form.

advisor: Mark Sterling Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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Campus and the City

Urban Design for knowledge centre

Tarun Saurabh, mud There is an alternative model of the college campus that challenges the traditional understanding of what a campus site is. Campuses are traditionally understood as places separate from the city. In the alternative model, the campus is built into the city, making it difficult to know what the identity or extent of the campus might be.

Traditional urban campuses, such as Columbia University in Manhattan or the University of Toronto’s St. George Campus, are groupings of buildings set within open space, and have a distinct identity from the densely occupied urban grid that surrounds each campus.

Alternatively, college campuses such as NYU in New York or Toronto’s Ryerson University are scattered across the city and often integrated with other nonacademic building types such as retail or condominium development. In these cases, the campus is often entangled with the real estate deals that are going on around it and often lacks the identity common to traditional campuses of a distinct and detached site.

This project is about the expansion of an existing campus, whose current plan integrates it with a larger real estate development. This thesis will explore how a campus might retain a clear identity or spatial quality amidst this integration and engagement with the city that surrounds it.

advisor: michael piper Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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CUTURAL IMPROVEMENT OF JOHN STREET Weiming Shi, mud As a “cultural corridor,” John Street doesn’t currently provide a stimulating atmosphere for people walking along the street, even though it has cultural spaces adjacent to the street such as the CTV building, Scotiabank Theatre, and the TIFF Bell Lightbox. The cultural elements are trapped in the buildings behind opaque walls. The study area focuses on the intersection of John & Richmond Streets.

Transparency is used as a tool to reimagine the building walls that are facing to John Street, letting culture flow on the street. New programs are inserted on the ground floors of these buildings to encourage public participation and to create new public spaces for potential cultural events so people can experience the culture of John Street during day and night. These design interventions will help make John Street a real “cultural corridor.”

advisor: mark sterling Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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Urban Footprints

Re-Imagining Toronto’s Structure through Its Jewish collective memory

Ziv Shtrikberger, mud Do cities remember? Is there such a thing as urban memory? Can the recollection of past communities and cultures catalyze urban development? This thesis stems from my passion for understanding the history and the impact of the Jewish community on Toronto’s urban structure and life at the end of the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century. Moreover, this investigation is triggered by my interest in immigration and ethnicity and their relation to architecture and urban design. This work examines the appearance and disappearance of downtown Toronto’s Jewish community. It traces the structure and influence of this community on its surroundings, and exposes the spatial footprints that have been shaping the area’s urban behavior since. I have taken this opportunity to uncover, re-imagine, and imagine the reappearance of an urban life that has been covered with different layers over the years. Furthermore, by exploring and re-imagining the Jewish existence at the city’s core, this investigation reveals not only the urban footprint that this community left behind, but also the potential to re-imagine the area’s future, and the relevance of uncovering this history to other city users.

advisor: mark sterling Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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insides

Martha Sparrow, MArch Dear Reader, What is ‘inside’? It has been argued that the concept of the interior only emerged in connection with an idea of modern subjectivity in the early nineteenth-century. The notion of inner character developed alongside a framing of the subject in a room composed as a set of affects — the space made comfortable with the softness and intricacies of textile, the interior curated as a refuge into memory, the subject refined through the socializing screen of the curtain.

But the fallacy of the interior is that it is a closed system. No longer is it a site for the creation of a conditioned individual at ease within society. The interior is precarious; invaded from the outside, it in turn avenges and fortifies itself. Containment has always included a notion of concealment. The boundary becomes a system of concealed desirous inputs, filtered invasions, and ejected wastes.

Whether the cause is some enchantment or only a whim,1 the project re-imagines the space between inner and outer, operating on this site as mur neutralisant.² The boundary between interior and exterior discloses the embodied relationship of an ecological subject to the surrounding architecture through a material filigree.

The celebrated material mass is made up of paths, intricate relationships seeking form. Neither economically performative nor merely ornamental, form here is neither rationally determined nor functionally indeterminate. Perhaps by engaging both, as a constructive slippage between the two, this house could stand up by itself.3

1Italo Calvino ‘Armilla’ Invisible Cities ²Le Corbusier 3Reyner Banham A House Is Not a Home / Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment advisor: Benjamin Dillenburger Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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Nuclear Scale

Katie Strang, mla On July 15, 1945 the explosion of the Trinity nuclear bomb in New Mexico forced the world into a new era, the Nuclear Age, and arguably the Anthropocene. Nuclear technology has given humans access to both unprecedented generative and destructive power. The by-products of this clean energy, spent nuclear fuel cells, remain dangerously radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years, much longer than recorded human history. Homo sapiens have finally found a way to appear as more than a blip on the geological timescale.

Always a leading nuclear nation, Canada’s Federal government and the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) are currently siting a deep geological repository (DGR) as part of our long term strategy for managing this waste. In the coming decades all of our spent nuclear fuel cells will be permanently consolidated into this structure bored down 500m into the Canadian Shield.

However, marking the surface of this space through time, and our choice to make nuclear power a pillar of our energy plan is a landscape problem. Over the 100,000 year intended life of the DGR, marking it becomes a design problem without a known user, who will likely not speak an existing language or recognize our symbols.

advisor: Fionn Byrne Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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Point-Cloud Surveying

Subjective-Metric Documentation and the Question of What Heritage?

Mikael Sydor, MArch The application of point-cloud based surveying techniques for the documentation of cultural heritage is a turning point. Output, millions of precisely measured points with associated photographic colour values, approximates an image; as points are orbited and manipulated, they tessellate and reveal their lack of solidity. The points exist discretely, yet the viewer connects them to imagine representations of structure. The point cloud is a drawing that bridges the metric precision of a survey, and the subjective interpretation of a site.

Using the definition of a cultural landscape as the assembly of traces of cultural production on a given site, this project proposes that point-cloud based surveying is a powerful tool to negotiate and interpret the layers of cultural heritage value. An increasing focus on community involvement in the designation and management of cultural landscapes begs the questions: what values and whose heritage? interpretation (n) the act of explaining the meaning interpret (v) to find the meaning within Investigating these questions, this thesis presents three spaces of interpretation of the site. Originally a Victorian neighbourhood, it surrounds an idiosyncratic landmark: Honest Ed’s discount store. The documentation of the site, using photogrammetry and LIDAR, is used as a tool to question notions of extant heritage value, the role of subjective interpretations, and as a projective design tool.

advisor: David Lieberman Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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SPACE, PLACE, STORY

Saghar Talaei, MArch In architectural discourse, the application of narrative and story onto buildings implies that a series of events and spatial impressions can be construed through a sequencing of spaces and views within a building. Storytelling involves stringing together a timeline of events, while architecture employs a physical narration by organizing spatial relationships and carefully constructing viewpoints and events.

Physical narration, however, can compromise spatial experience and lead to a lack of individual interpretation, since the experience of space is not a linear one, and since sequential narrative does not relate to the amalgamated processes that form the experience of a space. Unlike authors, who have complete control over the pacing and focus of each scene, architects cannot rely on others to interpret their exact intentions nor on their buildings to remain true to a single narrative over time.

This thesis raises the question of how to develop spaces into more meaningful places through applying stories to the design process. Therefore storytelling is used in the process of design, to create a non-linear narrative within the architectural body, which can then be subject to continuous reinterpretation from the perspective of the audience, thus allowing for the enrichment of architectural work through an ever-evolving dialogue between the visitor and the space.

advisor: David Lieberman Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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Reclaiming Mumbai

Raymond Tung, mla This project investigates how landscape architecture can act as a catalyst in the transformation of the industrial Eastern Waterfront, the historic port, of Mumbai to address the following critical issues the city is currently facing: 1. Minimal available green and open space, 2. Chronic housing shortage arising from high demand but low supply, and 3. Unemployment from deindustrialisation.

This project interprets the concept of ‘reclaiming’ in two ways: 1. Physical creation of new green space that will provide public access to a onceinaccessible waterfront and in doing so, 2. act as a social stimulus, giving the urban poor, previously marginalised and excluded persons, the ability to be included in the city-building and restructuring of Mumbai.

advisor: James Roche Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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Supports

Towards Adaptable Housing

Nathan VanEgdom, MArch Dutch Architect John Habraken is considered one of the original and leading architectural theorists on the topic of user-influenced design and the notion of adaptable, flexible, and polyvalent housing and architecture at large, a re-emerging theme within the profession today. First published in 1962, Habraken’s Supports: an Alternative to Mass Housing, now simply known as Supports, initiated a career-long commitment to adaptable design including the creation and subsequent publications of the SAR (Stichting Architecten Research, the Dutch Foundation for Architectural Research) as well as a number of additional, relative texts to follow. As introduced in Supports, Habraken’s principal proposal for a differentiation between ‘support’ and ‘infill’ and the need for a respected system of control hierarchies in design lead way to a series of innovative planning methods documented by the SAR as well as the development of the Open Building movement. This thesis project seeks to apply Supports and such SAR methodology to an adaptable, mid-rise housing system composed of a manipulated row house typology as an alternative proposition to the problem of urban sprawl within the Greater Toronto Area.

advisor: David Lieberman Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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A Canadian Monument to a Century of Constant Conflict Andrew James Vlcek, MArch Conventional monuments and memorials across Canada stand in remembrance of our fallen soldiers. We as Canadians are asked to reflect on the valiant sacrifice of those soldiers to try and understand the hardships they endured in the face of villainy. Our nation’s past is rife with an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ outlook, but does this mythologized history reflect the true nature of the last 100 years? With diverse and multicultural backgrounds, Canadians possess personal histories representing all sides of armed conflicts that often saw no victor. The lives of Canadians reflect a world at war; delicate histories are woven into the fabric of our evolving identity.

This thesis presents a traveling memorial that reflects our humanity in the face of war. It is a forum for all Canadians — regardless of their heritage — to give tribute to and reflect on a century of constant conflict.

advisor: Josemaría de Churtichaga Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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To Fix

Ye Wang, mla This thesis is a re-evaluation of the interstitial spaces between the existing highway systems and the urban build environments in the context of densely populated cities. These spaces are created where the highway structures come close to, but do not touch, the other constructions in the city. The site selected for this project is the gap between the Gardiner Expressway and the downtown buildings beside it from Yonge Street to Lower Simcoe Street. It was selected based on a series of spatial analysis studies which identified it as an area of extremely close proximity.

Although critical to the city, the site is both environmentally and socially destructive, due to its adjacency to the highway. This thesis proposes a design strategy for exploring the potential of revitalising the gap based on the existing conditions, to fix the tension between the highway and urban environments.

advisor: Shadi Ramos Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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Scenic Route

Rachel Weston, mla At every instant, there is more than the eye can see, more than the ear can hear, a setting or a view waiting to be explored. — Kevin Lynch In this accelerated, hyper-technological and hyper-connected era, we are becoming increasingly disconnected from our surroundings. Whether due to overfamiliarity or distraction, we move through the physical environment without fully experiencing it. Simultaneously, cyberspace is becoming the primary realm through which we interact, communicate, and experience the world.

Taking digital culture as its precedent, this thesis examines the aspects that make it so compelling and proposes ways to appropriate these attributes and use them to engage people within the urban landscape in a new way.

advisor: Liat Margolis Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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Intersection

Wildlife Crossings in Yoho National Park

Sarah Lucy Whitehouse, mla With the ever-increasing expansion of the human footprint, increased competition for natural resources, habitat destruction, patch fragmentation, bisected wildlife corridors, and the challenges of climate change, many wild animals are forced to travel further afield to sustain their basic survival needs. Isolated natural reserves cannot adequately service the requirements of larger carnivores, nor can they sustain larger ungulate herds that require vast connected areas of land to breed and find sustenance.

Populations of terrestrial and aquatic species need to be connected — this is the fundamental condition for their survival. Landscape architecture is well positioned to address this issue and to advance wildlife needs through research, anticipation, redesign, and modification of the problematic points of intersection between human life and wildlife.

Yoho National Park, B.C. is located directly along the Spine of the Continent Wildlife Corridor, which spans from Alaska to South America. Yoho is also the location of another major corridor, the Trans Canada Highway. My thesis examines wildlife road crossing strategies for safe passage, for both humans and wildlife, through Yoho National Park.

advisor: James Roche Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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SEISMI • CITY

LANDSCAPES OF REFUGE & EARTHQUAKE AWARENESS

Grace Yang, mla Imagine an evening in downtown Vancouver when suddenly a mega-earthquake shakes the city. Vulnerable buildings fracture, bridges close, public transportation grinds to a halt, and telecommunication networks overload and fail. After the earthquake, people and cars flood the streets, moving towards open spaces and community hubs on higher ground. During the first seventy-two hours, residents are expected to survive on their own with minimal communication from rescue personnel. It becomes critical to keep residents safe and calm in their community with access to water, food, power, shelter, and emotional support.

Situated near the Cascadia subduction zone along the Pacific Ring of Fire, Vancouver is at risk of a substantial earthquake. However, the complacency most Vancouverites hold towards the potential for a major earthquake poses serious risks during a catastrophic event.

This thesis focuses on the pre-disaster and immediate response phases of disaster management in downtown Vancouver and explores how landscape architecture can preemptively help people prepare for and recover from disasters. The design proposes visual and sensory cues that increase familiarity and visibility of emergency interventions. Passive streetscapes are transformed into a multi-faceted wayfinding system that serve the everyday and the event of an emergency. These same strategies reinforce a sense of community — and transcend the system’s value as functional infrastructure.

advisor: Andrea Mantin Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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SCENE CITY

Jou-Heng Yeh, mud Toronto has been given the nickname “Hollywood North.” More than 1,300 television, movie, and commercial projects are filmed in Toronto each year. Toronto is seen on screens around the world and has become an important centre for the film industry in North America. The city of Toronto is diverse in its range of ethnicities and cultures, but also in its building stock and kinds of neighborhoods.

This combination allows Toronto to play other cities as well as itself — from North American cities to European cities to Asian cities.

This project began by looking at the ways that Toronto has been presented as other cities. The dynamics of the movie industry, the locations of sets, studios and other related working aspects of film and television production were analyzed and studied within the larger urban context. This thesis takes the position that rather than adopting the conventional studio model (a large, consolidated site for filming and production, requiring huge parcels of available land) for the future development of the film industry in Toronto, development should be pursued through the creation of a loose affiliation of facilities within a logical proximity to one another — effectively what a neighborhood context provides. At this moment, many of the city’s neighborhood schools are being considered for closure over the upcoming years, including many whose facilities include other important community services and facilities. This thesis envisions strategically redeveloping some of the school sites as centres for film industry facilities, while also maintaining a mix of local, community uses.

advisor: laura miller Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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Medical Landscapes

Catherine Yoon, mla Canada is widely known for its universal health care system. Though the system’s efficiency is often under debate, the idea stands that all insured residents are entitled access to necessary health care services. Consequently, this system has gained the interest of many across the globe and plays a critical role in the nation’s demographic pattern. However, regardless of its growing number of new residents, Canada has been facing an imbalance in its population profile. Today, seniors make up the fastest-growing age group in the world, and Canada is no exception (Statistics Canada, 2014). By 2061, approximately 25% of the Canadian population will be over 65 years of age, making universal healthcare a pressing issue.

The change in Canada’s projected demographic pattern has required a transformation of policies on health service delivery. Paired with the health benefits of nature, which have been made evident through academic research, the health care environment is an important territory for landscape architects to explore and advance in order to accommodate for the future. This project explores how landscape can assist, accommodate and enhance medical research, long-term care and treatments for its aging population.

advisor: Shadi Ramos Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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WINDLab

Michael Yu, mla How do we begin to mitigate wind for one season? Four seasons?

How do we begin to mitigate wind for multiple cardinal directions?

What does this mean for the people who use a site?

Wind is a property that is hardly explored beyond the wind rose in traditional landscape design. This exploration questions the effectiveness of a static representation for such a dynamic force.

The exploration is framed around a game-simulation format as a way of processing complex data into manageable knowledge that transforms the process of design into a game that allows for a person to understand the spatial benefits and consequences of wind mitigation.

The design of this system aims to give designers further knowledge of the properties of wind in the landscape and how they can make better-informed decisions when implementing design using this methodology.

advisor: Rodney Hoinkes Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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THERAPY RAILWAY

Rui Yu, mla Mining has played an important role in Canada for more than 100 years. It has stimulated urban expansion, and led to thriving new cities and towns. However, after an average productive time period of 5-20 years, all active mines have to be rehabilitated because of high pollution and erosion during mining operations. The rehabilitation phase takes over 100 years and is costly due to necessary materials, such as backfill, top soil, and vegetation.

There are more than 12,000 abandoned mines in Canada and 17,000 active mines that will need to be closed and rehabilitated in the future. A great number of these mines are surrounded by cities and towns. What is the potential of these brownfields? Will they still be able to contribute to communities? Are there ways to reuse these mining areas? Are there methods to reduce the cost and recovery period?

This thesis proposes to link both active and abandoned mines in a big system through a railway track. The aim is to clear out and recycle materials in active mines, restore abandoned mines, and produce necessary materials on the site of inactive mines for existing or future mines. The overall goal is to create a sustainable method to reduce rehabilitation costs and the long healing period.

This thesis focuses on the Kam Kotia and Hollinger mines as sites that could be transformed from abandoned mines to productive landscapes and urban parks.

advisor: James Roche Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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[Re]link

Shilu Zhao, mla Canada is facing an aging population crisis as seniors make up its fastest-growing demographic. Statistics Canada estimates that the proportion of Canadians aged 65 and over will grow from one in seven to roughly one in four by 2036.

The urban conditions of Canadian cities are not equipped to deal with this huge demographic shift. Social and physical barriers make the life of a senior difficult.

As the daily needs of those who are aging change, so to does the ways that they contribute to the social and economic life of their communities. These big changes are forcing municipal governments to play a central role in anticipating the challenges and opportunities associated with an aging population. Landscape architects can provide a tool for rethinking our urban conditions to better suit the needs of seniors.

This thesis aims to reconnect spaces and facilities within the core of downtown Toronto as a way to rethink the underutilized spaces that exist between these nodes. The project works at 2 scales. At the neighbourhood scale, it will focus on making an existing network more efficient for seniors, while at the detail scale, it will re-envision existing spaces both aesthetically and functionally for the elderly.

advisor: Shadi Ramos Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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Linear Urbanism

Carving public space in the Chinese monumental block Guangyu Zhao, mud From ancient China to contemporary China, spatial configurations arranged according axial symmetry have been functioning as physical devices to enact and deploy the ideology of the central power within an undemocratic society.

Structured through a sequence of monuments — in both the enclosed versions (developed before the Revolution) and in more open ones (expressed in the Great Leap Forward)—these configurations, which I’ve named “monumental blocks,” have been present in different cities across many centuries, making them one of the most important urban types in the history of Chinese cities.

Nevertheless, in the current urban condition, the monumental block seems to be unable to address the complexity of the fast-growing Chinese society, and it doesn’t function properly as public space.

My thesis focuses on the monumental block in the city of Shenzhen, the city’s largest public space.

Unlike other proposals for the redevelopment of the area, my strategy doesn’t break the existing linear sequence. I choose to expand and enrich the existent axial configuration by introducing a linear building. Through the creation of a linear complexity, the old monumental sequence is preserved and re-used.

The resulting configuration works both as infrastructure, hosting formal as well as informal programs, and frame, producing a new field of activities running northsouth across the park and the institutional buildings.

The “bridge,” a non-figurative architecture, is simple and archetypical. It challenges both the rhetoric of political power and capitalism. It avoids any metaphor and figurative reference to any specific culture or tradition, to let people take ownership without superimposing a totalizing architectural language. advisor: roberto damiani Thesis Reviews Winter 2015

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