University of Toronto: Journal Publishing Services
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The Sketch, The Model, & The Student
No full textFor the next class, please print to scale and pin up three plans, three sections, and three sketch models that explore three different concepts.
… is the typical end-of-class announcement students get before their next studio. While professors often stress that deliverables are only guidelines that can be shaped depending on the project, I have often found that the number of weekly deliverables and lack of time to complete them leads to the sacrifice of the sketch model. Without a doubt, everyone has their own personal design process, as I have my own biases and perspectives, but what I cannot seem to comprehend is the beginnings of a process within a virtual modelling environment.
For the next class, please pin up 100 sketches. … is what I wish my professors asked us to bring at the start of the design process. Every idea must start somewhere, and for me, it starts with a sketch. (Actually, it starts with a site visit, research, and concept development, resulting in a sketch.) Then I’ll do ten more…and then ten more. Before I know it, I’ll have pages filled up with scribbles and sketches before I come to the realisation that I’ve arrived at a better idea. As architects and artists, it is very easy to become attached to an initial idea, concept, or form—and only through exhaustively exploring every aspect of it can we uncover its weaknesses and come to new ideas that we would not have initially reached.
The act of pinning up work has the potential to be extremely productive. Architecture as an educational and professional field relies on presentation from architect to client, from creator to receiver. However, when the start of the design process is predetermined by scaled printed pinups and restrictive guidelines, I believe it sacrifices exploration and discovery for the sake of deliverables
Bohm House (1955/2024)
No full textThe following letters, drawings, and models document the design of a house for the scientist David Bohm. The project began in 1955 during Bohm’s political exile, with work continuing in synchrony through 2024. The building was never constructed due to Bohm’s relocation to England, where he eventually passed away in 1992. The project strives towards an architecture that is in time, on time, at all times
Architectural Speculation + Representation-Based Inquiry
No full textThis section explores the various media through which ideas, narratives, and possibilities may be represented. Here, representation is not only limited to the act of visual communication, but becomes a method of exploration to tell stories, imagine new futures, and explore temporal and disciplinary intersections. The work of Jia Chen Mi engages in the process of speculative fabulation, where an alternate reality is devised as a fantastical contrast to present crises (p. 220). Reilly Walker examines frictions between engineering and architecture through technical hand drawings (p. 228), while Daniel Wong utilizes xerographic techniques as a way of layering over time (p. 236). The authors in this section challenge the conventional digital workflow of producing architectural drawings, some looking back to hand-drawn and physical techniques
Simulation and Story: The meaning diagrams hide and reveal
No full textIn an increasingly digital world, architecture has become abstracted—from its physical form into the virtual, but also into the language of diagrams. Given their reductive tendencies and often mathematical basis, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call diagrams ‘abstract machines’ as they express a sort of machine logic. In the process of diagramming, material is transformed into uniformed matter, stripped of its rough edges, imperfections, and idiosyncrasies to be readily processed. Uniform information also provides a basis for comparison. Giovanni Corbellini, in his work Diagrams, Instructions for Use, speaks about the diagram’s ability to simplify as a generative tool, making it constructive in the process of design. When materiality, program elements, climate data, traffic patterns, and similar factors are distilled into data points on a graph or lines on a page, they become easily comprehensible, allowing them to be incorporated into a model. However, the model produced is only an image of the reality it is meant to represent. It is the product of a specific perspective and not necessarily a shared or persistent material reality
Material Measures
No full textImmersive experience in a landscape is critical to understanding its qualities. A landscape is a site-specific, sensorial field that changes over time. This gap between what is seen and readily documented in conventional drawings and what is experienced within a landscape by moving through it is one we aspire to overcome through teaching. Through an alternative form of site survey, the story map, we balance data collection and conceptual design in the studio with outdoor experiences that provide moments for tactile and creative engagement. Students move from a remote, detached, and indirect knowledge of a landscape to an immersive, engaged, and direct form of learning by drawing in place on a large scale canvas with the materials and conditions they encounter. This attentiveness to engaged experience activates the landscape for students, making it the subject of their close attention
In The Forest, Don’t Touch Anything
No full textDuring the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe in World War II, existing ghettos were expanded, and new ones were established as staging grounds for the systematic extermination of Jewish populations. During this time, Jews were kept in deplorable conditions before being deported to concentration camps. The Holocaust transcended political and geographical boundaries. According to Tim Cole, the Holocaust should not be viewed as a single, monolithic event, but rather as a series of distinct genocides that occurred in various locations and at different times throughout World War II
We Wish to Acknowledge
No full textThe Master of Landscape Architecture Studio 2, titled Land(scape) and Memory, was established in 2017, following the adoption of the Final Report of the Steering Committee for the University of Toronto Response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC). Led by Associate Professor Liat Margolis (Israeli-Jewish) and Principal of Trophic Design, Terence Radford (Métis), this core studio serves as an entry point into the ongoing work of decolonizing landscape architecture education and professional practice.
Since the TRC report release in 2015, the Canadian public has been criticized for rushing to reconciliation before learning and embracing the truth of the ongoing issues stemming from Settler Colonialism, generally, and Indian Residential Schools specifically. This disregard is deeply rooted in an ongoing erasure of Indigenous history through the stories we continue to uphold about Canada
La realtà in Roma città aperta e Ladri di biciclette
No full textRome Open City, by Roberto Rossellini, and Bicycle Thieves, by Vittorio De Sica, are both films whose creation was heavily impacted by the Second World War. As films appertaining to the Neorealist movement, they both aimed to depict the conditions of their respective contemporary societies. This essay aims to compare and contrast the films to examine how they both reflect and are products of their societal conditions. This is initially accomplished by examining the logistics of filming, comparing the constrictive conditions of Rome Open City, created during the war, but after Rome’s liberation in 1944; to the more relaxed conditions of Bicycle Thieves which went into production in 1947. The next section examines the plot of the films, focusing on how Rome Open City depicts the war-time conditions of Rome, whereas Bicycle Thieves shows the post-war conditions of Italy. The essay concludes with an examination of the final scenes of both films and their perspectives on the future to come.Roma città aperta di Roberto Rossellini e Ladri di biciclette di Vittorio De Sica sono due film la cui realizzazione è stata fortemente influenzata dalla seconda guerra mondiale. Appartenenti al movimento neorealista, entrambi miravano a descrivere le condizioni delle rispettive società del periodo. Questo saggio confronta e contrappone i due film per esaminare come riflettano le condizioni sociali dell\u27epoca di cui sono prodotti. Confronto le logistiche delle riprese: le condizioni restrittive di Roma città aperta, realizzato durante la guerra, ma dopo la liberazione di Roma nel 1944, contro le condizioni più rilassate di Ladri di biciclette, entrato in produzione nel 1947. Successivamente esamino la trama dei film e focalizzo sul metodo in cui Roma città aperta descrive le condizioni di Roma durante la guerra, mentre Ladri di biciclette mostra le condizioni dell\u27Italia del dopoguerra. Il saggio si conclude con un\u27analisi delle scene finali dei due film e delle loro prospettive sul futuro
Mitochondrial Memory: Transgenerational Trauma, Functional Medicine, and Quantum Physics
No full textBuilding from Karen Barad’s “diffractive methodological approach” (2007, 71), this article combines Mariella Pandolfi’s notion of the female body as a transgenerational “physiological memoir” (1990, 255) with functional medicine perspectives on mitochondria and advances in quantum physics around “entanglement” to explore a new concept—“mitochondrial memory.” Recent findings in biological research depict a communicating collective of mitochondria distributed across different “human” organs and describe how this collective controls many aspects of human health through epigenetic mechanisms. Since exact copies of mitochondria are inherited through the maternal line, I draw from anthropological theory, functional medicine research, and recent discoveries in physics to offer a speculative and poetic interpretation of mitochondria as vessels containing a multilevel sense of self, allowing for connections within the same maternal line of descent across time and space. I offer autoethnographic anecdotes highlighting the struggles of immigrant women of color—women Donna Haraway might refer to as “cyborg entities” (1991, 149)—thereby framing mitochondrial memory as formed through “naturecultural” and intersectional “intra-actions” (see Barad 2007, 97; Crenshaw 1989; and Haraway 2007, 249)
