Winter 2013 Thesis Reviews Booklet

THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013 ALI AHMED LINA AL-DAJANI MEHRAN ATAEE NICOLE BAILLARGEON JASMEEN KAUR BAINS BABAK BAKHTARI TYLER BRADT SHANE BUDISH GREGORY BUNKER ULTAN BYRNE PHOENIX CHAN ZHEBING CHEN GLADYS LAI-MAN CHEUNG NOVKA COSOVIC CLAIRE CYBULSKI SHIRA DAVIS CATHERINE DEAN DING DING TODD DOUGLAS PEGAH FAHIMIAN SHARAREH FARAHANI MALGORZATA FARUN AMIRREZA FIROUZI DAVE FREEDMAN DAVID GARCIA MENGJIE HAN

ROBIN HEATHCOTE MAHAN JAVADI CLARENCE LACY YUQI LEI AZHER MALIK MATTEO MANEIRO BENJAMIN MATTHEWS ADAM NORDFORS CURTIS PUNCHER SOPHIA RADEV FERNANDA RUBIN LISA SATO MARIO SAVONE SHAHED SHAHIDI JULIA SMACHYLO UTAKO TANEBE CRYSTAL R. WADDELL JESSICA WAGNER TYLER WILKINSON LU YAO LULU YU AZADEH ZAFERANI HONGWEI ZHANG JI ZHANG YI ZHOU

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you to Andrea McGee, Zita da Silva D’Alessandro, Katrina Groen, Jan Braun, and Misha Rahardja for their essential coordination and administrative support of the thesis program this term; to Maxim Batourine, Yuri Lomakin, Joseph Stewart, Johnny Bui, and Nicholas Hoban for support in computing and facilities; and to Dale Duncan and Pamela Walls for communications assistance and production of this book. Finally, thank you to Dean Richard M. Sommer and Chief Administrative Officer Kevin Wilson — and the impressive array of guest critics and thesis advisors, whose unwavering commitment continues to show through the success of our students.

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introduction

Each year, graduate students from the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design present their final thesis to a distinguished group of guest critics, faculty, and members of the public.

This year, graduates in the final year of our Master of Architecture, Master of Landscape Architecture, and Master of Urban Design programs will present their innovative and thought-provoking work from April 17 - 20.

These four days of reviews constitute a stimulating event that highlights the provocative, creative, and varied work of our accomplished students.

This book showcases the 50 projects to be presented by our 2013 graduating class. The range of thoughtful inquiries into our contemporary environment found within provide a snapshot of the constellation of issues paradigmatic of our current urbanized world.

Responding to challenges that are increasingly complex and global in nature, this collection of work reveals new possibilities, provides fresh perspectives, and explores innovative and sustainable ways to design and inhabit our built environment.

An Te Liu Director, Master of Architecture Program Robert Wright Director, Master of Landscape Architecture Program Rodolphe el-Khoury Director, Master of Urban Design Program THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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THESIS ADVISORS Matthew Allen George Baird Aziza Chaouni Sandra Cooke John Danahy Georges Farhat David Lieberman Robert Levit An Te Liu Liat Margolis Francesco Martire John May Laura Miller Carol Moukheiber Adrian Phiffer Talal Rahmeh Barry Sampson Elise Shelley Victoria Taylor Mason White Jane Wolff

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GUEST CRITICS George Dark, Urban Strategies Howard Davies, McGill University Luna Khirfan, University of Waterloo Jeannie Kim, Daniels Faculty & Columbia University

Adam Nicklin, Public Work Michael Piper, DUB studios Sasa Radulovic, 5468796 Architecture Lisa Rochon, The Globe and Mail Mark Ryan, Public Work

Vivian Lee, University of Michigan

Lola Sheppard, Lateral Office; University of Waterloo

Andrea Martin, PLANT Architect

Mark Sterling, Sweeny Sterling Finlayson & Co

James Macgillivray, Michigan/ Taubman

Geoffrey Thun, University of Michigan

Fadi Masoud, Harvard University GSD

George Wagner, University of British Columbia

Paula Meijerink, University of Montreal

THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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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

Ali Ahmed Lina Al-Dajani Mehran Ataee Nicole Baillargeon Jasmeen Kaur Bains Babak Bakhtari TYLER BRADT Shane Budish Gregory Bunker Ultan Byrne Phoenix Chan Zhebing Chen Gladys Lai-Man Cheung Novka Cosovic Claire Cybulski Shira Davis Catherine Dean Ding Ding Todd Douglas Pegah Fahimian Sharareh Farahani Malgorzata Farun Amirreza Firouzi Dave Freedman David Garcia MengJie Han

60 62 64 66 68 70 72 74 76 78 80 82 84 86 88 90 92 94 96 98 100 102 104 106 108

Robin Heathcote Mahan Javadi Clarence Lacy Yuqi Lei Azher Malik Matteo Maneiro Benjamin Matthews Adam Nordfors Curtis Puncher Sophia Radev Fernanda Rubin Lisa Sato Mario Savone Shahed Shahidi Julia Smachylo Utako Tanebe Crystal r. Waddell Jessica Wagner Tyler Wilkinson Lu Yao Lulu Yu Azadeh Zaferani Hongwei Zhang Ji Zhang Yi Zhou

THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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recovering the landscape of the credit indian mission a cultural landscape of the mississauga first nations ali ahmed, mla In the 1820s, the Mississauga First Nation risked facing extinction. In 1826, at this critical time the government built the Credit Indian Village for the Mississauga First Nation, located on the present day Mississaugua Golf & Country club site.

What we know today as Mississauga has been shaped by geographical, ecological and cultural forces over time. Sometimes traces of these forces are evident in the landscape, while others have been lost to time. The Mississauga First Nation settled in this landscape before European colonization. The treaties were the procedural aspect of surrendering the First Nations land to accommodate the European settlers.

Although the Mississauga First Nations’ village life in the Credit Indian Mission lasted only about 20 years, they were exceptionally prosperous in this village.

There are archeological remains in the Golf Club property — including a cemetery.

According to the First Nation culture, they are obligated to maintain ongoing relationships with their dead ancestors.

Presently in this cultural landscape, the golf club, its current programs, and the surrounding neighborhood are limited to the elite community. The ancestral heritage and cultural bond to this landscape have disappeared and/or remain buried. The most important aspects of the First Nation culture, the relationship between the dead (left behind at the Credit Mission) and the living, have been severed.

This thesis aims to reclaim the cultural landscape of the Mississauga First Nation at the Credit Indian Mission by recovering their ancestral landscape, strengthening connections to their heritage, and increasing public awareness about their struggle and rich heritage.

Main program elements: •Trail Network •Ceremonial/gathering place •Lookout .

ADVISOR: sandra cooke THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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refugee landscapes lina al-dajani, mla The refugee is nationless, excluded from every corner on earth, awaiting his or her fate in a contained landscape where time stands still.

Palestinian refugees have been in exile since 1948, and negotiations to reach a solution for their displacement are stalled. Reasonable speculation suggests that their condition will likely remain unchanged for at least another 15 to 20 years.

Most of these refugees come from a peasant past — longing for a life back “home,” working the land in their villages. These values have been passed down to younger generations, as they continue to anticipate their return, despite the fact that they often reside in urban refugee camps scattered across the middle east. This thesis addresses the spatiality of refugee spaces, exploring the ability of landscape to attach meaning and value to open space within the confines of long-term refugee camps.

Burj al-Barajneh refugee camp is located along the outskirts of Beirut, Lebanon’s capital city. Today, it is the most over-populated camp in the Beirut area, accommodating a population of 15,600 people within the confines of a 21 hectare site. This project explores the evolution of the camp and its spatial structure, and identifies potential locations for open space development. Design strategies are proposed to create spaces that are reflective of the culture and heritage of the refugees, while adding value to these new spaces by introducing areas for social engagement and food productivity.

ADVISOR: Francesco Martire THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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connecting diasporic landscapes: towers in ravines

mehran ataee, mla The aim of this thesis is to explore the relationship between transnational bodies and the diasporic landscape. More specifically, it focuses on the effect of the everyday landscape in the spatial integration and identity building of communities in diaspora.

The architectonic context for this project is the “Tower in the Ravine,” which is at the intersection of one of Toronto’s predominant architectural typologies, the residential apartment towers, and one of Toronto’s unique landscapes, the Oak Ridges Moraine ravine network. Toronto’s apartment building heritage is a unique one in that it is interspersed across the city including the suburbs where the tower communities are especially ripe for densification and retrofitting due to large lot sizes, transit disconnections, lack of good public space, and low walkability.

The design site is the Tuxedo Court tower complex in the suburban community of Woburn, adjacent to the Markham sub-branch of the Highland Creek. This thesis focuses on the Toronto’s Sri Lankan Tamil community, which is the largest Tamil community outside of Sri Lanka, and has been the primary ethnic community in Tuxedo Court for several years.

The design has two primary objectives of 1) improving the public spaces on the tablelands and the ravine valley and improving pedestrian connections between them and 2) designing for an ethno-botanical program on the tower grounds that would encompass the growth and processing of plant material both for consumption and for ravine restoration. The program would catalyze a strengthened relationship between the residents of different generations and backgrounds and their surrounding environment. The car-oriented landscape surrounding the towers will be transformed into a productive and social landscape that celebrates the natural and cultural heritage of the site.

ADVISORs: Georges Farhat & Frank kershaw THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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No place nicole Baillargeon, MArch The future is but the obsolete in reverse.

— Vladimir Nabokov

No Place is a speculative re-conceptualization of an urban phenomenon. The setting is the city of the strait: “d’étroit” — a narrow passageway between two bodies of water, a threshold, or liminal state. A most iconic case of contemporary decline, Detroit has been continuously in the throes of simultaneous creative destruction (planned obsolescence) and destructive creation (forces of nature, the desire for re-invention), embodying its title as a place in-between. Dominating the city and its identity are vast spaces of tension between presence and absence, persistence and decay, which are “other” to the normally functioning city. But in Detroit, the production of these non-places is a form of growth; demolition is by far the biggest building project. Though often explained away as relics of ruined economy, of social and political tensions, as in need of renewal, these terrain vagues are residues of potential futures — receptacles of inspiration and wonder.

A situation is proposed in which the fragments of mass destruction are harvested and transformed into vectors of creation; all matter of debris is reconfigured and condensed into accumulations within voided sites at the city’s centre. By inversion, the symbolic reconstructions aim to render the indeterminacy and intermediacy of the site and of the city at large. Through constructs of narrative and choreography, the procession of materials through the city becomes a tool of projection and transformation — events provoking space, collective memory, and imagination.

ADVISOR: AN TE LIU THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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the sacred and profane of the subways of toronto Jasmeen Kaur bains, mla Present-day city speaks little to the heaven and earth.

— William Morrish, in Civilizing Terrains, 2010 This thesis is about a move from single-use infrastructure towards the reconnection of the city to HEAVEN and EARTH. Because…

We must cultivate our garden.

— Voltaire, in Candide, 1759

ADVISOR: francesco martire THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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forgotten landmarks babak Bakhtari, mla How can we bring awareness to cultural and historical landmarks that are disappearing?

This thesis focuses on urban tourism in district 20 of the municipality of Tehran. This area has not been able to flourish due to many challenges in the past, yet there is a broad range of historical and architectural potential for this site. A proper design aimed to connect four landmarks via a proposed pathway will facilitate better accessibility, improve the quality of the area, and rehabilitate its historic atmosphere.

Bringing tourists to that area and improving quality of life of the neighborhood are the two goals of this project.

ADVISOR: Jane Wolff THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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three urban cemeteries

new possibilities for an unknown future

tyler bradt, mla If a cemetery reflects its surrounding society, a new design paradigm is required for the future burial grounds of Toronto. Our values, demographics, desires, and perceptions have changed since the first garden cemetery was designed in 1831 and this new diaspora must be reflected in a new design.

It will be urban.

It will be accessible.

It will reflect the genius of Toronto’s diverse people.

The new cemetery will occupy a space between the enshrined designs of the past and an open and unknown future for the burial grounds of North America.

ADVISOR: mason white THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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[re]Adapting Mangrove shane budish, mla The Mekong Delta is the most downstream section of the Mekong River Basin.

The Delta is the mouth of one of the largest rivers in the world, and the largest in Vietnam. There are 17 million inhabitants living within 4 million hectares of land surrounding the Mekong Delta; there is great potential for agricultural production and economic generation.

The area supplies more than 50 percent of staple foods and 60 percent of fish production for all of Vietnam, and accounts for 27 percent of Vietnam’s total GDP. Rice and fish products contribute significantly to the country’s export earnings.

With environmental changes, such as the rising sea level, the Mekong Delta sustains massive continual trauma every year. Since the land surrounding the Delta is naturally flat, a mere one-meter rise in sea level will inundate 40% of the Delta region.

The significance of this region to Vietnam begs the question: How can we maintain sustainable agricultural practice in an area that will realistically sustain massive environmental trauma? Adaptation to these changes is essential to the survival of Mekong Industry. But why must we simply adapt and not attempt prevention?

This thesis addresses the increasing environmental stressors on this region and the anthropogenic practices that continually affect the environmental, agricultural, and aquacultural conditions that drive the economy in Vietnam. This model will be deconstructed through sociological, environmental, agricultural, and economical justifications to adapt the landscape to new and reoccurring stresses.

ADVISOR: Elise Shelley THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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the beach:

a landscape loved to death

gregory bunker, mla For small island nations in the Caribbean, the rapid growth in cruise ship tourism has created unprecedented opportunities for economic growth as well as unique social and ecological problems. These problems threaten small island nation economies in the long run because, in many cases, environmental resource management initiatives lag behind the development of cruise ship tourist attractions. Strategies to bridge the massive jumps in scale and intensity of resource use between modern-day cruise ships and popular tourist destinations within small island nations are urgently needed.

This thesis considers the case of Cane Garden Bay, a beach community in the British Virgin Islands (BVI). Cane Garden Bay is the predominant destination of hundreds of thousands of cruise ship visitors to the BVI each year. The beach in Cane Garden Bay is losing its ecological integrity — and its image as a pristine Caribbean beach — as a result of inappropriate development and overuse. Shoreline erosion and sedimentation of its sheltering, beach-generating coral reef are the primary concerns.

This project showcases a strategy that partners the movement of cruise ship tourists with the movement of stormwater in order to dissipate the deleterious effects of both on the beach. Using vernacular cues, new landscape features have been designed to compliment, connect, and ultimately divert these flows to further sustain this culturally and economically important landscape.

ADVISOR: elise shelley THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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Mythologies of the Digital ultan byrne, MArch The reception of computing within architecture has been influenced by certain, more broadly accepted fictions regarding digital systems. The intention of this thesis is to demythologize such systems through a series of architectural propositions for their constituent nodes. The three fictions under scrutiny within this research are, first: that digital systems are fundamentally non-spatial in character, second: that they can facilitate ‘real-time’ communication, and third: that they offer radically new forms of politics. Each of these fictions is overturned within the language of architecture — in the terms of an Internet Exchange Point for London, a High Frequency Finance Co-Location Centre for New York, and a Data Centre for a Northern Ontario site, respectively.

By offering architectural treatment to these systems, the thesis also engages with longstanding debates regarding the relationship between infrastructural nodes and architectural monumentality. In this sense, the goal of the projects is fundamentally epistemological — both discursively with regard to the myths, and architecturally in the sense of searching for cultural semantics to articulate the existence of these nodes.

ADVISOR: robert levit THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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Conversation with Culture LiZhi Wan Creek Rehabilitation

phoenix chan, mla Urban development has become more stereotypical. Many cultures have gradually disappeared. Cities have lost their identities. As modern high-rise buildings multiply, more and more cities look like each other. What makes one city different from another? How can we preserve their cultural heritage?

Guangzhou is a water city. Three decades ago, natural waterways still served as public transportation networks along with road systems. Lizhi Wan Creek, named a thousand years ago for the Lychee trees on both sides, was one of the symbolic natural waterways in Guangzhou’s history, functioning as infrastructure and conveying the cultural relationship between humans and water in the city. During the rapid urbanization in past twenty years, the creek was polluted and filled. The Xiguan District lost both its waterway and culture.

This thesis proposes a way to rehabilitate the Lizhi Wan Creek and its unique connection to the culture of the Xiguan District. Along with the creek, there are many heritage remains, for example, colonized arcades that combine architecture from the East and West. Because of the high temperature and rainfall in the city, the arcades act as a shelter for shopping along the street. People do not need to bring an umbrella for rain. Instead, they can walk in the arcades. The sliding doors of these houses are of typical Xiguan style, while the façade of the houses tend to be a western style. Cantonese opera artists and their associates gathered in the area and lived close to the creek. Boats could deliver performers and artists from where they lived to the stages.

In Guangzhou, people could not live without these waterways. The water culture is embedded in Cantonese blood. Rain and water inspire happiness in Cantonese people. Rain provides relief from extremely hot weather in the summer, while water and waterways facilitate transportation in everyday life.

The goal of Lizhi Wan Creek Rehabilitation is to restore the lost culture, let the creek function as a culture museum, and let local people and tourists experience the unique Guangzhou culture along the creek.

ADVISOR: John Danahy THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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A GLIMPSE TO THE PAST:

REVITALIZING THE WATER’S EDGE OF SUZHOU

zhebing chen, mud The city of Suzhou is located in eastern China, adjacent to the Shanghai Municipality.

Known as “Venice of the East” and “Heaven City” in China, Suzhou has been stirring for 2,500 years. When industrialization came, the old core of the city was protected by opposing steel and concrete. The old characteristics remain, but the ancient way of living is fading away over time. The water’s edge is abandoned, and the prosperous canal life no longer exists. Learning from what the city used to be, this proposal aims to bring back the life of the old, and to bond the past with present.

ADVISOR: AZIZA CHAOUNI THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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adapting obsolescence

a negotiation between the old and the new

Gladys Lai-Man cheung, MArch Since the introduction of Economic Reform in 1978, the urban landscapes of many major Chinese cities have undergone dramatic phases of redevelopment in exchange for modernization and economic growth. In Shanghai, this phenomenon has unfolded in the Nanshi district, the city’s birthplace, which has been recently stormed by modern towers, rendering the historic fabric disconnected and unrecognizable. The architecture at stake is the lilong, a native proletarian housing typology developed during the early 20th century in response to rising housing demands, an increased migrant population, and the commercialization of the district’s street front. However, due to a series of socio-political events in recent Chinese history, this housing type is now deemed obsolete. With an inability to generate economic activity and rapidly decaying conditions after years of neglect, high-rises are inevitably favoured. Yet, in the face of similar socio-economic trends in current Shanghai, perhaps the lilong holds the key to densifying the city, accommodating the growing population of migrant professionals, and continuing to strengthen the existing social fabric without compromising this important typology. In consideration of these issues, the challenge is how to negotiate the coexistence of radical stasis and radical change and how this rapidly modernizing city can evolve without abandoning the vernacular that shaped its urban living.

This thesis proposes a two-fold solution to minimize the loss of the existing settlements and continue the urban density patterns that fostered socially cohesive communities. First, it is proposed that the efficiencies of existent housing be adapted to create new residences for single young professionals, who can not only reactivate the neighbourhood’s economy but also benefit from their collective living patterns. The second solution involves re-construing the socio-cultural characteristics of the lilong to produce an evolved vernacular for neighbourhoods in Nanshi when the lilong expire. By combining these two building types within the existing fabric, in time, a more relatable living environment will return to Shanghai, at a junction where old and new, preserved and developed, and tradition and modernity can share a harmonious urban interface — and where obsolescence becomes ultimately challenged.

ADVISOR: aziza chaouni THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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Swimming and Diving Pools POOL CAPACITY

Rule of Thumb: A pool of 20 x 40 ft accommodates 14 live persons at a time. However, during a war, a pool can be used to store dead civilians. The pool and surroundings are adequate for 370 dead bodies.

line of closest wall of pool ahead of diving board Deep end

Shallow End

2'-0" min.

7'-6"

8'-0"

6'-0" min.

2.5* 1

2'-9" min.

1

3'-6" min.

8'-6" min.

pt. "c"

5'-6" min.

DEAD BODY LEVEL pt. "b"

2'-2" 6'-10"

2'-9" min.

pt. "a"

6'-6"

5'-0" min.

12' long diving board

407

7*

1

point of first slope change

1* if board is 12'-0" pt. "b" must be 8'-6" if board is 10'-0" pt, "b" must be 8'-0"

* maximum slope

longitudinal section at centerline

CERAMIC MOSAIC TILE

Ceramic mosaic tile may be either natural clay or porcelain in composition. Special abrasive or slip-resistant surfaces and conductive tile are available only in 1 in. x 1 in. size. Nominal thickness is 1/4 in. Suitable for swimming pools. If tiles come in contact with blood, use a 3 percent hydrogen peroxide solution. If this does not work, remove the tile grout sealer to make room for new tile sealant.

Cross section at centerline Top image: Tjentiťte’s Swimming Pool; near Sara jevo, Ex-Yugoslavia Below image: Union Station; Toronto, Ontario

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AQUATICS

the museum novka cosovic, MArch We gaze at live coverage of violence. We see screenshots of Ex-Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Israel, Syria, Serbia and Kosovo, Ex-USSR, Iraq, Palestine, Iran, Lebanon, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Chechen, Gaza Strip, and Afghanistan still under siege, mediated through television and photographs.

This is how trauma reaches us today.

When watching news clips, we see hospitals overloaded with wounded victims, prisoners of war locked up in school bathrooms, or a soldier shooting a gun from a bedroom window. The news clips are mediating trauma and we are viewing the broadcasts from a safe distance. But if you look closer, all of the clips have a common denominator: the backgrounds. They consist of tiles, wallpaper, gymnasiums, bedrooms, hospitals, and so forth. They are domesticated, institutional, and communal spaces that are perverted by war and violence. These are benign spaces that we also use in our everyday lives.

This thesis is to ride the rail of the uncanny, an experience that “leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar” (Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny). Why remember the blowing curtains in someone’s bedroom or the green tiles in a pool or the mustard yellow walls in a hospital? It is because you cannot absorb the rest of the image; it is because those backgrounds remind you of your everyday environments.

The Museum will describe these conditions of warfare and its communal backgrounds by using transitional spaces and television screens — specifically the pedestrian pathways in Union Station, Toronto. The pathways represent and abstract those same background details to the point where these fragments begin to prick our memories of those news clips and our memories of our daily settings. Unlike a traditional museum where you are confronted with the trauma of an event, this is an experience in which you will realize the trauma over time after passing through the pathways over and over again.

This is not about commemorating victims of war; this is about bringing to mind the mediatisation of trauma in our current society, and how trauma has become a background subject in our daily lives.

ADVISOR: Barry Sampson THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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BOOMTOWN claire Cybulski, MArch

Los Alamos was a boomtown in the classic sense; it arose out of the desert in a matter of weeks and underwent continual expansion for years. Hasty jerrybuilding left the housing conditions less than ideal, and young scientists disappeared into the Tech Area, leaving their wives behind. The pervasive atmosphere of secrecy in Los Alamos caused whispers of nuclear physics and engineering to mutate into the seeds of architectural experimentation; like a game of broken telephone, the output reveals bare traces of the input. Journal entries and photographs provide the basis for reconstructed drawings of the improvised housing built by the women of Los Alamos during their isolation. Working only with the prefabricated building components available to them, they may not have achieved the world-shaking results of their husbands, but they demonstrated a remarkable ingenuity all their own.

ADVISOR: An Te Liu THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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make space

a transposable park for vacant lots

shira davis, mla Cities are temporary by their very nature; they are changeable, in constant flux.

They record the passage of time in their varied architecture and in our memories: that used to be a school, this used to be a parking lot. But what is a space when it is no longer a school and not yet a condo building? Redevelopment in the city is not always fluid, it often halts leaving vacant lots, pauses in a site’s history of use.

Industrial decline, suburbanization, and economic uncertainty have all contributed to an increase in vacant lots in many cities in Europe and North America. City planners have no use for those spaces — they are voids waiting to eventually be filled as dictated by the master plan.

In recent years there has been an explosion in temporary use of these spaces in Western cities. Vacant lots and disused spaces are appropriated — by artists, communities, small businesses — to create public space. This thesis explores this bottom-up approach by designing tools to make it easy for communities to temporarily take over vacant spaces.

The thesis uses Hamilton as a backdrop for developing a set of parts that can be installed in and removed from a space to make a park. Flexibility in the design of the parts means that different programs can be accommodated in different spaces while maintaining a continuous identity and character. As spaces get redeveloped, the community can move their park to another location or choose to create a new park based on a better understanding of their requirements and the functionality of the space.

ADVISOR: robert wright THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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Charismatic Mini-Fauna and the Urban Park catherine dean, mla With the worldwide decline in pollinator species (bees, butterflies, moths, and hummingbirds) due to a wide range of factors, the creation of habitat that supports these wildlife communities can contribute to their preservation.

As pollinators are well adapted to the urban context, this thesis proposes that extensive pollinator habitat and valuable green space for people can comfortably co-exist in a waterfront park site. This co-existence is intended to lead to greater public awareness of the crucial role of pollinators in biodiversity, and the creation of further habitat patches and linkages throughout the city.

ADVISOR: liat margolis THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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Harnessing the flow within estuary:

A reclamation strategy of Qidu island

ding ding, mla Landscape design has always engaged with the relationship between urban development, agriculture, and natural habitats. Since the beginning of human civilization, undeveloped natural areas have been occupied and made to function as agricultural and urban areas. Nowadays, the practice of reclaiming vulnerable farmland and urban areas and converting them back to naturalized landscapes is adding a new dynamic to this relationship. Through a reclamation strategy, landscape design contributes to the process of helping nature find its way back for our world to finally achieve the necessary balance between human development and nature.

Estuaries are transition zones between river and ocean environments. The inflows of both seawater and fresh water provide high levels of nutrients in both the water column and sediment, making estuaries among the most productive natural habitats in the world.

Ironically, estuarine areas are amongst the most heavily populated areas of the world; over 60% of the world’s population is living along estuaries and the coast and twenty-two of the world’s largest cities are located on estuaries. The conflict between urban growth and the protection of natural estuarine areas is becoming more and more intensified.

In China, nearly all the highly developed and populated cities are located in estuarine areas, and more than 400 estuarine islands are located close to many of these cities. Due to the inconvenience of transportation and flooding, most of these islands have been left as intact wetlands or drained for farmland. With China’s trend toward increasing urbanization, the current vision for city planning tends to favour urbanization of these productive and vulnerable estuarine areas. Qidu Island, located next to the large coastal city of Wenzhou (population 9.12 million), is no exception.

Taking Qidu island as an example of an estuarine island close to a big city, this thesis shows the vulnerability of these island sites and argues that we should reclaim existing farmland and human settlement as multifunctional wetlands. The thesis provides a method of analyzing and reclaiming potential areas and tests how landscape design can be a catalyst for this kind of reclamation in order to achieve ecological, social, and economic goals.

ADVISOR: Victoria Taylor THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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Bathurst North Yard Station: Surface and performance

todd douglas, mla Major shifts are required to accommodate increases in commuter rail ridership coming into Toronto’s downtown core in the coming decades. Expanding Union Station is not an option; a new shoulder station is required to relieve pressure from Toronto’s busiest transit hub.

This thesis explores the design implications of a second downtown train station, a station that rejects the great hall station typology epitomized by Union Station.

Instead, this new station will be conceptualized as a continuous surface that organizes activity and flow. This surface will reconcile a new open space with the activity that exists below, exposing the supporting substrate.

The impetus for this project comes from an interest in how landscape architects conceptualize, represent, and manipulate surface, increasingly in digital environments. Designers work with abstractions of land form, not the land form itself. When working with surfaces, there is potential to incorporate constraints of materials, fabrication, and performance during the design process. This new rail station can be thought of as a horizontal field, shaped by performative criteria such as circulation, storm water management, and affordance for vegetation as well as structural and contextual constraints.

ADVISOR: Liat Margolis THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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TOWARDS REGENERATIVE URBANISM pegah Fahimian, mud The aim of this project is to analyze the potential of a coastal zone to harvest renewable energy to be transmitted to the grid of a city, while creating an energy park and research center for new energy technologies.

Vancouver Island has abundant, widely distributed natural energy resources. This thesis proposes to enhance the potential of each coastal zone to achieve greater selfsufficiency, functionality, and habitability of the urban environment. Each urban land is designed in its entirety, making maximum use of energy in order to provide a productive environment for the city. Different programs are distributed in different forms that overlap and weave tightly with each other to generate a rich and diverse mix.

The future of urban development is not about big budget innovation, but smaller steps through entrepreneurial progress and adaptability. Building successful cities of the future or regenerating urban centers will require a harmonization with natural surroundings and biodiversity which could be considered a major paradigm shift in the way new cities will be built or older ones retrofitted to achieve a change from the current unsustainable status to sustainability. At its core this shift involves mimicking the natural cycle when making development and operational decisions about water, energy and other material flows in and out of the city.

ADVISOR: MASON WHITE THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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silo Sharareh Farahani, MArch This thesis is focused on designing an environmental, shared infrastructure1 that shapes our lives, our relationships with each other, the opportunities we enjoy, and the environment we share. Infrastructure commons are ubiquitous and essential to our social and economic systems. The methodology that has been deployed to deliver this concept was started by scientific graphical analysis2 followed by artistic graphical analysis3. Final products are series of envelope systems that embody this environmental, intellectual shared infrastructure, which is a reflection of cultural influence, and which draw cities, societies, and states into larger transnational relationships and global political economies.

1

1 Traditional infrastructure is large scale, physical resources or facilities made by humans for public consumption, for example: road systems and telephone networks. Environmental infrastructure is natural infrastructure, for example: purification of air and water, decomposition of wastes, regulation of climate, and production of biodiversity. Both serve as shared means to many ends: infrastructure enables, frames, and supports a wide range of human activities and is generally accessible to all members of a community. 35 Ecology L.Q. 151 (2008) Environmental Infrastructure; Frischmann, Brett M.

This is based on the analysis of digital elevation models (DEMs): raster models of cities, which have proven to be very effective in the urban context. An established computer model to calculate energy consumption in buildings, DEMs analysis uses MATLAB Software to do numerical computation with matrices and vectors.

This image processing analysis produces elaborate graphic outputs. Ratti, C., Baker, N. & Steemers, K. (2005) Energy Consumption and Urban Texture. Energy and Buildings, 37:7, pp. 762-776

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Graphical illustration

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ADVISOR: George Baird THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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PARKING LOT AS A MULTI-FUNCTIONAL PUBLIC INFRASTRUCTURE Malgorzata farun, mla Parking lots were parking lots. For the most part they existed not so much from building something new as by demolishing something old. Beyond signage, few of the accoutrements of place-product-packaging readily applied. Parking did not involve architecture. — John Jackle Surface parking lots cover a vast amount of land in urban settings and thus have a significant impact on our environment, economy, and transportation patterns. It was estimated that parking covers up to 40% of the downtown area in American cities.

They were designed to exist as strictly utilitarian and free spaces.

As a result of their prevalence and strictly utilitarian functions, most of the time these parking surfaces are void and unused landscapes.

This thesis explores the question of how the parking lot as public infrastructure can be transitioned into a multi-functional space that supports programs other than car storage.

Through the design of parking lots at Exhibition Place, this thesis will demonstrate how the parking lot can be thought of as a flexible space that can merge with other programs and functions that are to their advantage and not an obstruction.

ADVISOR: Robert Wright THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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Waterfront Connection Amirreza Firouzi, mla Current and past land uses have generally compromised the quality of terrestrial and aquatic habitat along the shoreline of eastern Mississauga. The removal of stone and industrial uses, and its distance from urban areas has left the shoreline with a legacy of degraded habitat quality and quantity.

Past mining of sand, gravel, stone, and blocks of shale from the shore of Lake Ontario, known as “stonehooking,� has resulted in wholesale changes in and destruction of habitat through the removal of structure and shelter for fish, including the now extinct Lake Ontario population of Atlantic salmon. The loss of virtually all cobble substrates and the elimination of lake trout spawning reefs are also attributed to stonehooking.

The massive amounts of stone that were removed from these areas by stonehookers during the 19th century destroyed spawning grounds and caused accelerated rates of erosion by removing stones that helped to dissipate wave energy and to provide natural stabilization of the shoreline. Changes to the shoreline through the construction of piers, infilling, changes in sedimentation, and other factors related to stonehooking also opened up the habitat to be exploited by other fish communities.

In addition, there is a disruption in connectivity and public access to the shore due to the security restrictions of the Waste Water Treatment Facility, which is a major barrier to trail connections and the continuous public enjoyment of the Lake Ontario waterfront from Mississauga to the city of Toronto.

Furthermore, the Region of Peel has been undertaking extensive upgrades to their transportation, water, and wastewater infrastructure. As a result of these infrastructure upgrades, the Region of Peel anticipates that approximately 1 to 2 million cubic meters of clean fill would be generated over the next 10 years. This fill, which would normally be trucked directly to a landfill, could be beneficially reused to create habitats and public linkages along the waterfront.

As a result, this project deals with these issues by creating a new natural park that will establish ecological habitat and public linkages on the eastern Mississauga waterfront.

ADVISOR: john danahy THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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Prototype for a Tower of unlimited Height dave freedman, MArch What is the chief characteristic of the tall office building? …it is lofty. …it must be tall, every inch of it tall. The force and power of altitude must be in it, the glory and pride of exaltation must be in it. It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exaltation that from bottom to top it is a unit without a single dissenting line.

— Louis Sullivan, “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered,” Lippincott’s magazine, 1896 Until the year 2000, the world’s 100 tallest buildings were almost entirely office towers; but in just over a decade, more than half of this list has become comprised of residential, and mixed-use.

With an average of thirty-five tall building proposals each year, Toronto is currently in the midst of constructing more than fifteen skyscrapers. Through a development that outpaces any other city in the western world, Toronto’s urban environment is rapidly transforming.

Despite bolstering the real estate market, social mixing within each floor is minimal; and as towers climb higher into the sky (and proximity to mixed-use programs decrease), social integration, and the diversity that characterizes thriving cities, are left behind.

With nods to ambitions behind Frank Lloyd Wright’s ‘Mile-High’ Illinois, a new tower typology emerges as a building whose primary programs intertwine as they ascend.

Gaining exponential structural efficiencies through combined systems, the tower(s) become vibrant with activity stimulated by expansive ‘sky-lobby’ programming, and apertures embedded within its dramatic form.

Catalyzed by a destination terminus for Toronto’s PATH network—and a proposal for a new subway station along the forthcoming Downtown Relief Line—the tower’s height remains as unlimited as the city’s aspirations it advances.

ADVISOR: Robert Levit THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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Medellin Transitional Landscapes for Displaced Populations

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Medellin: Transitional landscapes for displaced populations david Garcia, mla Given that 26.4 million people are internally displaced worldwide, and 15.2 million are transboundary refugees, how are cities preparing their spatial framework to cope with migration flows?

The integration of new populations to urban ecologies falls under the scope in which landscape architecture can intervene to improve living conditions and to respond, post displacement, within a short, medium, and long term period.

This thesis proposes the design of a transitional strategy that serves as social mitigator and spatial organizer in the peripheral invasions and settlements of Medellin, Colombia. The internally displaced population has grown to 4 million in Colombia and more than 200,000 in Medellin, not only losing physical possessions but also experiencing the dislocation of lifestyles. The populations settle in the upper periphery of the city not served by infrastructure, developing informally, growing in density and poverty, and damaging ecologically sensitive areas.

The intervention creates transitional housing for displaced people in order to facilitate the development of a green belt plan that will generate employment through the installment of agricultural terraces and public green corridors. It seeks to host the migrating population transitionally until permanent aid or the restitution of lands in rural areas take place, at which time the housing infrastructure would be transformed into recreational and community destinations.

Aid in this strategy does not constitute provision as conceived in traditional humanitarian aid relief, but rather gives displaced people the means to adapt, find working opportunities, and leave a legacy through the creation of a public space system.

ADVISOR: Elise Shelley THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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Isolation, Transformation, and Integration

Cultural and Social Integration in Tower Renewal Program in Toronto MengJie han, mla There are over 1,000 residential towers across Toronto that were built between 1945 and 1984. The rise of towers in suburban areas is a phenomenon unique to Toronto that has been greatly influenced by Le Corbusier’s “contemporary city” and the development restrictions implemented to curb urban sprawl. On one hand, the tower, provides much more density than single-family housing and has an opportunity to bring an urban lifestyle into one building. On the other hand, it isolates communications between neighbors and cannot provide an intimate scale for humans. In the past two decades, an increasing number of new immigrants and people from low-income households have tended to settle in these apartment towers located in the more affordable inner suburbs. Life in these towers is not friendly to non-automobile owners and limits newcomers’ communication with others. The goal is to enable apartment neighborhoods to grow into fully vibrant places that meet the social and cultural needs of residents and enhance the broader community.

With the Tower Renewal Program lead by the City of Toronto, there is an opportunity to make comprehensive improvements to Toronto’s neighborhoods. The aim of this thesis is to develop a landscape design, which could reduce social isolation in tower neighbourhoods. The proposed design would encourage communication between people, create a friendly and secure environment, improve the flow of information, and increase inspiration within the community.

ADVISOR: John Danahy THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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RECYCLing the LANDSCAPE:

POST-INDUSTRIAL SITE RECLAMATION AS A CATAlYST FOR CITYWIDE REVITALIZATION robin heathcote, mla

From the early 1900s to the 1980s, the city of Brantford, Ontario, was home to booming industries. After Toronto and Montreal, it was the largest manufacturing hub for exported goods in all of Canada.

Today, the city is left with a declining economy, a lack of serviced industrial land, contaminated brownfields, tree canopy loss, strained relationships with the neighbouring county of Brant and the Six Nations community, and a general lack of public attractions. The 21-hectare Greenwich Mohawk brownfield, once considered the heart of Canada’s farm implement manufacturing industry, now lies abandoned and contaminated as a symbol of Brantford’s past industrial decline and current difficulties in moving forward.

Since much of the city of Brantford’s prosperity was built from the industries that once occupied Greenwich Mohawk, the site presents a unique opportunity to catalyze the city’s recovery.

The goal of this thesis project is to reclaim the Greenwich Mohawk brownfield through a closed-loop waste recycling and self-financing process that fosters county, city, and Six Nations partnerships, generates sustainable economic opportunities, and provides a centre for field scale remediation testing, education, production, and cultivation to catalyze the city of Brantford’s revitalization.

ADVISOR: sandra cooke THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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Reign of Logic mahan javadi, MArch personal scientific management [pur-suh-nl sahy-uh n-tif-ik man-ij-muh nt] noun the administration of personal habits, physiology and psychology based on experimental studies of efficiency.1 psychogeography [sahy-koh-jee-og-ruh-fee] noun the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, whether consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals.2 surrealism [suh-ree-uh-liz-uh m] noun psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express -- verbally, by means of written word, or in any other manner — the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.3 1 scientific management. Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com’s 21st Century Lexicon. Dictionary.com, LLC. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/scientific management (accessed: March 24, 2013).

2 Guy Debord, Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography. Les Lèvres Nues #6 (Paris, September 1955).

Translated by Ken Knabb.

3 Andre Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism. Manifestoes of Surrealism (Ann Arbor, 1969) Translated by Richard Seaver & Helen R. Lane.

ADVISOR: Matthew Allen THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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this thesis is NOT about the gardiner clarence lacy, mla In old neighborhoods, the streets have degenerated into highways, and the leisure is commercialized and adulterated by tourism. Social relations there become impossible. Newly built neighborhoods have only two themes, which govern everything: traffic circulation and household comfort. They are the meager expressions of bourgeois happiness and lack any concern for play.

— Constant Nieuwenhuis, International situationiste 3 (December 1959) pp. 37-40 Détourn the commute, Détourn the city, Détourn Toronto.

ADVISOR: Francesco Martire THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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Healing Urban Scars yuqi lei, mla As a consequence of rapid horizontal urbanization, leftover spaces are inevitably created by dynamically expanding highway networks. Such leftover spaces are usually broken pieces, considerably long and relatively narrow, where highway lanes diverge and converge. They are sometimes regarded as urban scars because they are not only underused, but also aesthetically, environmentally, and socially destructive to their contexts.

To investigate the possibility of revitalizing these leftover spaces, this thesis project focuses on the highway interchange of 401 and 400 in downtown Toronto, Canada, as a typical site to deeply explore. The goal is to propose a design strategy that could maximize the value of the leftover spaces and be applied to most highway networks.

ADVISOR: sandra cooke THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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archipelago

Consolidating the Invisible Centres

azher malik, mud Mississauga is a planned post-world war II suburban development. Despite the fact that Mississauga was conceived as a residential suburban development, it emerged as one of the fastest growing global cities in North America. Mississauga’s success as an emerging global city lies in its strategic geographic location. Large industrial zones, big-box commercial centres, and vast expanses of single-family houses give a peculiar character to the city of Mississauga. These are the very ingredients of suburban developments which perform well in a megalopolis.

The thesis topic is inspired by the city of Mississauga’s endeavours to revitalize its city centre. The goals set by the city of Mississauga are the precursors of the city’s desire to create a character by inducing an ultra-urban island in an ocean of sprawl.

Perhaps the solution to building character lies in shifting the paradigm, realizing the fact that people move to suburbs for a preferred lifestyle combined with the sense of owning a property within their resources. Opportunities to work close to their homes or within the city are their lowest priorities, which both contribute to and are attributed to an auto-oriented suburb/city. It is this relationship that irrigates the symbiosis between urban and suburban developments regardless of the need for a political city centre. This thesis attempts to equally distribute development efforts all over Mississauga rather than exhaust urban notions of walkability, fine-grain grid, and density in a political city centre, an effort that will only lead to further alienating the centre from its surroundings.

The thesis capitalizes on the active ingredients of the urban/suburban aggregate of the city of Mississauga through various studies and an analysis of its physical and conceptual layers. This exploration finally orchestrates urban design interventions in select locations to consolidate the archipelago of centres.

ADVISOR: Talal Rahmeh THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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VACANT//MEMORIES matteo maneiro, MArch The Paradise Cinema development will attempt to reconfigure the current architectural preservationist method. Through the proposed building-making process, this vacant art deco style movie house will not solely redefine architectural preservation fads, but aim to recreate and restore the cultural relevance of our built environment. Can a new architectural methodology yield meaningful multiuse developments in contrast to current developer driven products, which seem to eliminate our city’s sense of variety, wonder, and nostalgia?

ADVISOR: george baird THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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Interchange Aquatic benjamin matthews, mla Within the following 100 years, the eastern seaboard of the United States and Canada will experience rising seas, increased storm frequencies, and more severe events. When Hurricane Juan hit the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada, in September of 2003, it brought 20-meter waves, and storm surges of up to 2 meters — hurling boats, wharves, rail cars, and debris across the capital, Halifax. It ripped the 19th century waterfront to pieces, with high winds causing severe damage to homes, and flattening three-quarters of the Acadian forest that occupied the city’s 75-hectare Point Pleasant Park.

The Halifax downtown, not unlike many cities of the eastern seaboard, was conceived of in the 18th and 19th centuries, but played victim to urban renewal practices of the 20th century’s post-war period. It has become a monolith of asphalt and steel, strong but inflexible, ill adapted to changing climatological, as well as social, patterns. It has, and will again, reach its breaking point.

This thesis explores opportunities for building resilient waterfronts for the forthcoming century — ones that acknowledge and expect change, succession and decay. It explores the roles of residence, public amenity, industry, and private enterprise, and proposes landscape driven-design to respond to the open-endedness and indeterminacy of the contemporary urban condition.

ADVISOR: liat margolis THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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Disarming Landscape Architecture adam nordfors, mla At the Low levels of consciousness the artist experiences undifferentiated or unbounded methods of procedure that break with the focused limits of rational technique. Here tools are undifferentiated from the material they operate on, or they seem to sink back into their primordial condition. Robert Morris (Artforum, April,1968) sees the paintbrush vanish into Pollock’s ‘stick’ and the stick dissolve into “poured paint” from a container used by Morris Louis. What then is one to do with the container? This entropy of technique leaves one with an empty limit, or no limit at all. All differentiated technology becomes meaningless to the artist who knows this state. ‘What the Nominalists call the grit in the machine,’ says T.E. Hulme in Cinder, ‘I call the fundamental element of the machine.’ The rational critic of art cannot risk this abandonment into ‘oceanic’ undifferentiation, he can only deal with the limits that come after this plunge into such a world of non-containment.

— Robert Smithson: The Writings of Robert Smithson This thesis explores how the practice of landscape architecture is expressed when the contemporary palette of physical materials and construction techniques are absent. It is concerned with impoverished, remote, and degraded sites.

In search of tools, an exploration is carried out in a portion of the upper watershed of the Chesapeake Bay where clear cutting, acid rain, shortsighted engineering, and increased hurricane activity have all left their mark. Site solutions and materials are derived from the immediate context, re-organized and augmented with only the most transportable of supplemental inputs. Ephemerality is assumed, becoming the driver of a systems approach design, fluid throughout the landscape; an actor in the greater performance of landscape process.

ADVISORs: Robert Wright & David Lieberman THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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The Shifting Cultural Landscape of Vasai-Virar curtis puncher, mla Complex dynamics of Mumbai’s urban growth has led to the contentious development of the Vasai-Virar Sub-Region. The region’s rich agricultural heritage and ecological endowments make it both attractive for development and highly vulnerable to disturbance. Despite originally being slated for protection by the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority, forces of corruption, land grabbing and unrestrained profit-making led to explosive, unplanned growth for the past three decades. Today a population of 1.5 million face daily challenges as basic services such as water and sanitation have not been adequately provided. Piped water supply meets less than 50% of demand and wastewater flows untreated into the region’s mangrove estuaries. Such short-sighted and destructive growth has led to the development of a local resistance movement which has fought hard to protect a coastal belt of fertile agricultural lands and depleting groundwater resources.

This thesis explores three speculative futures for the Vasai-Virar Sub-Region: planned accommodation of urban growth based on the hydrologic landscape structure; harnessing the area’s hydrological conditions and agricultural heritage for wastewater treatment and food production; and finally restoration and preservation of the region’s ecologies through incorporation into a national park framework.

ADVISOR: Liat Margolis THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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Delirious Parkdale

Neighbourhood Transformations

sophia radev, MArch Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.

— Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities In the late 19th and early 20th century, Parkdale was developed as a middle class residential suburb with a strong sense of neighbourhood identity. A core element in defining a neigbourhood’s social identity is the existing housing stock. Many large Victorian houses in Parkdale were originally built for owner occupation, but were later turned into rental units due to economic, urban, and social trends. These houses were too large to be efficient single-family homes without servants. As such, they became the framework for rooming houses or bachelorettes with hazardous living conditions and poor safety standards for their inhabitants, mainly low-income earners and students.

These factors transformed certain areas of Parkdale over the years into a slum, despite its close proximity to the downtown core of Toronto.

Today, Parkdale is experiencing gentrification — a process where older houses are reclaimed by the owner once more. A broader view of gentrification would include new low-rise residential developments on vacant or existing lots, in cases where the existing housing stock is in a condition that makes it very uneconomical to be renovated and to meet today’s building code and city by-law requirements. Moreover, the City of Toronto has passed a by-law that prohibits any rooming house/bachelorette development or conversion in Parkdale, pending the outcome of a detailed area study.

In light of the above, the purpose of this thesis is to propose an architectural solution for improving the living conditions in three specific lots in Parkdale. The goal is to create a healthy living environment that is based on the following principles: •Connectivity — the proposed residential development that is linked and integrated with the existing urban fabric; •Efficiency that is reflected in optimal density, compactness, economy of resources, and individualization; •Flexibility that translates into unit variety, adaptability and openness.

The goal of this thesis is to lay the foundation for further research to explore new architectural strategies for improving the living conditions in similar neighbourhoods.

ADVISOR: George Baird THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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AN ANDEAN NETWORK OF KNOWLEDGE fernanda rubin, MArch The extractive approach of natural resource exploitation in South America is transforming the rural dynamics of its territories, and greatly affecting the sustainable quality of the continental landscape. The Andean region has been the focus of attention by foreign countries for research into untapped opportunities in resource exploitation. Compounded with South America’s unprecedented urban growth, the Andean region offers a unique opportunity to develop local knowledge towards a more sustainable ownership of its land. Due to the fact that the rural hinterland is the focus of resource extraction, there is a need for a framework to identify new learning opportunities and to build educated and developed communities.

This thesis looks at Yungay, Peru, as a case study for a natural resource centre in solar energy that operates at three different levels: a research level that investigates potential higher performing solar technology due to blue light found at high altitudes and low temperatures such as the Cordillera Blanca; a productive level, where an extensive photovoltaic panel field generates an energy system to electrify the adjacent rural communities, and catalyzes economic development in the area; and an education level, where the option for technical and scientific knowledge collaboration creates a new type of space for learning.

The architecture ties the different scales involved through the spatial experience of the topography. The design defines the transition from the extensive productive landscape, to the subtleties of a terraced cultural journey that articulates the relationship established between the programmatic components. The specific spatial qualities generated through this social condenser foster collaboration and education that is nonlinear and allows for a new network of knowledge rooted in the local conditions of the site.

ADVISOR: Mason White THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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RE-PURPOSE

An Adaptive Craftsmanship

lisa sato, MArch (in conjunction with Crystal R. Waddell) Modernists once argued that craftsmanship was obsolete, afforded only by the elite.

While this argument may be applicable now in Western society, it does not apply to rural Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where mass produced industrialized products are relatively expensive while handmade items are more affordable, suggesting that craftsmanship is not only not dead in various parts of the world, but also a more viable option for building. If the skills of local tradesmen in rural DRC can be enhanced, there will be a higher demand for craftsmanship, local materials, and local trade skills, resulting in an advancement of the economy.

Currently, in rural DRC, building opportunities are limited by affordability and security. As glass is expensive, and unsecured openings lead to theft, many buildings are enclosed with little to no sunlight passing into the interior, making it an undesirable place to inhabit during the day.

Thus, the focus of this thesis is to create a vocational training centre that will contribute to the local craftsmanship while improving the building conditions in the area. This will be done using an existing and familiar technique and material, while creating something that will adapt to social and environmental conditions, acting to stimulate the economy.

The existing technique and material is fired clay brick.

The form is adaptive.

ADVISOR: Barry Sampson THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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force permutations mario savone, MArch Continuing the tradition of attributing design intelligence to materials that exhibit desirable behavioral properties, this project speculates on the current nature of such a practice through a reduction of design in terms of force. This pursuit emphasizes the framework of a digital model as a consolidating representation of architectural intent.

Illustration: Rotation 188, 478 by Peter Jellitsch, 2012

ADVISOR: Robert Levit THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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Panic on Queen Street: The Neglected Landscapes

shahed shahidi, mla One in five Canadians will experience a mental illness in their lifetime. According to the World Health Organization, depression will be the single biggest medical burden on health by 2020.

Environmental psychology has recognized a strong interplay between humans and their surroundings. It states that landscapes have the power to manipulate social and psychological behavior. There is a strong connection between nature and mental healing and this manifests as increased compliance for therapy, reduced need for medication, shorter hospitalization, and a decrease in anxiety and stress amongst patients.

The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) is Canada’s largest mental health and addiction teaching hospital, as well as one of the world’s leading research centres in the area of addiction and mental health. CAMH is currently undergoing redevelopment in order to revitalize the community and change attitudes towards those with mental illness and addiction. With two phases already complete, CAMH redevelopment project proposes to convert the 27-acre site on Queen Street West into a welcoming integrated community, incorporating new CAMH facilities with shops, businesses, parks, and residences as well as an inclusive healing neighborhood by 2020.

This thesis is based on the premise that a patient’s experience and interaction with their surroundings play an integral role in their therapy. It can facilitate and enhance recovery and ultimately prevent relapse. It aims to bring landscape architecture to the forefront of redevelopment plans by shifting the design paradigm from a static conventional approach to a more dynamically holistic and equally integrated model. We envisage a therapeutic environment conducive to interactions between patients, healthcare staff, and the rest society thereby facilitating an effective dialogue that has yet to be elucidated, thus stigmatising the world of mental health sciences.

We aim to achieve this through the systematic deconstruction of architectural strategies into elemental components, each with their unique influence on the psychosomatic response of the individual. It will adopt a configuration which not only protects the individual from the mental anxiety they face in the outside world, but empowers them to transition flawlessly back into the society as a rehabilitated individual.

ADVISOR: Robert Wright THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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SOIL AREA PROFILE Grey Forest

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Successional City julia Smachylo, mud Cities have evolved in close relation to the natural world, embedded within nature through the process of clearing the environment that surrounds them. In a Canadian context, the 1965 literary critic Northrop Frye suggests that “civilization has installed itself in Canada in the form of garrisons that fragmented a monolithic forest into a mosaic of bounded spaces that comprised inhabitable interiors set against an exterior wilderness� (Frye, N, 1975).

The relationship between civilization and its surroundings has since changed. During the 19th century, the dual processes of industrialization and mass migration resulted in the alienation of the forest from cities. Furthermore, since the Second World War, the way in which cities in North America have been built has favored unstructured sprawl.

As suburban areas densify and expand, we are in the process of a paradigm shift that addresses urban design and urbanization processes that take place on the edge.

This shift involves a re-evaluation of these in-between landscapes and their ability to form part of our urban environment. Presently in Southern Ontario, municipalities are in the process of intensifying their existing urban land uses, augmenting coverage in suburbs and ultimately increasing the number of people living in and using these fringe areas. This is likely to increase both direct and indirect impacts on adjacent forest interfaces.

This thesis addresses the current state of Southern Ontario’s forest, viewing it as a fragmented and designed environment, where new initiatives have the potential to re-establish the relationship between inhabited and uninhabited space, while mediating both direct and indirect effects to the forest edge. Current policies and practices have been revealed as insufficient in regards to the management of these boundaries, exposing a need for further design research that proposes a new economic, social and ecological model for these landscapes.

ADVISOR: Mason White THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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On the Edge:

Relocating Ideas from Toronto to Yoyogi Park in Tokyo utako tanebe, MArch This thesis aims to explore the boundaries between a city and its parks. In particular, it investigates the transfer of Toronto’s expertise in culturally responsive programs and environment-conscious building tectonics to the urban fabric of Tokyo.

Yoyogi Park, one of the largest and most popular parks in the metropolis of Tokyo, is situated between two major downtown cores, Shibuya and Shinjuku, located to its north and south. The park is widely accessible and can be reached by an expressway, two major roads, two train lines and one subway line. The site is along the east edge of the park, where there currently stands a public parking lot.

The parking lot currently provides visitors with accessible parking space, and hosts outdoor activities for the local residents. The park’s entry points have the potential to harmonize the dichotomies of an urban cityscape like Tokyo and the hill topography of the park. However, the site is currently covered in flat concrete and fenced off around its perimeter. It is therefore an underutilized urban space that offers great opportunities for re-activation.

The proposed design reinvents the traditional parking program and aims to reactivate both spatial and social interaction, specifically between local residents and visitors, and between Japanese youth and international exchange students.

Internal programs include the establishment of a tourist center and student hostel, which broadens the cultural spectrum of the site, while external programs include an agora theatre and parking space that creates a smooth contour transition between nature and built forms.

The goal of this thesis is to explore the different lessons learned in two global cities, and apply them across borders, from Toronto to Tokyo. To that end, the proposed infrastructure exemplifies landscape urbanism ideas and optimizes the systematic flow between a park and the rest of the city.

ADVISOR: George Baird THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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A Catalytic Engine

Socio-Economic Stimulation in the Democratic Republic of Congo crystal R. Waddell, MArch (in conjunction with Lisa Sato) The proposition is to create architecture that is small, acupunctural, flexible, and repeatable in order to create a catalytic engine for socio-economic stimulation. This will be implemented through the design and build of a vocational training centre in the Anghal Collective of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Given that this region has experienced centuries of instability, it is important that the project start small, using local and existing nodes and networks that can be plugged into at scales that are feasible and manageable for the local community.

Such mini-campuses will be implemented throughout the region, acupuncturally plugging into and utilizing existing networks and capacities to create a restorative to generative process or “catalytic engine:� schools and communities that essentially build themselves, intensifying over time as capacity is built in the region, such that their structure and scale is always complementary and appropriate to the overall socio-economic infrastructure being simultaneously created.

The project focuses on the investigation of one area in particular, Nyalebbe, in the heart of Anghal, and its potential to start this catalytic engine. Working with a local NGO, the intention is to initiate the larger idea allowing for the members of the NGO to rear and expand the project throughout the larger region.

ADVISOR: Barry Sampson THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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Protecting the Edge.

Exposing the Tide. jessica wagner, mla The coastal city of Portland, Maine has developed an industrial waterfront. This urban waterfront is composed of wharf infrastructure that extends out into deep water to support marine activity. Today, this waterfront faces both physical and economic challenges that, if not addressed, could lead to its deterioration.

Current data projects a 2-6ft increase in sea level over the next century. This increase in water levels puts the existing waterfront infrastructure and the historic downtown at risk to inundation. While tidal waters rise, there has also been a decline in industrial waterfront activity. Residential development commonly fills in the vacancies exposed in post-industrial waterfronts. However, the city of Portland has prevented residential development on the waterfront in an effort to sustain the working industrial character of the harbor. Without opportunity for new economic activity on the waterfront, the loss of industry has allowed for the development of large surface parking at the water’s edge, dilapidated pier infrastructure, and vacant buildings. The city needs an infusion of economic activity on the waterfront to fund infrastructural improvements needed to protect the city from rising flood waters.

The waterfront in Portland, Maine presents an opportunity explore the role of landscape in improving the physical and economic resiliency of the urban waterfront.

This thesis seeks to address both issues through the development of a landscape strategy and site intervention.

ADVISOR: Elise Shelley THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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The Clarke tyler wilkinson, MArch A delightful play of repetition, cadence, depth, and texture, the Clarke Institute, completed in 1964, speaks to an era of Toronto development marked by equal parts prosperity and growth and short sightedness and professional ignorance. While the heroic nature of the building cannot be denied, problems of thermal bridging, poor ventilation, thermal stresses, and inadequate daylighting make for an energy inefficient building.

This project-based thesis is one potential response to a renovation that balances issues of conservation, performance, and indoor environmental quality specific to the Toronto context.

ADVISOR: Laura Miller THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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Creating a Toronto Continuous Rail-side Linear Public Space lu yao, mud As the city’s population grows, public spaces and parks are keys to making a metropolitan area livable. However, as an international metropolitan area, Toronto’s existing public spaces and parks are small-scaled and scattered. Generally speaking, there is a shortage and discontinuity of open space, especially in the inner city.

This thesis develops an opportunity to create a continuous public space along the Dupont Street corridor in Toronto. The corridor includes Dupont Street, the adjacent railway, and the hydro transmission line. This corridor can best offer the city a continuous public space, which will serve the surrounding highly populated neighborhoods and bring economic and development opportunities, while at the same time providing a transportation system for public use. On a larger scale, the development can connect the two grand natural ravine parks as well as the West Rail-Path that runs into downtown Toronto.

ADVISOR: Talal Rahmeh THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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Catalytic Landscape:

Post CISC Era in Chongqing

lulu yu, mla The Chongqing Iron and Steel Company (CISC) occupied its industrial site in the valley of the Yangtze River for over 80 years. With urban sprawl, factories such as CISC have moved out of China’s cities, leaving severe environmental issues and economic vacancy.

This thesis will explore a design framework using landscape approaches to deal with the opportunities resulting from the relocation of CISC. This thesis will use three themes to develop a design strategy for the site: landscape rehabilitation, new community development and industrial retrofitting. This will be done to integrate the three themes and create a living, dynamic, and sustainable system.

The design will be approached along the steel making “production line�, which runs through the core of the site. The entire industrial rail line, as the major access, will be used to integrate the whole site, as well as to present the industrial heritage of the site. The linear space of public realm infrastructure along the rail line will act as a catalyst to restore and rehabilitate the landscape, as well as stimulate new development. Each significant industrial element along the rail line will be incorporated to generate character through adaptive reuse and to develop a unique sense of place at each node. Each node engages a series of design rules that integrate industrial retrofitting, ecological restoration, and sustainable development.

ADVISOR: John Danahy THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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The “as if” Society azadeh Zaferani, mud What are the possibilities of an absolute public realm in a society where domination is realized through the spatial arrangement of surveillance within the public domain?

The answer to this question is what Mitchel de Certeau has referred to as the battle between “strategies” and “tactics”. According to de Certeau’s philosophy, strategies create and control specifically marked “places” by putting them under the control of the powerful state. In the case of societies under dictatorship, strategies are revealed under a centralized government as an internal political orientation, expanding the government’s authority across the country into various spheres of life, a practice of power that has had different players yet mutual goals in all ruling regimes.

Tactics, on the other hand, are, according to de Certeau, opposing forces that appear in situations that are not completely under control. In other words, tactics create spaces. Tactics rely on the use of time. Those who use tactics are always waiting for the proper opportunity to perform. In this moment, resistance is born, enabling the resistant to challenge the rigid organization of the place in order to create a space of defiance. In de Certeau’s opinion, the oppressed cannot escape the scene of oppression; instead, he or she can manipulate it. As he claims, these tactics don’t need to be political actions. Instead, they could be tricks and distortions, threatening the repressive order at an individual level. He refers to these distortions as the “everyday life” of individuals. In short, people create alternative spaces for their social interactions and engagements. Under such an approach, a society is born where the missing social nodes are converted into heterotopias where unspoken actions come to play.

This thesis investigates the historical deformation of the urban fabric and its socio/ political consequences in Tehran, Iran, since the discovery of oil in 1908. The findings are then analyzed to form a series of spatial and tactical arrangements that accommodate the vanishing socio/cultural activities within forcefully promoted commercial heterotopias of illusion. In short, the merits of the project are based on a formal reconstruction of destroyed social nodes of the city, borrowing concepts from the informal “everyday urbanism” of its citizens.

ADVISOR: Mason White THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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Lakeview Redevelopment hongwei zhang, mud The Lakeview site in Mississauga is best characterized by the abandoned coal generating plant that was built in the 1960s and demolished in 2006. After that, the Mississauga government proposed a mixed-use residential and employment area for the redevelopment.

The biggest challenge facing the site is that it was isolated due to the generating plant, which kept people away from it. Therefore, my focus will be on exploring a strategy to bring individuals to the area to be redeveloped. In John Danahy’s option studio last term, ten distinct projects were proposed to revitalize the Lakeview site.

The first step of this thesis was to make comprehensive comparisons between these ten plans in order to extract common advantages. Thereafter, three proposals were designated to integrate the extracted merits. In the end, a final proposal was made that balanced the three plans.

ADVISOR: John Danahy THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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Place to grow experiment ji zhang, mud What if we transform different contemporary urbanism theories into different drawing toolkits that can really be applied to a blueprint of a city? Everyday urbanism, post urbanism, new urbanism, micro urbanism... what can we conclude after experimenting with these different “drawing styles�?

Which one is more feasible economically?

Which one is easier to achieve from a planning management perspective?

Which one can best provoke the potential of the district?

Which one results in more public or private benefits?

ADVISOR: Adrian Phiffer THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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OCCUPYING THE CUT:

Re-envisioning the US Highway Experience (Or How to Spread Good Feelings in the American Rustbelt) yi zhou, mla This thesis aims to reconcile the urban fractures created as a consequence of the modern highway by taking advantage of the highway’s distinct infrastructural and experiential idiosyncrasies.

How do we begin to mend these urban fractures by reconnecting across the void at the scale of the region, the city, and the void itself? How can we transform these spaces of chronic separation into spaces of engagement, beauty, celebration, and pride?

ADVISOR: Victoria Taylor THESIS REVIEWS WINTER 2013

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