Winter 2011 Thesis Reviews Booklet

MISHAAL ABIDI TASLIMA AFROZE VICTORIA BELL ADAM BOBBETTE JENNIFER BUKOVEC SANDRA CAPPUCCITTI KATHLEEN CAYETANO EMILY CHENG KEVIN CHENG KAN JUSTIN CHEUNG CAMIILO CRUZ JONATHAN CUMMINGS JENNIFER DAVIS LANCE DUTRIZAC ANNE EHRLICH ALI FARD KENNY CHUN KI FUNG HAIJING GAO ADAMO GARRITANO MARC HARDIEJOWSKI SHABNAM HOSSEINI YUDA HUO FATIMA IDRIS REINALDO JORDAN YOU-BEEN KIM CLINTON LANGEVIN TIMOTHY LEE JOSE ALEJANDRO LOPEZ HERNANDEZ

MELISSA LUI BRIGITTE LUZAR KAREN MAY VALENTINA MELE JUSTIN MIRON FARNOUSH MOGHADDAM SAMAN AZADEH MOHAMMADI-ADERKANI NICOLE NAPOLEONE AMY NORRIS DENISE CARMEN PINTO JEFF POWERS HAMISH RHODES JUAN JOSE ROBLES NATALEE RODRIGUEZ SCOTT DUNCAN ROSIN FARHANA SHARMIN JAMESON SKAIFE TODD ANDRE DALE SMITH PASQUALE SUPPA ANNA ULAK GREGORY WARREN BYRON WHITE SHANNON WILEY JONATHAN WONG SIN WAI JOSEPH YAU FAN ZHANG LU ZHANG

THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you to Ana da Silva Borges and Daisy Lyman for strong program support and invaluable coordination of the Final Thesis Reviews; to Helena Werren and Nene Brode for communications assistance and production of this book; to Dean Richard M. Sommer and our Assistant Dean, Administration, Horatio Bot; and to John Howarth, Johnny Bui, Annette Nyga and Zita da Silva D’Alessandro for facilities, resources, and coordination assistance for this Winter’s Thesis Reviews. Also thank you to an impressive array of guest critics and to our many thesis advisors whose unwavering commitment continues to show through the success of our students.

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MESSAGE We are very pleased to present this provocative roster for the Winter 2011 Final Thesis Reviews. On April 18 -19, 2011, our newest soon-to-be graduates of the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, in all of our three programs: Master of Architecture, Master of Landscape Architecture, and Master of Urban Design, will present and defend their speculations to a group of external and internal guest critics and a large faculty audience.

Fifty-five students, whose varied work we will be contemplating, have engaged in a range of thoughtful inquiries about our contemporary environment. Seen as a whole, their projects offer simultaneously a snapshot and a reflection on the constellation of issues paradigmatic of our current urbanized world. They reveal new possibilities, provide uncharted directions, and in the process they expand the limits of our complex, diverse, and interrelated disciplines.

We look forward to two stimulating days of rich discourse, varied perspectives, and new revelations.

Pina Petricone Director, Master of Architecture Program Jane Wolff Director, Master of Landscape Architecture Program Carol Moukheiber Director, Master of Urban Design Program

THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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PRoJects

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8 10 12 14 16 18 20 22 24 26 28 30 32 34 36 38 40 42 44 46 48 50 52 54 56 58 60 62

MISHAAL ABIDI TASLIMA AFROZE VICTORIA BELL ADAM BOBBETTE JENNIFER BUKOVEC SANDRA CAPPUCCITTI KATHLEEN CAYETANO EMILY CHENG KEVIN CHENG KAN JUSTIN CHEUNG CAMIILO CRUZ JONATHAN CUMMINGS JENNIFER DAVIS LANCE DUTRIZAC ANNE EHRLICH ALI FARD KENNY CHUN KI FUNG HAIJING GAO ADAMO GARRITANO MARC HARDIEJOWSKI SHABNAM HOSSEINI YUDA HUO FATIMA IDRIS REINALDO JORDAN YOU-BEEN KIM CLINTON LANGEVIN TIMOTHY LEE JOSE ALEJANDRO LOPEZ HERNANDEZ

64 66 68 70 72 74 76 78 58 80 82 48 84 86 88 90 92 94 96 98 100 82 102 104 106 108 110

MELISSA LUI BRIGITTE LUZAR KAREN MAY VALENTINA MELE JUSTIN MIRON FARNOUSH MOGHADDAM SAMAN AZADEH MOHAMMADI-ADERKANI NICOLE NAPOLEONE AMY NORRIS DENISE CARMEN PINTO JEFF POWERS HAMISH RHODES JUAN JOSE ROBLES NATALEE RODRIGUEZ SCOTT DUNCAN ROSIN FARHANA SHARMIN JAMESON SKAIFE TODD ANDRE DALE SMITH PASQUALE SUPPA ANNA ULAK GREGORY WARREN BYRON WHITE SHANNON WILEY JONATHAN WONG SIN WAI JOSEPH YAU FAN ZHANG LU ZHANG

THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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HABITABLE ROOT NETWORK TURNING BACK THE SANDS OF TIME

MISHAAL ABIDI, MArch

The Indus Delta, one of the most productive mangrove eco-regions of the world, is fast becoming a saline plane. Hydro politics has turned a once fertile agricultural land and the port of Keti Bundar into a saline desert in a matter of 40 years. Poverty, sea intrusion, over-utilization of the fishing industry, and a lack of fresh and potable water are forcing the people who have inhabited the land for centuries to look at alternative survival methods. Policy makers propose to turn the region into an industrial port, which will lead to massive infrastructure and urbanization, further threatening the fragile ecosystem.

This project aims to revive the ecology and geomorphology, which in turn will revive the economy of the settlements in the region.

The proposal reactivates the site with mangroves as a catalyst for accretion of land, using the intelligent growth logic of mangrove roots to negotiate the tidal fluctuation, creating a morphology that accretes fertile land and provides habitat for marine life.

The project looks at the possibility of an augmentation of natural systems hybridized with technological inputs to revive settlement and productivity of the region. Through interchanging scenarios of performance by purely biological functions, and adaptations of biological systems and architectural instances, the design seeks to find expression. Exploring the concept of the living tree, mangrove roots become the support for the water infrastructures, redefining the landscape with minimum impact. As the mangrove meets the plumbing networks, reservoirs become productive social spaces defined by fishing and aquaculture. The system expands into a territory of habitable instances, coexisting and recreating with nature.

ADVISOR: MASON WHITE THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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BRANDING REGION TASLIMA AFROZE, MUD

Regions are rather elusive and elastic nations. Where does a region begin? What does it consist of? How can we identify it? Certain sights and places we experience in our environment are appreciated collectively.

With a population of 4.6 million and growing, the GTHA (Greater Toronto Hamilton Area) is one of the largest, most heavily populated regions in Canada. What makes this region unique is the surrounding green belt and its shared waterfront.

This thesis explores the opportunities the GTHA’s waterfront offers as a unique leisure destination, providing the GTHA with a branding identity as an urban actor.

ADVISOR: CAROL MOUKHEIBER THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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WATER GATHERING

DECENTRALIZING DRINKING WATER INFRASTRUCTURES TO GENERATE SOCIAL INTERACTION IN INFORMAL SETTLEMENTS

VICTORIA BELL, MUD Water scarcity is an increasingly critical issue in global development. In 2010, the United Nations declared access to clean and equitable water a basic human right, while 17% of the global population still lacks access. Current practices of water servicing employ extensive construction measures and incur prohibitive costs on local governments, due to highly centralized models of distribution. These models create uneven distribution between income classes and result in atrisk populations rarely receiving the services they need without NGO intervention, thus creating economic (not environmental) water scarcity. Without immediate intervention, the proportion of under-serviced populations will only increase.

By situating the pilot site within Metro Manila, Philippines—a city with an informal population of over 9 million and located in a tropical wet/dry climate—this thesis will address issues of economic water scarcity while investigating the potential of water infrastructure as a social generator. By developing a decentralized model of distribution, existing voids within the urban fabric will be utilized not only as distribution nodes, but also as spaces for social interaction within the community. Through layering multiple infrastructures within the decentralized framework, opportunities to further improve the overall conditions of the settlement, without the added costs associated with individual servicing, will be evaluated.

ADVISOR: CAROL MOUKHEIBER CO-ADVISOR: ADRIAN PHIFFER THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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FLIP FLOP ADAM BOBBETTE, MLA

Get a pail. Walk to the Atlantic, fill the pail with water, walk back west. Empty the pail in the Pacific. Repeat until the oceans have flipped sides.

This thesis argues that the shoe is our most immediate experience of the landscape. In walking to and from the Pacific to the Atlantic I propose to design the landscape by designing a series of shoes that would enhance the experience of flipping the ocean: relational shoes, personal shoes, sounds shoes, tall shoes, short shoes.

ADVISOR: JANE WOLFF THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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PLACES TO WORK, PLACES TO FARM JENNIFER BUKOVEC, MLA

The suburban business park is a problematic landscape. Its singular purpose, lack of amenities, generic big box structures and vast areas of impermeable surfaces create a space that is inhospitable to humans and nature.

Concern over food security, the increasing distances food travels and the limited capacity of the earth to produce enough food for the booming population have made urban agriculture a growing trend. Proposals for urban agriculture range from small scale community gardens to technologically sophisticated vertical farm towers. But could the suburban business park be a location for largescale agriculture? Business parks offer many potential productive surfaces. These include the vast expanses of roofs, bare walls and the manicured lawns that surround the buildings.

This thesis explores the technical and logistical feasibility of retrofitting an existing business park with large scale agriculture. How can the roof and walls be used for agricultural production? How can the ground plane be rethought not only in terms of production but also storm water management?

Can the grounds also be re-imagined to reflect a new formal aesthetic that surpasses the suburban gardenesque approach and alludes to the new agricultural production occurring on the site?

The chosen thesis site is the Pearson Eco-Business Zone. This area consists of over 12,000 hectares of commercial and industrial lands surrounding the Pearson International Airport. It is the largest employment area in Canada, containing 12,500 businesses and employing over 350,000 people.

An initiative run by the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority and the Greater Toronto Airport Authority aims to make this business park a leader in environmental sustainability. This thesis consists of an overall strategy for the business park, as well as a detailed design of the Bayer complex - a business that is particularly responsive to environmental initiatives.

ADVISOR: LIAT MARGOLIS THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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THE STORY OF A LAND GRAB

EXPLORING THE NARRATIVE OF A FOOD SECURITY PHENOMENON

SANDRA CAPPUCCITTI, MUD

With the global population rising and moving into urban conditions, questions of food security are raised in countries that are heavily reliant on food importation. Many have found refuge in land grabbing, a neocolonialist phenomenon that has recently become common with the global media.

Land grabbing is often defined as large scale international land acquisitions, where developed countries purchase or lease land within under-developed countries for the purpose of agricultural production. As rent on the land is either uncommonly low or not collected, the deals themselves are loaded with promises of infrastructural development within the host country.

By taking an issue that is constantly viewed through a highly political lens, urban design presents the opportunity to become a tool of exploration. Current land grab situations create an opening for this thesis to embrace the narrative of land. In exploring the development potential of proposed infrastructure, a hierarchy of codes is developed that begins to re-write the story of a land grab.

ADVISOR: MASON WHITE THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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LIVING BEYOND THE EDGE AN ARCHITECTURAL RESPONSE TO HOUSING IN THE MANGGAHAN FLOODWAY KATHLEEN CAYETANO, MArch Flooding in the Philippines is not a new phenomenon. The country’s political history represents decades of poor flood mitigation strategies and mismanagement of certain infrastructures. It comes as no surprise that flooding has become commonplace, finding its way into the everyday vernacular of the Filipino person. In 2009, Typhoon Ketsana (locally Ondoy) left the country in a state of adversity. The devastating consequences demanded the attention of the national government, leading them to be more aggressive in the eviction of informal settlements in what they consider “danger zones”. However, the concerns of the individuals and families living in these precarious settlements are rarely addressed in the government’s plans of action.

This thesis promotes the argument that housing is a human right, bringing into question the social responsibility of the architect. With climate change increasingly affecting local conditions, it investigates the possibility of creating adaptable homes at the intersection of architecture and infrastructure.

ADVISOR: AZIZA CHAOUNI THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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ASYSTEMATIC INQUIRIES AND INTERPRETATIONS CONCERNING THE OBSERVATIONS, FINDINGS, AND NOTES FROM CERTAIN SPACE-GAZING, ATMOSPHERE-INVESTIGATING, LANDSCAPE-EXPLORING, EARTH-BASED INSTRUMENTS, THEIR EXPERIMENTS, STUDIES, AND OTHER MONITORING TASKS EMILY CHENG, MArch

ADVISOR: AN TE LIU THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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A NEW INSTRUMENTAL SPACE KEVIN CHENG KAN, MArch

Imagine the next generation of music venues, where the buildings become the instrument. To achieve an instrumental space one must re-evaluate the “experience” of music and performance in order to create a new breed of concert halls. This musical environment will have the ability to react/vibrate with the sounds in the space. The driving idea behind this new venue will be for the audience to experience a more persuasive and immersive performance—where the acoustics, the lights and the movement of the surrounding surfaces work together to intensify the sounds that circulate in the space.

My initial thoughts consisted of creating a new dynamic musical experience without having to rely on high-tech mechanical skins. These thoughts eventually concluded in the design of a resonating environment where the surfaces will move solely through the physics of sound pressure and vibrations, coupled with a choreographed field of lights. In order to deliver this experiential concert, all of the surfaces of this environment will be replaced by large suspended bodies of liquid.

Shallow pools of fluids such as water, oils, or even gaseous drinks, will wrap around the audience and performer. These liquid surfaces will be set up with speakers of different types, frequencies and sizes to create extensive wave patterns and elusive light impressions in the space. Because of the lack of friction with liquids, this electro-acoustic space will be sensitive to any sound, allowing the performer to play this large-scale instrumental building.

Music is such a large cultural component to society that this new generation of music venues will have the social responsibility to promote, educate and deliver music to the public and surrounding landscapes. The ensemble of lights and sounds will be reflected from the pools of liquids onto the outer facade of the building: a thin-shell geodesic dome structure with a semi-translucent skin.

This will allow for the aqueous patterns, lights and music to become an urban performance. Music should not be just sounds coming out of a speaker, but an essence that allows the space to take on a feel through forms, colours and moods. In this space, a musician would not just be playing a song, but presenting a musical journey embarked on by everybody in the new instrumental space.

ADVISOR: DAVID LIEBERMAN THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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SUBMERGED: MODULAR ECOLOGIES FOR SHARK MANAGEMENT JUSTIN CHEUNG, MLA This thesis looks to create a suitable alternative saltwater habitat in the Tasman Sea and reduce the number of Bull sharks found within Sydney Harbor. The harbor features numerous beaches and swimming sites that are highly populated by humans. These areas can be very dangerous and are potential points of attacks. Also, when a shark attack occurs, the public often over-reacts, and the sharks are then hunted out of fear. By relocating the shark population to the Tasman Sea, a safer body of water would be created for both humans and sharks.

Since the Bull sharks typically spawn within the freshwater delta, the sharks have a tendency to enter the Sydney Harbor waterway. As there are numerous beaches along the Tasman Sea coastline, it is important to create a safer method of protecting both sharks and humans. The use of non-physical barriers would decrease the amount of shark deaths that occur within the shark nets, as well as any inadvertent deaths of other aquatic species. Since these new barriers are structurally simple, the possibility of altering access to various areas based on spawning patterns exists. This would allow sharks to continue to spawn in freshwater rivers, while maintaining a protected zone for humans to access the water.

An artificial reef system would be placed outside the mouth of Sydney Harbor, both to create an alternative food source of local fish species and to represent a new form for artificial reef design.

In most cases, reefs are created with sunken boats, cars, or tires. Currently, the trend for artificial reefs is to sink various objects and allow the forms to establish themselves as they sink to the bottom. It is the goal of this thesis to create a reef system through a design that incorporates the human experience and aquatic fish habitats. Through the concepts of scale, and open and closed spaces, the form of these reefs would create various experiences for divers to travel through the reefs and view the aquatic fauna found within this unique underwater landscape.

ADVISOR: ROBERT WRIGHT THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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CITY GENERATOR CAMILO CRUZ, MUD

From a designer’s perspective, cities are complex systems of juxtaposed and overlaid elements that inter-affect and interact with each other. Those elements relate to each other in theory through rules, but in real life they participate in a spatial configuration called the urban realm: the city. As architects - and designers in general - we are trained to bring ‘visions of the future’ closer to reality through the use of ‘the plan’ as the main tool of expression. However, the real world is far from being a blank canvas to draw beautiful plans on. Geography, topography, pre-existing man-made conditions, as well as regulatory frames, economic and political situations, create boundaries within which we have to use our intuition in seeking the most compelling rendering of an imagined vision.

Urban design, then, is a discipline devoted to operate within a heavily restricted environment, by mediating between the elements and the rules that bind them together through the use of designer’s intuition. Therefore, understanding the fundamental urban components and the syntactic structure that rules their interaction becomes essential in order to be able to develop suitable and comprehensive systems, capable of generating effective cityscapes.

In the search for a systematic approach to urban design, the use of computation—more specifically parametric technology—can be a helpful way to generate and simulate interaction between elements within a determined urban syntax. The possibility of introducing intuition through immediacy, to the management and manipulation of form in a ruled environment becomes available as a powerful tool.

In mathematics, computer science, and related subjects, an algorithm is an effective method for solving a problem expressed as a finite sequence of steps. In design, an algorithm is the system that links components and rules in order to generate a number of different possible formal outcomes.

Based on predefined fundamental urban components and the rules that mediate their interaction, I intend to explore the design of an algorithm capable of generating adaptive and reactive urban spaces by using an intuitive control interface.

ADVISOR: RODOLPHE EL-KHOURY THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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PEAK LIVING

BALDWIN HILLS MASTER PLAN, LOS ANGELES

JONATHAN CUMMINGS, MArch

Our collective attitude toward nature in the current ecological paradigm, as articulated by the Slovenian critical theorist Slavoj ŽiŞek, predominantly stems from a man-nature binary in which we approach ecology as an ideology, collectively understanding a pre-modern, balanced world as the best possible world.

This zeitgeist is present in the Baldwin Hills, an active 1400-acre oil field in central Los Angeles, in which anti-development public sentiment has been applying pressure on the site to cease its industrial activity, to be replaced with a politically expedient, restorative project to turn the site into re-constructed biodiversity, as well as passive and active park space. This thesis takes a divergent approach to the design of this site, and in general, of our urbanized nature, exploring the practical and rhetorical consequences of an urban design proposal involving a historically separate and culturally stigmatized infrastructure necessarily brought into close proximity with new programs by inevitable land use pressures.

In doing so, it seeks to re-couple the temporal and spatial separation between our pervasive dependence on petroleum-based products with their spaces of production, and through this interface of infrastructure with biological and recreational environments, articulate the poetics of an anthropogenic nature.

ADVISOR: ROBERT LEVIT THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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UNSETTLED GROUND JENNIFER DAVIS, MArch

Located on the northern edge of Halifax, NS, Africville was an autonomous village of AfricanCanadians that was razed by city authorities in the 1960s under the banner of ‘urban renewal’.

Presently, the site is a place of waterfront industry, transportation infrastructure and Seaview Memorial Park, all construction projects which apparently serve the best interest of the majority of Haligonians. Although the political activism of the Africville descendants catalyzed the city’s 2010 apology for demolishing the community, there is ongoing disagreement concerning how it should be developed in the future.

This site can be characterized as agonistic space, a battleground where the power struggles between adversaries is articulated. Its manifestations as both a village and a park demonstrate that agonistic space has a contingent character that is dependent on the particular power relations at a given moment. The apology and plans to rebuild Africville’s church are proof of the inevitability of spatial change alongside ongoing political shifts and show that excluded people and repressed interests always have the potential of being reactivated.

Unsettled Ground proposes a methodology for designing in agonistic space. It acknowledges that politics and architecture are not two separately constituted fields and is self-conscious of design’s role in constituting the symbolic ordering of social relations.

The design of a new park embraces the site’s agonistic definition rather than promoting consensus.

The infrastructure and landscape of this public space are formed so that at certain times it accommodates the dominant expectations of a ‘park for all’ and at other moments makes visible the often obscured and liminal interests of the Africville descendants. Various levels of access and exclusion affect how it can be used by visitors, so that any benefits offered by this democratic space are always at the expense of excluding alternatives or other people’s interests. The park’s form fosters many subjectivities so there are contingent and conflicting interpretations and dissensus about who can claim to own the park, how the park can be used, and what the park represents.

ADVISOR: RICHARD SOMMER THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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COLLECTIVE WALL LANCE DUTRIZAC, MArch

The cultural significance of foam is evident in the gradual transformation of the conventional home’s cavity wall to 90% foam structure. Gradually, foam’s extraordinary properties expand on a hidden and underdeveloped material culture within the house envelope, where a plethora of traditional construction techniques and layers expose a psychologism or tendency to exaggerate the relevance of psychological factors guiding normative techniques and material deployment. Over-identification with conventional building philosophy breeds normative forces of domesticity which are decoded through a form of deliberate amnesia. Collective Wall emerges from this loss of memory and is approached as a psychodramatic exercise (inhabiting spaces we are never meant to occupy). In this respect, reconstitution of the body in an unpredictable domestic environment, where the body is an essential figure in domestic place making, is primary to new ways of conceptualizing the world.

ADVISOR: CHRISTOS MARCOPOULOS THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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PROVING GROUNDS ANNE EHRLICH, MArch

Proving Grounds operates forensically, investigating the continued vitality and authority of defunct territorial representations associated with the Bikini Atoll Nuclear Test Site. This project tests the ability of the architectural exhibition to reanimate and modify the use of apparently exhausted plans, models, and measurements. It is an attempt to propose an alternative, productive venue for making these documents publicly available.

Proving Grounds functions under the premise that the archive, as a fluctuating register occupying real space, can be the literal extension of a physical site. In the case of Bikini, “the most carefully studied atoll on earth”,1 the archival landscape is both mountainous and deliberately fragmented through the process of declassification. Mainland record management facilities, laboratories, and boardrooms are implicated within the geography of testing and reporting, alongside crumbling island bunkers and control stations.

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Sponsel, Alistair. “Lords of the Ring”. Cabinet, Issue 38, Summer 2010. Pp. 55-59.

Image: A viewing instrument for the observation of a planning and measuring event at Bikini Atoll, 1969.

ADVISOR: AN TE LIU THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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INFO_NET: AFRICA

TYPOLOGICAL INTERVENTIONS FOR AN EMERGENT INFORMATION ECONOMY IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA ALI FARD, MArch

This thesis deals with information and communication technologies (ICTs) and their role in the emergent information economy in the African context, with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa. By looking at ICTs as agents of growth and development, my research will seek architectural interventions able to address the emerging role of ICT in future-oriented development of the region.

The middle belt of Africa, a corridor that stretches from Lagos in Nigeria all the way to Mombasa in Kenya, will be looked at as a case study. The current investment of Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria in developing ‘knowledge parks’ indicates the enormous potentials of ICT in the region. However, typologically, the local performance of such parks is limited. Devised as hyper-connected enclaves fitted with walls, security fences, armed guards and defensive urban design, these info-bubbles attempt to bypass the barriers and constraints of local geography by systematically ignoring the local condition, while aligning themselves with global flows of information and economy.

For adoption and implementation of technologies to be widespread, they must be aligned with local needs, as demonstrated by the growth of local innovations in the field of ICT such as M-Pesa (Mobile Money), Farmers’ Friend networks, and the advancements in mobile health. By proposing alternatives to the ‘park’ model, this thesis will look at localized opportunities for ICTs to address and improve the local quality of life. This is done by typological interventions at the intersection of ICTs and local needs. Furthermore, merely providing access to the underprivileged parts of the region is not enough. Wider strategies of economic, social, and cultural growth will need to be implemented to foster not only connections, but a network of supportive, educational and community-oriented spaces which address the local needs of their users. By providing means of participation for local residents, this will assure a non-passive inclusion in the global information economy, while remaining rooted in the local geography and issues.

ADVISOR: MASON WHITE THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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LIVING WITH WATER

A COMMUNAL LANDSCAPE WITH A SENSE OF PLACE

KENNY CHUN KI FUNG, MLA

In the past, water was a vital resource for all aspects of life, and it determined where early settlements took place—along riverfronts. Today, living by the water is not a necessity, but it enhances the quality of life. Pollution and the built environment have caused a disconnect between people, the riverfront and the water body. This thesis will explore the possibility of revitalizing the underutilized banks of such urban waterways, specifically focusing on the Shing Mun River by the town of Shatin, Hong Kong. With better design interventions, the scheme looks to shape the riverfront and the river to become the landmarks of the town, creating a communal landscape with a unique identity, encompassing a better sense of place.

ADVISOR: ROBERT WRIGHT THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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SYMBIONODE APPROACH

FARMS+SUSTAINABLE TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM+SUNKEN COURTYARD DWELLINGS+URBAN LIFE HAIJING GAO, MUD

Urbanization in China is growing at a very fast pace. It is expected to grow 0.8 to 1.0 percent annually between 2011 and 2015, which means more than 10 million people will need to be accommodated in cities and towns each year. New developments often occur in urban fringe areas in response to the increasingly packed inner cities. This urban expansion not only increases energy consumption but also leads to the loss of farmland, which in turn jeopardizes food security and requires extra energy for the transportation of food products. In addition, increased energy consumption has caused a significant increase of carbon emissions, and as a result, China has been ranked the number one producer of carbon emissions since 2007. Since a large portion of carbon emissions are associated with household and transportation activities, there is an urgent need for local farming protection and energy consumption reduction in new urban development.

Using the principles of symbiosis, with a focus on infrastructural and environmental concerns, this design thesis proposes an urban structure that integrates farmland into urban node development.

The structure supports sustainable transportation systems, promotes environmental friendly building typologies, and sustains a livable suburban center in northern China.

ADVISOR: ROBERT LEVIT THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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DELINEATION OF A SOLID SEA: DIRECTING SEASCAPE TRAFFIC ADAMO GARRITANO, MArch At present, a blurry line separates those with the possibility to move for pleasure from those with the imperative to move out of necessity; however the future may hold a much more complex scenario, in which human existence is primarily based on movement. This new reality can be paralleled to the Virillian notion of the omnipolis: a city that exists everywhere and yet nowhere, undermining the ideas of local identity, the border of the state, culture, and habitation. The world becomes a place of trajectories.1 Moves towards integrated border security in the European context suggest departures from conventional thinking about the nature and location of borders, so that they are now evermore offshore, electronic, and drifting. At the centre of this rather complex border condition is the Mediterranean Sea: a fluid territory, undetectably divided into sovereign plots, yet belonging to all who surround it.2 Although heightened military controls have increased the risk of mortality, the number of refugees continues to rise. It appears that the perilous situation resulting from the effects of globalization on the economies of the global south has made migration, in many cases, an almost inescapable conclusion.

The intention of this thesis is to provide an overview of the multi-national division that exists throughout the Mediterranean territory, imagining future scenarios for this (hyper) border.

Employing an interdisciplinary approach involving an analysis of economic, political, cultural, and social conditions, a contemporary perspective of the Mediterranean Sea border is presented, discussing its present condition a baseline for provocations of its possible future spatial existence, anticipating a collective change towards a Virillian migration-based society.

1 2

Paul Virilio, Open Sky (New York: Verso, 1997), 74.

Fortress Europe (http://fortresseurope.blogspot.com/)

ADVISOR: AZIZA CHAOUNI THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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NEGOTIATING SPATIAL BOUNDARIES ADAPTIVE RE-USE OF KENSINGTON MARKET’S INTERSTITIAL SPACES MARC HARDIEJOWSKI, MLA Abandoned lots, fragmented laneways, twisted corridors are sandwiched in between a tight and interactive environment of residential and commercial territories. It is within this complex territorial environment that Toronto’s eclectic and eccentric Kensington Market operates. Forever changing in its cultural and physical composition, the thesis investigates and imagines the re-use of Kensington Market’s interstitial spaces under the guise of increased interest in commercial and residential development in and around the porous boundaries of Kensington Market. The fragmented territories become a social and infrastructural armature where commercial and residential environments are mixed and mingled, furthering the growth and complexity of Kensington Market’s ambiguous territories.

ADVISOR: JOHN DANAHY THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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THE THING SHABNAM HOSSEINI, MArch HAMISH RHODES, MArch The Thing is a mobile architecture which registers the effects of climate change - it is a cold climate animal, capable of flourishing only in arctic latitudes. The Thing is a sensitive instrument. By the constraints of its survival, it is constantly mapping out its territory, momentarily delineating the boundaries of climate change. It is an endangered species, whose days are numbered.

The Thing survives, moves, and broadcasts what it perceives at the frontline of climate change.

What it perceives is conditioned by the dialogues which it facilitates. The Thing interacts with social, scientific, climatic, artistic, biologic, political and economic data. The Thing is a nomadic network of multiple Things. It extracts information from one place to several, in an effort to subvert an immanent colonialism.

ADVISOR: ADRIAN BLACKWELL THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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CARBON [NET]-WORK YUDA HUO, MLA

If everyone living in the world consumed our natural resources and generated carbon dioxide at the existing rate, we would need three earths to support human civilization. Unfortunately, we only have one. We have to accept the inconvenient truth that climate change has already become, and continues to be, an environmental threat.

Consequently, it is time to think about what is right, to do something to protect our environment, and to leave something precious for future generations.

This thesis envisions creating an exemplary model at the community scale to contemplate the ideological concept of a carbon-neutral utopia. The research interest focuses on how our daily lifestyle choices can influence our carbon footprint, and explores the driving factors that shape our lifestyle choices in urban settings. The project proposes a community design in Lakeview, City of Mississauga to demonstrate how landscape, as an infrastructure, can shape our lifestyle choices in terms of carbon neutrality.

ADVISOR: ALISSA NORTH THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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FROM DUST TO DRAIN

REVISITING THE AGRICULTURAL LANDSCAPE OF PAKISTAN IN A TIME OF ECONOMIC CRISIS DUE TO CATASTROPHIC DISASTERS OF FLOOD AND DROUGHT ON ACCOUNT OF CHANGING SEASONS

FATIMA IDRIS, MLA With the rapid increase in population and a higher demand for agricultural produce, and hindered by an inefficient irrigation water management system, Balochistan, a province of Pakistan faces intense climatic conditions resulting in a landscape unfit for producing annual crops. It is confronted with two extreme climatic situations: drought and flood.

Pakistan is largely an arid to semi-arid country which depends almost entirely on the Himalayan glaciers for its agricultural needs. Given its reliance on a massive integrated irrigation system, it is threatened in harsh droughts—1999-2001, the longest drought on record, and 2009—but is also vulnerable to seasonal fierce floods, such as that which occurred in 2010. Given that the economy of Pakistan is 90% dependent on agriculture, properly managing the hydrological variation in Pakistan, and specifically in the province of Balochistan, is an issue of utmost importance.

Balochistan, the largest province of Pakistan, occupies 44% of total land mass and is mostly comprised of deserts. It has an annual rainfall intensity of under 400 millimeters, but in many parts it is as low as 50 millimeters. In comparison to other districts of Balochistan, Jafarabad, in particular, is closest to the Indus River and hence a part of the flood plain. It receives high intensity flooding during monsoon season and experiences drought during the spring.

This thesis provides design strategies to be implemented in rural agricultural lands such as in Jafarabad (Balochistan) which manage the above-mentioned extreme conditions. The design strategies include the use of topography (terrain re-modeling), planting, different irrigation techniques and crop rotation methods to properly manage hydrological variation occurring in these farmlands.

ADVISOR: JANE WOLFF THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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TORONTO IS A LANDSCAPE FRAMED BY ITS BUILDING REINALDO JORDAN, MLA The City as Landscape Toronto’s urban core can no longer be solely defined as a financial and cultural district. Instead it is now the epicentre of further urban growth and expansion. The site is amalgamating into a thriving metropolis that combines office space, retail, culture and residential programming. While the performative character of the city core morphs into a hyperactive metropolitan condition, there is evidence showing that the image of the metropolis is also undergoing a drastic transformation.

In 1969, the Toronto Dominion Centre (TDC) defined Toronto as a global financial centre. Today, the symbolic stature of the TDC is diminishing. In the architectural race to reach greater heights, several skyscrapers have surpassed the TDC’s iconic vertical stature. There is no single building that defines Toronto’s skyline. Consequently, the TDC quietly recedes into the background and is now enclosed by a wall of tall, slender facades that characterize the Toronto skyline. The aggregate built-form of the metropolis is the one and only icon; the TDC is one among many other elements coexisting as an urban unit.

The Building as Frame The TDC is now framed in relation to the hidden city, buried underground in order to realign the urbanistic transformation of the city core and at the same time reimagine the city’s metropolitan character. Imagine: reasserting the iconic stature of the Toronto Dominion Centre by framing the buildings as a gateway that facilitates public access to a seemingly endless, privately controlled homogeneous environment. Such an intervention projects a distorted image of the modern metropolis. This consequential mirrored image is a surreal landscape, a delirious composite of the ideals that define the city as a landscape where we constantly negotiate our inherent desire for individuality in combination with our inherent desire for collective cohabitation. The TDC will serve as the frame that reveals the opposing and conflicting social strata that characterize the metropolis as they inhabit the open confines of the proposed metropolitan library. At both the underground and ground floor levels, a library emerges as a site of encounter, whose ideals are rooted in the desire to facilitate the realization of rational individuals to self-actualization.

ADVISOR: ROBERT WRIGHT CO-ADVISOR: LAURA MILLER THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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DMZ: TERRITORIAL PARADOX YOU-BEEN KIM, MArch

The Demilitarized Zone (DMZ)—the border between North and South Korea—was established in 1953 as a result of the 3-year Korean War. The DMZ is a strip of land running across the Korean Peninsula between North and South Korea, about 250 kilometers long and 4 kilometers wide. In the middle is a Military Demarcation Line (MDL) and running along both the North and South edges there is a double-wire fence. Korea is currently the only separated nation in the world with “separated” ideologies, cultures, and two different socioeconomic systems. Due to these discontinuities, the DMZ has been considered as a third world district with no human interference allowed. This no man’s land represents the extensive paradox in the political, cultural, economical, natural, anthropological and archaeological relationships between two divergent worlds: North and South Korea.

This thesis project confronts these paradoxical complexities and curates both nations’ parallel experiences of diverse paradoxical relationships through collective moments. After examining the entire DMZ, three distinctive paradoxical sites were discovered. Each of the three sites highlights its own paradoxical relationship, while the overall experience integrates the paradox between Reality and Negation through the mental and physical spaces superimposing, merging, and slipping from one to another.

ADVISOR: MASON WHITE THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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INFRASTRUCTURAL RECLAMATION COUPLING RENEWABLE ENERGY WITH ABANDONED MINES

CLINTON LANGEVIN, MArch AMY NORRIS, MArch “We don’t have an off-the-shelf remedy. What do you do with the enormous chat piles? When does cleanup become impracticable? We have limited resources.”

- Randy Deitz, EPA Superfund official “What’s going to happen ultimately, I don’t know. There’s nothing I can do to stop the flow of the water. There isn’t anything I can do to remove it. I’ll just have to accept it until somebody does something to remove it or eliminate it or dilute it. Or something.”

- George Mayer, Tri-State district resident “Mountains of mine tailings, some as tall as 13-story buildings, others as wide as four football fields, loom over streets, homes, churches and schools. Dust, laced with lead, cadmium and other poisonous metals, blow off the man-made hills and 800 acres of dry settling ponds. But today there is a new hope for Tar Creek: a solar energy plant and research station spearheaded by the Department of Energy’s landmark National Clean Energy Infrastructure Program (NCEIP) asks - can we productively co-exist with our disasters and give a forsaken landscape the chance to heal?”

- Margot Roosevelt, Time Magazine “The Tar Creek solar research and production facility will be a huge resource for all sectors of the solar energy research community. It represents a significant step towards the development of a competitive American solar industry.”

- Dr. James Taylor, National Renewable Energy Laboratory “I dunno about this new contraption they’re buildin’ over there at Picher. I know a few folks say they’re gonna go ahead and get a place there, and a buddy of mine, his daughter’s gonna be workin’ in some store that’s goin’ in. But I just don’t know. They say it’s gonna fix the place an’ maybe someday the fish’d even come back to the creek. How a big ol’ thing like that could make it happen I dunno, but that’d be somethin’ to see now wouldn’t it?”

- Ed Johnson, Cardin resident

ADVISOR: STEVEN FONG THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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REFRASTRUCTURE T.O.

THE ADAPTIVE REUSE OF THE CANADIAN RAIL NETWORK ON NEIGHBOURHOODS AND INNER SUBURBS TIMOTHY LEE, MArch

This thesis proposes to convert underused rail corridors around the city core into a continuous system of transit surrounded by parks and pedestrian-friendly mixed-use centers of development. Essential to the concept is that each of the three key elements - transit, greenspace and development - is interrelated and that the resulting network connects seamlessly with the current transit system, as well as with adjacent neighborhoods.

ADVISOR: CAROL MOUKHEIBER THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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WASTE2NO

AN INTERACTIVE SYSTEM FOR THE BUYING, SELLING, SHARING, SWAPPING AND REMAKING OF THINGS IN CITIES JOSE ALEJANDRO LOPEZ HERNANDEZ, MArch

Urban waste systems cut through a variety of scenarios, both individual and collective, that not only give us a picture of what is wasted in the city but also of what is consumed. This project addresses the problem of urban waste by questioning the dominant consumer product use paradigm (buy, use, dispose) through the introduction of other modes of exchange. Taking inspiration from online services like Freecycle, and shared-use systems like Zip Car, Waste2no proposes a speculative urban infrastructure that supports the networked sharing, swapping, and reselling of consumer goods in the city. By increasing the intensity and volume of these alternative modes of exchange, the goal is to reduce the amount of waste being produced, save resources on the supply end, and free up spaces occupied by things.

The Waste2no system is made possible through the integration of low-cost Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology, and through a social web application called the Stuff Cloud. Every passive RFID tag has a unique identifier (no tag is identical to another) and this information can be detected when the tag enters the field of an RFID reader. In a scenario where every consumer item in our possession is tagged or can easily be tagged, it becomes possible for its use and location to be tracked and for its status and quality to be logged. Moreover, an online profile of the item makes it easier for people to coordinate exchanging it with others.

This project questions ‘passive’ approaches to sustainability where networked self-regulating systems automatically handle performance leaving the agency of user out of the equation.

Hence, this system is designed recognizing basic social behavioral patterns around the culture of shopping.

The design process of the Waste2no project uses time-based techniques of Architectural representation and prototyping techniques borrowed from the field of Interaction Design. Its process is being documented and archived through a dedicated website at: archinteractive.net/ blog.

ADVISOR: RODOLPHE EL-KHOURY THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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A CONSTRUCT OF TIME MELISSA LUI, MArch

The introduction of street lighting in the nineteenth century radically changed the notion of the city.

Street lights allowed people to stay out after the sun had set, resulting in new urban activities.

As our desire to further the day into the night continues, there is still very little architecture that addresses the use of buildings at night. While daytime architectures are preoccupied with efficiencies, night-time ones are concerned with cultural celebration.

Located on the south-west corner of King and John Streets, this proposal seeks to eliminate all existing buildings on site, but retain their cultural value. The entire city block will operate under its own internalized time zone, in which artificial environments render day lighting methodologies obsolete, resulting in a dense, monolithic architecture. Time will be used as the measure and generator of form. The most significant part of the building is an enclosed path that, when traversed, recreates the passage of time.

ADVISOR: RODOLPHE EL-KHOURY THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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SHELTERING THE PERMEABLE BODY BRIGITTE LUZAR, MArch “The general failure to grasp the significance of the many elements that contribute to man’s sense of space may be due to two mistaken notions: (1) that for every effect there is a single and identifiable cause, and (2) that man’s boundary begins and ends with his skin. If we can rid ourselves of the need for a single explanation, and if we can think of man as surrounded by a series of expanding and contracting fields which provide information of many kinds, we shall begin to see him in an entirely different light.”

In his 1966 book The Hidden Dimension, anthropologist Edward T. Hall theorizes that spatial perception is the result of many factors resulting from cultural, sensorial and psychological conditioning. While his interests are primarily behavioral, Hall challenges the traditional perception of the impervious body and suggests that in designing for human inhabitation, we must consider a multitude of invisible forces.

This thesis will look at another set of invisible forces which have implications on the way we make and inhabit buildings, and will consider the permeable nature of human body which through absorption, inhalation, ingestion, and irradiation makes continual exchanges with the surrounding medium. While many of these exchanges are vital to our existence, are all exchanges as beneficial as they might be? Not according to the Environmental Working Group who, in their Body Burden initiative, claim that we are living in a “toxic soup” of synthetic chemicals; there are 80,000 in use today, and testing confirms detectable amounts of several hundred potentially toxic chemicals in all of us. We are guinea pigs of the “biggest experiment in human history” says Ken Cook of the EWG. And not according to the many experts on electromagnetics and human health who warn of potential consequences from an unprecedented proliferation of tissue penetrating electromagnetic radiation produced by electrical wiring, appliances, electronics and wireless telecommunications: “We have now just about filled up the available space in the electromagnetic spectrum. This change in our natural environment is actually the most drastic alteration made by mankind and is far greater than any chemical contamination yet recorded.” (Dr. Robert O. Becker) This thesis will look at the implications of chemical and electro pollution on health, and propose architectural strategies for a toxin free domestic space.

ADVISOR: RODOLPHE EL-KHOURY THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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A GUIDE TO URBAN CHICKENS KAREN MAY, MLA

The project genesis is the design and construction of an experimental chicken coop prototype, and the rearing of chickens in a friends’ backyard, to further understand the potential for different types of field work as design research.

With the development of an accessible, how-to guide to chicken rearing in the city, this thesis seeks to explore questions about inhabitation of the modern city with the introduction of a taboo animal—the chicken—confronting issues around urban animal husbandry as food production, bylaws and informal networks for illicit activities, inter-species encounters, and modern ideas of utopic and dystopic visions of the city. The investigation engages at an individual, backyard level, as well as neighbourhood, and city scales.

Is it possible for the chicken to be a transformative agent, asking us to re-imagine how we live our lives in contemporary cities?

ADVISOR: JANE WOLFF CO-ADVISOR: ADRIAN BLACKWELL THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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BĂ‚TIMENT ATYPIQUE VALENTINA MELE, MArch

A new type of building, one that is indifferent to its functional destiny, changing effortlessly from one day to the next.

Its intelligence is derived from its simplicity: its separation of hardware from software. With infrastructure permanently decentralized, this building can structurally morph minute-to-minute, accommodating a state of hyper-programmatic change and juxtaposition. The more it is used, the more efficient it becomes. Its evolution cannot be seen nor speculated upon.

ADVISOR: CAROL MOUKHEIBER THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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5 DEGREES

PERFORMANCE DESIGN OF PRAIRIE/SAVANNAH AS CLIMATE CHANGE ADAPTATION IN ONTARIO’S COTTAGE COUNTRY

JUSTIN MIRON, MLA This thesis proposes the large scale land conversion from forest into inhabited and biomassgenerating savannah, in response to expected climate changes, within the rural commuter/ recreational outback in the Canadian Shield of north central Ontario.

Located amongst extensive bedrock outcrops in the fire-prone mixed forest transition between the boreal and deciduous regions, this area of the Canadian Shield is iconic as one of the most picturesque and recreational areas in Canada. However, life on the summer lake—which characterizes the lifestyle and main economic thrust of this part of Ontario—is nearing capacity as more recreational users demand its landscape.

Meanwhile, worldwide greenhouse gas emissions, if left unabated for most of the next 60 years, are projected to induce significantly warmer temperatures here—by an average of about 5 degrees Celsius—making its future summers comparable to those of present-day Virginia and parts of North Carolina and its winters to southern Michigan. Such temperature increases will have a profound influence on this highly reactive landscape of shallow, acid, agriculturally marginal soils, and disturbance-prone forests—initiating landscape processes that will make suitable savannah/ prairie-like conditions that have not been seen here in several thousand years. However, such conditions also offer an opportunity to re-imagine the cottage country, and to shift its emphasis from the lakes to the enjoyment and use of the grassland.

What will climate change adaptation be like in this landscape?

Diverse savannah and prairie ecosystems, owing to their ability to generate large amounts of high quality biomass on relatively poor soils with little input of energy or nutrients, can be used to generate net carbon savings—a commodity based upon the cultivation of grasses for carbon sequestration.

This is an opportunity to re-design the recreational/cottage landscape as a management tool for the maintenance of a novel ecosystem that ties into an emergent carbon-sequestration economy.

The project proposes to design landscape options for integrating managed savannah/prairie with the recreational use inherent to cottage country. It aims to demonstrate the adaptive benefits— economic and ecological—of grassland-based landscapes.

ADVISOR: JOHN DANAHY THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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TRANSFORMING INFRASTRUCTURE INTO PUBLIC SPACE FARNOUSH MOGHADDAM SAMAN, MUD With increasing rates of urbanization and mobile populations worldwide, the capacity of conventional infrastructures is reaching a tipping point. It is now essential that they be re-examined.

As a result, more flexible forms of infrastructure and design practices have emerged during the past decade. Strategies that combine urban design principles with new infrastructures are becoming an important logic for reshaping urban regions within the Neo-liberal economy. Union Station in Toronto will be used as case study for infrastructural transformation. Owing to its location in downtown Toronto and proximity to the business district, entertainment zone, and waterfront, Union Station is surrounded by high land value and high density developments. However, as a result of the rail corridor and Gardiner expressway, this pattern is distorted at this point and a void has been left within the dense core of the city. Furthermore, all the traffic load of the GTA goes to Union Station which has twice as many passengers annually as Pearson International Airport. By 2020, an airport connection will also be added. Estimates show that the traffic load will be doubled at this station by that time, which means a considerable number of passengers will be added to this high density node. Demands for a qualified public space and services will rise drastically.

The intention of this thesis is to create a hyper dense urban node of primarily private development, while at the same time creating a strong public space that can serve as an equitable infrastructure for the city and a memorable experience for both passengers and residents. A new sky path system south of Union Station will be connected to the current underground pedestrian network at north of the station. A new Great Hall within the station will serve as the hinge or flipping point, between the below grade and elevated systems. The sky path system will be connected to the new Great Hall at one end and a set of mega blocks at the other. Pedestrians will experience different character zones such as commercial, entertainment and sports in the path during their journey from Union Station to the mega blocks. The new path system has multiple connections to adjacent streets to provide easy access for pedestrians to enter and exit. It also provides views to the city and the lake.

ADVISOR: ADRIAN BLACKWELL THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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CLASSROOM CITY AZADEH MOHAMMADI-ADERKANI, MArch

This research aims to study lifelong learning and possible integration into our existing learning situation. Learning is not confined to the classroom, but takes place throughout life and in a range of situations. During the last fifty years, constant scientific and technological innovations have had a profound effect on learning styles. Learning can no longer be divided into a place and time to acquire knowledge (school) and a place and time to apply the knowledge acquired (the workplace).

Instead, learning can be seen as something that takes place on an on-going basis from our daily interactions with others and with the world around us.

This research looks for ways to connect the everyday and the organized, the directly experienced and the conveyed, the practical and the theoretical, the formal and the informal through utilizing various high and low tech methods of learning to improve the quality of education for our future society. As a whole, this research will contribute to the following objectives: see the city as a comprehensive learning centre, rather than simply relying on schools as “micro communities� for education; connect everyday life with learning; combine social structures and technology to create a powerful theoretical framework for learning, and organize interaction between individuals to improve the learning process.

Lifelong (experiential) learning is placed in different situations and contexts (home, street, club, workplace, sports, etc). Research shows that 70% of the learning process takes place informally, in interaction with other people in different situations: during lunch time, smoke time, and leisure time.

So many different ethnic groups are living in Canada. They need to know English to communicate with others and acquire new culture. Consequently, this proposal seeks to combine the everyday lives of people with learning as an ongoing process in the city of Toronto by turning the city into a learning hub for immigrants who aim to learn English as their second language.

ADVISOR: RODOLPHE EL-KHOURY THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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TENDING TO BE ARID

A CASE STUDY FOR THE PREVENTION OF LAND DEGRADATION IN THE NEGEV DESERT NICOLE NAPOLEONE, MLA

Land degradation, or desertification, occurs as a result of a failure to balance the demand that humans place on land with what that land has the capacity to give. Poor land use practices, deforestation, drought, and overpopulation in arid lands accelerate soil degradation, causing the land to be unproductive. According to the United Nations, drought and desertification threaten the livelihood of over one billion people in more than 110 countries around the world.

Israel’s Southern District, occupying 60% of the country’s landmass (13,000 km²), is located in the arid and hyper-arid Negev Desert. With an increase in drought over the last 5 years, coupled with a governmental goal of doubling the population of the area in the next 10 years, this region is at an increased risk of suffering from desertification.

The Jewish National Fund’s proposal of the Beer-Sheva River Park, located in the capital of the Southern District, will be used as this project’s case study. As part of the Jewish National Funds’ Blueprint Negev initiative, this park has been proposed as a way of creating a 1700 acre ‘green paradise’ for the entire Southern district. This thesis will act as a critique of the park’s plan and offer an alternative strategy to be used in the area. It argues against the Western notion of park being used in a desert landscape and for the implementation of various ecologically conscious strategies to prevent desertification in the region.

ADVISOR: ELISE SHELLEY THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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INFORMATION AS A LIVING SYSTEM DENISE CARMEN PINTO, MLA At every moment in time there has been a technology that frames outdoor space—a device that directs our conception of the land and biases our engineering of it.

Romantic paintings compelled the design of picturesque gardens until the camera obscura modified this view of the land to a more objective vision of space. As the dominant framing device turned skyward to satellite imagery, our overhauling of landscape was given license to adjust at grander and grander scales. Now with the onset of large-scale problems, our challenge has been to reconcile the manipulation of terrain at this scale with our programming of ground-level experience, and equally, to develop a more diverse picture of the land to direct the work of landscape architects who manage ecological systems over the long term.

This thesis wonders what large-scale ecologies would behave like if we designed their components in partnership with a mass audience using the next ‘framing device’ at our behest—digital networks.

It wonders if collective consensus and public investment could sponsor healthy ecosystems by making them culturally relevant. It interrogates the rift between landscape management and the participant’s understanding of an urban park, posing an opportunity for new programming around the conversation between professional and constituent. And most of all, it puts forth a new form of recreation that expresses unseen networks of hydrology, migratory routes, and geologic shifts at a human scale, turning these flows into engagement strategies which hope to prompt the stronger prioritization of efforts to support healthier ecosystems.

In short, if we re-conceive of the overlap between digital space and public space, can a wide, willing public audience help the profession protect the public commons? Possibility lies in treating information as a dynamic, integrated living system.

ADVISOR: ALISSA NORTH THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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UPGRADE / REGRADE / RETROFIT RE-ENVISIONING THE COURSE OF HAITIAN DEVELOPMENT

JEFF POWERS, MArch BYRON WHITE, MArch The proposal aims to reshape and reorder the mountainsides to provide distributed infrastructure and allow for the viable inhabitation of steep slopes, in order to accommodate the rehabilitation of Haiti’s low-lying agricultural areas and flood-prone urban centers. The design provides a framework for new Haitian housing, by leveraging existing techniques and practices to present a plan that augments and transforms the architectural, landscape and social systems.

ADVISOR: LIAT MARGOLIS THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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NAFTA RAILWAY

A CATALYST FOR NEW FORMS OF ENTERPRISE IN AN ECOLOGY OF TRADE JUAN JOSE ROBLES

While new multi-lateral free trade agreements continue to integrate the global economies, the regional infrastructures of production and distribution linked to global markets continue to separate themselves from their regional urban and economic context. Governed by rules of efficient logistics, the engineering of these systems have only made them bigger, faster and more technologically efficient outside of the territories they occupy. They have failed to see trade infrastructures as drivers of an integrated territorial network occupied by cities (growing and declining), regional economies, and export manufacturing zones (maquiladoras) currently redefining the urban peripheries in Mexico.

From concentrated Rust Belts to decentralized Sun Belts, and now to internationally distributed maquiladora industrial zones, systems of distribution have continually steered the development of North American industrial landscapes. A maquiladora is a fifty-year-old labor-intensive assembly operation that has become the landmark of trade in Mexico. Logistically concentrated along the U.S.-Mexico border, this industry is mostly known for the exploitation of cheap labor and looser environmental regulation while providing no advancement in the regional economic development of Mexico. The maquiladora sector constituted 54% of the U.S.-Mexico trade in 2004, and in 2005 maquiladoras accounted for half of Mexico’s export market. While these manufacturing industries continue to grow, new free trade strategies continue to integrate the North American economies.

The most striking manifestation of this link is the recent sale of the eastern Mexican rail network to Kansas City Southern. Also known as the NAFTA railway, the system’s connection to the southwest Mexican port of Lazaro Cardenas has allowed the creation of an integrated intermodal corridor, bringing Asian cargo closer to the central United States. With 90 percent of the goods produced in maquiladoras being shipped to the U.S. market, the NAFTA railway is bound to direct the future development of the maquiladora industry, bringing with it the current socio-political, economic and environmental issues that have plagued the border region in the past years.

This thesis looks for opportunities provided by recent investment in the NAFTA railway as tools to divert the current direction of urbanization molded by global distribution trends of the Maquiladora Industry. It looks to provide a new model of enterprise with the intent of strengthening the regional economies of Mexico along the growing industrial sites.

ADVISOR: MASON WHITE THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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LEFTOVERS

THE ARCHITECTURAL POTENTIALS OF LEFTOVER SPACES, AND THEIR ABILITY TO RESHAPE THE CITY NATALEE RODRIGUEZ, MArch

In a city like Toronto, where land is costly, Leftover Spaces are of great value. This thesis asks questions that challenge the comfort of our own perceptions and the boundaries of what we know.

It asks these questions by producing affordable housing, which behaves differently from the rest of the city; thus redefining concepts of property and ownership.

The Leftover is a rich category that challenges rather conventional understandings of waste while adding new perspectives by recasting excess people, and odd spaces, as outstanding, bonuses, or opportunity. Therefore, occupying Leftover Spaces inverts conventional sensibilities. People are engaged, not as consumers, but as fundamental constructors of the city. Therefore, Leftover Spaces offer a counterpoint to the way order and consumption hold sway over the city; they represent what is left of resistance in cities; they embody what is still available.

Conceived as a field of investigation for the new relations between architecture and the contemporary city; Leftover Spaces escape the traditional ways of describing the city and of intervening in the urban fabric. In addition, Leftover Spaces are a rich field of invisible social and natural operations, while also serving as representations of urban politics. The city will become a laboratory for an experience that offers new opportunities for urbanity. Thus, the aim is to create an active combination of heterogeneous components that broaden the terms of experiencing the city.

ADVISOR: ADRIAN BLACKWELL THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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{DE}VOID

RECLAIMING WINNIPEG’S DOWNTOWN THROUGH THE CREATION OF INTERMEDIATE LANDSCAPES

SCOTT DUNCAN ROSIN, MLA In the early 20th century, the City of Winnipeg was a major player in the development of Canada as the country expanded westward. As time progressed, the City’s stature diminished, eclipsed by other major centres in Canada. As with many cities during the mid 20th century, an exodus from the downtown to the suburbs left the core of the city to disintegrate and decay. The demolition of buildings for the creation of parking lots, meant to serve as placeholders until redevelopment was possible, has left a downtown littered with lifeless voids.

As a result, the goal of this thesis is to reverse this trend and reinvigorate the downtown by reclaiming these voids as a network public/green space, serving as a placeholder for future development. These spaces will replace the surface parking lot as intermediate landscapes that will encourage, rather than hinder growth. Using landscape as the structural frame for the future development of the City of Winnipeg, the future growth will be structured within an existing landscape of continually evolving urban ecologies. These intermediate landscapes will give the City of Winnipeg a desperately needed identity, firmly anchored in its geographic context of the Canadian Prairies, as well as improving the image and livability of the downtown core.

ADVISOR: PETE NORTH THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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31TO

RETHINKING TORONTO’S EMPLOYMENT LANDUSE BY 2031 FARHANA SHARMIN, MUD

Around the world, economies are changing, labor markets are shifting, and large city regions are emerging as competitive forces, vying with one another for investment. Within this context, there are a number of key factors that give specific regions a competitive advantage over others. The GTA (Greater Toronto Area) has a number of characteristics and strengths that place the region in an excellent position on the global scale. In today’s global market context, planning for employment in an economy as diverse and ever-changing as that of the GTA is a complex task. The locational needs and expectations of the key sectors of this economy vary widely and continue to evolve.

From a land use perspective, it is essential that there is enough readily available, serviced land to allow for future economic activities and continued prosperity.

Since 2009, the Ontario Municipal Board (OMB) has taken initiatives to develop several “Strategic Industrial Employment Areas” along major highways in the GTA. Located at major intersections, these employment districts hold the keys to the next urban land use innovation for achieving economic excellence in the region . Over the past thirty years, the pattern of development in the GTA has included a remarkable growth in peripheral employment in the form of suburban office parks, located along major vector corridors. In this 21st century, with the episode of a third industrial wave in the knowledge economy and with the expansion of tertiary sector jobs, a new trend of employment zones will appear along with phenomena such as ‘bedouin workers’ or ‘digital nomads’ and will dictate the norms of employment destinations and generation. The manifestation of this is the emergence of the Third Place—a space that is separate from the usual two social environments of home and the workplace. In this context, I intend to explore new strategies for landuse aggregation in Toronto’s employment designated zones; that will promote adaptable reuse, provoke intensification and act as a stimulus for sustained economic growth in the 21st century.

ADVISOR: ROBERT LEVIT THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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RECONFIGURE GROUND

SPATIAL IMPLICATIONS FOR THE FUTURE OF PERSONAL MOBILITY

JAMESON SKAIFE, MLA

The cities of the world are instantly recognizable by the unique arrangements of their streets, easily mapped in an architectural drawing called a ‘figure ground’. These drawings describe the major networks that run through a city: the flows of people, of vehicles, and of material. This figure of the network has been used as the tyrannical armature onto which other infrastructural moves are piggybacked. It has served as an unquestioned base for how we configure our public space.

But the armature was developed over time, etched onto the ground by the technologies of the day, from the horse drawn carriage, to the introduction of the Ford Model T, to the congested streets of today. As the proportions and speeds of these artifacts of mobility changed, our city ‘figures’ evolved with them; sprawling more and more, becoming more paved, giving more space to today’s automobile.

Changes to our current model of mobility and the culture that goes with it are afoot. The challenges of environmental degradation and resource-scarcity associated with petrol-based automobiles have prompted a trend towards electric-based alternatives. Alongside this, a generational trend which moves away from singularly owned personal transport and towards a shared system of mobility is opening new doors.

If we are changing the way we move, shouldn’t the network that carries us change too?

This project explores the rife opportunity to take back the generous real estate devoted to the automobile, and transform it to accommodate and integrate the other networks that run through the city, reconfiguring the ground.

ADVISOR: ROBERT WRIGHT THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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ECOLOGICAL CONURBATION PERMACULTURE IN VAUGHAN ONTARIO TODD ANDRE DALE SMITH, MLA The Greater Toronto Area is predicted to urbanize by 3.7 million additional people and 1.8 million more jobs by 2031. At the current rates of 55% intensification and 45% greenfield development, all of the remaining Class 1 (highest arability) farmland in the whitebelt (area between existing urban and provincial greenbelt boundary) will likely be developed in the usual low-density and cardependent morphology of suburbia.

By that time, filling up a car with gas could cost $350 (at projected rates of $7/liter by 2025). A highway commute (even with a hybrid) to Toronto from Vaughan will cost $56; a trip to Wal-Mart to get milk will cost $7; driving to Montreal will cost $1400 round-trip.

In the interim, we have edge neighbourhoods where the public realm experience is an afterthought, where any surface ecology has been removed and replaced with artificial ecosystems of vegetation indicative of decoration only, and where an inflexible housing typology means you must drive to get milk.

There is a regenerative, smart, and ecological solution: Using the forest garden model of permaculture, this design thesis will employ agriculture as a formative element to farm rights-of-way and the public realm in an existing recent suburban neighbourhood. These actions will encourage food security and awareness, use landscape form to mitigate stormwater management, and explore interesting zoning guidelines to de-centralize amenities in favour of activated and perceptive neighbourhood-scale living.

This design thesis utilizes an organic approach to the management of public and private open spaces. Recovering the productive landscape memory, it creates a vibrant, self-sustaining soil biology that will substantially reduce the costs of maintaining both large and small properties.

The proposition integrates frameworks of urbanism, forestry, and agriculture, and positions them as a synergistic and resilient reform matrix for existing and future conurban open space development.

ADVISOR: ELISE SHELLEY THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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INHABITING INFRASTRUCTURAL SPACES OVER, UNDER, BESIDE, ATOP GUIDE SPECIFICATIONS FOR A TRANSPORTATION INFRASTRUCTURE

PASQUALE SUPPA, MArch As urban centres continue to experience greater densities, cities are faced with space shortages for building. New York is a prime example of a city having almost reached full capacity, fighting against further development to the outer periphery. Manhattan, the most densely populated county in the United States, is expected to grow by 289,000 people between 2000 and 2030.1 Nearly three percent of Manhattan consists of vacant land, largely consisting of small lots limited to any sizeable building.

Edges and leftover spaces, where urban and architectural scales meet, are seldom considered worthy of design attention. Of the many types are the linear incisions embedded within the city by transportation infrastructure. Such spaces generate seemingly uninhabitable zones and problematic discontinuities in the physical and social fabric. Reconceptualization and inhabitation of these compromised sites is a potential alternative to rural development and sprawl. The air rights above and the leftover spaces beneath and along immense infrastructural elements are particularly compelling conditions through which to question contemporary conceptions of the public realm. This thesis explores the potential of constructing over linear transportation spaces to alleviate space shortages within the city, and create an association between the discontinuities of the urban fabric generated by transportation infrastructure.

1

City of New York - Department of City Planning, 2009.

ADVISOR: ADRIAN BLACKWELL THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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STORMING MEDUSA VILLAIN’S LAIR FOR JAMES BOND NO. 23

ANNA ULAK, MArch

James Bond movies have been a veritable catalogue of Cold War villains. The villains’ lair— frequently using the language of modern architecture—has been a construct that has allowed audiences to visualize future built conditions. But now that the Cold War is over, what is the appropriate villain’s lair for our time? How can the James Bond genre be utilized to imagine a new kind of architecture?

Anchored off the coast of Cape Farewell in Greenland, the Medusa is proposed as the new villains’ lair in our ecological and politically precarious present. The project investigates the typical physiological characteristics already found in jellyfish by suggesting a new relationship between the built and natural environment. It posits formlessness over form, field conditions instead of clear spatial boundaries, and the opportunity for movement rather than stasis. This architecture occurs at the moment of contact between water and epidermis. The ingenuity of the Medusa is the way in which it exploits the physical and physiological conditions of homeostasis within itself and without. The project does not have a determined form but rather actively constructs its own environment by staging weather events and harvesting the energy needed for its own survival.

ADVISOR: RODOLPHE EL-KHOURY CO-ADVISOR: ZEYNEP ÇELIK ALEXANDER THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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WATERLOO LIGHT RAIL

TRANSITWAY DESIGN USING A LANDSCAPE PARADIGM GREGORY WARREN, MLA

The framework for 20th-century urbanism was not the product of architecture, landscape architecture, or urban planning, but rather transportation engineering. The engineered roadway system brought highways into urban cores and created the organizational basis for suburban development. Today, urban designers (including many engineers) dismiss the transportationengineering paradigm as incompatible with sustainable development. The official plans of Ontario’s municipalities, for example, typically espouse a more holistic vision for transportation infrastructure that emphasizes multi-modal integration – including transit, cycling and walking – support for a vibrant public realm, and enhanced ecological performance. The focus on these broader goals may be considered as transportation design using a landscape paradigm.

Despite the aspirational predominance of the landscape paradigm in Ontario urban planning, the transportation-engineering paradigm continues to be the dominant framework for the actual design of transportation infrastructure, even for transit projects intended to function as the catalyst for urbanist redevelopment. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Region of Waterloo, a car-oriented municipality of 500,000 people comprised of the small urban centres of Cambridge, Kitchener and Waterloo, and linked by an extensive highway system and a largely suburban fabric. The centerpiece of the Region’s growth plan is a 35-kilometre light rail transit (LRT) system, intended as the impetus for the “re-urbanization” of the Region’s core, with the goals of protecting its agricultural hinterland and decreasing reliance on the automobile.

However, the functional design of the Waterloo LRT, approved by its Regional Council, is wholly based on the traditional transportation-engineering paradigm. The integration of the LRT into the city has been designed with the goal – unequivocally stated – of maintaining the flow of automobile traffic. This thesis project will rigorously apply a landscape paradigm to the design of the Waterloo LRT transitway. Using the University of Waterloo station site, it will demonstrate how design of the LRT transitway can invigorate the University’s planned rethinking of its main gateway. Using the downtown Waterloo station site, it will demonstrate how LRT design can reprioritize transportation modes, create an improved public realm and address identified ecological problems.

ADVISOR: JOHN DANAHY THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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RECONSTITUTING THE VILLAGE OPPORTUNISTIC STRATEGIES FOR MOVEMENT

SHANNON WILEY, MArch

In the past fifty years, Alaska has warmed at more than twice the rate of the United States’ average, and scientists predict an ice-free summer in the Arctic Ocean by 2040. Given this context, shoreline erosion has become a considerable problem for the majority of villages distributed along the Alaskan coastline. Erosion and flooding have become so severe that at present, twelve Inupiat villages are at varying stages of planning their relocation further inland.

The village of Shishmaref is located on Sarichef Island—part of a 100 kilometer barrier island chain bordering the Chuckchi Sea and running 30 kilometers from the Arctic Circle. Erosion is occurring along the entire island chain, but it is exacerbated in Shishmaref because of the sandy shoreface and permafrost degradation that is being accelerated by infrastructure and human activity. The sea-ice that used to protect the peninsula from the worst fall storms now no longer forms until the winter, and so the northern shoreline has been eroding at a rate of three to five feet per year since 1970. In 2002, the community of 615 residents voted in favor of relocating the community to the mainland.

This thesis is not only a strategy for the community’s physical move, but it is also a proposal for how the fluid nature of culture, community, and sense of place can inform design. Rather than proposing an outsourced and standardized scenario of rapid resettlement, the design presents a customizable, autonomous, and gradual process for personal adaptation. As a result, the final characteristics of the resettled community will be a consequence of the logistical decisions made in order to facilitate the move.

ADVISOR: MASON WHITE THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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DRAWING AND ARCHITECTURE JONATHAN WONG SIN WAI

This thesis investigates the relationship between drawing and architecture. It is composed of two main events—namely a temporary drawing intervention in an existing space and the documentation of the intervention. It is a thesis that denies the establishment of a single, “correct” account and as such refuses to participate in the formation of specific subjects. It wants to mobilize political subjects; that is, subjects that are invited and are allowed to provide their interpretation through an aesthetic experience that the drawing and the documentation set up.

Through those two events, the existing space is prevented from assuming its usual associations as well as any notion of a stable form. The drawing calls into question the tacit assumptions that architecture makes on our behalf, and to counter any claims that the architecture might make toward attaining a “whole object” quality that can be understood once and for all. Instead it seeks to reach a state where the act of drawing in an actual space is a desire to turn the form of the space as a question.

By engaging with the operative reading that is demanded, the drawings give not one form but several, all of which can be understood, but none of which are definitive. And so this thesis attempts to return the form of the actual space as a positive source of ambiguity.

Drawing is done in a scientific manner. Using the typical architectural technique of measuring and line making, the thesis exposes those techniques in such a way that they can be re appropriated by anybody (architects and non-architects) to make new interpretations. It is to allow the possibility to subjugate architecture through the use of weapons borrowed from it.

ADVISOR: ADRIAN BLACKWELL THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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RURAL MOBILITY IN TRANSIENT AFRICAN LANDSCAPES JOSEPH YAU, MArch For those living in the developed world, mobility is an issue of convenience. The time it may take to commute to work or travel to school is oft cited as a quality of life metric. Research and resources are poured into developing comprehensive transit plans, incorporating the latest high speed rail, high capacity bus lane, or high efficiency road networks. Congestion is the bane of the developed world costing hundreds of hours of wasted productivity and millions of dollars. For many, the experience of this phenomenon materializes in the exasperation of sitting in gridlock or waiting on a crowded platform.

Yet, for people living in rural developing countries, mobility is the difference between a life in poverty and subsistence. In environments where travel distances are tens of kilometers and the mode of transport is one’s feet, the cost of a five hour commute is not simply exasperation—the cost is education, health, and subsistence.

It is no coincidence then that the poorest in developing countries are amongst those whose mobility is most challenged. For these people whose transplanted road systems are crumbling—once financed by the developed world and modelled thereafter—what does a solution fashioned after their needs and attuned to their means resemble?

ADVISOR: MASON WHITE THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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LIVING AS NOMADS FAN ZHANG, MArch

As of 2007, more than half of the world population is living in urban areas. Massive global urbanization has resulted in uncontrolled urban sprawl and erosion of natural landscapes. A tremendous amount of energy and time are wasted on commuting everyday. According to Scorecard 2010, in the Great Area of Toronto (GTA), the average commuting time of a round trip is 80 minutes.

While the citizens struggle to get through long hours of traffic jams and public transportation crash downs, more than half of the buildings are sitting empty and wasting energy.

“Our beds are empty two-thirds of the time.

Our living rooms are empty seven-eighths of the time.

Our office buildings are empty one-half of the time.

It’s time we gave this some thought.”

- Buckminster Fuller This project investigates the potential of mobile homes as an alternative to future building development. Instead of constructing static infrastructures to contain single functions such as home, work, school, transportation, and entertainment, a mobile living unit is proposed to host it all. By implementing the rapidly expanding technologies of online communication, virtual reality, global navigation system, robotics, and engineering, people no longer need to be physically present at work. Instead, we can go to wherever we have long dreamed of without the physical constraints.

People form communities not for their races or nationalities, but for their common interests.

Infrastructures are transient and dynamic. Natural disasters will not be as devastating and deathly.

Invasive urbanization will undo its damages and give back to nature.

ADVISOR: TOM BESSAI THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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PREPARING FOR OIL SPILLS IN THE ARCTIC OCEAN LU ZHANG, MLA The US is not prepared for a major oil spill in the Arctic region.

The Alaska Outer Continental Shelf is estimated to contain over 30% of the domestic off-shore oil reserve in the US. The oil production industry in northern Alaska has grown rapidly since the 1960s and it continues to expand today. With decreasing on-land production during the last decade, oil companies have started drilling in the Arctic Ocean to fulfill the country’s demand for oil. A major oil spill is inevitable with intensive oil drilling, yet the region does not have the appropriate infrastructure to react.

This project attempts to design for the future development of off-shore oil production activities in the area of Stefasson Sound in the Beaufort Sea. The key goals of the project are to use landscape strategies to minimize the risk of oil spilling in the arctic ocean, protecting the rare kelp community within the area, and to develop a sustainable oil production hub that can accommodate different needs and adapt to future changes.

ADVISOR: PETE NORTH THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2011

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