Two buses full of architecture students will depart from the “Cambridge Campus” at 6:30 this evening for the yearly pilgrimage back to the mothership, the main University of Waterloo campus, to take advantage of all that university life has to offer. There have been very few reasons for students to make the 40 minute drive north across the 401 back to Waterloo since Waterloo Architecture made its home in Cambridge in the Fall of 2004:...
ABSTRACT by Alexander Chan The Leslie Street Spit is a five kilometer rubble breakwater built along the eastern waterfront of Toronto during the mid-twentieth-century as an infrastructural add-on to the existing Port Lands Industrial District. Officially designated as the Outer Harbour Eastern Headland, the artificial peninsula was a lakefilling project made to realize the city’s ambitious desire for economic prosperity and world-class prestige by expanding its existing harbour facilities. Decades after the decline of Toronto’s...
Thank you to everyone who came out to the meeting Friday afternoon in the Loft – it was an excellent turn out and it was good to see so many students looking to get involved! The meeting gave a brief introduction of the history and existing status of the BRIDGE website and BRIDGE gallery for both current members and any interested newcomers. It was really exciting to hear all the new ideas people have for...
The All School Meeting, a “State of the Union” address given by director Rick Haldenby at the beginning of each term, is a chance to get caught up on what has been happening lately at Waterloo Architecture. Below is a summary of the announcements and issues raised at this term’s meeting, which took place on Thursday May 8th at 12:30. FACULTY: Undergraduate Officer _ Anne Bordeleau Graduate Officers _ John McMinn, Robert Jan van...
This past winter, an international ideas competition was launched to develop creative ways of reimagining the 5km-long hydro corridor that cuts across Toronto from Davenport Village to the Annex. Called The Green Line, the focus of the competition is to find a unified vision for further development of the site and to create a dialogue about the potential of hydro corridors in urban situations universally. Of the 77 entries in this open call, two teams...
For many current students at UWSA, Jonathan Tyrrell and Brian Urbanik are known primarily as adjunct professors, working with the 3a and 1b classes respectively over the Winter 2013 term. What many do not know is that they are also the vocalist/guitarist and percussionist in the Ketch Harbour Wolves, a band that has been described as “at once near and distant, intimate and vast.” Their music “ranges from episodes of sprawling emotional energy to moments...
ABSTRACT by David Schellingerhoudt: Architecture is an act of agency, and a technology that can be learned by anyone for their own purpose. It evolved as a system of organization and a protective shell for our fragile bodies, a vast, complex technology that enables human survival. Yet despite its universal nature, we have artificially limited our control over it, and who has access to it; we limit its potentials, its adaptive capacities, its diversity, and...
ABSTRACT by Ningxin (Sophia) Zhu: China has become one of the world’s economic engines. One major driving force is its rapid urbanization. However such rapid development has resulted in issues such as resource and energy depletion, pollution and environmental deterioration. Recently the government has endorsed green buildings and has urged ministries to work out a national action plan. It is predicted that green building will be the next big thing in China. But before importing...
A descent into the ravine is to step through a tear in urbanity. The terrain vague is a foil to the capitalist city; against a demand for order, specificity, and integration, it is disorienting, banal, erratic. Operating outside the constraints of dominant social structures, it harbours the unconscious of the city, not only an inevitable, but also a necessary rupture in the urban fabric. In this subterranean realm, the striated and measured plots of land...
The human being may no longer be reduced to the bounds of organic matter. An organism – a life form constructed from interdependent components that maintain various vital processes – may now reach beyond the limits of biological materials. Beyond the skin, thumbs, eyes, and organs of the average human being, we may notice the mutually dependent system of parts, functioning simultaneously as autonomous and interconnected components. These organic systems are now capable of fusing...